Episode 3: Selling time is a vastly better strategy than selling a room

Travelers seek experiences, most of which happen outside the hotel room. Yet, the process of booking a room is often transactional and impersonal. Building a relationship with travelers helps DMO’s connect the traveler to the experiences they wish to have, positioning the DMO as a better host, and creating opportunities for the traveler to extend their time in destination.

Contributors

Zach Stovall
Senior Creative Strategist, Flip.to

Greg Thurik
Strategic Marketer, Formerly Envisionit

Transcript

Zach Stovall: Greg, when you trace back the roots of hospitality, it's about learning who your guests are—meeting them, understanding what they want, what's going to make them happy, and delivering on that experience. Yet somehow, when hospitality moved into the digital space, travel marketers lost sight of all of that. So often when you go to a DMO or hotel website and try to book travel, it's completely transactional. Hospitality is really a missing part of the digital puzzle. What's your take on that?

Greg Thurik: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You know, and especially when you're looking at the destination marketing organizations’ websites in particular. I want to talk there for a second. There are voices out there. There are thought leaders out there that I've recently been hearing say louder than I have here in the past. What destination websites need is a complete overhaul. The purpose they’re surveying, how they're working, what they're trying to do.

It's I've seen data, especially in destination marketing sites, that maybe at best 2% of people who land on your site are actually in a booking mode. Bookings happen on those sites, but they're pretty minimal. I have probably, over the years, have asked—it's gotta be pushing into the hundreds of people—just coworkers, clients, just friends, family, whoever. How many people who have actually booked a trip on a destination marketing website?

Zach: I bet it's some pretty low number.

Greg: Nobody has ever raised their hand. Ever. And I'm being I'm being honest with you. And, what it comes down to is that we're all traveling for different reasons. We have different purposes. There's different information that we're looking for. If I have already booked my trip, and I'm looking for things to do, I'm looking for a very different type of information, than if I'm considering your destination. Or if I'm planning a trip in October, which is five months from now, most of the information in the content that you will see on a destination website is focused on the now. So, things to do now, maybe a month in advance. You know, it's very categorized into your seasons.

Zach: And that's even if it's not just all jumbled right out there in front of you.

Greg: What happens is then then the user has to go on and explore a journey on their own to try to see if they can find that information.

Zach: It's a lot more work.

Greg: It is a lot more work. And really, to your point, it's the sites have become transactional instead of interactional. There's no inter really true interaction that's happening, and I think that's where there is definitely opportunity that can be had. In today's day and age I’m pretty sure everyone has heard of this AI thing, right? I mean, something as simple as—and this is something that Choose Chicago several years ago actually was ahead of the curve and implemented.

But, you know, when you're able to enter into a conversation on your site—and AI bots are one way to do it. Where, you know, theirs was set up as kind of your virtual planner or your virtual tour guide where you can ask it questions, or you can select from categories, and it will give you relative information. It'll interact. Let you know things to do. But it is a way in which you can get back to the basics of, again, being that host.

Zach: Conversations are so important in getting to know a traveler, and helping to deliver the experiences they want. You know, think about a general manager who's standing in the hotel lobby greeting guests. GM’s have a lot to do on any given day, but they make time to stand in the lobby so they can personally collect feedback from their guests.

They shake hands. “Hey, how was your day? What did you do today? What did you like? Is there anything we can do to make your stay better?” It's a way of saying, “Give me some feedback so I can either enhance your experience or use your feedback to enhance another guest experience.” Sort of an ultimate form of hospitality.

Greg: Yeah. You just hit the nail on the head, too. When you when you talk about hotels and especially hotel sites. More opportunity abounds there, where. How many sites have you actually visited on a hotel that talks anything about experiences, things to do, events—as like an online concierge? Very few. And again, this is where you can bridge being that host versus just a transactional booking of a room.

And there are ways to do it on your sites. There are products that integrate, you know, calendars of events and things that are going on. There are things that you can put on your site that's about the community and the local businesses. So, it's becoming that host, and not just a bed.

Zach: And understanding what your travelers want, and then being able to connect them to exactly that. That's the hurdle to get past is—you know, how can you do that in the digital form? You know, where you’re really understanding what that traveler wants, and then able to make that connection and to give them that information that they're looking for. Or that experience.

We also have to be considerate of the fact that when people are coming to a hotel or a destination, they have a very limited quantity of time. You know, they're there from this date to this date. They want to see and do as much as they possibly can in that time to, you know, make it feel like they've gotten the most for their money, but also experience the destination.

What are the things that we can put up front and center that are going to appeal to them, and going to help them maximize that time and maybe even say, “Wow, there's more to do here than I thought. I'm going to book an extra day or an extra two days.” Instead of trying to, you know, maximize the value that we get out of every room every night, if you can extend travel by one day, then you're actually making more money than if you just increase your room rate by $5 a night or something.

Greg: Absolutely. And, you know, brand loyalty is huge in that industry. So, if you are giving something that they're not accustomed to getting, odds are you're the first place they're going to look again in their next search.

Zach: Wow the guest. I mean, that's really what it's all about. Give them something that they can't stop talking about. And, of course, they're going to go home and tell everybody else about it.

Greg: Yeah, exactly.

Zach: Many thanks to strategic marketer, Greg Thurik, for helping us think on ways we can infuse hospitality into the digital experience, and the concept of selling time versus selling a bed.

I'm Zach Stovall and I hope you'll join us on the next episode of the Thought Starters Podcast, coming soon.