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REPORT ON THE THINK TANK SESSION

About the Think Tank session on Friday 23th of April in Paris: the whole day was designed to discuss about digital developments in hospitality with professionals and classmates. Now here is what knowledge I gained from this conference and what I thought was most interesting.

First, let me remind you what the main topics discussed were: we talked about the concept of luxury on the net: “how do affluents and super affluents relate to the net”, the link between online reviews and revenue, the concept of augmented reality and to finish, the Fastbooking APP for Iphone.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that the social web has changed the relationships companies have with their customers. This is not a new idea, but it was demonstrated in many different ways throughout each of the discussions. Customers are savvier about products than they used to, thanks to the information they can now access and share online. Praising the advantages of products is then not sufficient anymore; companies have to find new ways to engage with their customers, to catch their attention. Today, customers expect a highly personalized level of interaction with companies, almost like a one-to-one conversation.

In the luxury sector, online marketers for hotels, designer jewelers, bags etc. have started to shift their approach to the clientele. They no longer put their product at the centre of their message; they now relay emotions, values and meaningfulness. Therefore, W HOTELS do not display any pictures of their rooms throughout their website and remain evocative rather than descriptive, CHAUMET tackle the topic of heritage with their campaign “save the bees", Rough Luxe Hotels associate luxury with intellectual values. Knowing that there is a great segment of high net worth individuals who are willing to buy online (65% of them say they prefer to buy online), this new approach with customers will definitely have a positive outcome for companies.

Similarly, in the technology sector for hotels, applications have broken through. Future customers still rely on the net to book hotels but they are now given the opportunity to book on their mobile phone too. It is a winning combination for both guests and hoteliers because the opportunities to book are greater: there are fewer risks for the companies that the customers do not book because they are away from a computer and may re-consider their booking, and future customers have a greater time flexibility when booking on their mobile phone. Same goes for augmented reality: users have access to real-time and updated information on their mobile therefore their decisions are made more quickly. Here is an example below, with Yelp App:

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However, as good and flexible these apps may be, I remain skeptical on how companies are going to manage unpredictable difficulties such as the running out of phone battery, and the human relationships that are key to some customers. The monetary loss suffered by the companies could then be higher than that of regular internet sales in that case.

The topic that really caught my attention was the “reviews and revenues” one. RJ Friedlander who founded his Hotel Reputation Company in Spain talked about online reviews and the impact they can have on hotel sales. 85% of hoteliers believe that reviews have an impact on their revenue however 70% of them usually manage their reputation with “home-made” and thus inefficient and insufficient solutions. There is far too much content for hotels to monitor and track and sometimes hoteliers feel that there is no proof that investing in Social Media Marketing is useful. You can check out this article: http://bit.ly/cziAKg.

Hotels are advised on one hand to proactively manage their corporate content. Setting up and keeping updated Facebook Fan pages, Twitter accounts and immediately replying to angry customers is a good and relatively cheap way to start. This may seem obvious, yet I see a lot of companies which do not regularly update their content on Facebook. I am thinking about some hotel chains (Grange Hotels London) or fashion companies. Some others do the exact opposite and overwhelm us with information, which I doubt this is efficient either. On the other hand, it is the contrary with user content. It has been reported that the higher the number of user content, the bigger the impact is on the company’s revenues.

Always faster and easier access to information, more personalized relationships with customers and managing online content seem to be the key topics for the time being. What I wonder is: what can possibly be the evolution of this? What can the next step be in terms of customer service, knowing how tailor-made and focused it is just now?

Hotels app

View more presentations from Gabrielle D.

According to the Telegraph.co.uk, the time when travellers were researching and booking their holidays on their own has now come to an end. Today, travel seems to be constantly threatened by natural disasters, strikes, and other unexpected obstacles. Legally speaking, how can the travellers recover the cost of their flights? Should we make cancellation policies more flexible? The author of the article seems to think that travellers are now better off booking with Tour Operators, which apparently can give them more guarantees in case of problems. Then, why do we all hear about TO that claim they cannot handle flights and holiday cancellations because of the Icelandic volcano ashes?

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