Hotels are decisively swinging their marketing operation online in order to take a slice of the lucrative online travel agency industry, a study by Hospitality eBusiness Strategies has said. More than two thirds of hospitality executives (68 per cent) say that they will be prioritising online marketing from this year. Almost three quarters said they expected search engine optimisation (SEO) to bring the biggest returns on investment.
This was followed by 68 per cent who said they would be combining SEO with organic search strategies and 62 per cent who would be combining this with site redesign.
Less than a fifth (17 per cent) said that they expected user generated media and blogs to offer a high return on investment, and just 2.3 per cent said that they were building these into their web strategies.
Other less-popular strategies included email marketing (chosen by 58.7 per cent), strategic and linking partnerships (52.7 per cent) and paid search (40.7 per cent).
Individual hotel marketing remains in relative infancy compared to the online travel agency sector said analyst Jeffrey Grau, and many sites are focussing on getting the fundamentals right.
"To compete with online travel agencies, hotels are focusing on improving the usability and functionality of their websites," he told WebProNews.
US websites rely most heavily on pay-per-click (PPC) marketing and SEO, while hotels elsewhere relied more heavily on website design, optimisation and strategic linking. Hotel franchises had the heaviest reliance on chain websites.
