Hotel Websites Are Tops in Customer Satisfaction

Recent studies in the US show that hotels' web sites have finally overtaken online agency portals in terms of customer satisfaction. This has been accomplished with a lot of hard work on their websites by the hotels, who can now enjoy a level of independence from the online travel agencies to develop their services for customers and increase their customer loyalty.

The Market Metrix Hospitality Index (MMHI) is a quarterly study that is the largest and most in-depth measure in the US of hospitality company performance. What the data reveals is the increasing popularity of hotel website usage and satisfaction with the online experience. More people are researching their trips online and more people are booking online.

Another significant trend is that people who book online in the US are looking to make their booking directly on the hotel’s website rather than a travel portal. In 2004 and 2005, travel portal sites like Yahoo Travel outstripped hotels sites for satisfaction with the online booking experience. Since then hotels in the US have worked hard on improving their navigation, design, usefulness of information, ease of booking and other critical components of the online experience. As a result of this, hotels are less dependent on the travel site portals, are paying them less and are establishing a relationship directly with their guests.

The message for South Africa is that international customers expect an online experience that is of international standards. If a site doesn’t meet their expectations, they can (and do) quite easily move on to the ones that do - all with the click of a mouse. Online customers expect that they can book easily, safely and securely online, and the US experience shows that customers would prefer to deal directly with hotels for their bookings. They may research, shop around and compare prices and packages in multiple places on the web, but when they come to book, their preference is to book with you directly.

And the reasons are multi-fold. Customers prefer hotel websites because:

• they can earn rewards points in the loyalty program
• there are no additional/hidden fees
• it’s easier to cancel and change the booking
• they already have an account with the site
• the hotel site provides true availability
• they get better customer service
• they feel hotel websites are more trustworthy

Online travel agencies have the edge when it comes to the selection of hotels on offer, they frequently offer cheaper hotels and the customer can get the best rate guaranteed, and they offer bookings for flights, cars and other activities.

The 5 most important factors that would most influence a US consumer to make a booking on a hotel’s website would be:

• if hotels offered best rate guaranteed
• offers of specials and promotions
• the ability to earn points and rewards
• making it easy to make, change or cancel reservations
• to provide better descriptions of rooms on the sites

Loyalty is the big buzzword at the moment. Everyone is trying to develop relationships with the customers and this is more so online than anywhere else. Studies show that certainly in the US, customer loyalty is on the rise. Guest loyalty is important because satisfying and retaining customers helps companies grow revenues, reduce costs, generate referrals, and enjoy price premiums. But loyalty is not rising for all hotels. People tend to be more loyal to the higher priced hotels and less loyal to the lower priced. This is because higher-priced hotels generally offer more attractive loyalty programs, and have a better online booking experience. People booking lower priced hotels tend to be price sensitive bargain hunters who are therefore less loyal to a specific brand.

For more on the above, check out the following links:
Loyalty is the Key to Online Travel Market
Are Online Customers Less Loyal?
Hotel Web sites scroll to the top in customer satisfaction
Hotel Web Sites Now Score Higher In Satisfaction Than Popular Travel Sites

The Internet Audience Keeps on Growing

Data released today by comScore for January shows that the internet audience worldwide just keeps growing. The numbers are mind-numbing.

There are 747 million people worldwide using the Internet (some sources have it at over a billion), which is up by 10% from the previous year. The largest country is still the US which grew by 2% to 153,447,000. With seven out of ten people in North America accessing the web that market is already saturated with internet users. The same is true for countries like Germany, UK, France and Spain, where the percentage growth is less than 5%.

But look at China and India. They are both growing at phenomenal rates. China is the second largest country after the US in terms of number of people accessing the Internet (86,757,000). Chinese internet users grew by 20% over the year, yet the penetration of the internet in China is still less than 10%. The story about India is similar though less radical. The total internet user population in India is 21,107,000 and it’s growing at 33%.

Africa is a blip on the radar – in the entire continent of Africa there are 33 million users of the internet, which accounts for only 3% of world internet users. (The total number of people who have access to the internet in South Africa is 5 million of which 2.5 million access it monthly. Yet approximately 7.5 million people access South African internet sites each month, which shows strong foreign interest).

Online Businesses Beat Offline Businesses in Customer Satisfaction

One of the prerequisites of successful online business is a commitment to customer satisfaction. The online customer simply doesn’t take the kind of abuse, disregard, or obfuscation that the offline customer is often resigned to. Online customers can go elsewhere at the click of a button; off-line businesses often perceive their customers to be captive because of the difficulty of going elsewhere, which can lead to habitually poor service by offline businesses.

