Blog homeHospitality eBusiness Strategies Inc. have announced their 2009 hotel survey via their irregular blog. This drew my attention back to their 2008 report which is well worth reading if you haven’t seen it before.
Last year’s survey came up with the amazing finding that 47% of all hotel websites were looking to add a blog to their website.
Read that again. That is a big number. I am not completely clear if this is “multiple hotel” websites that they are referring to (i.e. chain websites etc) or whether this is for individual hotel websites. I expect it is the latter. I will assume it is.
How many hotels are there? Most leading hotel agent websites have 50,000 large hotels on their system - but in you include all the niche accommodation providers you can get upto 200,000 (potentially - although I don’t think any site has that number in practice??).
Either way, lets muse for a second on what would happen if there were 100,000 hotel blogs on the web:
- Who would be reading them? Would consumers, as part of the pre-booking product evaluation, learn they have to check the blog first?
- Would blog articles come up alongside product availability search results? For example could you order by who has the best blog rank?
- What skills will be required in order for hotels to become content creators? (after all, 3rd party blog writing companies are hardly going to be able to service that number of clients)
- Will we need hotel specific blog meta-search? Could anyone make a business out of this? (for consumer use)
The one point that intrigues me is that how would the big chains handle this? After all the entire point of a chain is that you get consistent service and product between all your hotels of the same brand - hence your guests understand when they book with you what they are going to get - even if they haven’t been to that hotel before. For example I always book Ibis over Premier Inn (if I can) because Ibis always have French TV.
Chain hotels have become disciplined in creating uniformity between hotels. The thinking happens at head office, the doing happens in the hotels. Blogs though will only work if their objective is to assist with defining individuality between hotels. The thinking has to happen at the hotel level.
I suggest that with hotel blogs, individual and mainly independent hotels will probably have an advantage over chain and brand hotels. Could be interesting to watch how the chains handle this threat. They could either try to “control from the centre” (which wouldn’t work as blogs need to be unique to that hotel or destination) or let the hotels do their own thing (which will mean that there are good and bad ones…. which is exactly what the chains don’t want as that breaks their uniformity strategy).
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close to 50 percent of all hotels planning to add blogs to their website? hope this won’t actually happen, too many hotels who will just add a blog for the sake of having a blog. you are right in your statement that chains will have a hard time deciding what route to take, working for a chain myself I experience that most hoteliers don’t have time or competences to run a true blog for consumers.
Official hotel blogs won’t offer any opinions that the hotel doesn’t want the public to hear so won’t have any value.
Also just a quick point. You mention you book Ibis over Premier Inn and one of the reasons for this is the uniformity of each Ibis hotel.
In reality Premier Inn are the only true brand when it comes to uniformity because they offer exactly the same room in all their hotels and also manage all their hotels (they do not franchise) so as to ensure consistency.
Hi Chris and Marcel,
Thanks for your comments. If chains don’t / won’t support “official” blogs - do you think we may see “unofficial” hotel blogs?
Hi Alex, I think you’ve got a classic case of buzzword bingo there…! I presented to a bunch of Irish hoteliers a while back and they were more interested in blogging than fixing their booking engines. Which says a lot about the travel industry unfortunately.
Cheers
DJ
I think that hotel specific blogs work in the right situation, but they definitely don’t suit every hotel and every market.
Hotels which are in a leisure market are the first obvious candidates for blogs. One our hotels, the Napa Valley Marriott Hotel and Spa, has a blog to talk about Napa, the events in wine country, their spa and food and wine. Why? We are trying to generate fresh content and a resource for people to come and find information about the area. What to do when they get here? Which wineries have the best tours? Things like that. We need this to compete against the independent hotels who may be located on the property of a vineyard or in some more romantic location or against larger hotels who have bigger, but not necessarily smarter, budgets.
Hotels in markets with a lot of competition also could benefit from blogging. Why? To make them stand out. Whether, they are blogging about specific issues or a convention that is in town. Blogs serve as a communication point and community builder.
One off hotels in unique locations could also benefit from blogging.
I believe that the practice will continue to expand, but is more limited by time and resources at the property level than trying to keep the brand happy.
it is not that chains won’t support blogs, it’s just that within hotels many times there’s a lack of interest, competences and/or time to run blogs. And yeah, you may expect unofficial blogs of hotels who do have the interests and time.
And I agree hoteliers should spend more time on current functionalities, usability and other problems with their websites and booing engines before spending efforts on social media etc. What’s the purpose of social media if your website and booking possibilities are awful anyways? finding out your website and booking possibilities are poor probably…
@ Chris: I am not aware that Ibis do have franchised hotels (Mercure does though) and the chain does have uniformity in how they present their bedroom which is very different for Novotel, Sofitel or Mercure.
So Premier Inn is not the only brand where uniformity is found across all their properties. I also think Campanile and Etap Hotel are also the same.
I’m just surprised nobody refers to Marriott. IMHO he give a good example….even taking into account he dictates his posts in Luxury:-)