Views from a Corner Suite

Travel Gamification – How to Save Money Booking Hotels

by RobertKCole on May 16, 2012

Following the lead of airlines irrationally pricing airline seats, hotels embraced variable pricing and its promise of liberal price increases during high demand periods. Hotel revenue management became a high stakes game to optimize revenues.

photo credit: JasonTromm

Hotel revenue managers welcomed their new computer overlords - and then quickly started overriding the revenue management system pricing recommendations

Encountering wild price fluctuations, consumers began playing their own games to save money booking hotels. The ability to find discounts from rates offered by hotel websites alters consumer buying behavior – just ask the online travel agency community.

So what happens as a result of this gamification of the hotel booking process? Much more is involved than simply pitting two sides against each other in a tug-o-war over the contents of a hotel guest’s wallet.

Hoteliers learned that variable pricing was a double-edged sword – similar tactics could be used by competitors to undercut pricing and steal market share. The game became more complex than originally imagined.

Similarly, consumers faced with a daunting assortment of distribution channels, business models and promotional pitches had difficulty finding a reliable method to score big hotel discounts. The complexity of their game increased as well.

How to Save Money Booking Hotels
The approach detailed below has been used successfully for several years. Simply put, it involves bidding using Priceline‘s “Name Your Own Price” service while using Expedia sister brands Hotels.com to calculate an inital bid and Hotwire.com to set the maximum bid.

It is a relatively easy game for travelers to play, with only basic arithmetic skills and a bit of organization required. The hotel savings don’t require booking months in advance, waiting until the day of arrival, or involve buying flash sale coupons and hoping for open availability when travel needs arise.

Tragically for the hoteliers, there is no accretive demand generation, just a potential share shift between candidate properties. These savings do not inspire discretionary trips or stay extensions to take advantage of a great hotel deal. Rooms are booked into targeted destination neighborhoods only when a trip is required.

Plus, this game is not just for the leisure traveler – it also works well for the unmanaged business traveler. Worse yet for the hotelier, even formerly brand loyal guests will be tempted to become brand agnostic when consistently rewarded with discounts ranging from 33% to 67%.

I live a conflicted existence. My hotelier persona laments the slow hotel industry recovery following the 2008 global financial crisis and promotes the need for hotels to build differentiated brands and execute disciplined pricing strategies. However, I must sadly confess to my hotel industry friends that my personal consumer behavior is guilty of waging a deliberate assault on their average daily rates.

The rationalization for such treasonous behavior toward my hotel brethren is simple. I am playing a consumer game with a clear objective – pay the lowest possible amount for a good hotel in a good location. Publicly available tools are used in a manner that is consistent with their design and full endorsement of the intermediary website. The hoteliers deliberately make these rates available for sale, so they should have no gripe with me – The process does not violate any channel, access or opacity constraints. continue reading →

Tagged as: average rate, hospitality, hotel, Hotwire, online travel companies, Priceline, revenue management

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The Awesomosity of Kevin May

by RobertKCole on April 1, 2012

Over the years, Kevin May has been derided as a self-obsessed megalomaniac or foreboding overlord, but the King of Tnooz himself will tell you that these baseless charges are the work of trifling minions consumed with jealousy over his success, fame, and rugged good looks.

photo credit: HappyHotelier

Kevin May explains to conference attendees that the curse of his awesomeness is a lifelong burden that he alone must bear...

Exactly how did Kevin become so awesome? The details, like all aspects of his existence are swathed in secrecy, mystery, and legend.

After an exhaustive year-long effort, a team of two dozen researchers have managed to piece together a telling mosaic of the enigma that calls itself Kevin May. Their assessment? It was unanimous: Kevin May is the first Renaissance Man of the 3rd Millennium – the epitome of awesomely awesome awesomeness.

Full Disclosure: Following the conclusion of their engagement, the two dozen researchers participated in a group conversion to Kevism – and are now members of the religious cult headed by Kevin May. Unfortunately, none would break their silence regarding the reportedly rigorous three-day initiation ceremony…

Echoing the sentiment of the research team, a recent survey of senior travel industry executives revealed that the nearly unanimous choice topping their Bucket List was “Meeting Kevin May.”

Interestingly, even for those senior execs that had previously met Kevin, their #1 Bucket List item remained “Meeting Kevin May Again.”

What inspires such adulation?