The University of Michigan and ForeSee Results have just released the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which shows that customer satisfaction with e-commerce now surpasses that of offline business by 11.6 percent.

The Customer Satisfaction Index is a 100-point scale, and on that scale e-commerce scored an average of 80 against off-line businesses average of 68.4. Online retail scored 83 as opposed to offline retail’s score of 74.

Advertising Boosts Municipal Wi-Fi Ubiquity

There's nothing new about municipal WiFi. It has been around in the US for at least five years (that's 28 internet years), and longer in Japan and South Korea. Now it's available, or in process, in more than 300 cities across the US, and it is becoming almost the norm in major European cities.

The basic idea is that a municipality decides that broadband internet access is a utility, much like electricity or schooling, and that making it available to everyone within the city limits for free can only be good for the city's economy and education levels. The democratisation of information is a strong political driver, and a pretty powerful economic imperative. So the municipalities put up wide area WiFi networks that anyone in town can access with a WiFi enabled computer, phone, or PDA.

Typically these services are free, or at least they are paid for out of taxes, or they are advertising supported. And they are not that expensive to set up: Philadelphia budgeted only $10 million to WiFi enable the whole city, with ongoing costs of about $1 million a year. That's a small price to pay compared with the potential benefit to small businesses, learners, and government.

In South Africa, Knysna has muni WiFi, and there is talk that Gauteng may WiFi-enable the greater Johannesburg area in conjunction with iBurst. There are, of course, political considerations and pressure from internet providers who see their lucrative markets under threat. But inexpensive muni WiFi is inevitable even in South Africa.

Often muni WiFi is paid for by advertising: when you log on to the service, you see an ad. Often these ads are very local, for businesses within range of the nearest signal source. That produces great opportunities for advertising services for small businesses that otherwise would never consider marketing online: local restaurants, dry cleaners, finacial advisors, or car dealers can communicate with potential customers who are right there in the neighbourhood. Try that with TV or local radio.

In the US, a hotspot and advertising company called JiWire now plans to offer ad-supported Wi-Fi through a relationship with Ultramercial. The ads will appear prior to gaining free Internet access at hotspots. To avoid the initial ads you can simply pay a small fee to get online. Once WiFi providers and income generators like JiWire start investing in muni WiFi infrastructures instead of waiting for municipalities to take the initiative, things start to develop at a very rapid pace.

There's an article on JiWire here

Personalization Desire Outweighs Security Concerns

It is hard to imagine that people who are neurotic about data loss and identity theft would willingly relinquish security for convenience. But time and time again we see consumers acting in a way that might make life harder tomorrow in order to make life easier today. In German supermarkets, people who would refuse to allow their government to capture their fingerprints willingly pay for groceries by pressing their finger on a fingerprint scanner at the till.

The recently publiched "2006 ChoiceStream Personalization Survey" found that over half of the respondents will provide demographic and other personal information in exchange for a personalized online experience.

Part of this is familiarity. Ten years ago when online sites like Amazon.com first started using cookies and subscriber data to customise the shopping experience, people were wary. Suspicions abounded about who might get hold of the information and how it might be abused. But if you don't provide the necessary information, and if you crush your cookies regularly, the online experience can be dry, tedious, and often irrelevant to your interests. Over time, people get accustomed to the personal service and become more willing to give away information. At the same time, they get more sophisticated and discerning, and they actually read privacy policies and make conscious judgement calls about who to trust and who to avoid. The more information consumers are exposed to online and the more decisions they are making online, the more dependent they become on personalisation as a data filter.

According to the report, in the past year, consumer interest in a more personalized experience has increased by 24 percent to 57 percent of respondents. Consumers willing to let a site track clicks, purchases, and other behavior increased by 34 percent in the same period. Concerns over personal data security remained high, with six out of ten people expressing concern.

Not surprisingly, younger age groups have less concern about privacy and more interest in personalisation. Comfort with the norms of social networking sites play a role, with younger people expecting sites to provide personalised recommendations.

original ClickZ article

Neotel gears up for corporate launch

Only five years behind schedule, South Africa's official second fixed-line telecommunications provider Neotel will be launching phone and internet services for business customers from mid-March. Apparently Tata-managed company has already acquired more than a dozen large corporate customers.

They are currently putting together a cable/fibre network and a Wimax/CDMA infrastructure that has the ability to bypass Telkom's stranglehold on home phone lines. Neotel are promising to undercut Telkom's prices (how hard can it be to undercut the highest prices on the planet?) and to beat them on service (again, how hard can this be?).

IOL Technology Article