The key to driving direct business lies within technology. Hotel websites need more and better qualified website traffic—and to get that traffic, they need more searchers landing on their pages. That boils down to a discussion about the technology used to get there, according to Chris Rockett, SVP of sales for Milestone, a digital marketing and technology company.
The technology that hoteliers use can shift share from third parties and online travel agencies to direct business, he said during a recent webinar hosted by the Asian American Hotel Owners Association titled “Leveraging Disruptive Technologies to Drive Direct Bookings and Compete with OTAs.”
“It’s the technology that drives the surge that drives the traffic to the website that drives online revenue,” he said.
How to Get Found
Search and search-engine optimization are about being the right answer for users while also providing the best user experience, Rockett said, adding that hoteliers should keep in mind that the future of search is voice. He said that within the next couple of years, 50 percent of the searching that is done is going to be voice search with tools such as mobile phones, in-home devices like Google Assistant and Amazon Echo. And unlike online search, there is only one right answer with voice search.
“They only get one shot at that. They are looking for answers they can depend on most,” Rockett said.
He said the term all hoteliers should learn and know is “schema.”
“Search engines’ goal is to control search and have all search run through them, and 90 percent of your content is tagged with schemas to make your site easy to find in search engines and Siri, Alexa and Google Home,” he said.
The key to giving search engines the best answer is to tag content with schema, which provides context to the content. The more schema included on the website, the more likely that search will point to that website in results. Schema that can be included for hotels: address, location, shopping, reviews, things to do, events, images, specials, videos, rooms and breadcrumbs.
