MyGreatWorld is a free, alternative photo community that organizes photos by where they were taken, essentially creating a photographic map of the world, country-by-country, city-by-city. Residents and travelers alike upload their best pictures of a location to the site, and along with identifying each photo with a place on the map, you can add a date and classify pictures into categories, like art, nature, gastronomy, hotels etc. Optional written comments and descriptions can accompany each photo creating human generated content , and will be indexed for keyword searches. Visitors browse the site by map location, recently added photos, or top-rated photos, and can search by any combination of parameters including keyword, date, category, and location. There is also in internal private instant messaging system that will allow private members to communicate with each other.

This site in my opinion is far from perfect. There are way to many pages to filter through to get to where you need to go, it has a horrible home page, and it’s picture inventory is limited because they are still in infant stages.

This is a very interesting concept that I believe could become the “go to” place to access images of people at the same vacation destination that you and your family is planning. Another huge piece to this is the fact that not only can you look at images but you can read about what people say. This site can be extremely viral. Go help them out and upload your images of your vacation. The more content they have the faster it will grow.

Online travel marketing is getting more complex and more competitive with new business models and websites popping up daily all competing for a slice of the billions in online travel sales.

The HeBS Team put together a benchmark survey with some interesting results.

The full spectrum of hospitality and travel verticals participated, including boutique hotels, upscale hotels, budget, mid-scale and luxury franchised properties, major brands, real estate groups, resorts, hotel management companies, casinos, and more.

The survey results clearly show hoteliers understand the hotel Internet marketing strategy and respectively, should take a holistic view of the hotel online environment and adopt a comprehensive, long-term strategic approach to grow the online channel. No longer viewed as a source for only incremental sales, the website is a major revenue driver and requires an online marketing budget to support the activity. 

Today’s hotel marketing budget tends to include specific line items addressing direct web marketing. These are treated as “fundamental” and include website re-designs, organic search optimizations, search marketing, email marketing, strategic linking, online advertising and public relations, and new media formats such as Web 2.0 which includes  social media, CGM, and blogs.

Here are some main findings from the survey:

• For the first year ever, the industry reported that online business is coming from their own website more than third parties or corporate brand sites (see Table A below).
• Franchise/major brand hoteliers overwhelmingly find there to be major restrictions in online marketing conduct due to brand standards and regulations.
• Similar to last year, the highest percentage of survey respondents (72% this year, 80.7% last year) use search engine optimization and organic search in their search marketing campaigns. This was followed by paid search (50%, 62.7% last year), then local search (38.8%, 37.3% last year). This year we introduced mobile search into the survey, which 6.78% of respondents said they use in their search marketing campaigns.
• When asked what Internet marketing objectives they did not achieve in 2007 and would like to focus on in 2008, the highest percentage of hoteliers (44.23%) said website optimization, followed by search optimization – organic search (39.54%).
• The more hoteliers learn about online direct distribution and Internet marketing, the more they realize their property website does not conform to industry’s best practices. 54.62% of respondents said that no, their property website does not conform.
• This year, almost half of hoteliers surveyed are planning a blog on the hotel’s website. Other Web 2.0 formats planned for ’08 include photo sharing, surveys and comment cards on the website, and creating profiles on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.
• More than 96% of hoteliers are planning to increase their Internet budget this year.  68.1% of these hoteliers are shifting funds from offline marketing budgets to accomplish this increase.
• 49.15% of survey respondents believed that Internet marketing produces better results than traditional marketing alone. Another 44.07% believe that both Internet marketing and traditional marketing work equally well. The remaining 6.78% are of the opinion that traditional marketing produces the best ROIs.
• The most important factor hoteliers considered when planning their 2008 budget was last year’s budget. The second most important factor was industry averages.

Percentage of Business from the Internet
In 2007 over 35 % of hotel bookings were generated via the Internet. Approximately 62% of those (21.7% from total bookings) were done via hotel branded websites (i.e. Direct Online Channel). For the first time in 2007 the major hotel brand website bookings surpassed the brand GDS bookings (33.7% vs. 33.5%) (eTRACK).

What is the situation in the industry as a whole? As mentioned earlier, for the first time the Benchmark Survey respondents stated that in 2007, the direct website bookings exceeded the indirect (third-party online intermediary) bookings 23.5% vs. 20.4%. This result is on par with the industry and underlines the importance of the direct channel in the overall Internet strategy. 

Most Popular Internet Marketing Formats

Internet Marketing ROIs
In 2008, what are the Internet marketing formats hoteliers believe generate the highest ROIs? In the past, paid search and SEO were usually named the top drivers for increased revenues online. The 2007 and 2008 benchmark surveys show that hoteliers have matured and now understand that long-term, strategic objectives and formats such as website re-designs and optimizations, email marketing and strategic linking produce higher ROIs than “quick fix” solutions alone, such as PPC.

 
What Web 2.0 Initiatives are Hoteliers Considering?

Conclusion 

The Internet has become the largest and most important marketing and distribution channel in hospitality. As hoteliers learn more and more about Internet marketing, they are realizing that there are many missed opportunities and that the Direct Online Channel website is their most cost-effective revenue generating channel. The fundamentals of an Internet marketing strategy - a hotel website that follows best practices, search engine marketing – both paid and organic and email marketing, continue to receive the highest budget allocations. In 2008 several marketing formats are expected to receive increases: email marketing, website optimizations, paid search, local search, meta search. Web 2.0 and Social Media initiatives have become a hot topic in the industry and hoteliers are eager to explore these new media formats.

