ADEPT Marketing

The recent Aug/Sep 2009 issue of Tourism Business Magazine has an excellent article by Steve Davies from Accommodate Me that effectively outlines the key online booking systems available for New Zealand tourism operators (mainly accommodation) with their different strengths and weaknesses.

In lieu of an online version of the article I have briefly summarised some of it’s key content and suggest any tourism business interested in more detail to grab the latest copy of the magazine. For those needing more advice you can contact me directly to help you develop your own online booking strategy to suit your business.

Key Popular Systems

What you choose to enable online bookings in your website and receive bookings from other online sales channels will depend on your business products, size and strategy – for the use of a system do you prefer paying set regular amounts or nothing upfront with a commission on success model?

Research the differences, the costs and what works best for your business. In addition to the below considerations and others mentioned in the full article, I suggest you also look at how easy the booking system is to use for your guests – can they easily view your availability and then book and pay for it without too many clicks or forms to fill in? It’s ease of use will be a large factor determining it’s success in your website.

Here are some options:

AA Travel – Only available for those who advertise online with AA Travel. Free to set up as an advertiser – 1.75 to 3.75% for bookings. Sales channel also include AA Centre retail network. AA advertising costs range between $299 and $9000+ per year.

Availability – Uses ResBook online inventory management system popular with B&B’s and Lodges. Can integrate with resellers sites but leaves it up to the tourism operator to negotiate terms and commissions. Starts at $480 per year and no commissions.

Bookit – One of the few to offer a solution for accommodation, activities, tours and car rentals. Growing number of sales channels including key sites such as NZ Tourism Guide, Yellow Maps and some Regional Tourism Organisations. Free to use system, 6% fees for bookings in own website plus commission from sales channel bookings.

Jasons/Holiday Guide – Using the Holiday Guide System it is commission free with monthly charges starting at $10 per month. Can be used in your own website, and if a paid advertiser on the Jasons website.

Seekom – Their IBEX system is for accommodation, activities/tours and car rentals with comprehensive options for selling via wholesalers and retailers. Also offers effective sales channel management for online availability and pricing updates. Connects to popular property management system (PMS) Callista with more to come. Pricing from $39 per month.

SiteMinder – Australian based but offering effective channel management for a wide range of NZ, Australian and international online sales channels, plus have more recently added “The Booking Button” for online bookings in your own website. Channel management starts from $44 per month with additional per month for the Booking Button. No commissions. (Sales Channels will still charge their commissions however).

Tourism Exchange – Air NZ owned, the newest system on the market offering integration with your property management system or use of their Eviivo Frontdesk to manage all your bookings. Provides online bookings on your own website and from their sales channels including Air NZ (online, retail and wholesale channels) with many more promised to come. Monthly charges from $0 to $79 depending on room numbers, 6% fee plus cc charges for your website bookings, plus commissions for sales channels bookings that you opt in to.

Vianet – Now Trade Me owned offers a booking tool for your own website and comprehensive network of sales channels including Travelbug, tourism websites and several Regional Tourism Organisations. Free to use the system, 3% fee for bookings from your own website plus commissions from sales channels you opt in to.

Thanks to a “retweet” from someone I follow on Twitter (@ranui_organics) I came across this YouTube video about the “Social Media Revolution”. Watch it now if you still just don’t get social media or think it’s just for the younger generation – wrong!  It’s definitely for business too, start using it today to discover all it’s potential.

For the tourism industry travel reviews posted online is now one of the most important factors people use to make a decision on what to book.

Ignoring review websites because of the risk of negative reviews is a poor and dangerous path for the tourism operator to take. If you are confident of your product and service you should embrace travel reviews as a key strategy for attracting new bookings.  If you are not confident then serious questions need to be asked about your business fullstop – fix the issues and then go for great reviews.

Here are some tips on how to use travel reviews as a marketing strategy:

• Pick one or two key review websites to focus on. Ensure you are listed on the site and then link to your listing from your own website. For New Zealand tourism operators I recommend sites like TripAdvisor and Rankers. TripAdvisor Reviews are also fed through automatically to appear on your business Google Map listing.

