Survey Reservations: Hotels and modernisation

If you are a commercial website, there are a number of things you can do in order to attract more interest in and traffic to your site. I'm not referring to the jiggery-pokery of optimisation or rankings, but to simple publicity, and one way of getting publicity is to do a survey and, more importantly, get the press to mention it and write up the findings.

Such surveys come out with regular frequency, monotony even. Some can be quite useful, but one does always have to be slightly wary. Generally speaking, the methodology behind the surveys isn't revealed. Their rigour cannot, therefore, be verified. The headlining findings are what attract the press, always eager for free copy to fill a space or several, and they are presented without comment or question.

There is a Spanish hotel-bookings site called reservahoteles.com. It has conducted a survey, the findings of which have duly found their way into the media. They make good copy for the press as the subject of the survey, Spanish hotels, is found to be lacking in making attempts at modernisation. It is good copy with which to knock the hotels, therefore.

What is this survey, however? It is in fact one of travel agencies, 22 in all. One of the main findings is that more than 50% of Spanish hotels aren't bothered with investing in "fundamental aspects" of their offer which should now be more or less standard, such as providing leisure and entertainment services and activities or attracting the business and incentives market.

The travel agencies are probably in a reasonable position to judge, but the survey smacks a bit of the monkey and the organ grinder. If you really want to know about hotels' attitudes, what they might be planning and what they provide, wouldn't it make more sense to ask them and not the travel agencies?

Nevertheless, let's be kind to the survey, as it does rather reinforce an image of some hotels. A lack of modernisation in Mallorca is an aspect that the Balearic Government's new tourism law is seeking to address, and there are unquestionably hotels that are so past their sell-by dates that no amount of investment, short of pulling them down and starting again, will ever bring them adequately into the modern world. On the other hand, there are plenty of hotels which are very much of the modern day and which do everything the survey suggests they don't; the Iberostar chain is just one.

The survey suggests that a lack of investment can be explained by a concentration on sun-and-beach tourism and on sun-and-beach tourism alone. It's a reasonable point, but, and this applies to most hotels in most Mallorcan resorts, you run up against the inevitable problem of pursuing business that isn't sun and beach, primarily that of the off-season when everywhere, including the hotels, is shut.

When the survey draws attention to a lack of marketing and a lack of internet presence on behalf of many hotels, it again has a point. However, for many hotels, this hasn't been necessary, as they have been used to others doing it all for them, such as travel agencies and tour operators, while contracts with tour operators make more direct marketing irrelevant and indeed potentially open to allegations of breaches of contract.

If the hotels are contracted, if they know there is little or no business when they are not contracted during the dead winter season, then why should they bother making the sorts of investment in marketing or in attempting to attract business when they know full well it won't be forthcoming? Except of course, they should bother, if for no other reason than that hotels are massively under-utilised and totally unproductive for six months of the year. We've reached a point where, if anything is going to happen to resolve problems of the dead season, someone has to make the first move and not just blame everyone else; perhaps that someone should be the hotels.

But on the issue of the travel agencies criticising hotels for a lack of internet presence, the fact is that the wherewithal does exist for hotels to advertise and market directly and bypass the travel agencies completely. Google's different services, Travelzoo, what Microsoft probably has in mind with its global tourism hub all can leave the traditional travel distribution chain minus one of its core constituents, the travel agents: they should be careful who they criticise and what they wish for.

And there are always of course specific websites through which hotels can market themselves. Hotel reservation? Reservahoteles.com. Survey, anyone?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.