Hotels have begun offering direct bookings through Facebook and smartphone apps, and they hope that the convenience and direct contact will lure back travelers who have been turning to online travel agencies.
“We want to be there when someone transforms the recommendations of their friends into booking a reservation,” said David Godsman, vice president for global Web services for Starwood Hotels. “If they press the ‘Like’ button, we want to start a conversation.” He said he viewed his company’s Facebook pages as a way to extend Starwood’s relationship with its customers “from the 10 days they stay with us, to all year long.” Starwood has Facebook pages for 1,000 hotel properties across its nine brands.
Hotels need to make sure that their booking engines can be found wherever the customer is, rather than asking the customer to search them out, said Glenn Withiam, a spokesman for Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, which recently held a hotel industry conference that examined social media.
Offering reservations directly helps to keep the conversation between the hotel and its guests, Mr. Withiam said. He added that using social media to communicate took the relationship beyond the booking transaction. The hotel can find out what pillow guests prefer, the drinks they want in the minibar or the type of room they need. Personalized service can keep a guest coming back, he said, and that, in turn, helps hotels hold the line on room prices.
“Hotels need to demonstrate the value of staying with them,” Mr. Withiam said, because when the focus is just on the lowest price, the competition leads to fewer amenities, lower service levels and decreased customer satisfaction.
Mr. Withiam added that travelers were expecting trip-related services to be available on the new platforms. PhoCusWright, a travel research firm, has found that 13 percent of social-network users now shop for travel on those Web sites and 35 percent of mobile-phone users expect to book travel on their phones in the next year.
Axses Systems Caribbean, a company in Barbados, has helped about 30 small hotels and chains in Barbados and nearby make their reservations available on Facebook since early 2009. Ian Clayton, the chief executive of Axses, said he hoped that by offering reservations directly, while customers were excited by the property, his hotel clients would lose fewer bookings to online travel sites.
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