Hotels Don’t See Social Media as a Priority

Hotels are putting social media on hold as a marketing and selling mechanism, while they focus on driving direct bookings in response to their continuous struggle for better margins with the Online Travel Agents (OTAs), says research by Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne (Switzerland) and RateTiger.

The six month qualitative study, ‘The Distribution Challenge 2012’, conducted in five countries, found that while social networks including Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor and YouTube are recognized as new forms of digital marketing, hotels are still unconvinced about the impact these channels will actually have on bookings and are therefore deterred from implementing strategies in the short term.

One in three of the hotels have no social digital media strategy, and only one in eight use any form of social media as a marketing tool. Hotels have instead focused on the development of offline strategies to build more corporate contracts that deliver more predictable business, and to diversify their online distribution mix to generate additional revenue opportunities.

According to the research findings, while a few hotels have used travel deal platforms like Travelzoo and perceived it as an opportunity to stimulate demand, more hotels aim at optimizing the use of Google (both PPC and Adwords) and SEO.

Their goal is to bring more direct bookings and take potential bookings away from high-commission OTAs. Hotels are looking to reduce the cost of distribution by directing bookings to their own website but also by increasing the share of smaller third-party websites within their distribution mix.