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Did you know what trended at WTM 2016?

One of the leading travel trade events, WTM attracts thousands of hospitality and travel trade professionals from across the globe every year. This year was no different with over 51,000 visitors in attendance. The show has grown at an unprecedented rate in recent years making it the event where the industry conducts business.

eRevMax attracted a lot of visitors with its innovative product offering as well as unique stand design hosting a giant tree with colourful beach balls lending vibrancy to the Travel Technology Hall.

The company was there to promote its new hospitality operating system LIVE OS which is a one-of-its-kind platform in the industry today. It received a lot of positive comments with technology veterans using terms like ‘awesome’, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘mind-blowing’ to describe LIVE OS. Hotel clients were happy to talk about their association with the company and how they are benefiting from using eRevMax products on a daily basis. Here is a video of one such happy customer!

Reuel Ghosh, CEO, eRevMax was invited to present a session on Hospitality Operating System at the Travel Tech Theatre on Monday, the day when attendance is by invitation only at the show. The session saw an attendance of over 100 trade visitors, many of whom later visited the eRevMax stand TT550 to find out more about eRevMax offerings. Here is a quick glimpse of the session recording for those who missed it.

 
The event proves to be a perfect platform for hoteliers and travel technology companies from Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific to explore new technology offerings and partnership opportunities.

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Introduction of TrustYou Tile – Manage Guest Reviews from LIVE OS Platform

As a hotelier, you know that engaging with your guests is crucial for developing loyalty and converting them into your biggest brand ambassadors. We know you want to monitor each and every conversation, and respond to it. That’s why we are pleased to present to you the world’s largest Guest Review Management platform – Trust You in LIVE OS.
You can now access your guest reviews and ratings directly on your LIVE OS dashboard. From booking your hotel until after the guests check out, TrustYou’s products help hotels leverage guest feedback to impact the entire guest journey.
It is the undeniable truth that guests are the King in hospitality sector and in this age of digital era they rule the industry. You’d perhaps agree that reputation has a positive correlation with the hotel’s overall Average Daily Rate and revenue – thus we’re happy to bring Trust You in LIVE OS. This will help hotels to access guest reviews and ratings collated by TrustYou, directly on the LIVE OS platform for informed decision making and take actions to improve their ratings.
TrustYou is the world’s largest guest feedback platform that analyzes millions of travel reviews scattered online and transforms them into actionable insights and data visualizations for hotels and travel intermediaries worldwide. You can provide guests with better services and enhanced offerings by monitoring, surveying and acting on these reviews and feedback. TrustYou helps intermediaries to improve travelers’ search-shop-buy experiences by providing structured information like Meta-Reviews.
You can also turn your opportunity into business by leveraging reputation management tool by TrustYou directly from your LIVE OS dashboard.
Want to know more how it can help your hotels to improve guest satisfaction quotient? Contact us today!

Posted by Omprakash Singh, Business Analyst, eRevMax

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eRevMax joins hand with Hope Kolkata Foundation to celebrate ‘Daan Utsav’

eRevMax, the leading hospitality technology solutions provider, has partnered withKolkata based NGO Hope Kolkata Foundation to extend support to celebrate ‘Daan Utsav’– an initiative that encourages the joy of giving. Employees of eRevMax have enthusiastically volunteered and contributed generously to help the underprivileged children by sponsoring one month’s ration to one of Hope Kolkata Foundation’s protection home.
 
 
By encouraging and enabling employee volunteering, eRevMax brings together people and good causes to create a wave of change. Daan Utsav was celebrated at eRevMax’s Kolkata office from 2nd October to 4th October. Volunteers from various departments took an active interest and donated one month’s dry ration for the noble cause.
 
“Hope Kolkata Foundation is very pleased to be working with eRevMax for the all-round development of street children in Kolkata. eRevMax is one of our new partners who have taken keen interest in working closely with the kids at our protection homes. The team has been conducting various activities and has wholeheartedly supported us through Daan Utsav,” said Geeta Venkadakrishnan, Director, Hope Kolkata Foundation.
 

