Hraba Hospitality Consulting

This Quora question here finally provided me an outlet to sum up all my tired cliches. The best in this business are constantly innovating, but here’s why the overall industry is a conservative bunch of bores. This may clue all you tech and app people in to why we are so hard to reach, and even if you do find access to the innovator or connected “in the know” guy at any hospitality company, the difference between “getting it” and implementation is day and night… especially from a corporate HQ to property level.  Getting acceptance at corporate is easy.  Getting the idea distributed and implemented is a different story.

So, why don’t hotels innovate more?

Historically, we’re not a money business, and we’re certainly not a tech business. The famous saying is “Hotels aren’t pioneers, because pioneers were shot in the back with arrows.” We couldn’t afford to make capital cost mistakes with new fangled design, tech, etc. If you have ever let an architect make a daring and new “tech” design decision, and then during your opening week have to rip an entire HVAC system from a brand new hotel because it doesn’t work, you learn VERY QUICKLY not to take risks on innovating something if there is a potential failure rate. Within the last couple years, radiant flooring had been this issue – architects and owners designing from residential preference versus the complexity of commercial application. It’s a problem, and it makes hotelier like me seem boring. But the simple fact is this:

Do you want to innovate and potentially fail spectacularly, or do you want to be boring and conservative and have an operating hotel?

It’s not always *our* money to take those risks with, either… and a good ownership or management group will protect the assets. When we tried to pioneer infrastructural solutions ranging from phones or internet, we got burned by trusting salesman whose interest is to sell, and not worried about back end support. So we lost a lot of money trying to pioneer systems like that. Sales people will always sell products that their operational department can’t support – like marketing writing checks that ops can’t cash.

What we quickly learned is that we can have a hospital or dormitory spend their own capital (and public vs private) funds, learning from their errors…

Then we steal the way they built out infrastructure at infinitely lower costs because you don’t have the learning curve or associated costs with capital spending failures.

This is true of phones, which I talk about here:
The Story of the In-Room Phone, & the future of on property telephony

and even reaches something seemingly prosaic and simple, like in room coffee, which I talk about here: A coffee laden ramble about… hotel coffee. What does your coffee program, or lack of it, say about your hotel brand?

You will note the similar “pioneer” themes – and that we become conservative in the face of multi-layered complexities in regards to execution.

Basically, hotels aren’t a money business. They are about hospitality, and part of being hospitable means having things that work properly. Early adopters suffer everything from outages to glitches, and more – and it isn’t in the best interest of a hotel to spend liberal amounts of capital on things with high rates of failure. This is why you can easily see a trend of about 10 years behind the times for everything…. not just phones or wireless infrastructure, but even with websites and SEO, as well.

The sea change moment for hospitality might have been SEO – many hotels got so burned by their own unawareness that they vowed never to be left in the dust again. I still know some hotels that can’t be found in their market. That’s why the savvier of hospitality groups are *VERY* on top of social media, and most operators look at it as a phone, instead of the billboard. Marketing is trying to lead us astray, but in the end it will become an operator’s real time brand management and guest expectation / service tool.

Anyways, that basically sums it up:

Hotels aren’t innovators simply because we aren’t innovative. We rather be boring and actually work, than innovative and broken.

Why don’t we innovate? Because that, historically, hasn’t been our job, and we can’t afford to.

I don’t have much to say, other than I obviously don’t have kids or celebrate holidays. =)

See below.  I find this profound.  I have been harping on FB for years about this, not that they listen.

