Branding Crossroads

Branding at a Crossroads


Today, a brand must appeal to the psyche of customers to make a connection. For example: many senior travelers want hospitality and service above all. The core seniors market does not typically care for technology. They don’t like answering machines, PCs and automation. Younger travelers, in contrast, like casual and tech-friendly hotels with convenience, where food and drinks is a priority. They prefer to stay in hotels that have the look, feel, and comfort of their own homes.

Targeting a market niche start at the design stage.

Starwoods created the ‘Aloft’ brand for the young entrepreneur market and designed its hotels to include a bar, a food and beverage center offering fresh bagels, fruits and drinks, an outdoor area serving light meals, a fitness center with swimming pool, wireless Internet access property-wide, and flexible meeting and function space. Guest rooms have 9-foot ceilings and oversized windows, a signature bed, a work space with an MP3 docking station, and a flat-panel TV. Bathrooms are furnished with Bliss amenities and walk-in oversized showers. Starwood plans call for 500 Aloft to be open by 2012 (average daily rate: $100 to $125).

Brands for Small Island Hotels

Small hotels often don't have the opportunity to rebuild for a market. Nevertheless, the market for differentiation is strong and the small hotel is often sought out, particularly in Europe, where chain brand penetration is low (i). Small hotels can tap into the booming market for Boutique hotels, where uniqueness and character are preferred over big brand names. Differentiation and personality are the key.

Building a strong brand requires use of all appropriate channels, but too much reliance on the OTA channels can be have very negative side effects. Choice hotels discovered it had created a monster by building up its business with Expedia. In re-negotiating its contract with Choice, Expedia suggested that its brand was more important and that Choice just had no option but to abide by its rules and demands. The widely known secret is that OTAs don’t want all the hotels in the world, so many are going to get left out. Its wise to be direct!

Brand Integrity in the OTA Channel

We have seen chain hotels make great progress in building their own brand marketing and direct business, reducing their dependence on the OTAs, like Expedia. (81% of bookings to major chains are now direct). The Chains understand that reliance on OTAs is not good for Brand integrity.

Brand Integrity is a measure of the cohesiveness of the brand message and your ownership of it. This integrity is influenced by your message and how you present it, the medium/channels you use, what you promise and what is expected.

Your brand is your differentiation & your personality. How you market will influence your relationship with guests, their loyalty and your ownership of both the brand and the business.

See more on The Medium and the Message.

First be clear and then be seen

Branding requires being clear about your market and your USP and putting this across in words and pictures, with the right emotion and the right process in the right place. Next, get the message out with an appropriate call to action on all advertising, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and with appropriate exposure on the right marketing channels.

Shoppers need a reason to remember you and to return to complete their shopping experience. Create stickiness and be in true shopping channels, like Barbados.org, BarbadosVacationSpecials.com and BarbadosHolidayThemes.com, where shoppers can add you to their shopping lists and compare options. Shoppers must be able to visit your website and take action on interest; get a quote, save it or buy at any point.

The AXSES Travel Shopping Network is unique in its ability to provide easy access to your website at many strategic decision points. AXSES also provide many POS opportunities with bookable-maps, bookable-ads, bookable-banners, bookable-lists, etc. (click here for details). In fact, the entire AXSES network is bookable, every advertisement, listing and link is or will be driven by arcRes Tourism Bookings & Reservations System.

Branding with fair pricing and revenue management

A recent Cornell University study shows that travelers are confused by hotel pricing and often see it as unfair. This is not good for your brand! Many hotels now offer travelers a choice of rate plans and full disclosure. Many chains offer best rate guarantees.


We recommend that you manage rates and expectation with loyalty programs and special group pricing. Travel shoppers want to act (get a quote, save it, add it to a list, buy it) when they are ready, and they want to know they are getting a fair price.

AXSES is now introducing a new collaborative marketing solution, where we help tourism suppliers use technology to brand and market their products, get exposed and close more direct sales!!

For more information on how you can build and sustain your brand - please contact iclayton 'at' axses.net

More about AXSES: see
http://axses-travel.com | arcRes Marketing

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i. The brand penetration index that measures the percentage of hotel rooms that belongs to a flag out of the total capacity, is over 70% in the US, while France is the market with the highest brand penetration index in Europe, with less than 30%.

OTAs

The debate on Direct VS. Distribution took center tage this week with the release of PhoCusWright stats on OTAs, a survey that finds hotel not competitive with OTAs and the decision by Choice to quit Expedia. There are many discussions on the net.

Direct sales have been gaining market shares over the last several years. But that seems to be changing, or might change. OTAs are holding their own and gaining shares in these troubled times, when all markets count more that ever before.

The OTAs have taken the lead in travelers' minds as the best place to shop for deals. Hotels are not competing - USATODAY.com: Travel Deals Compared.