 

Launched in 2009, Daan Utsav is India’s annual ‘festival of giving’. Celebrated every year, in the week including Gandhi Jayanti (October 2-8), it brings together people across the country to participate in their own ways and give back to the society.
 
Read Full story here.


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Are you making the most of the Opportunities available?

Opportunities are meant to be taken!

eRevMax’s partner Booking.com brings to you the Opportunity Centre – a platform that helps hotels spot ways to get more bookings, boost profits and perfect guest’s experience.



With the Opportunity Centre, hotels can –

 – Analyse hotel profile on Booking.com, including content, pricing & availability

 – View a list of opportunities and their potential benefits to the hotel

 – Benefit from these opportunities with just a couple of clicks

The Opportunity Centre platform is –

 > Smart: a one-stop shop of opportunities & suggestions to boost your business

 > Relevant: personalised, data-supported tips tailored to your property profile

 > Easy to use: opportunities you can put into practice quickly

Log in today to discover a world of opportunities!

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Top Online Travel Trends to Watch in United Kingdom this year

United Kingdom is the eighth popular country in the word in terms of international tourism destinations. The country has attracted 34.4 million travelers in 2015, a 5.6 percent growth compared to the last year.

eRevMax, the leading hotel technology provider, has released an infographic showcasing online travel trends in the United Kingdom. The infographic has projected a positive outlook for UK hoteliers, who can expect to see a lot of bookings coming their way not only from international travelers but from Britons too, as a good 64% of them will take at least one domestic holiday.

Hotels using eRevMax solutions generated an average of GBP 199 per booking with average length of stay being 1.4 across properties. As per eRevMax production statistics, just like rest of Europe, Booking.com has a clear dominance over online hotel bookings followed by Laterooms, Expedia, Agoda and hotelbeds.

UK Online Travel Trends 2016

Source: eRevMax


Further, this infographic focuses on traveler buying behavior to give hoteliers a deeper insight. It is interesting to note that travellers visit around 17 OTAs during their travel planning phase and over 59% travelers are influenced by online reviews, especially for hotel bookings. Over 65% travellers use metasearch to compare prices thereby making it vital for hotels to manage online reviews effectively and engage actively with metasearch channels.

See full story on eRevMax website here.

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Arabian Travel Market 2016 – Top Middle East Travel Trends

This year’s edition of Arabian Travel Market (ATM) was held last month and witnessed a 7% year-on-year increase in visitor numbers with more than 28,000 trade visitors attending the show.


As per a recent report by IPK International, Middle East is the world’s fastest-growing outbound travel market, having witnessed an increase of 9% in outbound trips over the first eight months of 2015. Although Middle East is going through political unrest and economic uncertainty, the region has seen positive growth in the travel sector last year. Close to 12 million travelers visited Dubai in 2015, making it the fifth most popular city in the world for international visits. I have identified some interesting middle-east travel trends- 

High Spending Travellers

Outbound travel from Middle East increases in the summer months to almost 60% to avoid the summer heat, compared to about 40% in the winter season. In 2015, almost 40 million Emiratis crossed the border, and as per research, this number is expected to touch 81 million by 2030. When it comes to travel planning, Middle East travellers prefer long vacations with an average of 14 nights stay. And in terms of spending, travellers from the region are considered high spenders – with the average spending being 200 Euros per person per night.


Rise of “Digital Natives”

One of the youngest regions of the world with over 50% of the population aged between 18- 34, travel in UAE and other Middle East countries are largely influenced by the digital experience. 65% millennials begin their travel planning online while 52% prefer to compare prices in various online platforms before making a decision. High internet penetration and rise of smartphone users have increased online travel sales in the region in last couple of years. As young affluent travellers are migrating to new channels for travel planning, hoteliers too are making an effort to step up their game by being visible on multiple channels including meta-search for improved online bookings.
Personalization

Like every other traveller in the world, Middle East travellers too prefer personalised services and it starts right from the purchase journey. With almost two-third travellers accessing travel related information through their smartphones, it has become imperative for hoteliers to have a mobile optimized website with relevant content. Further with changing customer preferences, hotels need to have a dynamic marketing and pricing strategy to make the most of every available opportunity.