Tnooz North American Editor Dennis Schaal, one of the few interviewees capable of expressing sentiment beyond “he’s awesome,” remarked “Well, for starters, he pays my salary…”

A Tnooz Node who pleaded for anonymity added “The terror and fear aspects of Kevin’s persona are greatly overstated. Stories of loved ones suddenly turning up missing, while true, have nothing to do with the deep affection and heartfelt love we publicly express for Kevin.”

Culled from the 2,700 page dossier collected by the research team are the most revealing details about a man you previously knew merely as the most powerful man in the travel industry…

Seven Awesome (and little known) Secrets About Kevin May

Kevin’s Favorite Word is Awesome

Many have misinterpreted Kevin’s tirades against those casually using the word awesome to describe mundane things like technologies, people or natural phenomena as a dislike for the word itself. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Kevin deems awesome to be the awesomest word ever – warranting usage solely when referencing literal superlatives, for example, himself. May lacks patience for the ambiguity introduced by figurative language. All other things incorrectly described as awesome by others are simply inferior and undeserving of the hallowed term.

Kevin’s beliefs are founded on the notion that the awesomeness of an object, place or event is solely a consequence, inherited from awesomeness possessed by its creator. When it comes to technology, anything short of a successful teleportation demonstration won’t inspire much more than a “meh” from Kevin.

Kevists, unlike other religious sects, do not struggle with the God v. Science question. Kevism demands no faith – all beliefs are supported by empirical evidence. God’s existence can’t be proven, but Kevin’s can. That’s all his legion of followers need or want to know.

Deification has offered Kevin new clarity of insight. He has jettisoned voicing opinions and now expounds only truths. Tnooz is awesome because it was created by Kevin May.

“While it is undisputed that I personify the term Awesome as both an adjective and intransitive verb, my ultimate wish is to have it objectify me as a noun.”
- Kevin Luke May

continue reading →

Tagged as: humor, Tnooz

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Measuring and Monetizing Social Networking & Mobile Media

by RobertKCole on March 26, 2012

Kris Strauss of Sports Golf Management and I teamed up to present Measuring and Monetizing Social Networking and Mobile Media for the 2012 National Golf Course Owners Association Annual Conference held February 29, 2012 at the Renaissance Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

What happens in Vegas... Stays on Facebook... Successful visits to Sin City are now measured by the amount of incriminating evidence posted on social networks

Golf courses and private golf clubs in particular may be the premier example of offline social networking. Similarly, due to the demographics of golfers and the strong symbiotic relationship of golf with business, mobile penetration is among the customer pool is extremely high. As a result, a discussion of social and mobile at the largest gathering of golf course owners is more than appropriate.

The challenge for the golf industry is that while golfers are highly engaged with social and mobile technologies, course owners have typically been a bit late in arriving to the technology party. Justifiably, a good portion of technology related expenditures have been dedicated to core operational platforms like tee time booking platforms, GPS-based cart technology and food & beverage ordering systems.

Now however, innovative course owners are getting more adventuresome by creatively applying social and mobile technologies to help players and members interact with each other, drive more rounds and improve the end-to-end experience of the game itself.

Here is a copy of the presentation. It can be downloaded from the RobertKCole SpeakerDeck page.

I teed things up (no, we didn’t rely on golf clichés to annoy our standing-room-only audience) with a high level overview of the promise and pitfalls of the most dynamic aspects of modern personal computing.

My focus was the integration of SoLoMo, but started with social and a warning to focus attention first on running a quality operation and the needs of customers.

I continued with cautions about the mobile complexities and the impatience of mobile consumers, adding some mobile design best practices.

Kris then took the mic to provide an extensive array of examples including location based services, user generated content and social ads to engage golfers and promote both golf-related and non-golf events.

He then offered a similar variety of examples highlighting mobile strategies encompassing QR codes, text clubs, mobile websites and tee time apps.

One additional note regarding the conference is that the NGCOA leadership has been very proactive in embracing Open Travel Alliance XML standards that are used extensively to facilitate the booking of tee times.

The golf industry is now facing many of the challenges faced by the hospitality industry in the early 2000′s when intermediaries began flexing their muscles due to greater marketing reach and an ability to produce customers.

It will be interesting to see how golf course owners will embrace social and mobile technologies to attract, retain and create value that will increase player loyalty.

Tagged as: analytics, customer relationship management, facebook, golf, Google, marketing, mobile, ngcoa, personas, search, social media, strategy, technology, travel, twitter

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The Yin and Yang of Social Media

by RobertKCole on February 8, 2012

The Yin and Yang of Social Media was the theme of my luncheon keynote presentation at the 2012 Receptive Services Association of America Summit Conference held February 7, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans. Many thanks go to Best Western International for their sponsorship of the event.

