Never before has Internet played such a vital role in the Hospitality Industry. What I have experienced in the last few years has made me believe that there exists no logical model for forcasting the business development via the Internet.
I see myself as the perfect example who converted himself into someone I wouldn't have thought I would be. Let me explain:
For all these years, especially in Europe and Asia, we have been following a rather old business model in the Hospitality Industry. The way of managing a business, be it Hotels, restaurants or travel agencies, we didn't show a lot of innovation (at least not all of us). I was surprised to see even not so long ago, business owners still being hesitant about this whole e-marketing and e-business thing.
I remember this one business owner saying, I quote "I am not very sure of using my credit card online! If I don't trust the internet then how can the clients who come to my hotel do the same?" And so this chap actually didn't wish for his clients to pay for the services he provided via the internet! What he didn't realise is that he didn't have any choice anyway if he were to survive in this century!
Well, I met him a few months ago and you guessed it right, he finally allowed his clients to pay online. He also discovered that his annual revenue had doubled! That made him realise that he had actually lost so much of this potential business for all these years because of his 'Not trusting the new technology'.
For years now the Hospitality Industry has been using the traditional methods of marketing. As far as the Internet and their website was concerned, they trusted their web-masters to do the trick for them. They didn't realise that web-masters were meant to build websites and were not meant to be experts in marketing.
In the US however, they got this point real quick and good for them too as the online buyers there have been active since about 10 years ago. All this meant that the whole marketing plan in the business model had to be altered. This required a lot of thinking. Finally, the industry got the point and developed some specialised solutions accordingly. There are now loads of companies specialising in Online Hotel Marketing and offer customised solutions for Hotel Companies of all sizes.
In Europe, this took sometime and it was not very long ago that companies started importing this overseas model. Last february, I had been to the e-marketing fair in Paris which had something like 400 companies selling everything from Softwares to personalised marketing solutions, although there were not a lot of companies specialising in Hospitality or Tourism solutions. Never mind, this was anyway a big improvement. A few years back, this kind of a fair would have has something like 20 companies offering their services!
I see myself as the perfect example who converted himself into someone I wouldn't have thought I would be. Let me explain:
For all these years, especially in Europe and Asia, we have been following a rather old business model in the Hospitality Industry. The way of managing a business, be it Hotels, restaurants or travel agencies, we didn't show a lot of innovation (at least not all of us). I was surprised to see even not so long ago, business owners still being hesitant about this whole e-marketing and e-business thing.
I remember this one business owner saying, I quote "I am not very sure of using my credit card online! If I don't trust the internet then how can the clients who come to my hotel do the same?" And so this chap actually didn't wish for his clients to pay for the services he provided via the internet! What he didn't realise is that he didn't have any choice anyway if he were to survive in this century!
Well, I met him a few months ago and you guessed it right, he finally allowed his clients to pay online. He also discovered that his annual revenue had doubled! That made him realise that he had actually lost so much of this potential business for all these years because of his 'Not trusting the new technology'.
For years now the Hospitality Industry has been using the traditional methods of marketing. As far as the Internet and their website was concerned, they trusted their web-masters to do the trick for them. They didn't realise that web-masters were meant to build websites and were not meant to be experts in marketing.
In the US however, they got this point real quick and good for them too as the online buyers there have been active since about 10 years ago. All this meant that the whole marketing plan in the business model had to be altered. This required a lot of thinking. Finally, the industry got the point and developed some specialised solutions accordingly. There are now loads of companies specialising in Online Hotel Marketing and offer customised solutions for Hotel Companies of all sizes.
In Europe, this took sometime and it was not very long ago that companies started importing this overseas model. Last february, I had been to the e-marketing fair in Paris which had something like 400 companies selling everything from Softwares to personalised marketing solutions, although there were not a lot of companies specialising in Hospitality or Tourism solutions. Never mind, this was anyway a big improvement. A few years back, this kind of a fair would have has something like 20 companies offering their services!
This brings me to what I have been doing all this time. Well, I started off in this industry with my usual education with an MBA in Hospitality from Vatel. I then continued my career in the Front office hoping to be a General Manager one day. However over the years I realised that the clients who came to the Hotel had all been on the internet and had booked a room at least once in their lives. It was that very time that I said to myself that I need to jump into this and adapt myself if I ever hope to be a successful manager.
SEM, SEO, PPC, CPC !!! Ever heard of these abbreviations before? Well, they now need to be a part of any marketers vocabulary. You cannot afford to not know them. They are like the very basic 4Ps of marketing that we all learnt back in school. What is still sad is that we unfortunately do not have a very academic application to this online marketing subject.
Well, hopefully we will have some kind of a programme soon in place for us non-IT people so that they will not have to work the hard way like the way I did. More later.... Thanks for reading...
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