Hotel Industry Trends and Hospitality News That’s Worth Knowing
In our latest round-up of hotel industry trends and hospitality news we’re looking at pop-up hotels, AirBnB’s new Travel Stories feature, research that shows millennials prefer receiving travel updates via email, and how to use Trip Consideration for Facebook and Instagram.
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Get it While it Lasts
We are long past the day when pop-up stores were for sample sales and boutique retailers. Everyone from Google, to Match.com, to Pantone has hosted their own pop-up, and even luxury hotels are embracing the trend. For the past two years, Marriott has offered luxury pop-up hotel rooms at Coachella, while outfitters like Black Tomato build bespoke luxury accomodations in remote, wild locations. It’s the ultimate in exclusivity, as Black Tomato puts it, “It is yours and yours alone. There for a moment and then gone.” Check out this article from Skift to find out more about how hotels are embracing pop-ups.
AirBnB Travel Stories
AirBnB has quietly begun rolling out a new feature called “Travel Stories” which will allow users to build a video montage of their trips to “inspire other travelers in the AirBnB community”. While the feature is only available to a select group of users at the moment, you can head over to the stories section of their website to see what people are creating, or read their FAQ page. We’re not sure what kind of experiences people will include in their travel stories, but we hope it will include moments like going to this London pop-up store to wipe jam on their hands (yes this was a reference we wanted to use in the above section but couldn’t find space for).
Millennials and Their Moms Want Travel Updates Via Email
There’s a lot of marketing research that looks at how different millennials are compared to older generations, but this is something we all have in common. According to recent research released by Amadeus, 31% of Asia Pacific travellers aged 18 to 30 years old prefer getting travel updates via email rather than social media, apps, phone, messaging service, or signal fire; which makes email the preferred option for the region’s millennials. And, according to earlier research by Amadeus, more mature Asia Pacific travelers prefer email as well.
Hey Adobe, is this Photoshopped?
Photoshop, a software program made by Adobe, is the pre-eminent tool for manipulating images in the world, so much so that ‘photoshopped’ has become a synonym for ‘edited’. So, in a kind of surprising move, Adobe has been working with researchers at the University of Maryland to create a program that can detect if an image has been manipulated. It’s not clear how the program will be used or when it will be released, but the message from Adobe seems to be that Photoshop is intended for creativity and artistic expression, not for deception.
How to use Trip Consideration for Facebook and Instagram
Facebook’s recently released ad product “Trip Consideration” allows brands to target users before they have even started planning their journeys but who seem “travel ready” according to their online behavior. It’s a product that can help brands target millennials in particular. According to a 2016 survey, 68 percent of millennials used Facebook to find ideas for their most recent trips, and 60 percent used Instagram. If you’re wondering how to use Trip Consideration, take a look at this article from PhocusWire.
Can you Out-SEO the OTAs?
Many hotels struggle to compete with online travel agencies (OTAs) like Booking.com and TripAdviser when it comes to organic searches. An experiment by Hermann Valsson, an IT administrator in the Spanish island of Tenerife, illustrates the struggle for hotels. According to Valsson, if you Google “hotel tenerife” from the UK, OTAs dominate the entire first page of results. In Valsson’s opinion, hotels have lost the SEO fight to OTAs. In our opinion, it’s definitely not time to wave the white flag. We’re still sorting through the arguments and separating what works from what doesn’t, but once we have some creative solutions we’ll be bringing those to you on our blog and newsletter!
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