Choice Hotels International has been using Google’s hotel booking option since early October. Book on Google, which is also now available via Google Assistant as of January 8, has already signed on multiple hotel and OTA companies, including Choice Hotels, AccorHotels and InterContinental Hotels Group as well as Priceline, Expedia, Mirai and Travelclick.
Unlike booking a hotel room through other third-party sites, the Book on Google reservation is handled by the hotel, meaning the guest receives a confirmation from both the hotel company and Google once they’ve made their booking (without ever leaving Google’s site).
HOTELS spoke with Choice Hotels Chief Commercial Officer, Robert McDowell, about the opportunities and learns thus far from the company’s use of the Google hotel booking tool.
HOTELS: Why was this a good fit for Choice and how has the offering been performing so far?
Robert McDowell: The Book on Google platform allowed us to meet our consumers where they are in terms of the booking process and provide them with a Choice hotel that really best meets their needs. If you think about it, from our perspective, the next wave in direct booking is really about customization and personalization so we’re very focused on meeting the customer where they are, whatever channel they prefer and using the most personalized and relevant approach. So, we partnered with Google to launch this and we have seen very positive results. Obviously, it’s still early given how (google) rolled it out and in how consumers are adopting to it, but we continue to be very pleased in terms of the revenue, the percentage of our clicks coming through as well as the higher-than-average conversion rate we’re seeing through the channel as well. All signs are extremely positive.
HOTELS: Any specifics you can speak to in terms of clicks and conversion rate?
RM: We do, but nothing we share with the general public unfortunately.
H: So, perhaps unique to Book on Google, the reservation is handled directly by Choice, which includes receiving a confirmation that allows guests to manage reservations directly with the hotel.
RM: That’s absolutely right. Google will pass the guest through as if the guest was booking directly on Choice’s website and we then take care of the guest in terms of anything we would similarly do for a Choice guest booking through our site. We handle that directly and any Choice Privileges, anything they need day of stay, we step in and assist the guest in that manner.
H: While it is “direct booking” in a sense, the user does complete the reservation without going to Choice’s website. Have you found there’s a loss in terms of being able to expose the guest to your brand, not having total control over the booking experience?
RM: We would love if 100% of our guests were booking through ChoiceHotels.com, but we recognize that they all don’t. This gives us an alternative on Google’s platform to really connect with the guest and it gives us the opportunity to have them book on our site. We have the opportunity then, if they’d like, to enroll them in Choice Privileges and obviously if we can get consumers to engage with us on Choice Privileges, we see they have a high propensity to spend more share of their wallet with us throughout the year as well as paying us a higher-than-average daily rate.
H: And is there a percentage of the booking fee that goes to Google?
RM: Yes, there is a compensation model tied to these reservations. It is lower than third party distributor agreements.
H: And any learns so far? How is the experience on the user end?
RM: So far, we have not gotten any complaints from consumers, either through Choice or Google. We believe it is a very seamless experience. Obviously, Google has just launched this in October and they continue to sign up other hotel chains and suppliers so my expectation is the product will continue to evolve over the next several months. But right now, we have not seen anything but really good seamless transactions between us and our consumers.
H: What’s the bigger picture/long term play on this for Choice?
RM: The hotel distribution landscape continues to evolve and change and a pretty rapid clip. We work very closely with all our distribution partners. If you go back to when TripAdvisor launched Instant Booking, we were the launch customer there as well. From the Choice perspective, we look at how to be innovative in this space and really sort of insure that we get our product onto the right channels in the right locations to ensure that consumers that are searching for Choice Hotels or a segment like this, that we’re putting our brand in the right position.
H: Finally, how does this move fit in with ChoiceEdge, the company’s cloud-based global reservation system and digital analytics program launched last year?
RM: Having ChoiceEdge has really given us the flexibility to be faster in our deployment of things like Book on Google. So we have a lot more flexibility working with our IT teams to really deploy products like this in a more timely fashion than we did in the past.