I was recently asked to respond to these questions. I believe my responses ran too long to be printed. =) Go figure. I thought you might enjoy my responses…

1. What can lodging operators do to affect sales using digital marketing. Is there any “low hanging” fruit that everyone should be leveraging?
2. How important is SEO and SEM or how important should it be to a lodging operator? Why?
3. Are social media sites like Pinterest and, of course, Facebook worth a hotel marketing department’s time? Why or why not?
4. How important should online travel agents like Expedia be in a hotel’s marketing strategy? Some of these agencies take a big commission on each booking?
5. Increasingly, I hear about hotels interacting with customers and prospects on TripAdvisor. Should this be part of each property’s marketing strategy? Why is this interaction important?
6. What is on the horizon digital marketing-wise? What do lodging marketers have to look forward to in the future?
7. How important is fresh content in digital marketing? I’ll bet today’s audiences get bored easily.
8. Please add anything you feel I might have missed that our readers should know about when it comes to digital marketing.
1. What can lodging operators do to affect sales using digital marketing. Is there any “low hanging” fruit that everyone should be leveraging?

1. What can lodging operators do to affect sales using digital marketing. Is there any “low hanging” fruit that everyone should be leveraging?

The low hanging fruit would be Management Responses on Tripadvisor, Yelp, and Google reviews. If you are unlucky enough to have to play with OTA’s, then also add management responses on those sites as well. The latter are easy to respond to via your extranets, while the former require signing up for accounts, and claiming your business. If you haven’t done so, do it! It’s relatively easy, It is vital to manage those profiles with fresh content, pictures, and info. But the management responses on user generated review sites are not just free marketing, but it’s customer service, concierge work, service recovery, sales, and more. It’s free, and it is vital to engage consumers and guests concerned enough with your brand to share their experiences with you, potential, future guests, and the world.

2. How important is SEO and SEM or how important should it be to a lodging operator? Why?

They are vital. SEO is so complex, and ever-changing with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, it’s important not just to try and stay on top, but also not to fall to the bottom. SEM is important because it’s ROI is so simple, and clean. Hotel people have never been tech people, and our lack of capital makes us conservative and less innovative than other industries. Beyond not always knowing the right questions to ask, we prefer to let a dormitory or hospital pioneer the infrastructure, and pay for the learning costs of installing new systems. That worked for us for a long time, including phone systems, or accounting, etc. But when the internet started, we were so caught off guard, we lost our ability to control inventory, because we panicked about this new realm of distribution. We didn’t get websites right, we didn’t understand SEO, ad spends, etc, and many properties dropped off the face of the modern world. It took some properties 10 years to catch up, let alone those still struggling in cluttered markets. We hotel people are so skeptical of spending, it took many people a long time to understand the importance of SEO without a concrete return (prior to analytics). But I think that’s why clearer ROI with SEM has been able to keep many brands and flags in the game, and people were quicker to become involved in that, after the SEO and website debacle. Now, you note that many brands, flags, and independent / boutique operators were incredibly quick to understand and use social media as free, engaged marketing for their properties.

3. Are social media sites like Pinterest and, of course, Facebook worth a hotel marketing department’s time? Why or why not?

If you don’t have your review sites taken care of, and management response up, info updated, etc – Facebook should be the last thing on your mind. It’s a closed system that is more about “pictures as storytelling”, where the only meaningful updates you can share are local food and beverage / spa events, because you risk spamming your facebook following with “me me me” posts, cluttering their stream. Some hotels post every day, but you have to have a special brand (think Racey Vegas), but typically it is regarded as insecure and more like spam. People worry about being forgotten, but it’s more about helping them to remember at the right time. Regard your Facebook Page more like an email marketing blast – if you got an email from a hotel every day, would that be fun, or overwhelming spam? Twitter and Tumblr are for content generation without annoying users, as it’s an open network rooted in interest. Facebook’s closed network makes overly chatty people or biz pages look spammy, or self absorbed. It’s more about listening to other people, than being all about you. Pinterest is great to set up with all your best marketing images, but then it’s up to the community to perpetuate your brand. You don’t need to hover over every like and share. Sometimes, social networks are most successful for your brand when marketers make a conscious choice to leave it alone.

4. How important should online travel agents like Expedia be in a hotel’s marketing strategy? Some of these agencies take a big commission on each booking?

