The document discusses the many communication channels that hoteliers must deal with today, including walk-in customers, telephone, email, fax, website, review sites, booking sites, social media, blogs, forums, chat, and photo/video sharing. It notes that hoteliers pay up to 15% in sales commissions to booking sites. The multi-channel environment is described as "the growth of the multi-channel monster".
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The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customerThe Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
www.sti-innsbruck.at 3
HOTEL
RECEPTION
The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
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The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
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The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
hotel website
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
hotel website
- review sites
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
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The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
www.sti-innsbruck.at 9
HOTEL
RECEPTION
The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
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The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
- blogs
www.sti-innsbruck.at 11
HOTEL
RECEPTION
The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
- blogs
- fora & destination sites
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
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The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
- blogs
- fora & destination sites
- chat
www.sti-innsbruck.at 13
HOTEL
RECEPTION
The Crazy Hotelier
- walk-in customer
- telephone
- email
- fax
- hotel website
The Hotelier of today has to deal with many different communication channels:
hotel website
- review sites
- booking sites
- social network sites
- blogs
- fora & destination sites
- chat
- video & photo sharing
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
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The Crazy Hotelier
The Hotelier doesn’t
only have to deal with
an overwhelming
number of
communicationcommunication
channels, but also has
to pay up to 15% sales
commissions to the
booking sites!
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
The Crazy Hotelier
-> 40 million overnight stays
-> 3 billion € transaction
volume
-> 70 million € sales
commissioncommission
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HOTEL
RECEPTION
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(Mulpuru, Harteveldt, & Roberge, 2011)
Call this “the growth of the multichannel monster”
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Content
1. Multi-channel Dissemination
2 S i l M di M it i2. Social Media Monitoring
3. Semantic Communication Engine Innsbruck
4. Seekda Social Agent
5. Summary
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MULTI-CHANNEL DISSEMINATION
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Dissemination
Dissemination refers to the process of broadcasting a
message to the public. Classification of channels:message to the public. Classification of channels:
– Static Broadcasting
– Dynamic Broadcasting
– Sharing
– Collaboration
– Social Networks
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– Internet Forum and Discussion Boards
– On-line Group Communication
–Semantic-based Communication
Image taken from: http://www.softicons.com/free-icons/application-icons/or-applications-icons-by-iconleak/file-cabinet-icon
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Static Broadcasting
• Prehistoric methods of dissemination: cave drawings, stories of triumphs on
columns and arches, history on pyramids, stones with messages
• More modern means: printed press, newspapers, journals
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• Online static dissemination: homepage …. And various web sites
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Static Broadcasting
Homepage Example
St ti W b it E l
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Static Website Example
The same hotel mentioned
on Wikitravel’s entry for
Innsbruck
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Static Broadcasting
Static Website Example
Entry in Wikipedia for Hotel
Goldener Adler
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Dynamic Communication
Small piece of content that is dependent
on constraints such as time or location.
Examples of tools (organized considering first
the length of message and second – the level of
interactivity)
• News Feeds (f.e., RSS)
• Newsletters
• Email / Email lists
• Microblogs (twitter, tumblr, …)
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• Blogs
• Social networks
• Chat and instant messaging applications
(skype, messenger, …)
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Sharing
• There are a large number of Web 2.0 websites that support the sharing of information
items such as: bookmarks, images, slides, and videos, etc.
• Can use specialized applications (see below) of features of other platforms and
services (e g share photos through Facebook)services (e.g. share photos through Facebook)
• Examples:
– Flickr, Pinterest – means of exchanging photos, visible to all users (no account necessary),
allows users to post comments;
– Slideshare – channel for storing and exchanging presentations;
– YouTube and VideoLectures – sharing videos, all users can see the posted videos and leave
comments on the websites
– Social Bookmark sites: e.g. delicious, digg, StumbleUpon
– Social News websites: e.g. reddit
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Dissemination through Collaboration
Wiki
• “Wiki” = Hawaiian word for “fast” of “quick”.