So what, if OTAs are bringing in business, does it matter? There are hotel managers who think OTA distribution is great. In many parts of Europe, hotels have almost opted out of the reservation business, allocating the majority of rooms to tour operators. There are hotel managers who do not like distribution and have done much to get out of that channel. Some have been burned, some just find the terms are getting more and more difficult, some say it is blackmail!

The issues are complex. For a very good analysis, see Robert Coles' article - Expedia and Freedom of Choice

We have also prepared a detailed analysis about brands in the channels. Watch http://tourismplatform.com/ for the latest news. Our first issue explains branding from a new perspective. It outlines AXSES' approach to the Next Generation Tourism Platform, which integrated all media and attempts to strikes a balance with direct and distribution marketing. http://axses.com/destinationmarketing/1-shopping.html

LINKS

What happened when Georgia lost its OTA listing
OTAs Rev up at hotels' expense
OTAs' market share breakdown
Get out of the OTA Trap

LESSONS
What is the Brand definition: Johnson & Johnson Customer Business Analyst, Hannah Chi, says, "Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, I feel like they all give you the same options, with results from multiple airlines, kind of giving you a slew of what fits that criteria.” “Each doesn’t give me anything that another travel engine wouldn’t give me!”

Consumers will go where they find the best deal. This is good for Hotel Websites, if they are competive!

PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... C: wait...

SEO2

SEO 2 - Themes marketing


Following the success of page ranking for st lucia apartment rentals for Poinsettia apartments, Stlucia. We added a new page for St Lucia catamaran sailing trips to the pitons, Soufriere volcano, the diamond waterfalls and the botanical garden in St lucia. Poinsettia apartment resort can arrange day sailing adventures to several destination; including a tour of a St. Lucia Coco plantation and heritage sites.

The page proved powerful and was soon listed on Google for searches such as "st lucia sailing pitons" and "st lucia catamaran sailing to volcano"

Sailing to the St lucia pitons from Poinsettia Apartments

This is also promoted on BookingsStlucia.com

see Bookings St. lucia sailing charters and trips


This concept of themes marketing is very important to destination and tourism marketing.

Stlucia Themes Marketing

View more presentations
from AXSES.

also see http://holidaythememarketing.com

HouseHolidays

We have been running travel portals for over 12 years now. In some of our channels I find that very best value is often overlooked. Travelers have pretty fixed ideas about what to look for. For instance they will insist on being on the beach - but across the road we often have far better hotels; offering better value and sometimes a far more comfortable and elegant setting.

House rentals is another area that tends to get passed over. There is a passionate following for villas but I am still trying to figure what a villa really is. We have villas that are really apartments or condos, and that to me is wrong. To me, a villa has to have a private front door - not an hallway and elevator. So really a villa is some sort of house. In Roman days it was a upper class country house and through the middle ages it was associated with luxury. wikipedia.org suggest that today a villa refers to a specific type of detached suburban dwelling. I don't think that holds. Settlers Beach Villa complex in Barbados is not detached but it is clearly a Villa Resort of the highest standard and on a perfect beach.

Now I know that holidays are a chance to get away and one likes to go to a hotel where everything is catered for - But golly gee, the Villa-Home complex across the road has better prices, full maid service, a cook you can hire, a pool, a fantastic view and its private - spacious - spotlessly clean with a helpful and friendly family management and staff. Its a whole house with washer, dryer, stove, microwave, a full stand up fridge, iron and board, 3 rooms - kitchen, patio and a garden with fruit trees you are invited to pick from! Why are so many people ignoring houses and settling for a Room. A house is so much more that a room - why settle for less!

I think the holiday home resort vacation is undervalued. If you don't want to cook - there are many restaurants that offer more variety. But part of a real holidays is exploring - shopping - going to the market and buying your fresh fish and local vegetables - experimenting and sampling another culture. Lets hear it for Island house rentals and holiday home living!

An example I like is http://poinsettiaapartments.com. Its a family run complex of 7 villa style homes/apartments, tastefully furnished, fully equipped and on a hill overlooking a lovely bay with a working marina. Its not on the beach and you need a car to get around, but if you have a car its a perfect spot for the more discerning traveler who prefers not to be one of a crowd and have their own space. For the business traveler a Townhouse is the perfect choice; see Town houses and Apartment Rentals - St. Lucia. Poinsettia Villa-Apartment and townhouses can also be rented long term.

Check out the latest webpage dedicated to Island House Holidays in St. Lucia - http://island-houses-for-rent.com - a http://bookingsstlucia.com initiative. Soon to be a Caribbean wide service - if you would like to participate please contact us.

SocialMedia4TravelMarketing

How to market travel on social media

Who is using which social media - how is the traveler using social media, which social media site is best for travel marketing.

