Personal concierge features have the added benefit of furthering customer engagement and fostering loyalty for further bookings. This may culminate in becoming a crucial tactic for third-party apps to leverage as they strive to maintain connections with customers and prevent them from hopping from one competitor to another.
However, if personal concierge services become too saturated, users will ultimately be the deciding factor on which grab most of the lion’s share and which fall to the wayside.
HotelTonight just launched its newest product, Aces, which is an in-app chat feature connecting users with a personal travel concierge. The concierges,..
HotelTonight just launched its newest product, Aces, which is an in-app chat feature connecting users with a personal travel concierge. The concierges, collectively referred to as “Aces”, are available 24-7 during your booking to do things like make a restaurant reservation for dinner, or get extra towels sent up to your room.
If a customer has access to Aces (the product is being slowly rolled out to users in DC, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego and San Francisco) the option to chat will show up on the bookings page starting on the morning of your hotel stay.
How Aces Actually Work
For recommendation requests, HotelTonight says that Aces work in tandem with local insiders like food bloggers and tastemakers who have a deep knowledge of their respective cities. This may change as Aces expands to thousands of cities, but for now it seems that the advice is pretty hand-curated. The service also uses online advice websites and other HT employees to supplement these recommendations.
For hotel requests like a wakeup call or room service, the current method is for the Ace to call the hotel you are staying at. HotelTonight hinted in the future that some automation could be taking place, as it seems pretty simple to interpret keywords like “bring me towels” and automatically send a request to the hotel.
The chat function also offers pre-written suggestions like “can I get my room cleaned” or “where is the best place to go out tonight” which could make it even easier to automate in the future.
Le GNI salue l’adoption définitive ce jeudi 9 juillet 2015 par l’Assemblée Nationale de la loi pour la croissance, l’activité et l’égalité des chances économiques, plus connue sous le nom de loi Macron. Il se réjouit plus particulièrement du vote de l’article 33 octies A qui rend aux hôteliers une totale liberté des prix. Les hôteliers pourront, dès sa promulgation par le Président de la République, pratiquer des tarifs inférieurs à ceux qu’ils postent sur les sites des agences de réservations en ligne (les (…)
Starting from yesterday, thanks to the Article 33g A of the recent “Macron law”, hoteliers “regain” complete freedom of prices. Hoteliers now can charge prices lower than they post on the websites of online booking agencies (OTAs) and look for direct contact with their customers.
This communication comes from the French national union of hoteliers, Synhorcat (and it is written in French).
If Booking.com is committed to the “homestay” category, it is entering the turf of Airbnb, the current market leader in short-term rental customers.
“Homestays” is now a category that Booking.com users can filter on. It’s distinct from “Apartments,” “Holiday homes,” “Villas,” “Guest houses”, “Bed and breakfasts,” “Hotels (with kitchen),” and “Hostels.”
Significantly, Booking.com is not requiring a credit card in advance to secure a homestay in many of the listings Tnooz saw. That makes it different from many Airbnb listings.
It will soon be Memorial Day, the unofficial start of the summer travel season, and that means it’s time for AdGooroo’s annual Travel and Paid Search rep
These are the Top 10 Travel advertisers based on Paid Search impressions generated from January through April this year.
So far, Expedia.com leads all advertisers, taking the top spot from Booking.com, which fell to #3. Notably, Trivago.com has jumped to the #4 position from #9 in 2014 and Kayak.com has broken back into the Top 10 at the #5 position. TripAdvisor.com moved up one position to #2 in the first four months of 2015, while the remaining advertisers all fell in the ranking and Hotels.com fell out of the Top 10 ranking.
Full extract (ppt) and video of the Google Hangout presentation of the Google’s 2014 Traveler’s Road To Decision Study made in collaboration with Ipsos MediaCT. Google – The 2014 Traveler’s Road To Decision from Francesco Canzoniere Here a quick recap of the most important insights: – 76% of leisure travelers select an OTA for its lower
Beta-testing is set to launch this week. HotelTonight is adopting an approach that’s closer to the one long-championed by online travel agencies (OTAs). It reminds me of RatesToGo.com business model change…
The US Department of Transportation has proposed a new travel metasearch rule. Google, Kayak, Hipmunk, Skyscanner, Travelzoo, and TripAdvisor oppose it.
One of the more surprising counter-arguments by the lawyers of the six metasearch companies that are putting up a united front against the DOT (Google, Kayak, Hipmunk, TripAdvisor, Skyscanner, and Travelzoo/Fly.com) is this: “The metasearch site, in connection with a consumer’s search and the provision of responsive data, does not collect personal identification, payment, or frequent flyer information from the user.” That statement is surprising because the conventional wisdom in the industry is that metasearch sites are about to start doing precisely that. Plans are believed to be afoot for metasearch sites’s user interfaces to ask users for identifying information, payment details and loyalty program membership accounts to help filter relevant search results and speed up the purchase. This functionality is said by some insiders to be vital for mobile apps and websites. Users want to be able book travel without having to leave the metasearch sites themselves and without having to type in their credit card and loyalty numbers repeatedly on tiny devices. But metasearch companies argue they are not actually “collecting” that information. They are passing it through to the third-parties.
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