When I talk with hoteliers about their social media efforts, most say that they are using the channel to find powerful ways to engage with their guests. They are treating their social media marketing like a cocktail party and listening to their guests first, before speaking. Through this engagement, they are able to deliver more personalized service that in turn helps deepen customer loyalty and brand advocacy. This fortuitous cycle inherently gives customers a greater [...]

Online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia and Priceline as well as meta-search engines like Kayak and Google Hotel Finder have become crucial to many hotels’ overall advertising mix – especially during low booking seasons or to fill rooms at the last minute. But property owners should be careful not to neglect other hotel marketing strategies and let these channels consume too large a percentage of their revenue.Rate parity clauses in agreements with OTAs make it [...]

Just 20 minutes to all major attractions in Orlando, The Florida Hotel and Conference Center is a 511-room, 50,000 square feet facility located in one of Central Florida’s largest indoor shopping malls, The Florida Mall. Thirty years old, the building has had a rich history since it originally opened as a Crown Plaza. Current ownership began on May 4, 2004, and for nearly a decade the hotel has set itself apart with a focus on [...]

Google recently released more information about Knowledge Graph, which is important because it impacts the way search results appear on Google. The Knowledge Graph is a new technology aimed at offering a new way to display search results that matches search words with entities or concepts instead of web pages. Google launched the Knowledge Graph a year ago but has now expanded it to include far more queries, including many different hospitality-related and local searches. Upon [...]

Recently, Pinterest launched an analytics dashboard for businesses, which gives brands the ability to more closely monitor their presence on the platform. If you haven’t started using Pinterest, it is a pinboard-style photo-sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, hobbies and interests. Users can browse other pinboards for images, 'repin' images to their own pinboards, or 'like' photos. Hotels and restaurants can have their own boards where [...]