The travel industry in the Middle East region has changed dramatically over the last decade and hoteliers need data-driven analytics to respond more rapidly to changing market conditions, reach out to “new age” travellers and offer personalised products and services.

Ram Mohan Dubey is the Sales Manager MENA at eRevMax. He can be reached at rammohand@erevmax.com.


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ITB Berlin 2016: LIVE OS all the way!

ITB Berlin continues to be a crowd puller and this year was no different. One of the largest travel trade events globally, ITB Berlin attracted a record 120,000 trade visitors that attended the show to meet over 10,000 companies that exhibited at the event.

eRevMax ITB Stand

The event provides a platform for travel and hospitality companies to showcase their products and services and is a great place to form new partnerships and acquaintances.

eRevMax witnessed a strong response for its newly launched LIVE OS platform attracting various new partners and clients to sign up for it. Our uniquely designed stand drew a lot of attention, so much so, that SnapShot, a hospitality analytics solutions provider and an exhibitor at ITB Berlin covered eRevMax in its blog, “First off, a shoutout to eRevMax for their cafe-style stand at ITB. We also like their (relatively) new analytics tool built into their LIVE OS product. A combination of nice design and a good user base makes this a solid booking and revenue-based analytics tool.”

It is important to reiterate that LIVE OS is a first of its kind hospitality operating system that offer hotels a single point of access to multiple applications and service providers for business process improvement through relevant call to actions.

4hoteliers.com, a leading hospitality publication, featured LIVE OS for its unique proposition.

While most of the feedback received at ITB was fantastic, we have to feature what Lukas Kakalejčík from Room Assistant had to say – “LIVEOS makes it so easy for all hotels to have relevant KPIs at their disposal. The platform helps them to identify the overall effectiveness of the applications they are using and thus measure their return on investment. LIVE OS definitely helps them to make informed decisions on the performance of their technology applications. We are happy to work one-to-one with our customers, and demonstrate how our programs improve their operations, sales and marketing, and revenue. They can see the real output it brings to the table,”

More than thirty companies have signed up to integrate as partners on LIVE OS, with many more in the consultation stage. ITB Berlin continues to be a great show and we look forward to the 2017 edition.

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Top three travel trends to watch in 2016

With 2016 upon us, let’s take a quick look at the movers and shakers of 2015 – TripAdvisor launched its Instant Booking service, Google announced the Google Hotel Ads Commission Program, Amazon entered the travel space and Marriott acquired Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide! Do these ‘events’ make predicting 2016 trends any easier? We are not sure! However, based on some industry reports and market research studies, here are some trends that we have derived for 2016 –

Less people, more data

Around 40% of the world’s population is online and they are interacting in newer ways. Internet continues to generate massive amounts of information and data. An IBM researchshows that 2.5 exabytes (that’s a whopping 2.5 billion gigabytes (GB)!) of data was generated in 2012 and this figure will get doubled by 2016. This data is a combination of all the activities happening online across platforms – desktop, tablets, laptops, mobile apps etc. A recent TripBarometer study by TripAdvisor shows that around 42% of travellers use smartphones to plan or book their trips. As technology is leading the way in hospitality, hotels need to focus on deciphering the data trends to offer the right products to travelers through the right channel.

eRevMax big data

Consolidation continues

Hospitality professionals would agree that 2015 continued to witness the consolidation trend. Over the last three years, two of the travel majors – Expedia Inc. and Priceline Group have been gobbling up one company after another. Earlier in 2015, Expedia announced to buy Orbitz for about $1.6 billion in cash following its acquisition of Travelocity. In order to gain supremacy over each other, Expedia and Priceline has spent collectively more than $7.6 billion over the last two years in various acquisitions. Regional biggies did not stay behind in the ‘merger & acquisition’ spree – Chinese online travel giant Ctrip acquired 62.4% share in eLong from Expedia. However, Marriott’s acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide was perhaps the most discussed news piece, making Marriott the largest operating hotel brand worldwide. While it’s difficult to predict who’s next, there definitely will be some more in the offing for 2016.

