At the 2013 Best Western North American Convention, held over the past weekend in San Antonio, Best Western International, Phoenix, announced new marketing initiatives including a proposed partnership with Google to offer a 360-degree view of lobbies, breakfast rooms and guestrooms included within the Google Street View feature within the Google Maps application as well as integration into Google’s new carousel feature for hotel search results.
To find out more about this and her thoughts on how hotels’ digital marketing is evolving, HOTELS spoke with Dorothy Dowling, Best Western’s senior vice president, marketing and sales.
HOTELS: Does Best Western believe the Google partnership will increase online sales conversions?
Dorothy Dowling: Google has done extensive research on user experience and we know that this will help on conversion. We’ve just started beta testing but it’s not much of a leap to see how this will boost online sales for properties that have this versus ones that do not. This will be integrated into Google’s carousel feature for search engine results on a market’s hotel properties.
HOTELS: How does this fit into the predicted rise of the metamediaries in online travel booking?
Dowling: There is lots of sophisticated attribution modeling there, but this process is still in its infancy. I have spoken with Cindy Estis Green, and I believe it is a combination of understanding a sale’s transaction costs and media costs that will best position hotel companies moving forward. The metamediaries are the new players in the space and if we don’t meet them there, we won’t be part of the online travel purchasing funnel.
Big data is going to help us get there. We are investing in a new CRM platform. There will be social media and a lot of loyalty attribution, that is where the big data integration will be. Our marketing will change — not so much on the media side, but it will change a lot on one-to-one marketing in the loyalty program and one-to-sum marketing toward small groups.
HOTELS: Speaking of groups, do you think the post-recession status of group sales in North America is the new normal?
Dowling: That is what my colleagues say. Best Western doesn’t play large in corporate groups, but we do well in the unmanaged group space.
HOTELS: Do you think the rise of hospitality exchange networks like Airbnb will have a significant impact on occupancy?
Dowling: It is an interesting development, but from my point of view I don’t think it takes away from our core business. It is more of an outlier.
HOTELS: Do you think RoomKey will be able to get more traction versus the big online travel agencies?
Dowling: I am very supportive of their model and for Best Western it is another piece of the channel mix. However, they are handicapped by amount of marketing dollars. Do you have enough money to be in front of customers? That is what holds both Room Key and the brands back versus the OTAs.