This blog/web page offers a simple explanation with easy to understand detail. Social media clients have been analyzed in depth. Patricia Brusha of hospitality.net talks about 5 types of social media users - what they like and what social sites they might frequent - she adds marketing implications and lots of good advice for the travel marketer.

The blog/page summaries this dialogue with a simple table chart. In addition it offers a table of the leading social media channels for travel - with a layman's explanation of what they are and how they can apply. The page is full of examples and links to useful tool and resources for hotels, tourism operators and destination marketers.

The page is a social media resource of AXSES.

AXSES is a travel marketing and applications developer; building tools for travel suppliers (hotels and tourism operators) to market and manage their travel business. AXSES recently launched a Bookings engine and tourism marketing & e-commerce application for Facebook.

Social Net

A Social Net Primer - how to use Facebook in your travel business

Obama has 5 million support Friends on Facebook - it helps him get his message out and stay in contact. Spurred on by his successful use of social media, more and more businesses are using, or wondering how to use Facebook and similar social sites.

In December 2008, AXSES began a project to use and evaluate the technology and the network. In the first week of this exercise, Kathy-Lynn Ward became a fan of Jennifer Figge, who is attempting to be the first woman to swim the Atlantic, from Africa to Barbados. Jennifer's manager contacted us through Facebook and AXSES put him in contact with the Barbados Tourism Authority (BTA). The BTA launched a similar Facebook project shortly after.

So we have to say it has value from a business perspective for tourism. It's hard to get to grips on just how to optimize it in a positive and socially acceptable way.
But we are beginning to see that the network and the technology can be a significant resource. The key is to shift thinking from a marketing perspective to one of helping and sharing. It's a good shift, and one that many companies are practicing without being on the Social Net.

Here is how it works: You sign up and then go about inviting Friends, who invite Friends, who invite more Friends to become your Friend. The Friends can become advocates and clients. Start using it, but be warned, it is addictive!

The first thing to learn is that if you want to be successful, don't choose your friends - just accept all that apply, that way it will grow. I don't do that well - I like my privacy, so I am careful who I approve.

Next, learn to create pages to describe, in pictures and words, your company and/or some of your products. Post it to your profile so it is visible to all that check to see who you are.

At AXSES, we created pages for the Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia (BTE) (http://Barbados.org),
http://BookingsBarbados.com, http://BookingsStLucia.com and http://BarbadosBoardwalk.com as a photo gallery, to name a few.

I say we did this, meaning that our people did. Facebook is personal, so a real person, not a company, is expected to create a Facebook account. They may then add pages, photo galleries, groups and make comments which can be sent to others. Facebook pages can be about companies and products. In fact, we made the mistake of setting up a profile for the BTE page and, in fact, there are advantages (more detailes to follow). It seems many companies also made this mistake! But for visibility on access, a page is superior; a profile is private and will not be picked up by SEO, whereas pages may.

Facebook groups may be formed to discuss topics of interest and share news and happenings. They are a good way to network and keep up to date and in contact. It's similar in a way to the thing they call a Wall, where all can post messages to be read by others who look at your Wall. Sort of like graffiti. Groups are more focused and you can create multiple topics. In the St. Lucia group, there are discussions going on about Amy Winehoue, as well as the new St. Lucia Marketing strategy. Unlike Pages groups, they are not open to the public; they are only accessible to Facebook people and you have to belong to the group to participate.

Margaux Daher, an AXSES Associate from St. Lucia, has taken the lead in creating links and sharing insights on the St. Lucia page and the St. Lucia group we created. Her friends have joined the group and now others are joining. It's not generating business but it is away to communicate and share.

Kathy-Lynn, always thinking of our hotel and travel clients, established RSS feeds which grab Holiday Specials off our bookings services and display them on the respective Facebook pages. Anyone who looks at the page can see a Special on offer.

Facebook's pages, photos, videos, events, invitations, discussion boards, Walls and messaging, as well as Flash and numerous applications, give us a very rich platform for a travel dialogue and e-commerce. It has potential for hotels and tourism operators.

We have already deployed arcRes Booking Engine on Facebook. Our next step is to integrate clients information on Facebook, to link in our travel network with special applications built on our travel platform.

4 million people use http://Barbados.org each year. If they choose to become a Friend or Fan of our Facebook page for Barbados, they will see all the Barbados.org posts, news and specials, all in one place. It will give us a useful way to communicate with travelers in a social way, on their terms, and with not in-your-face advertising.

Our next step will be to investigate how best to help hotels use social networks (more later).

According to eMarketer research, Social network users made up 41.2% of the US Internet population in 2008. 60% of Internet users are consumers of all user-generated content.



eMarketer estimates that 115 million people use the social media.
By 2013, the total number is expected to be over 154 million.
It's growing because its easy to use, appears to be more credible and it's free!