Guests of the Future

In a world where consumers are using multiple devices and interacting on social media platforms, it has become imperative for hotels to forge relationships with them, particularly in the digital realm. Omnipresent information and instant communication has made competition even fiercer. Hotels those are quick to respond to guests and be visible at every touch point – be it guest review sites or mobile optimized brand website, will surely be preferred over their competitors.

eRevMax Guest Review Management

An eMarketer report shows that in 2013, one in four people was connected through social media – i.e. around 1.73 billion people across the globe. This number is supposed to rise to 2.55 billion by 2017. These users are actively sharing experiences and writing reviews on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Hotels that are monitoring and responding to these reviews and employ innovative technologies to interact with guests will have an edge over their competitors.

With scientific use of big data and new technologies, hotels can attract modern travellers, manage daily operations effectively and provide best-in-class guest services.
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3 areas where Hotels need to incorporate big data analytics

If I have to choose the buzz word for the hospitality technology industry in 2015, it would surely be big data. From BI (business intelligence) to BB (Big Data) the shift is definite, and here to stay. Big Data, which Wikipedia defines as ‘a broad term for data sets so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate’ has become the central to the business strategy of a smart hotelier in the recent years. With the data volume growing about 50% a year, hotels need big data analytics to define and shape consumer behavior, and maximize their efforts to reach, engage and compel target audiences to action.

Monitor your customer at every touch point

Here’s an interesting fact from Google’s recent study on traveler. Almost half (46%) of travellers who carry out mobile for travel research make their final decision on mobile and then turn to another device to make the booking. With users constantly switching devices during the purchase journey, and getting influenced by social media, mobile and other web-based exchanges, hospitality industry is being forced to constantly adjust and refine their marketing strategies. 

Faced with a multi-faceted and multi-platform traveler whose preference would change depending on the type of trip, hotels need to get close to them by capturing prompt, accurate information – and correctly interpreting it – to change the course and outcome of interactions.

Integrate Big Data Analytics into your Revenue Management System

Revenue management is all about selling the right product to the right person at the right channel. Dynamic pricing helps hotels to optimize demand with flexible pricing, however, with the online distribution landscape continuously throwing new challenges, the complexities of managing hotel’s revenue has increased many-fold.  With each channel having its rule, segment, buying behavior and platform, managing rate and availability in real-time to these channels can become a nightmare.  Gone are the days when hotels would depend on historical data for rate forecasting – today’s revenue managers need to consider consumer’s buying behavior, search pattern, social networking habit for right pricing. This is where big data analytics come into help revenue managers include individual consumer behaviors, including loyalty and lifetime value, past purchases of ancillary services, and online shopping activity in their pricing model.

Personalized marketing for maximum benefit

Each customer is different. So treat them differently. According to an Adobe research, about 70% of today’s online buyers expect personalized service from brands. For hospitality industry, expectation is even higher. OTAs, with their scale of marketing budget and technology superiority, has been one of the earlier adopters of Dynamic Content Personalization’ which allows websites the ability to recognize a past visitor, tag them and create personalized, unique and optimized experiences for consumers – finely tuned for each individual preference. For hotels, personalization also gives them an opportunity to serve the guest better, earn loyalty, while gathering 360 degree view of the guest throughout the guest journey to provide more relevant offers, improve communications and increase engagements. Big Data involves the collection, management and analysis of multiple sources of data, both structured and unstructured, while analytics give the insight to optimize the information.

