The integration of real-time news from Twitter by Bing and Google is yet more proof of the growing importance of personalization and the social graph in search. The biggest steps I’ve seen in the direction of this prediction are the introduction of social network search by Google (first an experiment and now available to everyone who has a Google profile)…as well as the acquisition of Aardvark.
Successful hotel search marketing of the future will be more about optimizing content of all types and reaching the right audience through the right niche and social search channels.ġ8 months later: Google still leads in terms of search market share…the once proud and strong Yahoo! has lost the search war…and Bing has made a splash with vertical search, nifty visuals and a $100m marketing budget. Aggressive paid search and website SEO to get at the top of Google search results just won’t cut it. Combining personalization, multimedia, social bookmarking and niche search, it’s not hard to see that the way we place importance on search rankings today may need a dramatic rethink. That’s not all…if you’re signed in with a Google account, you’ll probably see different search results and rankings based on your past search behaviour. Try a search on Google today and the evidence is there…a mashup of text, images and video results. The days of pure search are already on the way out. Hopefully the major chains should pick up the pace coming out of the recession, especially the ones who’ve cleaned up house and are now leaner, meaner and more focused on efficiency and tapping into growth segments.Ĭurrently, with the heavy emphasis on search rankings and generic paid search, this statement may come as a bit of a shock…but surely, this is the natural evolution of search.
The recession DID however put a damper on tech development and the hotel industry still shows limited signs of moving toward enhanced revenue management systems that can break down experience elements for bundling. For the likes of Expedia, packaged business drives a sizable chunk of business and travelers clearly love the ability to choose and package elements like air travel, rooms, car rental, etc while saving on overall travel costs. As travelers shopped for the best options and travel deals, major online travel retailers clearly won the battle, dropping airline fees and getting super aggressive on low fares and opaque packaging. This creation of experience units will also allow tourism industry suppliers to collaborate more effectively online, as well as spur the evolution of 3rd party providers who provide superior experience engines, taking destination marketing to a whole new level.ġ8 months later: The recession hit hard sometime after this article was written…and OTA’s have bounced back and reclaimed quite a lot of online market share from hotels in the last 18 months. The more elements you provide to what I like to call the “Experience Engine”, the better the choice available to customers to personalize and tailor their experiences. This will mean that successful suppliers (hotels) will have to break down elements of their inventory like rooms, dining, sports, spa and supporting services into individual units that can be booked and packaged both internally and externally. “Experience building” will become key to the looking and booking process online. The clear winners of the online distribution race will be suppliers and 3rd parties that provide the most choice to the customer. I thought it’d be fun to take a re-look at the article and see how far we’ve actually come in the last year or more and if those predictions still hold water… here goes: The article talked about 5 broad tech trends that I thought would radically alter the way we approached digital / internet marketing for hotels back at the end of 2008. I came across a piece I’d written about 17-18 months ago on the future of hotel internet marketing.
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