• Invite your guests to leave a review. Both TripAdvisor and Rankers provide free “widgets” to place on your website that show your current reviews and ratings plus invite people to write a review. You can also make it standard practise to email your customers with a link to write review.

• Promote your Reviews on your Website. You should have a Reviews page on your website showing a selection of your best reviews with a link to the review on the travel website. This provides credibility and trust that your reviews are authentic.
• Stone Store Lodge Accommodation rated “excellent” by 19 travelers
• Respond to reviews. Particularly if there are some negative comments. Always show you are happy to get feedback and have dealt with any issues identified, this is by far better than just ignoring it.

• Regularly search online for user content. Visit key travel review sites regularly and use websites like Technorati that help you to scour the internet for blog comments, photos or videos posted about your business. Travellers love showing off about their travels so there is a good chance they have posted photos on popular sites like Flickr or videos on sites like YouTube.

Check out this article from Hotelmarketing.com that offers some best practice guidelines for managing online reviews.

During a recession individuals and businesses cut back in spending borne out of uncertainty and necessity. As a business you still however need to attract new and retain existing customers. This means you need to become more clever and careful about how you spend the money you do have to market yourself.

Here are a few ideas to help with what you can focus on for your online marketing during a recession with cost effective strategies:

• Learn how to manage your own website so you don’t have to keep paying your web designer to do it. This means having a Content Management System that allows you to easily update text, images, add new pages and so on without knowing html code. The added benefit is that you can easily keep your website up to date and fresh.
• Make the most of all the free online marketing tools out there such as google maps, social networking, youtube videos and photo sharing.
• List on free business website directories like Made From New Zealand and websites related to your industry (see more about this here).
• Make comments on relevant and popular blogs about your area of expertise and even start up your own blog page that can be part of your website.
• Maintain relationships with your customers through regular email marketing initiatives and social media networking to keep them interested and hear their feedback…all for very low cost. These should also work in with content on your website to drive traffic to it.
• Make online “pay per click” advertising work for you and to suit your own budget using Google Adwords.

If you haven’t yet formed a strategy about online marketing for your business then the time to do it is now.

Twitter is a great equaliser when it comes to whether you are a small, medium or large business. Meaning, you no longer need a huge marketing budget to make this form of marketing communication work effectively for your business.

Mostly, Twitter just takes an investment in time. When getting started on Twitter, take to time to:

• see how twitter works first and what people tweet about, so just register and observe for a while.
• work out what your twitter strategy is. what is your objective and who do you want to target?
• follow people or organisations that you want to target and tweet about things that interest them so they will follow you back.
• it’s not about being a sales person, it more about communication and relationships.
• check out the Twitter “101″ Getting Started pages to help with learning the ropes, the lingo and twitter etiquette! Or view the “Mashable Twitter Guide Book” presentation (Adobe Reader 9 required).

By putting in the effort to understand and use Twitter for your business profile you will be rewarded with an excellent marketing tool that can be used effectively in conjunction with your website, blog and other social media pages.

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Time and time again businesses get emailed with some sort of offer to list on a website to promote their themselves with promises of better search engine rankings and increased website traffic.

My mantra when it comes to this decision is to only pay upfront for a listing which meets the following criteria:

• It is a well known and quality website relevant to your industry or target market.
• It provides a link back to your website.
• It can provide you with it’s monthly web statistics (unique browser visits) to measure it’s effectiveness.
• It ranks highly in search engine results for your business categories.
• It provides good value for money i.e. the upfront cost is not over the top and realistic for the profile it has and the content it allows you to add.

Know Your Stats!

For any listings you already pay for make sure you can track the traffic sources for your website through tools like Google Analytics, that way when it comes to decide whether to renew any listing you can find out how much traffic you’ve received and work out stats like the cost per click.

There’s a lot of value in checking and knowing your web statistics and traffic sources regularly. Free listings are the way to go for the bulk of your online listings, but there will be a selection of sites that are worth the money if they can give you quality website traffic.

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