For most, few topics are as confusing as social media, so I decided to incorporate an even more baffling subject - Taoist metaphysics...

Receptive Operators are the organizations responsible for bridging the gap between tour operators located throughout the world and the travel suppliers and destination management organizations serving as hosts to international travelers visiting the United States.

With the renewed focus on inbound tourism by the Obama Administration and the United States Travel & Tourism Brand USA initiative, receptive operators in the US can expect to be increasingly busy over the coming years.

Below is a copy of the presentation. It may be downloaded by selecting the Slideshare link.

The Yin and Yang of Social Media

View more presentations from Robert Cole

It occurred to me that many complementary forces are at play in social media, and like Yin and Yang, one force cannot exist without being described in relation to its opposing force.

Since I was speaking in the home of New Orleans Voodoo, it seemed appropriate to discuss social media given the impassioned hyperbole professed by self-proclaimed “Experts, Gurus, Ninjas and/or Jedi” of social media as a panacea for virtually anything and the serious social scientists struggling to statistically prove causation.

The result was somewhat a good news & bad news story, with the moral being:

A primary focus should be on business objectives and operational excellence
To succeed at social media, management resources must subscribe to the Golden Rule
There are simply too many social media platforms and channels to manage, so participation must be be highly prioritized

Several hat tips are due to Edelman, Altimeter Group & Brian Solis for some great stats and content to help frame the issues.

Tagged as: customer relationship management, facebook, Google, marketing, personas, RSAA, social media, strategy, technology, travel, twitter

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Unsuspecting Travel Hero and Travel Zero Awards 2011

by RobertKCole on January 4, 2012

The winner of the 2011 Unsuspecting Travel Hero Award goes to hrrmph (a.k.a. Hugh R. of Las Vegas, Nevada) for the nearly 9,300 word TripAdvisor review of his solo shore snorkeling trip to Kandholhu Island Resort & Spa in The Maldives. Not only was the review extensive and highly informative, but it provides an excellent example of the benefit provided by unbiased, anonymous, user generated reviews.

This year’s Unsuspecting Travel Zero honoree is HotelReputationManagement.org, an Online Reputation Management group that will “aggressively improve your online reputation” with brazenly described methods including “the more content we create, the more we feed the monster and thus we bury the negative results deeper and deeper.” A poster-child for the Fake Review Optimization movement is born.

photo credit: xjrlokix

The double edged sword of anonymity frames the 2011 Unsuspecting Travel Hero and Travel Zero Awards. Travel information is power and the forces of good and evil are being contested.

The huge travel stories of 2011 included the aftermath of Japan’s Tsunami, Google’s acquisition of ITA Software, American Airlines bankruptcy and Groupon’s highly controversial IPO. All dominated the headlines and were well covered by traditional media and the blogosphere. Conversely, the Unsuspecting Travel Hero and Travel Zero Awards go to those stories that were overlooked and deserve greater exposure – for better or worse.

Unsuspecting travel heroes represent the lifeblood of the global tourism industry. Their unheralded works of generosity provide immeasurable value to countless numbers of travelers, yet typically yield little in terms of immediate financial reward. For the Travel Hero, there is rarely a windfall return on investment resulting from the particular act of traveler-empowering compassion. For individual, the effect may be an unrequited contribution to assist others with common interests; for the business, an act may reinforce the foundation for guest loyalty, with customer retention measured over years, not by quarterly financial results.

On the other hand, one finds that Travel Zeros are typically focused on short-term financial gain that often reflects a willingness to sacrifice ethics, customer service or return business. A profit motive supersedes the priority for an optimized consumer travel experience. While reducing operating costs or growing revenues to maximize profit is no sin, when it results in a degraded travel experience, it does a disservice to both the traveler and the industry as a whole. continue reading →

Tagged as: hospitality, hotel, insight, inspiration, marketing, social media, strategy, technology, travel, TripAdvisor

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2011 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Predictions

by RobertKCole on November 15, 2011

The PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit offers thirty travel technology companies the opportunity to pitch a panel of judges comprised of industry leaders on their customer value proposition, technology platform and business model.

Predicting the opening odds for the 2011 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit

photo credit: Louish Pixel

Based on the number of punks trying to stuff the ballot box, there's big money to be won or lost betting on the 2011 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit - just like betting on the companies themselves...

