Founder of RockCheetah & Views from a Corner Suite Blog
Following the lead of airlines irrationally pricing airline seats, hotels embraced variable pricing and its promise of liberal price increases during high demand periods. Hotel revenue management became a high stakes game to optimize revenues.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Hotel revenue managers welcomed their new computer overlords - and then quickly started overriding the revenue management system pricing recommendations"]
photo credit: JasonTromm[/caption]
Encountering wild price fluctuations, consumers began playing their own games to save money booking hotels. The ability to find discounts from rates offered by hotel websites alters consumer buying behavior - just ask the online travel agency community.
So what happens as a result of this gamification of the hotel booking process? Much more is involved than simply pitting two sides against each other in a tug-o-war over the contents of a hotel guest's wallet.
Hoteliers learned that variable pricing was a double-edged sword - similar tactics could be used by competitors to undercut pricing and steal market share. The game became more complex than originally imagined.
Similarly, consumers faced with a daunting assortment of distribution channels, business models and promotional pitches had difficulty finding a reliable method to score big hotel discounts. The complexity of their game increased as well.
How to Save Money Booking Hotels
The approach detailed below has been used successfully for several years. Simply put, it involves bidding using Priceline's "Name Your Own Price" service while using Expedia sister brands Hotels.com to calculate an inital bid and Hotwire.com to set the maximum bid.
It is a relatively easy game for travelers to play, with only basic arithmetic skills and a bit of organization required. The hotel savings don't require booking months in advance, waiting until the day of arrival, or involve buying flash sale coupons and hoping for open availability when travel needs arise.
Tragically for the hoteliers, there is no accretive demand generation, just a potential share shift between candidate properties. These savings do not inspire discretionary trips or stay extensions to take advantage of a great hotel deal. Rooms are booked into targeted destination neighborhoods only when a trip is required.
Plus, this game is not just for the leisure traveler - it also works well for the unmanaged business traveler. Worse yet for the hotelier, even formerly brand loyal guests will be tempted to become brand agnostic when consistently rewarded with discounts ranging from 33% to 67%.
I live a conflicted existence. My hotelier persona laments the slow hotel industry recovery following the 2008 global financial crisis and promotes the need for hotels to build differentiated brands and execute disciplined pricing strategies. However, I must sadly confess to my hotel industry friends that my personal consumer behavior is guilty of waging a deliberate assault on their average daily rates.
The rationalization for such treasonous behavior toward my hotel brethren is simple. I am playing a consumer game with a clear objective - pay the lowest possible amount for a good hotel in a good location. Publicly available tools are used in a manner that is consistent with their design and full endorsement of the intermediary website. The hoteliers deliberately make these rates available for sale, so they should have no gripe with me - The process does not violate any channel, access or opacity constraints.
Over the years, Kevin May has been derided as a self-obsessed megalomaniac or Awesome as both an adjective and intransitive verb, my ultimate wish is to have it objectify me as a noun."
- Kevin Luke May
Search is radically changing to become more contextual, relevant and focused on producing the right answer for the user. The shift from a web of documents to a web of data is evolving. The impact can be seen on search engine results pages across many product categories, which foreshadows the future of travel search.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Search engines are providing travelers with an increasingly dense forest of options"]
photo credit: [le]doo[/caption]
Moderating the "The Impact of Structured Data on Travel Search" panel discussion at the Open Travel Alliance 2010 Advisory Forum in Seattle last week provided an opportunity to highlight some of the dramatic steps forward in the area of travel search. Unfortunately, in the process, there were also some unintentionally ugly results discovered as the industry and the major search engines struggle to cope with the geometrically expanding range of unstructured data.
The topic was exceptionally timely given the breaking news regarding Google's rumored acquisition of ITA Software and Facebook's launch of its Open Graph protocol (that leverages RDFa data sets.) Even Apple Computer's leaked iTravel patent filing incorporates search functionality for flights, hotels, rental cars, cruises, trains and buses. These three applications create new paradigms for travel search - all relying on access to the "Deep Web" - the source information that serves as the foundation for today's web pages.
It was great to see that attendance rebounded healthily at the annual Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals HITEC conference, held in Orlando, Florida June 21 - 24, 2010.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="There's not only an App for that, but there's also a device and operating system as well, plus a bunch of travel industry complexities..."]