(Credit: Compete.com)

Resources:

see Jason Falls on FacebookBrand Page Best Practices/

Facebook Population

The Rush to Social Networks

Destination Marketing

Destination Marketing at a Crossroads

Not so very long ago a traveler had few options and the world of travel was pretty straightforward and perhaps a little too expensive।

Travelers went to their neigbourhood agent and pored over brochures, got advice and booked with the agent. Agents got to know the traveler well and could recommend vacations that suited. Travelers were well served, although the service was not necessarily timely or convenient.

Today the traveler is overwhelmed with armchair choices. Travelers who still go to agents often will first research on-line, and more and more of them are booking on-line. Arm-chair booking a holiday can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Travelers will look at several sites, consult friends and agents, read reviews on social sites, check airlines and look for the best value. Back and forth, they go looking at maybe a dozen sites.

Most people begin their holiday research by searching for destination guides (typically through Google). Often, they end up on Destination sites such as Tourism Authority sites, where the information is general, helpful but often limited in its ability to offer real in-depth comparison, shopping and planning services. The destination sites are often great for finding official resort websites, but the resort websites don’t present information in a consistent form and they are hard to compare.

Travelers move on to shopping sites like Expedia to compare resorts, to Trip Advisor to read reviews and to other sites to get more information and find deals. In the process they have a confusing and muddled array of information. The sites that help them most stick. The sites that don’t stick fall off the radar.

In the end the traveler will narrow down options to the few sites that help them most, the ones that give the best information and the best deals. They will narrow down the options to a few preferred resorts (unless it is an opaque site) and many will want to review the resort website, if they can find it. The traveler soon learns that it is impossible to get back to the actual resort because the shopping sites like Expedia, are a closed loop. All too often a search for a particular resort links them back to a shopping site. The big online portals have the budget and the knowhow to get listed on the Internet search engines (SEO); small hotels often don’t.

Destination sites are often the best place to find links to the official website of selected resorts, so the “clicked out traveler” may come back to the destination sites in the last stages of the decision making process. Many travelers prefer to book direct and most like to see the resort website. Convenience, value, service and after sales support drive the decision of where to buy, but all to often the hotel website is not convenient, does not offer the best value and can be difficult to find.

This buy cycle is not well documented, but it is intuitively understood. Its implications for travel websites are important.

The buying cycle and its implication for the destination supplier website



The Destination site is a pivotal point, Shoppers often use it first and may return to link to the resort that they have subsequently selected. The questions we ask are; how can the destination site hold onto that traffic or how do they get people to come back. It is unrealistic to expect the destination site to be the only place travelers go. So the real question therefore is, how do they get them back.

Building a compelling reason to return!

1. Provide online shopping

The challenge is in balancing integrity of information with on-line shopping, channel conflict and channel competition. The cost of a good destination site is rising. So operators are moving towards a business model that stresses income generation in an effort to make the site self-sustaining. But this comes at a price of muddling the roles and creating conflict with destination trade partners. Destinations can involve trade partners with affiliate marketing, but it is not always equitable and the question is who are the affiliates and where do tour operators fit. Destinations are reluctant to cut out the tour operator and agent and they don’t for the most part want to be either a travel agent or a tour operator।

2. Offer the tools travelers need.

Destinations can help travelers research by providing expert intelligent systems that learn who the traveler is and configure the experience based on unique requirement. These tools will necessary include offering comparison-shopping. Ideally the result will be to give the traveler the option to choose the channel, including dealing direct with the supplier. Word of mouth reviews and a traveler forum will also help keep them on the site and give the site top-of-mind recall. It is not appropriate for a destination site to link to Trip Advisor and such, as these are shopping channels that will not keep them coming back. Cost conscious travelers are always looking for a deal and the destination needs to offer a list of specials and deals and the ability to sign up for newsletters on specials and deals।

3. Award & create loyalty
Destinations have a great opportunity to reward repeat travelers and cooperate with airlines point systems to encourage them to book a destination hotel

4. Offer travelers their own website itinerary and own planning tools
There are huge opportunities for destinations to lead this charge by providing destination specific planning and a place to return to manage and share a holiday itinerary and the memories। Travelers should be able to build a personal website brochure by adding any page they look at to it. The traveler website should also be a comprehensive personal information resources and planning tool. Travelers may read and add reviews here, see a calendar of activities and events taking place during their holiday, and link to other social media sites and others like Tripit and Traveldk. It may include personalized maps showing the options they are interested, ranking them according to preferred and final selection etc.

Ultimately the Destination site is the key portal to support direct marketing for the destination suppliers. It must move beyond being a information site to becoming a system to help shoppers plan, compare and book, in harmony with its trade partners.

Links: http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-credibility/travel-booking.shtml