The Tech Edition
April 09, 2008
High tech for hotels both blessing and curse
 Technology handed the Eden Roc in Wildwood a black eye when Trip Advisor included the hotel on a dirtiest list. Although some Trip Advisor contributors gave it a good review, many others complained. The Eden Roc owners says it’s all a bunch of lies. |
By JOHN SAMSON
Staff Writer
Today’s hotel technology can be both amazing and maddening.
Nowadays, you can enter a hotel room by looking into a retinal scanner
instead of using a keycard, and motion detectors trip lights and
influence room temperature.
A plethora of ports and Internet portals connect I-pods, laptops and
hand-held devices to sound systems, flat-screens and GPS services.
And you can IM the concierge.
Enter a Guitar Hero tournament in the hotel lounge, play on a Wii golf
course or book an Xbox-360 room with an enhanced sound system and a huge
high-def flat-screen.
Check into a “Facebook hotel,” so called because it has its own online
community where guests can network among themselves to make plans for
sightseeing, dining out or research area attractions.
Look it up, check it out and book it all on a Blackberry.
Have handheld, will travel.
Priceline's new mobile features allow customers to search live,
real-time hotel inventories and pricing by city and date. Once the
desired hotel is located, customers can click on a link to be connected
to Priceline's telephone-booking service for hotel rooms, air and
hotel-vacation packages and cruises.
It also connects to mobile flight-status pages for American, Northwest,
United and US Airways, and provides links to dial flight-status phone
numbers for most major domestic and international airlines.
But, Mickay Michael says to heck with technological advances in the
hospitality industry. “Technology is garbage,” said Michael, whose Eden
Roc Hotel in Wildwood wound up on TripAdvisor.com’s 2008 dirtiest hotels
list recently. “It gives people a chance to screw you. Technology? For
me, it has hurt us. You can judge by yourself.”
In all fairness, the Eden Roc did get a few very good comments on the
site. And though it made the top 10 in the country for dirtiest, the
motel ranked 62nd of the 69 hotels in Wildwood on the site.
Of the 41 posts, there were eight that were very complimentary, ranging
from “always been treated with courtesy and laughter, the room was clean
and we were satisfied” and “it was a great place to stay, clean rooms,
close to the boardwalk” to “wouldn’t choose any other place to go” and
“before I went to stay at this motel I read these reviews and I was
scared to go, but I did go and I was very happy I did.”
The other 33 were horror stories, many of which were a pretty good read
unless you’re Michael.
“It is not true,” she said of all the negative comments. “It is not fair
for us. It made me mad.”
But, she could have responded.
| Travel sites www.tripadvisor.com www.expedia.com http://travel.yahoo.com/ www.frommers.com www.fodors.com www.gusto.com www.hotelchatter.com www.travelpost.com |
“We have a hotel-management-response tool that allows hoteliers to
respond to travel reviews,” said Brooke Ferencsik, senior manager of
media relations for TripAdvisor. “We want to offer hoteliers the
opportunity to respond to travelers so they can have their voice heard,
too.”
When told about the tool, Michael, who said she has been in the business
for 30 years, and that her father ran the Ambler Motel in Wildwood for
years, said she “would look into it.”
TripAdvisor has been around since February of 2000, and Ferencsik said
it has 20 million unique monthly visitors, and more than 10 million
reviews on the site.
“Hoteliers are pretty familiar with the site and how it works,” he said.
Louise Sinn agrees. She has written a few managers’ responses to
negative posts on the site for the Cape May’s Marquis de Lafayette
hotel.
“Anyone can go on and post whatever they want,” Sinn said. “We have made
a concerted effort to monitor all of our guest complaints. We keep logs
on room issues. If someone wants to talk to a manger, we log it.
“Unfortunately, the people who are happy are less likely to post
something on a site. You can encourage them to, but you don’t want to
look like you are trying to pay them off to post something good.”
Ferencsik agrees.
“We hear that hoteliers monitor our site on a frequent basis,” he said.
“Some travelers are a little more leery to provide face-to-face opinions
to hotels. So, Trip Advisor offers them the opportunity to share all of
their opinions about their stay.”
Michael may have something on which to blame all the low opinions of the
Eden Roc.
Algorism.
It is a term that has nothing to do with Al Gore and everything to do
with what he claims to have invented – the Internet, which was the root
of Michael’s anger.
Algorism, traced to a ninth-century Persian, is the root word of
algorithm – a set of step-by-step instructions used to compute a desired
result. They form the basis of computer programming, and are what guide
search engines to find what travelers seek, as well as what guides
hoteliers in online marketing.
“It is all based on algorithms,” said Deanne Hoppe, vice president of
hospitality marketing with Cape May Resorts, whose properties include
Congress Hall and the Virginia hotels in Cape May. “We use the
technology for search-engine optimization. Google, MSN – it’s all about
content relevance.”
The motive of search engine optimization is for a web page to attract
more targeted, “relevant traffic” from search engines so that will
appear higher up on search-results pages based on the “relative content”
of a hotel’s website.
The Expedia network has even been beta testing a program called
TravelAds, which gives hotel properties the ability to bid for sponsored
placement at the top of the hotel search results for their market during
the dates they specify.
“This is one way hotels can generate demand during specific times when
they may need it,” said Katrina Thomas, and Expedia spokeswoman.
But what may be needed more is a change of focus.
Sales managers have lately focused on getting their hotel’s website to
the top of a search results page, but their strategies must always stay
up-to-date with all of the latest trends and algorithms to maintain that
placement. Even though a hotel’s website is optimized one month,
however, ongoing changes in algorithms may mean major or minor changes
to keep the site optimized.
And, because Trip Advisor also uses the same algorithmic techniques, its
reviews usually appear at the top of each search page for most hotels
anyway.
Add to that the fact that Expedia, along with other companies that book
rooms online for hotels such as Priceline and YahooTravel, also have
hotel-review programs, and many of those reviews appear on the same
pages.
So some hotel managers, like Sinn, are focusing more on guests’ concerns
to minimize low opinions with high placement on webpages.
”We keep tabs on things in the hotel” Sinn said. “If it ends up on a
website, we usually know what happened. There are two sides to every
story.”
Thanks to the growing number of travel-review sites, there may be many
more sides to consider.
“The depth and breadth of content will give the guest a pretty good
idea,” said Ferencsik of all the information on the sites. “You can read
a lot. The more homework you do, the better choice you will make.”
And of the Eden Roc’s plight?
“Those reviews were compiled based on reviews of cleanliness,” Ferencsik
said. “If you are on that list, the idea is to look into cleaning up
your property. I am sure it will improve the experience for her guests.”
Michael has already begun improvements.
“You can come and check my motel,” she said when contacted. “It is
clean. Today we had the fire department come and check everything out.
They helped us a lot, and we are up to code.”
And up for further scrutiny.
John Samson can be e-mailed at
samson@catamaranmedia.com or you can
comment on this story by calling 624-8900, ext. 250.