• Described by the developer of the first wiki software Ward Cunningham as theDescribed by the developer of the first wiki software, Ward Cunningham, as the
“simplest online database that could possibly work”*.
• Websites whose users can add, modify or delete content via a web browser using
simplified markup language or a rich-text editor.
• Most of the content is created collaboratively.
• Promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making link
creation intuitively easy and showing whether an intended page exists or not.
• Often used for internal collaboration, however, when public also
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an indirect means for dissemination.
*http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki
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Social Networks
• Provide a community aspect, i.e. forms a community that shares information in a
multi-directional way
• Common features (regardless of platform):( g p )
– construct a public/semi-public profile;
– articulate list of other users that they share a connection with;
– view the list of connections within the system
• Some sites allow users to upload pictures, add multimedia content or modify the look
and feel of the profile
• Social networks typically offer more than one channel of dissemination (thus they will
be considered platforms with many available dissemination channels):
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– Facebook: Pages, Groups, Share options
– LinkedIn and Xing are focused on professional use and fit the purpose of organizations
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Internet Forums and Discussion Boards
• Web applications managing user-generated content
• Early forums can be described as a web version of an email list or newsgroup
• Internet forums are prevalent in several countries: Japan, China
• Are governed by a set of rules
• Users have a specific designated role, e.g. moderator, administrator
• Common features
– Tripcodes and capcodes - a secret password is added to the user's name following a
separator character
– Private message
– Attachment
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– BBCode and HTML
– Emoticon or smiley to convey emotion
– RSS and ATOM feeds
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Group Communication
• Many-to-many
• Threaded conversations
U ll d i l i• Usually created on a particular topic
• Have different access levels
• Better for disseminating within a group that shares common interests as the purpose
of the services is to enable collaboration, information sharing and discussions
• Exampled: Google Groups, Facebook Groups, Yahoo! Groups, LinkedIn Groups,
Xing Groups.
• Similar in many ways to Discussion boards and Internet Forums
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Semantic Based Dissemination
Rich Snippets
• Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed
to give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query.to give users a sense for what s on the page and why it s relevant to their query.
• If Google understands the content on your pages, it can create rich snippets—
detailed information intended to help users with specific queries.
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SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
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What is Social Media Monitoring?
Definition*
Social Media Monitoring is the continuous systematic observation and
analysis of social media networks and social communities It supports aanalysis of social media networks and social communities. It supports a
quick overview and insight into topics and opinions on the social web.
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*http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Media#Monitoring
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Social Media Monitoring
• Social Media Monitoring tools facilitate the listening of what people say
about various topics in the social media sphere (blogs, twitter, Facebook,
etc.)
Listening: is active, focused, concentrated attention for the purpose of
understanding the meanings expressed by a speaker.
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Social Media Monitoring
Channels to analyze
MICROBLOGS
FORUMS/NEWSGROUPS
VIDEO SHARING
The
Conversation
SOCIAL NETWORKS
WIKIS
VIDEO SHARING
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PHOTO SHARING
BLOGS MAINSTREAM MEDIA
SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS
AGGREGATORS
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Channels to analyze
Social networks, e.g.:
• Facebook (Q1 2012):
• Twitter:
– 200 million Tweets per day (2011)
• Facebook (Q1 2012):
– 526 million daily active users
– 3.2 billion Likes and Comments per
day
– 500K comments per minute
– 200K Tweets per minute
• LinkedIn: 147 million users
• Google+: 170 million users
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– 700K status updates per minute
– 80K wall posts per minute
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Channels to analyze
Sharing networks, e.g.:
• YouTube:YouTube:
– 4 billion videos are viewed a day
– 100 million people take a social action on YouTube every week (likes, shares,
comments, etc)
• Flickr: >6.500 new photos per minute
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• Pinterest:
– 13 million users
– American users spend an average of 97.8 minutes
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Channels to analyze
News feeds
• Total Feeds*: 694 311
Blogs:
• >95 million blogs available online
Total Feeds : 694,311
• Atom Feeds*: 86,496
• RSS feeds*: 438,102 (63% of
the total)
• 22K posts per minute
• Tumblr (Q2 2012):
– 55.9 Million blogs
– 23.3 Billion posts
– 20K posts per minute
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*source: http://www.syndic8.com
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• WordPress (Q2 2012)
– 73.724.911 WordPress sites
Channels to analyze
Traditional mediums:
• TV:• TV:
– 365 TV channels licensed in Germany
• Radio:
– 822 Radio stations in Germany
Print medi ms (ne spapers maga ines)
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• Print mediums (newspapers, magazines)
– 382 Daily newspapers in Germany
– 4180 Weekly magazines in Germany
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Reference architecture
• SCEI is a reference architecture.
