"Travelers don't believe hotel marketers anymore"

As if they ever did!

This was an original piece on Hotelmarketing.com.

"They don’t trust our pictures or our adjectives. They believe each other, writes hospitality industry consultant Carol Verret."

OK so I know we are all on the Web 2.0/Travel 2.0 bandwagon but isn't this a little sensationalist? A good chunk of our visitors check out the pictures gallery, and we get millions of page views per month. The 3/4 million of visitors per month read the content on our pages and make booking. We had the best quarter ever in 1Q2008 with our direct to brand bookings online. So they have not gone away.

So please relax....

"In the hospitality industry, the customer is less likely to blindly believe the ‘marketer’s’ story as there are so many ways to access stories written by people like them about the experience they had or want to have."

Yes, Web 2.0 and customer review certainly do influence consumers and also makes hotel operations and experience more transparent to the consumer. They know better and better what they would be getting for their value.

In actuality, this drives the capitalist supply and demand economy and "survival of the fittest" mentality. If you have a crappier room than your neighbors, then you should charge less... period. If you have not spend money on renovation in the last .. oh, say ... 15 years, then you should not be charging the same as that new Hilton with LCD TVs, club floors, and new bedding.

They quoted Seth Godin: "… marketers aren’t really liars… they’re just really good at telling stories that customers want to believe."
The thing about the hotel industry is that our product is as much the physical infrastructure as it is the service. There must be a balance between what we naturally exaggerate in order to sell/market and what we deliver. And delivery is the problem now with staffing crunch and higher expectations because of higher ADRs.

"The good news is that price isn’t the only driver the bad news is that our customers don’t believe hotel marketers anymore – they don’t trust our pictures or our adjectives. They believe each other!"

I am not sure about that. People have always believed in word of mouth, but the web is full of crap. There are tons of uninformative reviews and it takes a while to sift the good from the bad. And pictures still help, if nothing than give users a view of the hotel or room. Consumers however do understand that the hotels need to "put their best foot forward".

In my own personal searches, I always look at both the hotel's site and other sites. Consumers are just doing more research and they can do it so much easier now with the web. They have lots of choices. As the flight attendants often say over the loudspeaker as you are deplaning, "Thank you for flying with XXX Airways. We understand you have many choices, and we appreciate your business. See you again."

Maybe we should get our Front Desk staff to say something similar as well....