Owning Your Customer Is Key For Hotels Seeking To Get Back Web Bookings

The need to know your customer is fast being replaced in the hotel industry by the need to own your customer. Many hotels may have already given up to third-party vendors a good deal of information on their customers. Consider the in-room Internet-access provider who through its technology has the ability to observe how plugged-in guests navigate the web in a guestroom. Information is also given up to third-party Internet booking engines that record all that vital consumer site-registration information as they serve as the liaison between the hotel and the customer. One way hotels can recapture the opportunity to get a piece of that direct information for customer profiling back is to drive consumers to their corporate websites. Which brings us back to the ever-present topic of branding. In 2000 the saying, ?Those with the strongest brands will win? still rings true and in fact, seems to be voiced more and more frequently by experts as technology continues to roll over the way our industry has traditionally done things. In the fray to garner customer loyalty, hotel companies more than ever have to lure customers with billion-dollar, trustable brands. Steve Kent, an analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York, recently said in a groundbreaking Internet Lodging report that hotel companies will benefit greatly from customers visiting their sites because they will be able ?to build unprecedented customer profiles that may enable them to target customers with specific promotions and gather market data for future hotel development.? Kent? who pointed to Marriott and Four Seasons as being the strongest brands in the industry? noted that ?those companies with strong built-in loyalty with exceptionally strong brands, consistency, or frequent-guest programs should be able to hold their premium pricing,? avoiding the potential for the rate erosion that can come from massive on-line room discounting. Branding was a common theme for two major hotel companies that relaunched their websites in recent weeks. Choice Hotels International and Bass Hotels and Resorts, each hotel giants whose corporate names reflect nothing of the actual hotel brands they sell, have revamped their Internet presence so that consumers can type in the name of the actual hotel flag they would like to search, i.e., QualityInns.com or HolidayInn.com. Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which is in the same position since there is no actual ?Starwood Hotel,? also has branded sites for each of its five flags. Last month that hotel giant set a new marketing strategy to drive customers to its sites by launching its first Internet-only promotion, through which it is paying its frequent guest members 1,000 bonus points or airline miles for each stay booked on-line through the end of May. Cendant?s Wingate Inns has taken a completely different tact to lure a very specific type of customer to its site. The high-tech chain has partnered with a company called FunkyTalk.com in an effort to draw the Generation X crowd. Visitors to FunkyTalk.com?s site can easily link to Wingate?s, and the two entities have already planned promotions that get consumers to interact with the site. The goal is to brand Wingate strongly in the minds of Gen X?ers. With all this direct connection to customers, hotels should have ample opportunity to create profiles of the consumers visiting their site. The next step, of course, after getting all of this valuable information, is to figure out what to do with it. In the words of Bill Marriott Jr., chairman of Marriott International, that could be a whole new challenge. ?We have been pretty cautious, especially on the customer information side,? he said of Marriott?s efforts. ?We want to make sure we have customer information, and that we don?t have too much of it and that we use it. The problem with information overload is, you end up wondering what piece of information you should use, and how to avoid getting so much that you don?t use it.?