Many destinations have
suffered steep declines in visitors over the
past three years. And while travel to some
destinations is down by 10%, 15% and in some
cases 20%, online travel to these same
destinations has grown by 30% annually over
the past three years. Hoteliers cannot control
the amount of travel to their destinations.
At the same time Internet-savvy hoteliers can
dramatically increase their online market
share at the expense of their competitors that
are “asleep at the wheel”. Hoteliers that
employ robust Destination Web Strategies have
an effective means to capture new lucrative
markets, boost direct distribution and
decrease the need for intermediaries.
Defining a Destination Web Strategy
A Destination Web Strategy means leveraging
the popularity of your destination to your own
advantage by making your hotel or cluster of
hotels the “hero” of the destination, and in
the same time turning your hotel website into
a valuable destination resource for your
online customers and increasing its value and
relevance for the search engines.
This strategy is one of the most effective
means to market a local property or a cluster
of properties within a particular destination.
It allows the hotel to leverage the richness
of the destination and shape the local
attributes of its environment with creative
marketing initiatives that appeal to its
online customer base. The strategy is also an
imperative for hoteliers to highlight the
property within the context of local
resources, because local government sponsored
initiatives to promote the richness of the
destination, which includes your hotel, are
quickly diminishing.
Hotel planning is destination sensitive. When
searching for accommodations on the Internet,
consumers usually use keywords based on the
name of the destination +hotel, e.g. “Boston
Hotel”. An estimated 85% of Internet users
rely on search engines to locate information
on the Web (e.g. Yahoo, Google, MSN,
AltaVista, etc). Independent hotels, branded
hotels, hotel management companies and lodging
companies must all rely on search engine
referrals. So by having a robust Destination
Web Strategy, the search engines will be able
to find additional value in your website,
catalog and index the website more
effectively, associate it more specifically
with various local attractions, lifestyle
attributes and aspects of the destination, and
drive more business to the property.
Hoteliers able to leverage the popularity of
their destination, matched with a well-defined
hotel product mix, can capture more online
market share and boost conversion rates. The
key ingredient is by promoting the many facets
of the hotel and cluster of hotels and its
relationship to the destination. This approach
allows for creative flexibility by making the
hotel always the center of attention, the
“hero of the destination.”
Types of Destination Web Initiatives
A Destination Web Strategy can take many forms
and shapes based on the particular destination
or business environment. Here are the most
common types of initiatives we at Hospitality
eBusiness Strategies have developed for many
of our clients:
* Destination Section or Page: An optimized
destination section or page within the hotel
website of a single hotel property or a
corporate website that represents a cluster of
hotels in a given destination.
* Destination 1-Pager: A stand-alone fully
optimized one-page website representing a
cluster of hotels within a destination.
* Destination Website (single property): A
stand-alone website encompassing destination
attributes matched with attributes of the
hotel. (e.g. eco travelers, gamblers, spa
enthusiasts)
* Destination Web Portal: A stand-alone
multi-page fully optimized website
representing a cluster of hotels with local
area content, pages targeting different
audiences (e.g. business travelers, leisure
travelers, etc).
Some hotel companies, guided by Internet-savvy
consultancies, have already begun employing
Destination Web Strategies to counter the
disastrous effects of merchant model discounts
and better market their product and local
destination attributes. Whether the hotelier
has one hotel or cluster of hotels, a
Destination Web Strategy enables the hotelier
to offer a rich, deep, destination focused
website with the creative flexibility of
appealing to a variety of patrons. These may
be: conventions, meetings, groups, business
and leisure travelers, lifestyle activity
seekers, family, weddings, honeymoons,
recreation, etc.
Building a Destination Web Strategy
A Destination Web Strategy is an exercise in
evaluating the attributes of the destination,
the various aspects of the hotel product, and
the relevant lifestyle attributes of your
existing and potential customers, and
packaging it in a presentable manner for the
online consumer. The final product becomes a
well defined destination-oriented website that
serves as the foundation for creative and
innovative online marketing and distribution.
You will now be able throw marketing muscle
behind various initiatives in response to
societal trends, current events, and general
shifts in the market place. This strategy is
“natural” for the hospitality vertical as the
product, by definition, is destination
specific.
