A very Merry Christnas and a Happy New year to all our customers. It seems that all hotels are feeling the winds of recession at the moment, we are trying to help wherever we can, we have said many times in this forum that the majority of hotels we talk to are NOT making the most of the internet. Although it is hard to be pragmatic when battling the current economic climate, it could at least be an opportunity to stop, think, and put in place a solid Online Marketing Plan ready for better time...

We have done something similar to this before, but it was a long time ago and we thought it would be useful to update it. Winter offers an excellent opportunity for hotel marketers to do the things they have not had time to do during summer. 1. Update your rates on all Booking Engines until the end of 2009 (January is the month when many people make long lead-time bookings) 2. Check all the Booking Engines you are on - Do they have your latest images and text. (is that new 'outside' shot utili...

It was good to meet many of you at the World Travel Market, it seemed to be a very good show, and we certainly have our names down for next year. The importance of selling rooms online has been growing for the last 6 years or more, but it seemed to us that 2008 was the year that everyone woke up to the idea of 'Inventory Distribution' ie using Online Travel Agents such as http://www.booking.com/ to sell rooms online. All the talk at the show was 'What are you using for Channel Management?' ie ...

Don’t forget the Online Marketing Awards Ceremony taking place in Rathmullan House on Wednesday November 19th at 11.30 am World Travel Market - London November 11-13th. Will you be there? Meet us at the show E Mail info@accubook.net Interesting Articles Expedia got no reservations on hotel analytics This article is interesting for the conclusions it comes to that consumers dont want technically correct but complex search mechanisms that allow them to search by hotel size, star rating and...

Much of the hotel industry suffers from the fact that anyone with sufficient experience to run a hotel is unlikely to have been born in the 'Internet Generation', and yet 55% of bookings are said to originate online, creating a 'knowledge gap'. However, the conductor of the orchestra does not need to know how to play the instruments, and so it is with Online Marketing, as with every other section of the hotel, it comes down to; What are we going to do? Who is going to do it? What ...

AccuBook Booking Engine Version 4 has now been released, making it one of the most advanced Booking Engines on the market. The login for the booking engine is now located on our website http://www.accubook.net/, any previous pages you were using should re direct to this page where you can logon using the usual login and password. The basic functionality remains the same however, so you should not need any extra training to explain how Version 4 works. If however you are not attending the Onl...

To participants on the Online Marketing Award; Next week is module 8 (just 3 more remain), the peak summer period is over, and now we are back to using all the Online Marketing tools at our disposal to increase the hotel profile and sell rooms. In addition to getting back into the rhythm of distributing SMS Messages and E Zines, we will also be looking more closely at web statistics ie Hits, visits and Google Analytics, and the creation of Online Marketing Plans Online Marketing - Easier than ...

Please find below a number of articles from our Discussion Area relating to the Hotel Online Marketing Industry. Currently the hot topic seems to be how to sell roooms though Online Travel Agents (ie CentralR, Booking.com etc), so we thought we would focus on that for this issue Feel free to logon and disagree, or simply ask questions. Why are Internet Rates So Often Wrong? An analysis of why internet rates are so often wrong and what can be done about it. Package Handling On Travel Portals...

Feel free to post any comments on this subject below, or any other topics in our Hotel Marketing Forum . I keep sending out E Zines, but i am getting no results!!!! How often we hear that! We can see from our statistics that with many E Zines less that 20% of recipients actually bother opening it, and less than 1% find anything inside atractive enough to actually click on. The result is; Blood sweat and tears compiling the E Zine and very little results. To explain this we offer the followi...

Participants on the Online Marketing Award have now broken up for summer. If you do no other online marketing over summer DO KEEP BUILDING YOUR CUSTOMER DATABASE. Simplifying Google Adwords Most hotels cannot live without a Google Adwords campaign, yet getting the best from them is proving every bit as complex as understanding how Google operates Search Engine Ranking. Many of the features are straightforward enough (see list below), but the one seemingly complex area is the Quality Score, w...