Day ONE BTO2017 | TEN
Mercoledì 29 novembre
WORLD Hall
I love OTA!, No, I don't!
https://www.buytourismonline.com
Keynote Speaker
Walter Lo Faro Expedia
Des O’Mahony Bookassist
Conclusioni
Sergio Farinelli Simple Booking / QNT Hospitality
08448380779 Call Girls In Shahdara Women Seeking Men
BTO2017 | TEN - Walter Lo Faro - Expedia
1. Expedia for Hotels
Expedia for Hotels
@Expedia4hotels
@Expediaforhotels
Walter Lo Faro
Senior Director, Market Management
Southern Europe, Expedia group
15. 15
Our Brands Generate
Global Demand
Expedia travelers
book a hotel on another
continent from where
they shop.
1 in 3
Nearly
+200 SITES
75+ COUNTRIES
35LANGUAGES
21. We’ve received over
20 Million
feedback responses
since launch
Properties that respond to
Real-time Feedback see
higher post-stay review
scores up to 10% higher
The second, is what is coined the great consumer engagement crisis. Our attention have never been more sought after. We now live in a world overwhelmed by technology, information and solicitation.
Let me illustrate this point.
[To begin this segment/story]: An average person checks their phone 110 times/day…That’s a lot of time…but it gets worse…studies have shown that the more addicted users check their phones as much as 900 times/day (Source: http://www.addictiontips.net/phone-addiction/phone-addiction-facts/)
The American spends over 10 hours a day in front of a screen (split between TV and Digital)
of Source URL: http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/love-sex/relationships/a21506/would-you-answer-your-phone-during-sex/
Nomophobia – fear of being without your smartphone – affects 40% of the population (Psychology Today) (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reading-between-the-headlines/201307/smartphone-addiction)
It’s getting so bad that Rehab facilities have now started catering to all those people who have diagnosed themselves with cell phone addiction. (Source: http://www.addictiontips.net/phone-addiction/phone-addiction-facts/)
Add source: Gartner Worldwide device shipments, Jan 2017
However the mobile space isn’t just mobiles anymore, multi-device ownership is becoming the norm. Consumers are constantly connected to their phone, computer, and tablet all at the same time, and their purchasing habits are reflecting this: according to Criteo’s H2 2016 study (State of Cross Device Commerce), 31% of all online transactions involved 2 or more devices (Criteo dataset Q4 2016, US, all categories, excluding apps)
What about mobile bookings in Italy
Against all of this complexity, we invest $1.2 billion on marketing and tech
To help hoteliers with online visibility and marketing
Our brands generate demand
This is some of the demand we are seeing come into the region at the moment : present day snapshot
We are now observing over 1.86B interactions and exchanges of data between you and the Expedia marketplace every day.
This represents 1.9B signals and feedback opportunities to learn from.
Let me now share with you how we applied the framework for innovation to help address some of the hospitality industry problems we have observed.
These are stories I have heard over and over again. General managers terrorized by guest reviews. Stories like: “Guests had a defective TV in their room, or rooms at the wrong temperature, but didn’t let us know about it. They were very disappointed and shared their frustration on TripAdvisor and that review portrays a negative image for my property. If only they had told us, we could’ve easily solved their problem.
Here lies the problem: once a review is posted online it never goes away. Ever. This can materially hurt a Hotel’s brand and bookings for a very long time.
On the flip side, positive reviews boost conversion by creating trust with your property and/or brand, resulting in more bookings
So this is what we have today :
3 Simple Questions:
Happy with Check-in?
Happy with your room?
Happy with your amenities
In the free text bar guests can leave structured feedback – so that you would have tangible reasons behind the positive or negative impressions. This gives us a completion rate of 80%!!!
Red/Green – we use colour coding to make it really obvious
And because we are receiving some much feedback, we are also analyzing the date and transforming into insights.
What do response times and response rates look like?
What are the primary reasons that guests are happy and unhappy?
And we see that responding to Real-time Feedback does pay off. We have received over 5.6M feedback responses since launch, and we see that properties that respond to Real-time Feedback (positive or negative) can see higher post-stay review scores of up to 10% higher
Look, Revenue management and optimizing one’s online distribution is a painful, repetitive and gargantuan task.
A hotel partner told me is was like preparing his tax return, every day. But it does not need to be.
For many, between 1 to 3 hours daily is spent on price research activities.