This strategy involves conceptualizing,
developing and optimizing the hotel website to
achieve two main goals:
* Provide valuable and relevant destination
information so that the online travelers and
the search engine spiders alike find value on
the website beyond the mere hotel product
content
* Turn the hotel into the “gravitational
center of the destination”
Developing the Destination Web Strategy is a
complex task (see Table 1:
Destination-Hotel-Lifestyle Matrix) and
requires a combination of Internet,
hospitality and destination-specific knowledge
and extensive research. Some required steps
include:
* Identifying the most popular area
attractions
* Identifying the relevant lifestyle
categories, attitudes and values of your
existing and potential customer base
* Identifying local events that can be
exploited to attract guests at the property
* Identifying how local attractions and
lifestyle attributes relate to the property
* Identifying patterns of consumer online
purchasing habits for the hotel/resort and the
particular destination
* Evaluating the most popular target keywords
for the destination
* Ranking the keywords according to their
popularity and relevance
* Developing credible and relevant copy based
on detailed destination research
* Weaving the target keywords throughout the
copy
* Developing the "invisible copy": page
titles, description tags and meta tags.
* Overhauling your website to add the
identified destination, lifestyle and property
attributes and position your hotel product as
the central point of the destination
* Performing a Destination-Focused Search
Engine Strategy
Case Study I
Hotel Management Company
The HMC owns a cluster of multi-branded
properties in a hyper-competitive market. The
firm launched a destination web strategy in
early 2002. This particular market serves as
an ideal venue for family vacationers. This
client’s destination website was built within
the context of these two audiences and
positions the properties at the center of the
destination. With multiple properties the site
provides choice: city-wide availability across
a selection of branded hotels, displaying
price, location, services, and amenities. The
site provides a detailed directory of area
interests, distances to attractions, top ten
lists of things to do and places to eat, tips
on getting around, and identifies relevant
lifestyle attributes. It offers an excellent
platform for highly successful email and PPC
marketing campaigns. As a result the HMC
generates incremental Internet-related
revenues well above the national average,
captures new markets and realizes significant
savings.
The Destination – Hotel - Lifestyle
Attributes Matrix
The complex nature of clearly identifying and
defining the specific appeal of the
destination, matched with the special or
unique characteristics of the hotel product
and its attributes, combined with the values
of your customer base, is best described in
the Destination - Hotel – Lifestyle Matrix
table below. It is likely hoteliers will be
able to identify with more than one matrix
combination.
The process for building a destination
strategy begins by evaluating typology,
attributes, and resources in the local
environment. Identify your type of
destination. Is this an urban destination,
suburban destination, ocean or resort
destination, mountain destination and so on?
Next identify all the external attributes
within your area. The destination may offer
outdoor recreation services, an extensive
transportation infrastructure, seasonal events
and attractions, major business districts,
conference centers and much more. Finally,
based on typology and attributes, what are
those particular resources that people need or
may desire at the destination? These may
include water-based recreation, historical
artifacts, cultural resources, dining
resources, and business/commerce resources,
and many others.
After the destination is analyzed, begin
evaluating and introducing the hotel product
and the lifestyle attributes of your customer
base into the mix. The product mix may
include: wedding facility, conference room,
meetings and reception area, and concierge
services, while the customer profile may
include business travelers, senior travelers,
and even families with pets.
The lifestyle attributes are more complex.
Identifying the attitudes and values of a
person or group, and sometimes of people that
you have never seen or heard from (e.g.
potential customers) is inevitably more
difficult. Are your property and/or
destination appealing to city slickers looking
for “old world charm”? How about attracting
snowbirds coming form the north? Or the
Generation-X crowd? Or antiques hunters?
It is a matter of perspective on what is truly
important to the customer. Different
characteristics of the property or destination
can appeal to different customer segments. For
example, to the business traveler, choosing a
hotel may be influenced by the availability of
a function room, high-speed Internet access or
proximity to an area corporation, while a
leisure traveler may find the same hotel a
great location for local area attractions;
same hotel, same destination, different
purpose.
The Destination - Hotel – Lifestyle Attributes
Matrix is meant to illustrate the complexity
of the relationship between the property, its
customers and destination. Identify each
element in the matrix relevant to you and
compare the results with your existing online
strategy. How do you compare? Are you
representing your property or properties in
the best possibly way? Have you ignored market
segments or lifestyle categories that are core
to your local destination? Any Director of
Sales & Marketing and e-Commerce Manager
should be asking such questions as they
evaluate their online marketing and
distribution strategy.