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The good news was that I had been selected to speak on a subject that combined two of the hottest topics in technology and travel: Mobile Hotel Distribution. It's always fun to speak on a topic that should attract a good crowd...
The bad news was that the session was scheduled for 8:00am Wednesday morning - A time slot generally not conducive to strong crowds, especially following a second straight late night of highly entertaining client parties...
Rather amazingly, the early start time still produced a good sized audience that was sincerely interested in the monumental changes taking place in the mobile space and its impact on the hotel distribution landscape.
Many thanks are owed to to Rob Torres of Google, Flo Lugli of Wyndham Worldwide and Brett Keller of Priceline who generously provided some great graphics and data points regarding mobile and hotel distribution in presentations at the Association of Travel Marketing Executives Conference the previous week in Boston. Several of the statistics included are staggering.
The session was titled "Mobile Distribution - No, It's Not Billboards and Neon No Vacancy Signs"
It was great to see that attendance rebounded healthily at the annual Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals HITEC conference, held in Orlando, Florida June 21 - 24, 2010.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="There's not only an App for that, but there's also a device and operating system as well, plus a bunch of travel industry complexities..."][/caption]
The good news was that I had been selected to speak on a subject that combined two of the hottest topics in technology and travel: Mobile Distribution. It's always fun to speak on a topic that should attract a good crowd...
The bad news was that the session was scheduled for 8:00am Wednesday morning - A time slot generally not conducive to strong crowds, especially following a second straight late night of highly entertaining client parties...
Rather amazingly, the early start time still produced a good sized audience that was sincerely interested in the monumental changes taking place in the mobile space and its impact on the hotel distribution landscape.
Many thanks are owed to to Rob Torres of Google, Flo Lugli of Wyndham Worldwide and Brett Keller of Priceline who generously provided some great graphics and data points regarding mobile and hotel distribution in presentations at the Association of Travel Marketing Executives Conference the previous week in Boston. Several of the statistics included are staggering.
The session was titled "Mobile Distribution - No, It's Not Billboards and Neon No Vacancy Signs"
The United States Government is the world's largest purchaser of travel, with an estimated $20 Billion annual spend.
The Society of Government Travel Professionals is comprised of a diverse group of government employees, travel management companies and travel suppliers. I was honored to have an opportunity to share some thoughts on the factors I see influencing the future of both government and civilian travel. The talk was titled "Future Trends and Leading Technologies."
[slideshare id=5163378&doc=sgtp-future-trends-leading-technologies-robert-cole-100909071540-phpapp01]
There were also edited versions of four videos embedded in the presentation - the full versions of each are included below:
I was honored to present the closing keynote for the Wisconsin Hotel & Lodging Association 2010 Annual Conference and Tradeshow held October 25-26 in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
While I frequently joke about Wisconsin representing the center of the travel universe, there is more to it than most would give credit. Several members of the Wisconsin Hotel & Lodging Association are definitely doing a lot of things right.
Meeting attendees included representatives of the innovative The Iron Horse Hotel, voted hotel of the year by the Boutique & Lifestyle Lodging Association, mega-indoor waterpark operator Kalahari Resorts and the uniquely diversified Marcus Hotels & Resorts. All three Wisconsin-based groups are raising the bar in very different ways for quality, guest-centric, hotel and travel experiences.
The presentation was titled "Future Lodging Trends and Emerging Technologies."
[slideshare id=5571214&doc=whla-future-lodging-trends-emerging-technologies-robertkcole-101026180927-phpapp01]
The full versions of the three videos that were embedded in the presentation are included below:
I’m the founder of RockCheetah. My role in the travel industry is to help companies bridge the chasms separating marketing, technology and operations to create best practices and process improvements that benefit the consumer and drive profit. I serve a synovial role – tasked with the responsibility of eliminating friction between the three disciplines so travelers can easily attain their goals and objectives.
I’m the founder of RockCheetah. My role in the travel industry is to help companies bridge the chasms separating marketing, technology and operations to create best practices and process improvements that benefit the consumer and drive profit. I serve a synovial role – tasked with the responsibility of eliminating friction between the three disciplines so travelers can easily attain their goals and objectives.
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