Another interesting result of the survey is that for the first time, the industry reported that online business is coming from their own website more than third parties. This shows that hoteliers are embracing direct online distribution. We expect this to become the norm over the years as hoteliers continue to increase their knowledge of Internet marketing and the benefits of making their customers their own from the first point of contact.

As you prepare for a record breaking year in website revenues, seek advice from an experienced and ROI-centric Internet marketing hospitality consultancy to help you adopt industry’s best practices, implement latest trends, and utilize the Direct Online Channel to its fullest potential.

Survey prepared by the HeBS team which for this project consisted of Max Starkov, Jason Price, Mariana Mechoso and Evan Rosenblum.

We recently rebranded our company and within the past week have launched a new website.

Our old website has decent rankings which haven’t yet transferred to the www.propelmedia.com as we haven’t yet applied our 301 redirects so needless to say our traffic is quite low. 

Our old website’s contact page had a fairly long form asking questions regarding the type of services someone was interested in, whether their site had been optimized for natural search or not, with required fields including their domain name, email address, phone number and full name. We initially had a long contact form so we would eliminate spam requests but also to gather enough information so our first phone call with a client would be a lot more productive.

Our new contact form is quite simple, three fields, name, email address and remarkes. The send button is above the fold on most computers to have as little drag as possible.

The increase in conversion rate has been astounding, while I’ve “known” a simple form creates less drag, I wasn’t prepared for the enormous difference in conversion rate. How much to attribute to a better company name and a better site design is an unknown, however we’ve seen a 400% increase in the first few days which brings me to my point about optimizing your website to capitilize on existing traffic.

Let’s face it, there are ten positions more or less within natural search on Google, Yahoo and MSN. That means ten or fewer companies are going to get 80% of all search traffic for a given term. That doesn’t leave much on the table for the millions of other websites.

To remain competitive within the rankings search engine optimization is an ongoing battle.

However improving conversions or sales for your existing traffic is much more within your control via web analytics.

Even small sites with small budgets can participate via Google Analytics which has a very low cost - free. Webanalytics is not just measuring clickstream, it’s much more than that. Determining your success metrics will vary from website to website but is well worth the investment of time or money or both. The web is arguably the most effective non human sales tool, is an excellent source of customer data, can serve as a focus group, provides excellent customer feedback and can be your most effective sales channel.

Getting your website to be your most effective sales channel will require that you master the challenges of measuring your site via web analytics and listening to what your customers are telling you.

Going back to our own case study, what would your bottom line look like if you could increase your conversion rate by 400%?

YouTube recently announced a major policy change:

STRIKES THAT EXPIRE

It didn’t seem fair that a user who uploads three videos that violate the Community Guidelines over the span of a year was being treated the same as someone who uploads those same videos over the course of a week. To change this, we’ve made it so that violations are now rescinded after six months. Accounts that had one or two warnings (as of April 16, 2008) for Community Guidelines (or Terms of Use) violations have been given a clean slate and are going forward under the new system, too!

Note that this does not apply to copyright claims, which don’t expire and are not being cleared.

As Director of SEO&SEM for a leading travel website, I was responsible for the strategy to convert existing websites to new platforms, launch a new domain and rebrand websites all at the same time! Search Strategists don’t typically work in a vacuum and have to answer to C level executives and sometimes the Board. Here is what we did for one of the sites that was in a very special situation.

During early 2005 there were conflicting opinions on whether 301’s or 302’s were better for launching a new platform or migrating a site to a new domain. This was before Big Daddy which has pretty much put the topic to rest and 301’s are widely considered the best and only tactic for migrating or re-launching websites. However there are some very special situations where a 302 redirect may be necessary during a website re-launch.

Here is what I experienced as we re-launched a large website with a new look and platform:

The challenges for launching this site on a new platform were:

1.       Maintain traffic and conversions

2.       Flat site architecture to dynamic search driven platform.

3.       Startup staff in development and customer service

4.       Loyal customers were familiar with old navigation.

5.       Change in site content.

The SEO / SEM plan:

Document pre-launch rankings, traffic and conversions to effectively measure post-launch results. Use 302 redirects to get the site through peak traffic / conversion season so that the old pages would still be found in the SERP’s while we worked to build rankings for the new pages. This tactic by and large worked for this particular situation. The old pages slowly drifted down in the SERP’s while we worked like mad to get the new pages to index and rank well. When the new pages began to challenge the old pages, which took about three months, we changed the 302’s to 301 redirects and focused completely on the new pages. Site traffic sank during the launch but didn’t take a deep dive during a critical traffic period. We used the ppc campaigns to bolster traffic/conversions in locations that were not performing as well as they had the previous year. Additionally email campaigns were launched targeting troubled areas to support the level of conversions necessary.

To make the most of our ppc spend, we did extensive keyword research, built out ppc campaigns maxing out the number of adgroups/keywords allowed precisely targeted to what the searchers were looking for.  We grouped the paid ads to maximize conversions and spend. We also engaged efrontier, a bid management company to manage the portfolio. Through their intelligent tools we were able to assign a value to our conversion events which proved to be more efficient and more scalable than we could do manually.

This tactic might work for your website re-launch IF the new pages content is significantly different than the old pages and you are entering or in a peak traffic/conversion period or you cannot afford to buy the traffic to fill the traffic lost when your site re-launches. However based on experience I wouldn’t use 302 redirects unless it’s absolutely necessary to get through a few weeks of a peak traffic period.

After every site that was re-launched we did an extensive review of results and determined as best we could the cause….took our lessons and applied them to the succesive site re-launches with increasingly better results. 

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