Here are my top reasons you should give free Wi-Fi at your hospitality or tourism business;

• A recent survey by Hotels.com reported that free Wi-Fi is a must when choosing a hotel room and that it is now the primary in-room and hotel perk that they will base their decision around.
• 31% of those surveyed by hotels.com said they expect free Wi-Fi in a hotel now.
• People are more likely to mention and talk about your business on social media if they are given the opportunity to connect easily with free Wi-Fi.
• You’ll encourage roaming sales people to use your cafe or bar for meetings with people that live locally and will probably come back.
• Everybody knows how inexpensive internet is, by charging your customers; they know it’s just another way for you to make more money on top of their coffee.
• It can encourage people to stay in your cafe or restaurant for longer & spend more money.
• If you don’t, you’ll be put to shame by the Canyons Resort in Utah in the US, who have managed to offer free Wi-Fi from Canyon to Canyon covering its entire hotel, meeting space and ski fields!
• You’ll also be behind this little town in rural Otago that offers free Wi-Fi throughout the whole main street. (It works; I used to drive straight through!)
• By adding a landing page you’ll encourage more people to Like your brand on Facebook, Follow you on Twitter or check-in on FourSquare.
• The technology to set up a secure free Wi-Fi spot is now very affordable & the ongoing costs minimal.
• You’ll actively encourage new customers.
• If they can run to the cost of offering free Wi-Fi on buses and planes, why can’t you?
• You stop the complaints from people who expect it.
• Giving something for free will make you feel good inside.
• Most importantly, because your clients wants it!

If you oversee the website of an RTO or DMO why not try adding ‘places you can access free Wi-Fi’ to your home page. It will be great for your visitors and a compelling incentive for your operators to start offering it!

Do you offer free Wi-Fi at your business? Do you plan to during 2012?
Do you run a travel site? Do you let people filter by properties that offer free Wi-Fi?
Do you look for places with free Wi-Fi as a consumer? Would you like to see more places offer free WiFi?

I’d love to hear your thoughts as a business operator and as a consumer.

As always, if you enjoyed the blog post then please share it on Twitter and let other people have their say too!

I was chatting with someone the other day (let’s call him Ron) talking about what he looks for most when shopping for travel online. It wasn’t what I would have thought, and it probably wasn’t representative of what most people look for, but it was worth thinking about.

When Ron books accommodation online he is most likely to book the room that, when he turns the handle and opens the door, is exactly as he expected it to be.  More importantly, the room must be as his girlfriend expected it to be, otherwise there will be trouble.
So, if the photos, room names and descriptions are poor, Ron won’t book. If there is a large discrepancy between the photos, descriptions and room names across different websites, he won’t book. If all these are consistent across sites, then he’ll book on his favourite site that has the best price.  Why?  Because he’s been burned too many times with rooms that are nothing like the promise he’d made his girlfriend based on what was viewable online.

This is pretty extreme (and a little whipped, sorry to say fella), but the basics are sound.  Photos, room names and descriptions help clarify expectations. The more accurate they are, the better prepared your guests will be for what they get when they arrive.  Is your “executive room” a “king executive room” on some sites when it is the same thing?  Does every product have at least one photo attached to help clarify expectations?

Just in time for those Valentine’s Day check-ins it’s worth thinking about what your listings have promised your guests and help men everywhere keep their girlfriends happy.

Here’s a recent tv ad from Stamford Plaza that touches on guest expectations.
Until next time, happy Valentine’s Day.

Perhaps the market size of Australia in comparison to New Zealand allows some re-sellers the opportunity to develop this sort of business approach. I guess the smaller market size and transparent nature of NZ ensures that most re-sellers and tourism providers themselves are keen to pursue every possible sales opportunity from every possible market segment – a balanced multi-channel distribution strategy that includes sales from wholesale, retail, direct, and indirect distributors appeals to the entire market with consumers decisions based on price, choice, convenience, service, and perhaps most importantly ‘reputation’.

One of the popular phrases in the online travel space lately has been “price parity”, an idea pushed by the OTAs (online travel agencies) and expected of the supplier, as outlined in this article. 

If I were an accommodation operator, I would ask myself, “why does it matter, surely I can play with prices across the sites I deal with, who will even notice?”  Not only that, as an operator I would naturally have better relationships with some OTAs than with others, and I would like to offer better prices on x site versus y site.  Factor in a variety of commission levels across OTAs and all of a sudden it is conceivable I would have a wide variety of prices online for even my core products.

Unfortunately, one of the immutable truths of online travel consumption is that people shop around, and price differences will be noticed by the online shopper. Usually, these differences will not matter – the traveller will merely take advantage of the lowest price they find and book there.  Aggregator sites have ensured that this is a simple task.

There are occasions where such a wide variety of prices across different OTAs and travel websites can erode trust in your property and may lose you a booking that you might otherwise have secured. I recently came across an example of this on my site, Travelbug, where travellers can make enquiries direct to the supplier. In one such enquiry, the traveller indicated that they were so confused and taken aback by the variety of prices they saw across the internet for what seemed to be the very same products, that they were compelled to ask the hotel why this was happening:

So how should you manage your pricing while allowing for your relationships with OTAs and managing profitability despite varying commission levels? I’d like to suggest a few things:

• Commission levels on retail sites are a cost of doing business.  If you have decided that the audience provided by an OTA or a network of resellers is valuable to your business then you have to accept the commission level charged by that site or group of sites. If the commission level is too high for you, don’t participate in that network.
• Your core products, eg ‘Standard room’, ‘Queen room’, ‘Studio apartment’ and so forth should have the same retail price across all third party channels and OTAs
• Use added value products and multi-night rates to differentiate across your preferred sites. For example, offer a B&B rate on your favourite site that you might not offer elsewhere.  Shoppers making comparisons will not find this confusing or feel that you’re playing a game – it’s an entirely different product
• Use channel management software to make your pricing updates easy and seamless
• Lean on the account manager or support team of the OTA in question to help you configure your rates

If you follow these key points, you’ll have happy OTAs and happy online shoppers.

I’d love to hear your reactions to this, the first of my contributions to this blog site, so don’t be shy!