Mobile is eating direct and 5 more stories
Mobile is eating direct bookings
In a recent study on conversion rates published last week, a fact is becoming more and more obvious: Mobile is really lousy at converting visits into revenue at least for hotel websites. Yes there is the important fact that people who browse on mobile are more into "micro" moments. But now let's factor in that the majority of website sessions are from mobile devices (and growing) and they aren't incremental to total sessions, they're eating them up. Mobile is not just eating website sessions, it's eating direct revenue. And until we solve mobile payments this is going to continue to be the case.
From hotelier to Micros Founder and back
What does one do after selling one's company for $5.3 billion? Start a free-speech and creative hotel in Berlin. Here's an interesting interview and sit-down by Hotels Magazine with Dietmar Müller-Elmau the Founder of Micros who sold to Oracle. Some great words of wisdom to the hotel tech community on the subject of hotel technology: "It’s an experience you’re buying, and the experience is far more than just the room." The case for making better products.
What was hot and what was not in 2017
The yearly review of hot/not in hotel marketing is a great reveal of the upcoming trends and the trends that are fading away. In case you missed the last email, here's the link to the article. Some highlights, HOT: OTAs, New Products, Hotel Brands, Data, AI and Bots. NOT: Direct Bookings, Airbnb, Metasearch and more. Worth a read, even if just to catch up on the top articles from Hotelmarketing in 2017 (full list on bottom).
A bit of history on hotel brands
A succinct read of of the history of major branding trends and how they affected the hotel industry. Luckily hotels avoided many of the branding trends of the 80s and 90s, but it does seem like some of those really weird names are creeping in now. Let's see if they catch on. If nothing else read this to impress colleagues at ITB.
Some trends to watch for
An interesting though not complete look at the trends to look for in 2018 (and probably the future) for hotel technology, hotel services and hotel marketing. Missing here are mobile payment solutions (but maybe they're just not properly on the horizon yet), the evolution of loyalty and how to reinvent it and the concept of data platforms which will be the cornerstone to much of the upcoming data needs (yeah blockchain, I know).
Skift Megatrends report, beautiful but flawed
Skift's impressive megatrends report just came out and it looks amazing. The layout, the illustrations and the content are great. But it is flawed, too focused on opinions and and possibly influenced by self sustained ideals it misses to really show what is happening in the industry on key topics. For example, The future of hotels being everything for everyone is also the definition of bad design, the best new hotel concepts are tailored to specific demographics and are fewer things (but better) to specific people. That 2018 follows two years of uncertainty and instability might seem that way when one reads the politics section of the news, but 2018 mainly follows a great year both in investments and revenue. That Back-end travel tech gets a design renaissance is awesome, but most definitely not a megatrend. Some of the smartest travel tech companies are going the design first approach and they get it. However, the megatrend is more down the road of travel tech companies finally working together to grow the travel sector and exchange data seamlessly. But I recommend you get your copy, there's a lot of great articles in there as well. Some of those opinions are right, and quite instructive.