Hotels these days are looking for more and more channels to distribute their brand. One of the more popular ways customers are looking for hotels is on the internet. One of the world leading lodging franchise operators, Choice Hotels International Inc, has introduced a newly designed website called ChoiceHotels.com. This website is designed to meet the online customers hotel needs and desires in their search for a hotel by using direct feedback and input from hotel guests as well as other extensive research. The company will then make the changes that the guests have suggested, making their future customers stay more enriched for their travel needs. Some enhancements of the website include, the Ability to search by attraction, city, Zip Code, address, and more using a single entry, finding the best deals with hotel comparisons, highlighted deals and amenity icons, being able to easily compare rates and packages according to needs and interests, having a personalization feature to save favorites for trip planning and faster future booking, streamlining online profile and account sign-in, and improved Choice Privileges pages for easier account management. The company has also been able to continue expanding it's customers opportunites through applications on the iPhone and other mobile devices.
Global Distribution Systems and channels have totally become a huge part of the hotel industry. ChoiceHotels.com is just another means of helping hotels get their name out there. I like the idea that a customer's ideas and thoughts can actually make a difference. I am a person who is reluctant to fill out surveys and opionion sheets because i always feel as if they are tossed to the side and not really taken into account, because i always hear the same complaints from people that have just experienced what i have experienced in the past...filled out customer suggestion sheet and all. However, it sounds like the ChoiceHotel.com website has it's act together. The internet can bombard a potential customer with so much information that sometimes they just pick the first thing that shows up for them rather than picking a hotel that will work for their needs and wants. If somebody always finds a hotel through the ChoiceHotel.com website it is nice to know that they can personalize their searches in so many different ways like by price, city, amenities, interests, and needs. Our job as future workers of the hotel industry is to make sure the customer will be happy. If they aren't pleased from the start of booking their reservation online, then that will make our job that much more difficult.
"Choice Hotels Takes Guest Input to Heart: Revamps Website According to Direct Feedback" , Hospitality Technology, 2/4/2010
http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=0ADC9F26611D487D98090EA0685E9994
Lauren -
ReplyDeleteIt's good to read that on a corporate level, Choice Hotels is taking customer feedback to heart and then implementing their improvement ideas into their updated website in a prompt manner. Unfortunately, I feel like the same can't usually be said for hotels at a property level, at least from my experience. It seems that brand wide websites just tend to update and improve at a much better rate than individual property websites. I would imagine this is due to the much larger staffing and budgets that works at the corporate level. I would hope that one day individual properties begin to hire dedicated IT professionals that focus solely on updating the various websites that a property could have, such as their own hotel website, and their individual social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc).