Jeffrey V. Fallis 
With superheroes, you see every single incident turn a “normal” person into someone with unimaginable superpowers. Whether it’s a radioactive spider bite, being struck by lightning, being exposed to gamma rays, or being injected with a serum, an ordinary person becomes extraordinary in an instant. Throughout their transformation, they gain special abilities ranging from invisibility to flight.
If of course these situations and transformations are entirely fictitious, are they really impossible to achieve on a hotel site?
The answer is clearly no. Hotel websites can easily and quickly undergo a similar transformation that will make an ordinary hotel website absolutely extraordinary. The trigger event to start the transformation is a quick three-second injection via copy/paste of a simple follow-up into the hotel’s main website and booking engine. This will activate the full power of targeting, personalization and benchmarking on the hotel website. The instant transformation into an extraordinary website reveals the following superpowers:
- Invisibility: With this power, users can move around in an environment invisible to others and act unobserved. While the hotel website and booking engine are loading, information from the backend can be monitored, reviewed and analyzed invisibly. Based on this data, the hotel can choose to take action and send a message to users if they meet certain criteria.
- change shape: With this power, users can change their shape, size, and color. Based on what the hotel learns about the website visitor, the hotel may automatically provide different content depending on where they access the website, what they view on the website, and of the time he leaves. The metamorphosed content may be through images, copies, links, or a combination thereof, and how they are delivered to the device. Thus, the pages of the hotel website can change dynamically from person to person. For example, dynamic content may appear to be part of the existing web page, note, or layered message on the website.
- Telepathy: With this power, users can transmit information to another’s mind without using known human sensory channels or physical interaction. Understanding the hotel website visitor’s purchase intent and delivering an appropriate message based on their intent is seemingly impossible. However, it is made possible with predictive personalization. With a hospitality-specific algorithm that tracks over 150 variables about each user’s past and present interactions, the predictive personalization AI compares visitor behavior with each previous user. Therefore, the hotel can know what the user wants even before he knows himself. Based on the calculated results, the website can instantly determine whether the visitor has a low or high intention to make a reservation. The website can then use discounts to target low-intent visitors who need extra incentive to book, and attempt to sell higher room categories to those who are more likely to book in the first place.
- Teleportation: With this power, users transfer matter from one point to another without crossing physical space between them. Using geo-targeting technology, visible content changes based on where you are physically viewing the hotel website, right down to the zip code. Therefore, the content of a specific web page may vary from country to country, state to state, city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood.
- Time travel: With this power, users can travel to the future and/or the past. It is obvious that what has been reserved and consumed in the past cannot be changed. However, hotels can change the future booking model on their booking engine. Depending on the dates visitors choose to travel, a series of date-specific messages may be displayed. In this situation, someone looking for stays for a holiday (Labor Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years) or for specific future needs, may be presented with a tailored message depending on the date. The booking engine with selected dates becomes a time machine providing relevant information about their stay on that specific date.
- Healing: With this power, users can heal, restore and/or regenerate. A sign of a sick or weak hotel website is a site with low conversion. This weakness can be site-wide and booking engine-wide, or it can be very specific parts of the booking funnel. To determine the extent of the misconversion, direct channel benchmarking is necessary to reveal whether this performance is specific to the hotel or to the whole territory. Once the level of conversion is understood, it is a matter of providing the hotel’s website and booking engine with a series of tools that will increase conversion. These tools can help prevent users from leaving the hotel website to check the hotel’s reputation on social media, reassure them that they won’t find a best price for hotel on an online travel agency (OTA), or convince them that this property is the right choice for them by displaying hyper-relevant content.
- Telekinesis: With this power, users can interact and manipulate matter through non-physical means. For hotel websites, this can be achieved through “set it and forget it” messages. When a hotel implements technical conversion and personalization solutions, messaging is tied to targeting rules that are put in place within the first month of implementation, determining how the hotel wants messages to appear by device, location on the page, as well as based on the user’s browsing actions. Once the targeting rules are activated, the corresponding predefined message will be displayed each time the targeting criteria are true, whether it is the day after the configuration or three years later. It is automatic and does not require continuous monitoring.
- Energy Blasts: With this power, the user has the ability to release significant energy on a specific target area. Hotels can use a burst of energy like energy when launching a flash sale with a countdown timer to create a sense of urgency. It is a specific message at a calculated time intended for a particular segment of activity, on pages defined for a precise display frequency. This is a hyper-targeted message that can only be delivered and seen once and is very effective in generating a spike in direct revenue when needed.
- Super strength: With this power, the user can exert force beyond what is physically possible for an ordinary human being. For a hotel, this takes the limitation of the explosion power of a specific message and frees up messaging capacity anywhere on the hotel website. In theory, the array of messages can be seen anywhere on the hotel’s website. Guests will see it when they arrive, when they leave a page, and they will be retargeted. It is a series of optimized messages that are relentless and a site that continues to send messages to the website visitor no matter where they go or what they do.
- Very fast: With this power, it allows a person to move faster than humanly possible. For hotels, it’s about delivering the right message, at the right time, on the right page. Visitors to the hotel website do not need to search and search for the content they want. The website will anticipate their needs and deliver the appropriate message quickly.
- Flight: With this power, the user can fly through the air. Hotel websites can’t actually directly help people fly, but they can stimulate real flight. It is by being influenced to book a hotel which is too far to drive there, the person who has just been persuaded to book the hotel will have to take a plane and fly to the hotel.
It is evident that hotel websites and booking engines can be transformed instantly with the injection of technology to make their ordinary hotel website extraordinary. As Peter Parker’s uncle said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” With the transformation of your ordinary hotel website into an extraordinarily powerful hotel website, be careful how you use that power. Always think about the guest experience on the website and your digital goals. While you can take advantage of all of the powers above, you don’t want to overwhelm guests with your message. It is important to be strategic with your tactics. When you do, you’ll increase engagement with your website visitors and ultimately generate significantly more revenue and bookings.
About the hotel network
Working with over 14,000 hotels worldwide, The Hotels Network offers its customers a comprehensive growth platform to power their direct channel. By leveraging a suite of built-in tools and analytics, hospitality brands can attract, engage and convert guests throughout the user journey.
In addition to price comparison, review summary and a full suite of personalization options, THN’s Oraculo product leverages machine learning techniques to predict user behavior and then automatically personalizes the message and content. offer for each user. The company’s latest innovation, BenchDirect, is the first benchmarking product for the direct channel, providing hotels with unprecedented competitive data that is a complete game-changer.
THN’s mission is to improve the online booking experience, increase direct bookings and strengthen the relationship between hotel brands and their customers.
For more information on hotel rates, visit: https://hotelier-rates.thehotelsnetwork.com or contact [email protected]. For more information about The Hotels Network, visit https://thehotelsnetwork.com/en or contact [email protected].
