The annual review of hotel marketing headlines that got most attention has finally completed. This edition is again upgraded from last year in terms of graphics which you can find here. The methodology is similar to last year in that it takes the top articles of Hotelmarketing, Phocuswire and HospitalityNet and each headline is categorized in terms of main topics and brand representation.

The HOT TOPICS

The battle for Direct Revenue is over

Traditionally Direct Revenue has been a hot topic every year. The war against OTAs for more Direct has been the rallying cry for most hotel marketing agencies, tech companies and more. It even permitted one tech company to raise millions of dollars from investors. In 2017 it clocked in over 13% of the mentions, declining to 7% in 2018 and is now at an all time low of 2%. The fact is, while hotels should always seek a healthy balance of distribution - the war for direct is over and sadly it seems Direct has lost.

Better Distribution Management is on the Rise

Interestingly the topic of Distribution is becoming a topic of interest, and it should be. Managing one’s distribution intelligently and seeking to balance the weight of the various channels more evenly has been what the smarter guys in the room were doing, while others were fighting the bigger players. This year Distribution arrived on the scene as a topic with almost 4% mentions.

Rate and Revenue Management are Important Again

Between stopping rate leakage and the arrival of new revenue management tools, it seems that hotel marketers are getting more interested in the science of hotel marketing again, the topic received 9% mentions which is a good increase from the mere 4% it got in 2018.

Disruptors are Top of Mind Now

While OTAs are the news when it comes to hotel marketing, Disruption in the space has been a side story for many years, but that side story wasn’t very interesting. This year 18% of the topics were about the “long tail” companies who are coming to for the OTA space. Between Amazon, Airbnb, OYO and Google’s many travel products, it seems they are getting the attention from the hotel marketers. As a reference it was 10% in 2018 and 2% in 2017.

One can’t help but think that since the Direct Booking battle is over, are hoteliers and marketing people turning to the Disruptors to do the job?

OTAs ARE THE NEWS

From being a necessary evil of hotel marketing it seems OTAs are now the accepted norm. Most of the news has been about OTAs in 2019 and while that’s similar to previous years, in 2019 it was over over 30% of the news whereas in 2018 it was only 17%. The second most talked about subject was the Disruptors in the industry with 18%.

Expedia got quite some attention but for mostly the wrong reasons (bad Wall-Street performance followed by firing of the CEO) still they were in the news.

It just confirms the story that the Direct Booking vs OTA battle is over and hoteliers have learned to accept that a better distribution management is smarter than fighting the big players in the industry.

Innovation, New Technology and Trends

Two topics that continue to be important are Innovation & New Technology which came in third with 14% of the news being about new technology and innovation. This lost some traction but has been fairly consistent with the previous years (20% in 2018 and 18% in 2017). Is that because there has been less innovation in 2019? There hasn’t been any breakthrough new technology launched and the main tech startup hype has been for existing players that raised bigger rounds, not new players entering the market (at least they didn’t make it to the list).

Following trends was slightly less interesting in 2019 than the year before (10% of the news in 2019 vs 16% in 2018). But looking at the articles in the category we’re seeing mostly the buzzfeed type lists a-la “10 things” and it’s also possible that these types of articles have saturated our news and they’re just not as interesting.

Notable absentees

Loyalty didn’t make it to the list, at all. Oddly one of the categories that is most ripe for disruption is loyalty, it is a big money maker for hotels but is based on a model that pre-dates the internet. With all the technological solutions we have today there are opportunities to make this a great new system. Accor’s ALL and Marriott’s Bonvoy have received a revamp, but neither new systems are quite clear and what about the rest of the companies? What about the independent hotels? There just isn’t a great solution that has worked so far. Are OTAs going to take that part of the business as well?

Personalization, there was just one mention of personalization that made it. Yet arguably this is where hotels will gain the most in terms of guest experience. Finding ways to use the vast amounts of data that guests are willing to share in exchange for a better experience is not making it to top of mind for hoteliers which is surprising. Since the beginning of time, the best hotels were those who understood guest needs and could deliver “magically” when a guest appeared. Technology has a huge opportunity to deliver on that and many companies are working on it, but hoteliers do need to pay attention.

Experiences, the buzzword of the last two years entirely fell off the radar. Either it was too early or it just isn’t the gold mine that investors, tech companies and OTAs were looking for. On paper it definitely makes sense that this could be the next frontier for travel tech, but in reality it possibly takes some more work. I wouldn’t discount it entirely since building the information/API infrastructure to search, promote and book local experiences is quite likely the next OTA experience.

The Top Brands

A little under half of the top stories of 2019 were branded which is more than last year. The notion of branded is that the title includes the mention of one or more brand.

The top brand of 2019 was Booking which dethroned Airbnb, the number most mentioned brand of 2018. Booking has managed to be on the top of the list for every year keeping within the top 3 positions almost every year which says something for how much they occupy hotelier’s minds. It’s not so hard to imagine, considering that in Europe, they account for a lot over half of the online market.

Airbnb lost some positions this year, that might be planned as they reportedly moving to IPO and controlling one’s image before an IPO becomes quite important so “less but better” is a good media strategy when coming close to an IPO.

This has been a banner year for Google in the hotel marketing sector with the highest position they’ve had since 2015. The diversity in Google’s news in travel is very different from any other brands in the industry. From search, to metasearch, to Trip apps, Maps and more. They’re also involved with everyone on the chain from the OTAs who are trying to become less Google dependent to the global chains and all the way down to the independent hotel. It’s a complex place to be where they profit from allowing brands to hi-jack each others names (think of OTA brand-jacking) and thus begin a long and lucrative chain reaction of businesses spending money with them.

TripAdvisor is still one of the big players in the industry, one of the few that has survived and with mentions every year, which is saying something because their counterparts such as Kayak and Trivago haven’t been making enough news to even show up on the top of the yearly list.

As mentioned in the Topics section above, what we are seeing more of this year is the disruptors in the industry such as OYO, Amazon, Google and Airbnb. This comes mostly from OYO’s entry on the brand chart.

In Summary

Last year’s summary ended with the question, will this year be the year of disruption. While that hasn’t proven to be the case, the interest for something or someone new is definitely increasing. The media lives on stories of the underdog winning over the incumbents, big brand and what ever has big money attached to it, thus disruptors get plenty of media attention. For much of the last decade it was Direct Bookings that held a constant spot on the list. This coming decade will probably be quite different. It isn’t too far fetched to believe that there will be a market correction in the course of this decade. How will that affect hotel marketing? Today we’re optimizing revenues (bottom line focus) but each time a market downturn comes attention focuses towards distribution and top line becomes the priority. That changes the dynamics of marketing.