Peter O'Connor: "For those hotel groups, right now what they’re doing is they’re basically just using demographic data and a small amount of preference data about their customers to do their target marketing.  But you can take it so much further.  So you can take it into operations and you can use those preferences to customise the guest experience.  This is starting to happen.  Just Monday here when I checked into a hotel, not to this hotel, two days before I received an e-check-in email which was really interesting, being a technology guy this interested me.  I obviously clicked on it and they allowed me to check-in to the hotel two days in advance.  When my room was available on Monday I got an SMS with the little 3D barcode which allowed me to go to the hotel, flash the barcode and receive my key.  Great.  Now during this process they asked me about my preferences.  You know what preferences they asked about?  Smoking or non-smoking, there is a missed opportunity.  They could have found out maybe just two or three key things about me this time and two or three key things next time and two or three things, key things next time.  And  they could have used that to enrich the experience and to tie me into their brand.  They didn’t, missed opportunity."

Peter O'Connor: 'The whole area of online distribution for hotels is one that is constantly evolving and it’s really confusing.  And there are few hotel companies that really get it at the moment.  Many peoples’ knowledge is probably two to three years out of date.  So for example on the panel this morning the representative from Expedia was getting a really hard time.  Now, Expedia 10 years ago was probably a naughty company, they were probably doing some things that weren’t good for hotels.  But that’s evolved.  And I found it amazing that the audience hasn’t actually evolved in their perception of the company.  But OTAs, online travel agents, they’re partners.  If you work with them they can deliver a business to you, it’s expensive but they’re providing a service, they’re putting heads in beds.  So as a result they deserve to be rewarded.  The key challenge we have for hotels working with OTAs is they don’t work with OTAs, they begrudgingly give them rooms and moan about the fact that they have to pay so much afterwards.  But most hotels are running at 60% occupancy, maybe 65, that means one-third of their rooms are sitting idle every night.  I’m a businessman, at the end of the day I would prefer to sell those rooms at 75% or 55% or even 50% rather than not sell them at all.  And yes, you can talk about the damage to your brand, you can talk about so many different problems, but at the end of the day we have to make money.  The other area that was quite interesting today as well is we were talking about developing business models, so one of the models that’s developing most rapidly at the moment is the whole area of flash sales.  And today we were lucky, we had a representative from Groupon on the panel and again this is a model that’s misunderstood by many hoteliers.  They see a large cost without seeing the benefits that Groupon can bring in terms of reach, in terms of targeting.  They all say, “Oh, it’s easy, we could do this for ourselves.”  But actually in reality if they try to do it for themselves it would be much more expensive."

Peter O'Connor: "Right now social networks, you look at the statistics in the UK, almost a quarter of internet users time is spent interacting with other people on social networks right now.  Hotels are very personal, there is a brand image issue, there is a connection with the customer if they do it right.  If they were to leverage social networks effectively they could actually start to talk and interact and engage with the customer.  Right now the majority of hotel chains are using social networks as an advertising media.  And unfortunately when you try to sell to people over social networks it just doesn’t work.  It’s a little bit like a very, very pushy car salesman coming to you at the bar when you’re having a drink with some friends and you’re trying to relax and all of a sudden you’ve got a guy in there trying to sell you a used car, it just doesn’t work.  It’s like an awful lot of developments that we’ve had in the electronic distribution arena, the hotel industry just doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t give it enough resources and by the time they figure it out the consumers will have moved on to something else.”

Peter O'Connor: "We have sites like TripAdvisor where reviews are being posted of our properties, good and bad. We have on the online travel agencies, reviews that are being posted as well, very few hotels are taking that opportunity to actually go in, see what consumers are saying about them and react.  If they’ve had a bad experience, trying to do some service recovery, if they’ve had a good experience thanking the customer for actually talking about it and reinforcing the good message.  If we look in other industries this is very, very common practice, in the hotel industry we’re aware of the issue but we don’t give it the resources and we don’t give it the priority that it needs.  Now, one thing I’ll add there is in order to do this you can’t do this on an amateur level, you have to be highly professional about it.  In order to do that you need tools and there are a large number of online reputation management tools out there which take those reviews, they amalgamate them together, they amalgamate what people are saying about you on Twitter, on blogs and on lots of different social media channels and they present them in a very, very concentrated format and give you the ability to respond in a consistent way."