If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Being in the business development department at Blizzard Internet Marketing, I often hear property managers make statements like, “We don’t offer online bookings because our guests don’t feel comfortable making week-long vacation arrangements over the Internet.” Or there’s the handy, “We pride ourselves in talking to each of our guests personally.” While I don’t disagree with the above statements, I do try to help clients understand the various reasons why this decision could be costing them.

The vacation rental industry is vastly changing the way people vacation. While these accommodations offer the same luxurious comforts of your home, they’re often more costly. It’s because of this cost, and length of stay that statistics show most guests still prefer to call rather than book online. However, you’re forgetting quite a few people when you’re only catering to the “over the phone” booker:

• Those who want to book online
• Returning guests who already know what they want
• Guests who are in a different country or time zone and want to book when your office isn’t open
• How do you handle giving potential buyers a busy signal?
• Some people prefer to buy online and have documentation of what they saw, booked and paid
• Guests may be in a hurry and not have time to make the call - but they do have five-minutes to sit down at the computer and multi-task.

How many guests are you losing because of these factors?

The question should be, how convenient is your website for all guests? Do you make it as easy as possible for ANY guest to make a booking? Whether it’s making sure your phone number is on every page, or having a secure and dependable booking engine, the point is you’re giving your visitors options!

There are so many ways to effectively track your marketing dollars with online bookings. You can also still maintain a “personal relationship” with clients who have booked online by calling to confirm their reservation. For a list of our recommended booking partners and tracking options please contact our Business Development Department at 888-840-5893.

Video is the new mobile - in a sense.  Three or four years ago, the thought of surfing the web on your phone was a bit foreign to most of us, today it’s second nature - even for those of us with horrible phones that don’t surf well.

So in the door walks the new darling child of the online marketing world - (it’s really an infant) and an excellent opportunity to take advantage of SEO on your travel website.  Most of you already HAVE videos on your site, you just may not know it.  Virtual Tours are basically videos of your hotel, property, rooms, restaurants, etc.   There are ways to convert or build virtual tours in formats that allow easy uploading to video search engines, and easy embedding on individual pages of your site….you see where I’m going with this, right?

 Each page on your site that features a video should have a few things to make the subject matter of that video rank well -

1. Search engines can’t index video - yet - so you need to wrap some excellent descriptive text around your video on the page to make sure search engines know what you’re offering.  An easy way to do this it to create a written transcript of what you have to offer and place it on the page with the video.
2. Use closed captioning when possible.  Some format allow text files that are transcripts to be attached to the video, if you can do this - take advantage of it
3. Give the video a descriptive keyword rich file name.  Try “northshorevacationmovie.wmv” vs. “movie.wmv”
4. Optimize the text on the page - add relevant and unique page titles, meta description, h tags, inbound link text, etc.
5. Link to that page with good keyword-rich text.

Search engines will not index your video on your site - they don’t have the technology to make that happen.  You MUST upload those videos to a video sharing site such as YouTube, Ifilm or MetaCafe to have them included in the Google or Yahoo indexes and showing as results.  If you do this correctly, you could potentially capture a good listing in the regular web results or in Video results.

 Converting and File Types

There are some technical and logistical issues you need to consider if you want to convert a virtual tour into a video.  Some come ready to upload to the video search engines, in .mov format - others do not.  Ask your virtual tour provider for a copy of the tour in a supported format.  Every engine is different but YouTube for example supports .wmv, .avi, .mov and .mpg. 

Make sure you OWN your videos.  Some third-party companies will not let you have a copy of your video or virtual tour for use in promoting your business - this is limiting and you should be able to negotiate a copy in the correct format when you sign the contract to have the work done.  Make sure you read the video fine print - are they going to add in ads or graphics that don’t support your brand?  Yellow Pages videos add a graphic to the corner of every video they make, this forces the viewer on YouTube to find you in the yellow pages, not directly on your own website - and the potential for a lost sale increases.  Investing in video is expensive - so make sure you can get the most out of your investment.

 For more information on optimizing the images and videos on your website, check out Blizzard’s Free Markting Whitepapers and particularly the whitepaper on SEO: Images and Videos.

There has been a ton of coverage on Microsoft’s recent bid to buy out Yahoo! for a reported $45 Billion in cash and stock.  For the travel industry I speculate a few ripples coming down the pipe - although there may be more and I’ll report on those as they become evident. 

Paid Advertising:

 Microsoft actually has a pretty nice Paid Ad platform w/ AdCenter.  The problem lies in where they show your ads and how easy/not easy it is to opt out.  Because of the huge number of people who use MSN as their default browser, showing ads on irrelevant Microsoft properties and for strange queries isnt condusive to a large return on investment right now.  That being said, MSN AdCenter has potential. 

Yahoo on the other hand has a very un-intuitive platform with Panama.  I will admit it’s better than the old Overture platform, but I personally think it’s still clunky, hard to navigate and a royal pain to maintain and hold high CTR and ROI. 

Neither Yahoo or MSN show the return on investment for the travel sector the Google Platform enjoys.  Speculation is that the MSN AdCenter brand would suffer in the merger as Yahoo has a larger audience.  I think that’s a mistake as AdCenter’s platform is easier to use, more “Google-like” in interface, and some great targeting features for demographics, etc. 

