When your guests talk - do you listen?
May 17th, 2007 by Joost SchrierOne of the industries that has changed the most due to the power of the internet is the travel industry. In the ‘good old days’ when you wanted to travel somewhere you would go to a travel agent, load up on brochures and book your vacation with a travel agent. Your opinion of a destination was based on those brochures and the recommendations of travel agents and your friends’ stories. If nobody in your circle of friends had ever been to Thailand and your travel agent didn’t actively tout it, chances were that you would never go there. Some adventurous souls would grab a Lonely Planet and chase Phileas Fogg around the world, but the majority of people just spent their holidays on the well-beaten path.
The internet has changed all that. Roughly 80% of travelers research and book their holidays online and this is expected to become 90% before this decade ends. If you are in the hospitality business you need to be where your guests will find you and the internet (read: Web 2.0) is a different ballgame than the travel agents. In the days of the travel agents and the brochures potential guests could only listen to what you said, but now you need to listen to them and join the conversation or suffer the consequences.
With the emergence of Web 2.0 the internet has become a place to be social, to engage in conversations with people around the world and to do research with a huge amount of information at your fingertips (literally). People are no longer limited to brochures and agents when looking for a destination or a hotel, they can find their own information on-line.
This trend has sparked a large amount of hotel- and destination-review websites to be set up. Some of the more popular are TripAdvisor, IgoUgo and TravelPost and a very recent one is boo.com. (For the people that don’t travel: on these websites travelers can read reviews of hotels and destinations written by their peers.) In the good old days you would ask your friends and now you can ask people on-line. The big advantage is of course that chances are slim that you have 50 friends that have been to some obscure hotel in Nepal, but it might well be that 50 strangers put their review of this hotel on-line. Just like a review from a friend is more easily believed than a brochure, or even a professional review, the reviews from those online stranger are typically very important in the decision-making process.
The really cool difference between the old days and now is that you can listen in on what people are saying. If you are a hotel or destination marketer you can actually see what people are saying to their friends. Some marketers go to the extreme in listening and taking direct action, but at the very least you should look at it and see what people are saying. There might be someone there who raises a valid point and you might be able to do something about it.
