Modern technology is fast replacing the quintessential personal touch in brand marketing for hotels, with some efficient solutions available
Under the present economic scenario, marketing even necessities is difficult, leave alone luxuries like five-star hotels. The online platform makes it a little more convenient to reach out to a bigger audience, expanding the playing field. In most cases, technology has stood by the hotelier in good stead.
As Sachin Suri, associated director, HVS Web Strategies, points out, “Marketing specialists are trying their best to come up with the most feasible mix as well as strategies, that could help their companies reap the most benefits while keeping a rein on spending, and online marketing plays an extremely productive part in these decisions”.
The biggest advantage of online marketing, as Suri points out, is that the immediate results are clearly visible, and then the scale up in applications is easy. To illustrate his point, he gives more statistics, “In 2008, 37-38% of all hotel bookings were generated from the internet (as against one-third in 2007, and 29% in 2006). At least another third of all hotel bookings will be influenced by the internet, but done offline (call centre, walk-ins, group bookings, etc). All major hotel brands are already generating an excess of 40% of the (CRS) bookings via their brand websites. By the end of 2010, over 45% of all hotel bookings will be completed online.”
Another advantage, Suri says, is the savings in agent payments. “The biggest advantage in online marketing and reservations is that it can save on agent commission which is usually 15 – 20%; by using online applications this can be 8-9%”.
However, there are some industry specialists who dispute that online marketing is the best bet today. Says Lalit Kapoor, MD (Asia), PMI, who has set up a number of hotels over the last few years, “In India, online marketing is not a very high paying strategy. This is because, with impersonal online booking, a lot of things don’t come across, such as special tariff programmes, freebies, and so on.”
Adds Amlan Dasgupta, associate sales director, The Park, Bangalore, “Online channels were only an additional business outlet previously, but today, they are up to almost 50%, from the 40% mark last year. It is only metros, by and large, that are seeing this trend; in Tier-2 cities, online marketing is still not the best option.”
The answer to the efficacy of online marketing applications lies somewhere in between. There are some very efficient applications available, that can drive the online marketing initiatives of a hotel or a chain to the levels required. For the longest time, almost all the large hotel chains in India have been relying on GDS, the Global Distribution system, created by the airline industry in the 1960s, to keep track of flight schedules, availability, and rates. It can be defined as a ‘worldwide computerised reservation network used as a single point of access for reserving airline seats, hotel rooms, rental cars, and other travel related items, by travel agents, online reservation sites, and large corporations’. Growing to include the entire hospitality industry, GDS now includes four major applications that help online bookings and reservations— Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre, and Worldspan, and a couple of other local ones across the world.
While Prologic and Prolific have been around for some time, and are efficient in their own right, Micros Fidelios and Opera are now taking over a large part of the market requirements. Corporate Wish is another range of software products, integrated with WISH (Prologic First’s integrated software solution for hotels), and intended for use by hotel chains. WISH can be deployed at each hotel property, or hotel chains could host WISH at a data centre accessed by each property over a reliable and efficient data network. It basically caters to rooms and rates management, contracts database and marketing, individual reservations, and group bookings. It also integrates with the front desk, housekeeping, cashiering and management statistics. WISH has an easy user interface.
Another solution is T Rez, an online hotel booking engine which is designed to manage all types of bookings, made by clients, GDS, and corporates. Its main functionalities in addition to online hotel booking include inventory management, rate management and generate promotional e-coupons for discounts. It can also create unlimited packages and tours instantly, and provide B2B distributions for other travel agents and corporates. Further, it can generate instant business reports for strategising.
The Park, Bangalore, uses a number of applications including Rate Shopper. Says Dasgupta, “We are using Rate Shopping tools, and an RFP rate updating tool. Rate Shopper provides me with the lowest online rates of other hotels, so I can have a competitive strategy.” Rate Shopper application provides real-time market intelligence about the market prices in an actionable format and the pricing data also has other key pricing influencers – such as comparative location and quality factors. This can help in making the right pricing decision, since they do help in optimising rates, even if not aiding marketing directly.