With further developement in AdCenter, and Yahoo’s number of clients - they could combine what they have into something that works great. 

Search:

Microsoft has struggled with making their “Live Search” brand a household name.  MSN is known, Live us unknown.  Adding Yahoo! into the mix could confuse the consumer even more.  The reality is - you’re going to have to be found in any search engine, but with Google handling a huge percentage of “travel shoppers” they’ll stay secondary unless they combine and make one REALLY GOOD search engine to rival Google. 

We tell our clients we optimize for Google, because that’s where the market share is for travel.  We dont “throw away” Yahoo & MSN (or “Live”) searches, but we emphasize that hurting your Google rankings for a piece of Yahoo action is not a sound decision.  You cannot optimize a page to rank highly in Yahoo! and see them succeed in high organic positions on Google - that’s a fact of life for private (not large chains or networks) travel & tourism websites right now.

Yahoo! Travel

Google has yet to roll out a dedicated travel vertical like Yahoo! has with Yahoo! Travel.  This is a chink in Google’s armor that I’m sure Microsoft plans to capitalize on.  I belive the popularity of Yahoo’s verticals is a tempting bonus for Microsoft. 

It’s important to have good reviews in Yahoo! Travel already, as even Google Maps pulls reviews from Yahoo, but with the merger,that importance will increase.  I also believe the competition w/ GDS providers sending availability out through Yahoo! Travel could cause some issues with people booking directly with the property. 

 Overall I think there will be ripples, and if Google wants to stay on top, they’ll need to work hard to roll with the needs of the advertising and user communities.  For online travel sales I see a few changes in what we need to know and where we need to apply our knowledge, but I’m pretty confident we’ll be able to handle whatever comes up. 

I dont think the changes will be painful, and with the potential to have a bigger competition going on between MicroHoo and Google, our bottom line may increase as costs MIGHT decrease.  That’s speculation of course, but wouldn’t it be nice to see ad pricing drop a bit?

Read more about the potential Merger here:

SearchEngineWatch.com

SearchEngineLand.com

Are you getting tired of hearing about how important reviews are in the hospitality industry? Too bad. Reviews are becoming more important every day and the trend isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Now, Frommer’s, one of the original sources of trusted, professional, travel reviews , has teamed up with Trip Advisor, the online review king, to publish “Best Values 2008″, as the cover story for the February 2008 issue of Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel. The first line of the article is “Real travelers know best.” This is why so many travelers seek out the opinions of others before making decisions about their trips.

This also points out that it’s not only high end travelers or those venturing far from home who are searching for advice. Even people booking airport hotels, accommodations for business trips or family lodging near the Iowa State Fair appreciate the opinions of those who have gone before them.

Blizzard Internet Marketing strongly encourages you to take reviews seriously, to learn from them and improve and to manage your reputation online. Please see these additional resources for more information and advice:

Article: Building A Brand Online

Article: Do You Have a Reputation Management Plan?

Free Whitepaper: Online Reputation Management for the Hospitality Industry

No matter what industry you’re in, you probably have a love/hate relationship with reviews and review websites. They can make us glow with pride and satisfaction when they are complimentary. They can also make us frustrated and angry when the opposite is true.

It’s a fact of internet life that reviews are not going away. People want some help making decisions and they want to see others’ opinions about something before they spend their time and money on it. So, you’d better get used to the idea and figure out a way to use them that will help your business.

One idea is to publish reviews from trusted sources on your own site. See this  recently published article at HotelMarketing.com about how one online travel business doubled their conversions using this tactic.

I ran across this Monthly Category Report from Hitwise - they are a major competitive intelligence analyst for many industries across the web. This report outlines the Statistics for Travel Website Traffic for December 07. SOme interesting data here that really didn’t jive with some of my assumptions, but we all know what happens when you “assume” things.

37.34% of ALL visits to the online ‘Travel” industry went to the top 10 websites for the month of December 07. 46.76% went to the top 20 websites and 68.04% went to the top 100 websites

So what were the top 20 websites?

Wow! Mapquest? Really? It’s nearly 10% ahead of Google Maps and it really surprises me. If you’ve every tried to use a GPS that features Mapquest you know what I mean!

Top 10 keywords for travel in Dec 07

No real surprises here, we can see how important maps are to the online travel shopper. Do you have an interactive and comprehensive map on your website? Think about it and learn more in our free marketing white paper, Travel Maps for Hotel, Resort and Vacation Rental Websites!

Insiders are hotly anticipating the acquisition of Sidestep.com by Kayak.com that was announced in December 2007. When the two giants in Travel Search become one, what will it mean?

Greg Saks of Compete.com notes that the two sites don’t have much overlap in usage - only 10-20% - making this one of the biggest developments of the year in Travel Search. Both sites rely on other travel sites for leads and now the two will no longer have to compete against each other for that traffic.

Sidestep’s acquisition of TravelPost.com has helped it establish itself as a travel content site, which is a weak area for Kayak. Kayak’s technology, in turn, will help SideStep compete better. Between them, they attract about 5 million US visitors to their websites each month. See Greg’s analysis of their merger here.