Traveling Light

WORLD TRAVELERS will go a long way for a good resort. But when it comes to marketing themselves effectively online through either ads or customer relations, a large segment of the resort industry itself has miles to go.

That’s the main takeaway from a recent study of Internet marketing best practices for resorts, released in late October and sponsored by the resort marketing group of the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI).

Study participants were a mixed bag of resorts: Chains and standalone properties ranging from large to very small hotels, together with resort/condo combinations, all ranked as three- to five-star properties, and all of which opted into the study voluntarily.

Respondents also represented a broad range of Internet capability, says Cindy Estis Green, managing partner of hospitality consultant The Estis Group, which administered the study. While all had Web sites, many of those sites didn’t offer visitors the ability to make online reservations or perform other e-commerce. Some were little more than brochure ware — attractive, but almost useless for actively marketing a property with more than pretty pictures.

Interestingly, the most adept online marketers were not necessarily the largest properties among respondents, Green says. She hypothesizes that smaller resort marketers are more prone to take advantage of the Internet’s level playing field.

“I thought we’d see more of a correlation between Internet presence and size and resources, but some of the biggest players turned out to be considerably behind the smaller ones,” she says. “The small players seemed largely to realize that the Web was their chance to stop being constantly out-resourced by their larger competition.”

But even some of the most e-commerce-savvy resorts fell short of the mark when it came to optimizing their Web sites for effective search engine marketing, the study found. Not only did participants often fail to include as content the kinds of keywords that would improve their ranking on relevant search results pages, but they showed a distinct reluctance to make optimization of their sites a continual ongoing marketing effort.

“We got live comments such as, ‘Oh, yeah, we optimized our site — hey, Susie, wasn’t it 18 months ago?’” Green says. “That floored me. There was almost no recognition that search-engine algorithms change frequently, and that search optimization requires constant research and tending to remain current.”

That set-it-and-forget-it approach to optimizing Web sites for search marketing may feed into a larger tendency among resort properties: The inability to comprehend the role that search engines play in drawing Web traffic that can convert to sales. Many participants said their online customers came to them directly by inputting the URL address of their Web site. In other words, they were looking specifically for that resort or brand name.

But in fact, research reveals that the number of customers who look for a hotel by location rather than by name — and who therefore come to a hotel Web site through a search engine — may be 100 times larger than those who go directly to a Web address.

“The common response was, ‘We’re so well known and our customers are so sophisticated that we don’t need to make ourselves known online — our people know how to find us,’” Green says. “That just indicates another type of cluelessness in the segment about building traffic using the Web.” Resorts should be a dominant presence in the travel search marketing channel, particularly because so many searchers are looking for leisure travel options when they search.

It’s not so much that resorts lack the resources to do effective Web marketing as it is a lack of will to dedicate them to the task, says Green. While Web site optimization is a specialized technique that’s probably beyond the grasp of in-house programmers, a wealth of outside firms exist that could help with their search marketing needs. And other segments of the lodging industry — for example, chain hotels from the likes of Marriott and Holiday Inn — certainly have shown the importance of search marketing in their verticals.

But the resort segment is more decentralized than the chain-hotel segment, Green says, and very often doesn’t see that approaches which have succeeded in other areas can help them. That includes both search engine marketing and the broader issue of linking online advertising to offline sales. Only two of the 13 resort participants in the Estis Group study had the ability to track the origin of sales leads and therefore could tell what effect their Internet ads and Web sites were having on their sales over the telephone or through third parties.

That online/offline linkage is important not just for properly crediting sales but because it will let resorts take better advantage of the upsell possibilities in shifting some complicated bookings from the Web to a phone call. The study participant most active in Web selling was also the one that most carefully tracked offline sales, Green says. “They were very supportive of the Web effort but were also happy to get as much offline traffic from those efforts as they could, because by shifting the actual close offline they could upsell the customer and get more revenue from the sale.”

Leading Hotels of the World did not take part in HSMAI’s best-practices research, but it could be an excellent candidate for the next study, which will focus on customer relationship management. The New York coalition serves as a service provider to 420 independent luxury hotels in 80 countries around the world, providing them with marketing products and services they’d probably have a hard time acquiring on their own. And right now, the pre-eminent product Leading Hotels is offering its member properties is a comprehensive and automated Web-based CRM solution that will let them build customer loyalty.