Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Hotel News Resource offered a synopsis of an online survey concerning “Hotel Internet Marketing and Distribution.”a

It offers an “overview of the current attitudes about costs and benefits of online distribution from a unit level perspective in the hotel industry.”a

Some of the report's main points are:

• Respondents rated their own website as more effective than any other online channel of distribution; their off-line reservation department is the most effective at delivering business volume they want at the price they want; meeting planner websites were considered least effective of all channels to deliver the desired business volume.

• While most hotels have their own website, 10% of them don't offer booking capability. Furthermore, 10% of hotels still do not have a dedicated site at all.

• The average spending for online marketing was just over $50,000 a year; the most often cited range of spending was $25,000-$35,000 annually. While many hotels have begun to embrace the use of online marketing fully, one-fourth of the hotels claimed their online budget was 'too small to note.'

• Revenue managers, often the decision-maker on online travel agency usage, were on-site in most hotels and spend almost two and a half hours per day on channel management.

• While many hotels are starting to use their online channels to collect customer profile information, more than one-third are not. In addition, just over one-half of the respondent hotels report actually using customer profile information to drive marketing campaigns.

• Most hotels anticipate significant growth in online business volume with the average expected increase to be at least 50% by 2008 over 2005 levels. These projected increases referred to business conducted through the hotels' website and third-party websites, excluding changes in GDS volume.

• The online channel expected by most respondents to have the greatest impact is search engines followed by third-party travel agencies.

There were several unbelievable points made that I found hard to believe: 10% didn’t even have a dedicated site at all, and another 10% didn’t offer booking capability. 

Another extraordinary statistic was that one third of the hotels weren’t using their websites to collect customer profile information. That is beyond imagination when you think of the reasons for a website in the first place.