In today’s market, one of the biggest brand playing in the online marketing applications field is Micros Fidelios, and their newest offering, Opera. It seems to have caught the fancy of most of the bigger chains, with over 13,500 deployments across ten countries, despite its cost which could be inhibitive for smaller brands or standalone properties.
Opera Enterprise Solution or OES, says Sagun Sawhney, country manager, India, at Micros Fidelios, is not a single product offering, but a fully integrated suite of products consisting of scalable modules for expansion from smaller operations to global, multi-branded hotel chain environments.
From the user point of view, Gopinath G, director of rooms, Hyatt International says, “Opera manages guest, travel agent, group, source and company profile information in a central database that can be accessed and shared by multiple points. Every intricate detail regarding the above – be it demographic or related to the stay, productivity or revenue statistics, as well as loyalty programme details, can be shared.”
OPERA also facilitates the sales team to enhance customer relationship management. It can be deployed in any size, and offers products for a hotel chain’s corporate office, including Central Reservations Systems, for both centralised guestroom and function space sales, and the Enterprise Information System – the Customer Relationship Management (CRM). In technical terms, OES is powered by Oracle and can be deployed on a single server or multiple servers on any combination of thick and thin clients, with clients running any internet browser.
An additional feature available is the OPERAPalm, a mobile, wireless connection to the hotel’s OES applications through a hand held device, which allows the hotel to provide service directly at the point of contact, enabling remote check-in and check-out, remote room inspection, remote event management, and contact management.
“Opera’s rate management and forecasting tools help hotels capitalise on opportunities, whilst enhanced profile management lets them exceed guest’s expectations every time. Interactive dashboards and customisable reporting help keep track of how well the property is running. The key to Opera’s success is its powerful integration; all modules share a single database, meaning no duplicated data”, Sawhney adds.
In India, a large number of chains use Micros Fidelios, since some hoteliers feel it is the best thing to help in reservation and room sales management. Says Hemant Khattar, general manager – IT, Bharat Hotels, The Lalit Group, “We use Micros Fidelios Opera; it is a great system, and has no interoperability issues, since it is very well interfaced with POS software and reservation”. Khattar feels the application is designed with deep insights into the running of the hotel business, so it covers the entire gamut of operations.
Benefits, he points out, need not always be revenue based. The fact that the data generated is user friendly, can be used for better planning and strategising, speaks for itself.
However, at The Lalit, the only issue he faces is the lack of control over what can be done with the application. “Opera is proprietary software, so while most of the best in-use applications in it come in the bundle, if we need a very specific report, we need their help to develop it. We get very regular and very accurate reports as a part of the package, but anything more, needs extra inputs for which we need to approach Micros. For instance if we want more BI or data mining, it is not possible form our end. That makes me feel a bit handicapped. It all can be done, of course, but at a cost.” The application doesn’t come cheap, working out to about $120-to-$150 per room.
Says Gopinath, “MICROS is used at the point of sale at all the food-and-beverage outlets in the hotels, the fitness centre/spa, salon and at the business centre. It is a disc-less device used to facilitate information sharing across multiple applications on a single database. When a guest places an order for a product or service, the same is fed into the MICROS. At the end of the day, post the MICROS night-audit, the revenue from such orders are then posted to the back office for the facilitation of reports.”
The advantage of using OPERA is that it allows utmost flexibility in configuring reports which therefore enhances data mining, better analysis of trends, guest history, and company productivity, which plays a critical role in strategic decision-making”, he adds.
Recently, ITC Welcomgroup decided to install the MICROS’s OPERA Enterprise Solution and MICROS 9700 Hospitality Management System (HMS), as its next generation technology. ITC will deploy the MICROS OPERA Central Reservation System (ORS), in its Bangalore data center facility, to manage call center operations and automate its global channel sales. “MICROS has shown it has the products, experience, and proven track record necessary to deliver the integration and world class solution we require”, “says Arijit Bhattacharjee, general manager, Information Systems, ITC Welcomgroup.
Micros Fidelios’ Opera seems to have set trends in the current market, providing integrated solutions for hotels to have an efficient system that covers online marketing, booking, reservations, all the way through POS, and even, property management.