Benefits of a Destination Web Strategy
The Destination Web Strategy allows for a
highly informative, content rich website that
encourages site references for increased link
popularity that boosts search engine
positioning. The creative flexibility of this
strategy captures key customer segments and
shapes the property with a variety of new,
varied and exciting insights for the online
consumer. It attracts new customers seeking
choice, particular in lifestyle categories,
plan meetings or weddings, or provide close
proximity to a convention center. This
strategy can be configured to appeal to any
audience where there is relevance to the local
destination.
Since the Internet provides unprecedented
flexibility to shape locally relevant content
at relatively low cost, a Destination Web
Strategy becomes a source of “permanent
innovation” for the hotelier. Exploiting the
existing popularity of the destination and
leveraging the appeal of the local market to
various customer segments boosts
direct-to-consumer distribution over the
Internet at a very reasonable cost. The need
is very real as the environment is
increasingly more competitive and traditional
marketing channels and even government
supported efforts are diminishing.
The Destination Web Strategy:
* Allows the hotel brand, hotel management
company, branded or independent hotel and
resort to leverage the popularity of the
destination for the benefit of its property or
cluster of properties within a destination
* Allows hoteliers with cluster of properties
within the destination to cross-sell their
properties and leverage differences in
location and price to appeal to a range of
travel planning budgets, tastes, and perceived
values
* Reduces the overall marketing cost
(creation, development, maintenance, and
search engine submissions) as the strategy
bundles together more than one property, or a
single property with the attributes of the
destination
* Allows customers to locate a property or
group of properties unique to a particular
attribute of the destination or a lifestyle
category
From an online marketing and distribution
standpoint the strategy increases a site’s
link popularity, boosts positioning on the
search engines, creates numerous co-marketing
opportunities, expands and lowers cost of
pay-per-click marketing, increases the
relevancy of targeted email marketing
strategies, offers real-time city-wide
availability for cross-selling and up-selling,
and most importantly creates numerous points
of entry online to the property. It’s your
chance to make your property the champion of
the destination!
Case Study II
Major Resort in Southeast US
A slowdown in travel forced this upscale
resort client to overhaul its website aimed at
attracting outdoor recreational travelers,
golfers, families and capture an upsurge in
the weddings market. Its mountain setting
makes for not only an ideal wedding venue but
also enables a similar approach applied to
hiking, boating, golfers, and eco-travel
enthusiasts. The resort is positioned as the
center of the destination and identifies all
area attractions, local and regional events
and activities, and lifestyle attributes. As a
result the resort website already generates
20% of the resort’s revenues and captures
important markets that otherwise would be
inaccessible without a robust Destination Web
Strategy in place.
Conclusion
One of the most effective means to market a
local property or a cluster of properties
within a particular destination is through a
Destination Web Strategy. Hoteliers must begin
thinking about how to leverage the appeal of
the destination to boost incremental Internet
revenues from key and new markets that are
within reach. First movers have already
demonstrated the viability of this strategy.
Now is your chance to practically monopolize
the local destination with respect to
web-based distribution as you become the
“champion of the destination” over the web.
Hospitality eBusiness Strategies (www.hospitalityebusiness.com
) is one of the pioneers of the
Destination Web Strategy concept and helps
hoteliers conceptualize, implement, and launch
their own robust Destination Web Strategy.
About the Authors:
Max Starkov is Chief eBusiness Strategist and
Jason Price is VP of Business Development and
eMarketing at Hospitality eBusiness Strategies
(www.hospitalityebusiness.com)
in New York City. HeBS’ consultants combine
the best practices in three critical areas:
solid hospitality and travel background (22+
years), Madison Avenue advertising and
marketing background (8+ years) and Cyberspace
experience as founders, CEOs and executives in
two consecutive Internet technology start-ups
in hospitality and travel (7+ years). In 2001
they won the prestigious 2001 Worldwide
Microsoft RAD Award for Web-based technology
applications, inventory management and
reservation systems for hospitality. Max
Starkov also teaches graduate courses on
"Hospitality/Tourism eDistribution Systems",
"e-CRM", “e-Knowledge Systems” and "e-Travel"
at New York University's prestigious Tisch
Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Travel
Administration. They lecture and train
hospitality professionals in the principles of
online marketing and eDistribution. To read
more click here:
www.hospitalityebusiness.com/team.shtml