• A reference software architecture is a software architecture where the
structures and respective elements and relations provide templates for
concrete architectures in a particular domain.
• A reference architecture consists of a list of functions and some
indication of their interfaces (or APIs) and interactions with each other
and with functions located outside of the scope of the reference
architecture.
• SCEI provides a semantic engagement engine applicable to various
domains and tasks
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domains and tasks.
• Core of its efficiently and flexibility is its separation of concern.
• And the proper separation and alignment of form and substance.
• In total, SCEI is based on three different types of functionalities.
43
SCEI *sky
• Infrastructure
– The infrastructure layer provides basic functionalities needed by the other
f ti litifunctionalities.
– The infrastructure layer is responsible for separating and multiple alignments of
communication content and communication channels.
• Communication
– The communication layer used the basic functionality of the infrastructure layer to
implement the on-line communication of an agent.
– It combines these elements into useful patterns of on-line interactions.
– It supports exchange of meaning.
• Engagement
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• Engagement
– turns communication into cooperation.
– Workflow
– Crow sourcing
– Value generation through on-line cooperation.
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Customization of the Architecture
• To derive concrete products and services from the reference
architecture it must be instantiated for Application types (Tasks) and
Domains.
• Task customization:
– Advertisement
– Customer Relationship Management
– Revenue management
– Brand management
– Reputation management
– Quality management
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• Domain Customization: E.g., eTourisms.
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Infrastructure
Infrastructure
Content
Channels
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• Content can be down-/and uploaded from GUIs,
Repositories, CMSs, and others
• Channels are the millions of on-line communication
possibilities
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Four roles of Semantic Technologies
Infrastructure
Content
Channels
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Semantic Analysis
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Semantic Analysis
• Discovering facts in texts and other sources (audio, video, etc.)
• Deriving additional facts from them
• Typical tasks:
– Topic detection
– Named entity recognition
– Co-reference and Disambiguation
– Relation Extraction
– Sentiment detection and Opinion mining
– Social annotation
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– Text summarization
• Obviously all of them are needed in Social Media Analysis
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Four roles of Semantic Technologies
Infrastructure
Content
Channels
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Semantic Channels
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Semantic as a channel
• Not to be interpreted by humans, but machines that can make something
out of it:
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• Publishing Linked Data can take various formats and vocabularies
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Four roles of Semantic Technologies
Weaver
Infrastructure
Content Manager
- Import Content
- Export Content
Channel Manager
- Integrates
- Personalizes
- Interacts
- Describes Channels
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Content
Channels
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Semantic Content Model
Semantic Content Modelling
Separate content and channel.
Same Event
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Separating Content and Rendering
• Analogy:
– Content may be presented differently in different contexts.