Swapan Kumar Manna is the Sr. Executive – Marketing at eRevMax. He can be reached at swapanm@erevmax.com.


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WTM London 2015: Three hot trends in global travel industry

WTM London continues to be a crowd-puller and a great networking platform and this year is no different for us. During the four days of the event hundreds of hoteliers, travel technology professionals from all around the world gathered at eRevMax stand TT550 to witness the launch of LIVE OSand I personally got chance to interact with them to discuss more about recent trends in the hospitality industry.
Here I find these are top three trends which are influencing the global travel industry at this moment.
Online Travel Leads the Way
Online travel channels (OTAs) continue to outpace other distribution channels, and the two giants Priceline and Expedia dominating the show by no small margin. According to a PhoCusWright estimate, close to 50% of the total OTA bookings are controlled by them. For Europe, the figure is even more skewed, with the duo controlling over 70% of the market. With smartphones and tablets in nearly every consumer’s hands today, bookings from this  channel is growing faster than any other channel, and currently accounts for 12.5% of overall bookings. By 2017, Euromonitor predicts that more than 30% of online travel bookings by value will be made on mobile devices. The emergence of mobile as a serious channel has also forced the hospitality industry to focus on a seamless experience for travellers as they switch devices on the road to purchase. The OTAs have been frontrunner, and with big hotel chains also joining in, it’s only a matter of time before the personalized marketing strategy becomes the norm for the hospitality industry.
Smart Travel is the new regular

As the travellers’ personal preferences are changing constantly hoteliers are also incorporating new technologies to transform the travel experience of their guests. Hotels are now investing on the big data analytics to identify future trends and changing preferences of customers. Analytics also provide a better sense of direction for the hotels to segment guests according to booking trends, behavior and other factors in order to reveal their likelihood to respond to promotions and emerging travel trends.
The understanding guest preferences, purchase behavior like frequency, length of stay, booking channel and profit potential are critical for hotels to increase the brand loyalty and upsell opportunity of their most valuable guests. Global hotel chains are already experimenting with personalized pricing based on customers’ online activity, preferences and predictive analytics. One of the challenges hotels face today is the dependence of multiple systems which produce own reports. A single platform, offering integrations of all technology solutions, and actionable intelligence based on data is the future. 
CPC to CPA
Hospitality industry is constantly evolving – this year we’ve seen big players have changed their business models. Now the travel giants are shifting from CPC (Cost per click) to CPA (Cost per action) model and this is welcomed by the hotel industry due to its cost effectiveness. Recently, TripAdvisor announced Instant Booking feature – now consumers can book their accommodations right from the TripAdvisor site without leaving the booking window. Google has also followed in the same footsteps of TripAdvisor, killing its metasearch site Google Hotel finder. Earlier last month, the search engine giant launched Google Hotel Ads Commission Program allowing hoteliers to take full control starting from a guest’s search process to the completed booking contrary to the OTAs. As in this new meta-OTA model, hotels only have to pay to Google after a successful booking this will help hoteliers to increase their revenue and lessen dependence on online travel agents.
Global Travel is Booming
Though the economic condition across the globe is uncertain due to rising geopolitical unrest, a potential US interest rate rise, oil price volatility and the Eurozone crisis, growth of travel industry were remain the same. In 2014 international tourist arrivals was 1.1 billion up by 4.3% and by the end of this year the figure will be slightly down. Despite recent economic slowdown travel expenditure is rising, with the Asia Pacific region predicted to see the fastest growth in inbound expenditure over the next five years.
The global hospitality industry has become more competitive in last five years. Organizations which are responding quickly to the technology led opportunities are creating new revenue streams and driving higher profits than ever before.

Image Credit: WTM Trends Report
**With inputs from PhoChusWright & Euro Monitor International

Claudia De Leo is the Sales & Marketing Manager at eRevMax. She can be reached at claudiad@erevmax.com