They are a necessary evil for some. But it’s also why our inventory is hard to manage, and revenue management is out of control (as well as why that role in a hotel is superseding Rooms and DOS decision making powers, in some situations). If you can invest in Tripadvisor’s Business Listing or CPC campaigns, or Yelp’s advertising (when you are in a market that it makes sense), along with SEM, it’s a better way to get people to your website to book direct rather than allow yourself to bleed reservations to online travel agencies. It’s still important for some hotels, but at all costs reduce your inventory and reliance on OTAs. Look into Google Hotel Finder, which is gaining momentum, and invest in driving bookings directly to your website. There are also hotel website booking engines that you can purchase with certain property management systems that have *NO COMMISSIONS*, which should perk up some ears. If you can find ways to do that, and drive booking direct via GDS with their delivery commission, you can save a lot of money, and have better control of your revenue management, ADR, and inventory. There are many ways to reduce self reliance on OTAs. I know many, but a Google search for excellent hotel posts on the subject is more affordable. =)

5. Increasingly, I hear about hotels interacting with customers and prospects on TripAdvisor. Should this be part of each property’s marketing strategy? Why is this interaction important?

The interaction does a number of things. First – it humanizes the hotel. UGR site users don’t connect with a hotel on a review site, or truly realize a human is on the other side of reviews, until they see that interaction. I’ve seen many situations where a hotel is going through a problem period, and prior to response, reviews are very aggressive and visceral. As soon as the management responses are posted, future reviewers tone down their antagonism because they understand a real human is involved, and it is no longer an anonymous profile to hurl negativity towards. What’s more, just by responding, earnestly, non-defensively, and transparently, I have seen people change their review score for the better, noting that they appreciate the interaction, and the hotel’s involvement. Some have completely deleted their negative review. It’s important to understand, whether or not your are responding to these reviews, they are happening without you. It’s a conversation online, about your brand, and you have every right to be a part of it. It’s very humbling to open yourself to this new world of transparency, where you can no longer control your brand in the traditional ways. But if you get past that, and listen, and learn, you will be able to self-attenuate, grow, and improve in a way that will create a resonance within the community, and stabilize your business. The first part of rooting yourself to the community and showing your enthusiasm for being a successful part of it, is expressing your concerns and appreciation to the people who take time to review you.

6. What is on the horizon digital marketing-wise? What do lodging marketers have to look forward to in the future?

Google’s movement into Travel is impressive, and we’ll see much more of that this year. Google Now, Google Flight Search, Google Hotel Search, Google Plus Local, and more. It’s very tightly wound in to search, so if your business relies on Google search to drive traffic to your website, or grab you business, or get directions via maps to arrive at your business, ignoring Google right now would be a pretty big mistake. Also, HD Video tours, from room tours to marketing of outlets like spas and restaurants, should increase. It’s relatively low cost to put together an informal, or well edited, video and put it on a Youtube page. It’s a way to engage your audience, and help tell the story as well as answer questions they might have. In fact, Google Image search is becoming more important too – at one property, 20% of our site visits come from Google Image searches (which surprised even me). The other thing that’s on the horizon is a lot of meaningless apps, bad ideas, and gimmicky tech as marketing guest experience. Make sure to do the numbers on anything you demo, and understand the real value vs the giddy rush to glam-apps. There’s a lot of people out there trying to sell stuff to us non-techy hotel people. I can’t remember who said it, but “Silicon Valley is exceptional at answering questions no one is asking” – so beware something that seems exciting, but is really just cost and no meaningful value. Invest wisely. We got giddy with OTA’s, and many made the Groupon mistake. It’s time to be wise with our cash.