– Therefore, it should be modeled independent from a specific representation
– Stylesheets connect content with a specific presentationy p p
• Content:
<html><head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/tryit.css" /></head>
<body>
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<img src="http://www.fensel.com/dieter.jpg" itemprop="image" />
<span id="property">Title: <span itemprop="jobTitle">Prof. Dr.</span></span>
<span id="property">Name: <span itemprop="name">Dieter Fensel</span></span>
<span id="property">Nationality: <span itemprop="nationality">German</span></span>
<span id="property">Birthdate: <span itemprop="birthdate">October 1960</span></span>
<span id="property">Address: <span itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
www.sti-innsbruck.at 55
<span itemprop="streetAddress">Technikerstr. 21a</span>,
<span itemprop="postalCode">6020</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Innsbruck</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">Tirol</span>
</span></span>
<span id="property">Tel.: <span itemprop="telephone">+43 512 507 6485</span></span>
<span id="property">E-Mail: <a href="mailto:dieter.fensel@sti2.at" itemprop="email">dieter.fensel@sti2.at</a></span>
<span id="property">WWW: <a href="http://www.fensel.com/" itemprop="url">http://www.fensel.com/</a></span>
</div></body><html>
Separating Content and Rendering
• Style Sheet 1:
body
{
background-color: rgb(220,220,255);
font-family:"Times New Roman";font family: Times New Roman ;
font-size:20px;
}
img { float: right; }
span[id="property"]
{
display: block;
font-style: italic;
}
span[itemprop]
{
font-weight: bold;
font-style: normal;
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font style: normal;
}
a:link
{
color: green;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;
}
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Separating Content and Rendering
• Style Sheet 2:
body
{
font-family:"Calibri";
font-size:25px;font size:25px;
}
img
{
float: left;
width: 120px;
margin-right: 50px;
}
span[id="property"]
{
margin-right: 40px;
float: left;
}
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}
span[itemprop] { font-style: italic; }
a:link
{
font-style: italic;
font-weight: bold;
}
Use an Ontology to model the content
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Infrastructure – Weaver
• Separating content from channels also requires the explicit alignment of
both.
• This is achieved through a weaver.
• A weaver is
– an uni-set of tuples describing bi-directional content-channel mappings,
– an execution engine for these tuples,
– a GUI to define these tuples, and
– a management and monitoring component for these tuple sets.
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Use a weaver to align content and channels
Branch specific Ontology
Weaver
Collect feedback
+
statistics
Distribute content
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Web 3.0/Mobile/OtherWeb/Blog SocialWeb
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Semantic Channel Modelling
Branch specific Ontology
Matcher
Collect feedback
+
statistics
Distribute content
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Web 3.0/Mobile/OtherWeb/Blog SocialWeb
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Semantic Channel Modelling
• The number of digital publishing channels has increased exponentially in
the past decade.
• Using semantics (i.e., an Ontology) to describe these channels.
• Automatic review and adjustment of content and dissemination to channels
based on semantic match-making.
• Content-Channel mapping becomes an instance of Ontology alignment.
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Communication & Engagement
• Meaningful communication requires often more than just a single and
isolated act of exchanging information.
– It can be active or reactive (Dissemination, Social Media Monitoring, and its
integration)
– It has a trace, a history
– It needs multi-channel switch
– It is bi-directional and multi-agent
– It is based on patterns of successful interaction styles (campaigning versus individual
interaction, etc.)
• For effective engagement (cooperation) is needed:
Workflow management
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– Workflow management
– Crowd sourcing
– Value chain generation
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www.sti-innsbruck.at
SEEKDA SOCIAL AGENT
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Multi-channel booking problem
• Hotels are facing the multi-channel booking problem
• More than 100 different booking channels available
• Daily maintenance of right balance of rooms availability
across more than 100 channels does not scale
• Average time for hoteliers required to maintain a profile of a
medium size hotel at one portal takes between 5 to 15
minutes a day
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• An effort of maintaining hotel’s profile on 100 portals would
require then at least 20 hours of work
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Multi-channel booking solution
• The multi-channel solution for hotel-industry internet
distribution
seekda! connect
www.sti-innsbruck.at
seekda! IBE
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Direct bookability for hotels
• Booking quickly and directly via hotel Web sites
• Seekda producs for direct bookability:
– Dynamic Shop
– Dynamic Shop Mobile
B fit
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• Benfits:
– Hotels do not give part of their profit to booking chanells
– Guests spend less time in booking using the instant booking engine solution of
seekda
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Direct bookability for hotels - challenges
• Does the customer find the hotel web site?
