hotel marketing Year in Review 2011 644x285 2011 Hotel Marketing Year in ReviewAs 2011 comes to a close and we find ourselves analyzing what worked and what didn’t in online hotel marketing, we found some interesting stats and facts that we thought we would share other hoteliers and hotel marketers. We analyse the figures for all our hotels (they are all independent hotels) and here’s a bird’s-eye view of the year in terms of online hotel marketing.

Biggest increases from referring sites
Top

The top 3 referring sites that improved the traffic to hotel websites in 2011 compared to 2010 are:

  1. 15% increase by review sites, and that coming mainly from TripAdvisor but not exclusively.
  2. 2% increase Online Travel Guides (the ones that contain links to official hotel sites).
  3. 2% increase by Flash sales and Group purchasing  sites such as Groupon but with the huge increase in number of these sites this category has literally “arrived” from nowhere.
Flop
The 3 referring sites that lost the most traffic compared to 2010 are:
  1. 17% loss from Map based sites, such as Google Places and others. Google being the largest of these sites.
  2. 2% loss from Meta search sites such as Kayak and others.
  3. 0.58% loss from Yellow Pages.
Facebook and social media, is it just hype?
Facebook accounted for 9% of the visits on hotel websites but only 1% of the bookings could be tracked to a link from Facebook. When surveying guests 2% of them said they heard about a hotel from Facebook in 2011. Facebook increased the percentage of bookings in 2011 by 1% since 2010, where it was slightly less than 1% of hotel bookings.
With 9% of the total visits Facebook and social media is an important tool for branding. Hoteliers and Marketing/PR staff need to learn to increase the conversions. See our article about Social media for hotels here to learn how to improve conversions from social media.
Offline marketing and what guests say

Aside from many analytics tools to track visits, there’s the off-line tracking as well. Asking guests (that booked on the hotel’s website) how they heard about the hotel gives some similar but more embracive data.

  1. 23% said they heard about it from Friends and Family (word of mouth).
  2. 19% said they saw the hotel on an OTA (the billboard effect).
  3. 15% said they found the hotel on TripAdvisor or other review sites.
  4. 13% are repeat guests.
A mobile revolution has happened

If anything, 2011 was the year of mobile with mobile visits to hotel websites increasing by 345% compared to 2010 and which now accounts for 6% of all hotel website traffic, versus only 2% in 2010. By device the breakdown of percentage in 2011 is very much in favor of iOS and despite the large increase from iPads it still only comes second to the iPhone.

  1. 47% iPhone
  2. 37% iPad
  3. 10% Android
  4. 3% iPod
  5. 2% Blackberry
From a previous study we did on mobile hotel marketing we saw that hotels with a mobile website had 70% more chance of bookings than hotels without. Mobile hotel marketing must be a mainline strategy for hotels in 2012 and it is predicted that by 2013 the majority of internet use will be from mobile devices.
Browser compatibility is an issue

While internet browsers are changing and new technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3 are the future web designers need to stay compatible with the older browsers which still dominate the market. Browser use in 2011 to hotel websites looked like this:

  1. Internet Explorer accounted for 45% of traffic to hotel websites. Which is down 9% from 2010
  2. Firefox accounted for 22%
  3. Safari accounted for 18%
  4. Chrome for 12%
While more than half of the browsers are compatible with the newer technologies there is still a large percent that don’t and must be catered for in hotel websites.
Other facts about hotel marketing in 2011
  1. Travel Bloggers are slowly generating more bookings to independent hotels representing 2% of the bookings generates by online referrals.
  2. Sharing links to hotel websites by email increased by 3% in 2011 and accounts for 5% of the bookings generated by online referrals.
  3. While flash sales and group purchase sites are increasing traffic to hotel websites (increase of 2%) the direct bookings generated through the hotel websites isn’t improving.
  4. Online Travel Guides are improving both in traffic (2% increase in traffic) and in bookings (0.43% increase in bookings) though not commensurately.
We hope this gives you some insight into where to go for 2012 and some ideas for your hotel’s marketing efforts.
Wishing you a great 2012.