7. How important is fresh content in digital marketing? I’ll bet today’s audiences get bored easily.

I think this worries many people, because of how hard it is to write talented copy, that pleases both web people, marketing people, etc. It’s hard to be free to write copy that doesn’t sound bound by groupthink. But, fresh content doesn’t just mean copy. In fact, I think SEO-based keyword-stuffed hotel page content (to meet the robotic needs of an a search ranking algorithm) destroyed normal web users patience to read *anything* on a web page. Videos and pictures are the fresh content that will be more meaningful, potentially share-able or viral, and more engaging to potential guests. A room tour is going to be more important than a new paragraph on your website. But the full package should be a friendly, neighborly blog that talks in a way that defines your hotel with a “voice” (hopefully a GM, or the like), a calendar of events for the local community (like farmer’s markets, concerts), and new pictures and videos (whether high gloss and pricey photos you get done for brochures, or crowd sourcing photos from instagram and tumblr). The new changes that make google’s search algorithm focus on local, mobile, and freshness of content will be much easier to manage if you have a proper content production plan. It doesn’t have to be forced, but it should be a hierarchy that is understood. The only advice is to *not* give this to marketing. They aren’t doing it right. Twitter feeds and Facebook pages look like spam – RSS feeds of specials or overly “me” focused, pat, disingenuous posts. You want to create a real voice, and really involve the operators at the property level. Often, PR/Marketing sits off in a silo, disconnected, and until they understand the need for a legitimate voice at the property, they are going to damage the reputation of the hotel. It’s meant to be a conversation – concierge work like a phone call. It’s not a hollow opportunity to use social as a one-way billboard. It’s much more dynamic than that, and engaging your audience with fresh content that tells a story about you, is more important. What’s most important is understanding the way traditional marketing has changed, but how it’s vital to have it synced up with modern marketing for real success. This is a difficult time for traditional marketing, but it has a bright future. When people stop the traditional pitching of their product, and think of their hotel more as a media outlet for information and events in relation to a geographic region and specific type of experience, they will better position themselves for the future rhythm that old world and new world marketing will have in the near future, and content will begin just to produce itself, in a way.

8. Please add anything you feel I might have missed that our readers should know about when it comes to digital marketing?

I could go for days. Hope this helps. I typed way too much for you, I think, and might reprint this whole thing on my blog, if that’s okay? After you do yours? Let me know what you think.

UGH – the word “engagement”, indeed, will make me rant. Pardon me. A TNooz article quotes Facebook Travel,  “a team lead for the travel vertical in Facebook said that the travel industry is lagging behind other industries in maximizing the power of the social networking site for marketing messages”. That’s disappointing they think that. But maybe it’s not me, it’s you….

Enjoy exploring this page, yourselves: https://www.facebook.com/deals/checkin/business/

See this is the disconnect with Facebook, and real business. Real business needs to make sense of real dollars, and don’t really get “engagement”. You can’t just say things and hope they mean something when your infrastructure is broken. I have drunk the social kool-aid 100%. Review sites have upended traditional marketing models, and how operations steers the ship. It’s more revolutionary than the printing press, in many ways. We have a networked superconsciousness now, and we all have almost ESP like access to each other’s information.

But for Facebook to talk about “engagement” as a currency, when it just, truly, does not exist on Facebook (yet?), is dense. It’s a bad move for them – I have talked about all their bad moves, ad naseoum, and am beginning to wrap it up. I imagine I am not the only industry person who will have this point of view. If you don’t, then explain why Facebook chastises our industry, where marketing features like Check-Ins that they claim they are “committed to” offer zero help, broken videos, and links to dead guides (especially funny as the “how to do facebook check-ins” guide links to a pitch black page, a literal black hole, if you will.<br/>

UPDATE: It now leads to a “This page doesn’t exist” link.

For Facebook, I think it’s too late. That spontaneous press conference to announce social graph search (unavailable but to .01% of users, and slow to roll out, taking years?) seemed a bit spontaneous in lieu of losing 1.4 million users in the US and 600,000 in the UK, last December alone.

It seems to be a desperate way to keep people’s attention.

But we all know how silent that world of Facebook has been recently. Updates, changes, settings confusion, privacy confusion, purges. That’s lost some people, for others – there’s only so much you can know about people you know. We all know how frustrated we are with the site. The unstable, complex architecture –  it’s exhausting to keep up with, for those that haven’t already given up.