• Does the customer trust the web site?
• Are his/her requests properly answered?
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• Is his/her feedback taken serious and form a positive review of the hotel?
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Multi Channel Communication and Yield
Management
• Multi-channel communication tools can improve revenues and benefits
within the hospitality industry by:
– Increasing the on-line visible presence of hotels
– Make hotels offers visible to a broader audience via multiple channels
– Attract potential guests to hotel websites and thus increase direct bookability
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– effective and targeted on-line marketing
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Multi Channel Communication and Yield
Management
SCEI *sky+
h li i l i h l i i
www.sti-innsbruck.at
= holistic multi channel communication
and revenue management for the hotelier
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Touristic Portal
• Multi-channel communication (SCEI *sky)
• seekda booking engine
• Linked Open Data (LOD)
• On the fly service integration as you pay
• Everything integrated into a comprehensive map
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Linked Open Data (LOD)
• Use LOD to integrate and lookup data
about
– places and routes
f– time-tables for public transport
– hiking trails
– ski slopes
– points-of-interest
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On the fly service intergation as you pay
• Data and services from destination
sites integrated for recommendation
and booking of
H t l– Hotels
– Restaurants
– Cultural and entertainment events
– Sightseeing
– Shops
• Two integration approaches:
– ad-hoc service integration: via Web
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scrapping as a quick integration
solution
– via APIs and backend integration
for a long term, durable solution
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Everything integrated: Tourist Map Austria
• Based on Open
Street Map
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Everything integrated: Tourist Map Austria
• Based on Open
Street Map
• Increase on-line
visibility for hotel andvisibility for hotel and
destination via multi-
channel
communication -
SCEI
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SCEISCEI
Everything integrated: Tourist Map Austria
• Based on Open
Street Map
• Increase on-line
visibility for hotel andvisibility for hotel and
destination via multi-
channel
communication -
SCEI
• Hotels, ski passes,
etc. directly bookable
– seekda engine
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SCEISCEI
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Everything integrated: Tourist Map Austria
• Based on Open
Street Map
• Increase on-line
visibility for hotel andvisibility for hotel and
destination via multi-
channel
communication -
SCEI
• Hotels, ski passes,
etc. directly bookable
– seekda engine
• LOD to integrate and
lookup data about
www.sti-innsbruck.at 77
lookup data about
hiking trails, ski
slopes, etc.
LODSCEISCEI
Everything integrated: Tourist Map Austria
• Based on Open
Street Map
• Increase on-line
visibility for hotel andvisibility for hotel and
destination via multi-
channel
communication -
SCEI
• Hotels, ski passes,
etc. directly bookable
– seekda engine
• LOD to integrate and
lookup data about
www.sti-innsbruck.at 78
lookup data about
hiking trails, ski
slopes, etc.
• On the fly service
integration as you pay
LODSCEISCEI
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www.sti-innsbruck.at
SUMMARY
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Summary
• The multi-channel monster can be seen as a threat of:
– Failing to be properly present (active and passive) in a multitude of opportunities
– Spending a non-justify effort on achieving the former
– Going out of business in both cases (even if for different reasons)
• We propose a scalable solution for this based on using semantics.
• Core is the separation of content and channel and its explicit
interweavement.
• For our approach, semantics is a corner stone but requires many
additional services and layers to actually provide its potential.
• Together with Seekda we are currently focusing on the eTourisms
www.sti-innsbruck.at
• Together with Seekda we are currently focusing on the eTourisms
domain, however, other verticals may follow.
• In general, we target domains (verticals) with many SMEs that need to
intensively interact with their customers on-line.
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