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Hemant Khattar, GM, IT, Bharat Hotels, The Lalit Group
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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%”.

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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.