The Results Are In!

For the month of March we ran a survey aimed at capturing hotels’ opinion of online booking and how important it is to their business.

The uptake of the survey was relatively slow with only 41 completing it eventually. Being the first survey we’ve done, I’m sure we’ve got a bit to learn in terms of making the entry tempting enough – perhaps we’ll offer an incentive next time!

Regardless, 41 hotels is still a nice snapshot of the industry and the results make interesting reading.

As expected, the vast majority of entrants (78%) already possess a ‘book online’ button on their website. 49% viewed online booking as an essential element of their business. This isn’t at all surprising; as we all know, online is ‘where it’s at’ (count how many times you hear that from SEO companies and at conferences this year) and it’s encouraging to see how much importance hotels are placing on their online presence.

Website and search engine investment drew a fairly split response with 34% of participants unsure if they were actively investing in Google Adwords or search engine optimisation. The sudden raft of SEO companies and Adwords specialists does seem to be having an affect though, as a number of the respondents have actively invested in both. I’m not entirely surprised at the level of confusion over this. SEO is a hugely congested topic with many different views being expressed by many different ‘experts’ – trust us, at Welcome we’ve heard it all!

Lastly, and of particular interest to ourselves, the question relating to the use of GDS saw 37% of entrants confirm they make use of some form of global distribution whilst 49% do not. We’re actively investigating a GDS interface at Welcome as we understand it still dominates the online market. If a hotel wants to make itself as visible as possible on the web, it must invest in three things; its own website, affiliates (Booking.com, etc) and GDS.  This can present a headache in terms of channel management and we want to help make the process as stress-free as possible.  More on this in the coming weeks.

Keep an eye out for future surveys. We are using Constant Contact for both these and our e-shots and I can heartily recommend them; if you’d like to hear more on our experiences of the system, please get in touch by clicking my name below.

View the online booking survey results here

Mark Ellis 2nd April 2009

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