Leveraging the wisdom of crowds (attendees of PhoCusWright are supposed to be smart people, right?) and in the interest of having some fun, everyone following the conference on social media were invited to predict the top six winners before the actual presentation sessions started. Think of it like handicapping a horse race.

But before we review the results of the handicapping exercise, a bit of unanticipated editorial commentary on the process is necessary…

[Climbs onto Soap Box...]

At first glance, the raw results showed two clear favorites in the Emerging and Established company categories, with the Startup group looking like a tight four-way competition. Unfortunately, upon closer scrutiny, it seems that certain “fans” of various demonstrators (you know who you are) felt that their faves needed a little boost in the voting.

How could I tell? Well, they only voted for their company once – not for 2nd 3rd or 4th place as the other people did… Yes, individuals from multiple presenters were either lazy or stupid in their approach to astroturfing the vote tallies. The singular votes represented a whopping 51% of the total votes cast – a material number with a highly atypical voting pattern that was clearly differentiated by the other respondents.

Morons. Didn’t they know that a cardinal rule of astroturfing is to blend in with the crowd?

By sheer coincidence, I just authored a three-part series for Tnooz on how black-hat fake review optimizers combine social media and SEO techniques to undermine the reliability of travel reviews sites. Take a look at the second installment: Fake Review Optimization – How black hat masters beat the travel system

So here’s the moral of my sermon.

Considering that the motivation exists to game a goofy poll that has no bearing on the outcome of a judged competition, one can only imagine what steps these reprobates are willing to take when real sales volume and profit are on the line. More evidence travel marketers and their technology partners might not be as trustworthy as one would hope.

There is an excellent case for punishing this behavior by posting the names of these groups on a wall of shame. I won’t – the actions may have been undertaken by a single individual and not condoned by the company. They get a pass this time, but one never knows when I might need a good example of social media abuse for a speaking engagement in the future…

Sparing you the gory details, let’s just say an adjustment was made to mitigate the impact of these highly irregular votes. Does this mean the scrubbing process was perfect? No. Just like with review spam, it is very possible the smarter / less lazy ballot stuffers went undetected {sigh…}

Does this action invalidate the reliability of the survey? In short, no. The survey never claimed a scientific sample or process. The results were always to be based on what I call Trustularity – results that look reasonable and superficially appear to have authority based on their presentation. I merely took measures deemed necessary to clean the data to improve the veracity of the results.

This is exactly why PhoCusWright went to a 100% judging process – In the past, audience votes (which had to be done in person, with only one vote per terminal during a defined time frame) were skewed toward larger companies with more personnel attending the conference.

It was a smart move to eliminate the audience component. Next year, I’ll see what I can do to create a more reliable method to gauge authentic audience sentiment. And maybe add interactive parimutuel betting…

[Descends from Soap Box...] continue reading →

Tagged as: innovation, marketing, mobile, search, technology, travel, Web 2.0

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Handicapping 2011 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit

November 12, 2011

Thirty companies battle for the title of Most Game-Changing Travel Innovation at the 2011 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit. Held annually in conjunction with The PhoCusWright Conference, attendees and the general public are being asked to complete a survey and vote for the demonstrators they predict will win the $15,000 prizes for topping a category and the DEMO Award.

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A Faster Way to Search Google Flights – Cut and Paste

September 15, 2011

Google Flight search provides incredibly fast search air fare results by leveraging technology acquired through the ITA Software acquisition. While not yet supporting flight routing outside of the US, it provides many interesting new features. By copying the URL/query string text into a Chrome browser, experienced travelers can experience Google Flights searches with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

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What are Most Trusted Sources for Hotel Reviews and Ratings?

September 9, 2011

Hotel reviews and ratings are a popular topic of discussion, with many hoteliers relying on hotel rating sources to validate the quality of their hotel operation and promote it to a broad spectrum of travelers that would otherwise have been too difficult to reach. A key question asked by this survey is what source does a traveler trust most when it comes to hotel reviews and ratings.

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SuperShuttle in New York – Make that Super Shittle

August 8, 2011

SuperShuttle operates shared ride services between LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark airports in the new York area. By booking my daughter with them, in an effort to help her save some money, she wound up experiencing a three hour episode of continual service delivery failures highlighted by a complete disregard for customer needs. This post explores what should have happened, as well as the underlying reasons why she had such a disappointing experience.

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