Competitor sites are monitored more than 3 times per day in urban markets.
Millions of dollars a year are spent on rate shopping tools alone, many can’t afford
Less than 15% of hotels revenue manage today.
This, is a missed opportunity for too many of our hotel partners and a problem worth solving.
Rev+ is our solution to try and solve this problem, leveraging the vast amounts of data that flows through the Expedia marketplace every second.
The Price Calendar allows you to assess your rate competitiveness and detect market demand signals in ONE PLACE
We’ve also developed Market Alerts, a real time feed of market events and pricing activity taking place in your market you should be aware of.
The Pace Report allows you to assess your booking velocity compared to previous years
You can even customize how the data is presented to meet your existing workflows.
The Competitor Price Grid allows you to view real-time competitor pricing for up to 20 hotels. No more stale pricing data.
You can download also the Price Grid to work offline if needed.
The whole point here is to allow hoteliers to leverage the vast amounts of data we have in a way that makes sense to hoteliers. Or job is to get out of the way and focus on making the data and tools to interpret it as easy to use and as reliable as possible.
For example,
How can we help you assess how you are doing in the global Expedia marketplace?
What is working well for you and resonating with travelers? Allowing you to develop a competitive advantage…
What is not and what small changes could you make to improve your competitiveness?
We don’t run hotels or design guest experiences. That is hotelier’s unique expertise.
We do know understand the importance of the funnel when it comes to online retailing and here, we can help you understand where the problems and opportunities lie.
It’s as if we erected a wall between you and your guests.
Made it hard to enable simple but much needed interactions
Special Requests
Welcome message and promote your services
Special Check-In instructions
Meet Mary
requests and reservations of all sorts
Meet Elizabeth.
Introducing EPC Conversations
And why does this matter? Why is guest engagement important? These numbers are probably no surprise to you…
29% more that average for fully engaged guests from normal guests
12% less than average for disengaged guests
41% more for fully engaged over disengaged
Source: GALLUP, Nov 2014, per stay at the hotel they visited most frequently in the past 12 months
Another feedback you gave us was to help you understand your online reputation in the Expedia Marketplace. As you know, we receive millions of guest reviews every year. But to understand how your reputation evolves over time can be tricky.
Also, how can we help you understand how investments you make in amenities, services or staff affect your online reputation over time?
Rather than having you go back in time and read through all of them to understand what guest love about your property and what are areas for improvement, we’ve decided to put data science and natural language processing to the task.
Introducing Guest Review Insights in EPC
Screen 1: The system will automatically read every guest review we have received for your property
Screen 2: It will then categorize guest sentiment into what guests loved about your property, what they were neutral about and what guests didn’t like.
Screen 3: The tool also allows you to compare yourself against your competitors – so you can assess what amenities or services are making you more competitive and which ones require attention.
Screen 4: The tool will also show you what guests are thinking over time. If you have made an investment in an area, say renovated your pool or changed the chef in your restaurant, EPC sentiment analysis will allow you to see if this is resonating with your guests and if this investment is paying off by improving your reputation in the Expedia marketplace.
Question for the audience: Raise your hand if you have noticed guests are often asking the same questions and over again about your room or your properties?
Well, I can tell you, we get them too ;) As a matter of fact, we get over 10M of these requests every year. If one person were to answer each of these requests, in a single year, this would represent 19 years of his life.
We are experimenting with new ChatBot technology to help protect your sanity.
For example, you can see how we can help answer guest questions about your property, like if your property offers on-site parking or the cost of valet parking if offered. Within seconds we can inform the guest that long term parking is free and that you also offer a $24 per day valet service.
It can also answer room level information, such as what are the exact check-in and checkout times.
Finally, a guest can also continue to send a custom question to your property through the Expedia bot.
So many of you, over the past few years, have expressed a desire to promote your destination, your neighborhood and it’s highlights.
You wanted greater control over the destination information we associate to your property on Expedia
We will be testing something completely new in 2017.
For the first time ever, we are opening up our destination content platform to each and everyone of you.
You will now be able to review, curate, customize your destination highlights and points of interest.
Think about it, as true destination ambassadors, who best than you to promote the neighborhood around your property and it’s highlights to the world?
Let me show you how it works.
Screen 1: For example, if you believe a point of interest associated to your property is not as relevant for travelers, you can now simply remove it from the list.