“Engagement” hasn’t meant anything there, and now it’s just storytelling with pictures.  Building brand, slowly, with little cost, *is* valuable, but we shouldn’t overvalue it. Definitely not on this website. The fact is, it’s a closed system, so it may end up irrelevant. Twitter, alone, is concierge services, storytelling, a telephone, service recovery, a Q&A platform, and more. It’s far more useful. Google Plus is heading in that direction too, with the marketing capabilities of hangouts, it’s amazing.

However we end up measuring “engagement”, there’s almost none of it on Facebook for most smaller travel brands. If you crunch the numbers of likes and comments on most major brands, it’s approximately .00005% engagement of their “liked” fan base.

A huge issue, and a metric I am waiting for from Facebook, is how many people have liked your page, and subsequently hidden your page. I think that is really important. How much of our audience is even really there? How many hotels overposted or were too self absorbed early on in their Facebook page career, and were hidden by most of their “liked” users? (I wasn’t – I treated posting like an email database, and wanted to make sure not to overuse).

That surely should be known, though, as Facebook keeps talking about “engagement” as transaction. Engagement isn’t the same on Facebook, all the while it happens everywhere else: Tripadvisor, Yelp, Travel Forums, Twitter, Google+. Hotels are engaged ***everywhere***. It’s not that our industry isn’t doing it right, on Facebook. It’s …. just….. that …… it’s …… Facebook.

A light hearted chuckle for all of you. Many of you know I started in F&B, and it spanned much of my early career. The trends for F&B, and already difficult business, are brilliantly highlighted here, in these Portlandia sketches. The “organic” thing has sort of jumped the shark, and now the word has been so heavily borrowed, abused, and marketed, it doesn’t mean what it once meant. Of course, we’re concerned about chemicals in food production, but “organic” is more of a buzz word. The word local is the next thing to jump the shark, randomly appearing as a slogan for this year’s elections, or just a buzzword to overuse throughout a menu. It’s delicious, important, and vital – seriously, “local” is at it should be. As if we were so mindless to let the industrial revolution help us forget that a carrot grown out your back door is going to taste better than something shipped and trucked from half way across the world. Well, the industrial revolution did help us forget that, so was the rise of Truck Farming. People still shop at Trader Joe’s, with strawberry’s grown in South America, that get fungal within a day in your fridge. It’s not your fridge – trust me. It’s that you are eating the decaying flesh of ancient fruit. This really frames our panic about these trends, and it does it really well. The current trend is Gluten Free, which is hilariously inane, unless you have Celiac. Maybe not…. but I saw gluten free vodka the other day. Shark jumpage.

As for the “Mixologist” thing…. being a barkeep is an ancient and noble profession, and dearest hipsters – you don’t need to dress up the word bartender just to appease your parents who don’ t get it as a profession, just because they wasted so much on your psychology degree. It’s a natural transition, and just be proud of the work you do. Making it “mixology” just makes you sound insecure – and gives you faux carte blanche to mangle ancient drink recipes. Yes I didn’t want to learn iambic pentameter to better understand free form poetry, but learn the classics prior to breaking out the ginger foam and home made bitters. Bitters that you can buy for a dollar are a tried and true recipe, and just because you can try and make bitters doesn’t mean you should…. as if we want that crap “brewed” in the back by a trash can and flies. Save that crap for your ironic holiday sweater parties. Being a bartender is a good profession. Be proud, and know what you are. There were 3 original professions – the prostitute, the hotelier for the room, and the hotel bar for her to meet her John. You are part of history.

Fun!

So I meant this to be more meaningful or thoughtful, but to those that “get” local, and organic, and get why it’s important, while getting it shouldn’t be marketing but just the way we do things…. enjoy Portlandia, and the “Is it Local” sketch, with a “Mixologist” sketch to boot.

IS IT LOCAL?

And the Mixology skit: