Offline Survey of 2012 by WIHP of how guests discovered the hotel

A survey conducted in 2012 of 20,000 hotel guests asking how they heard of the hotel.

A recent survey we conducted (2nd quarter 2012) of almost 20,000 hotel guest asking them how they heard about the hotel gave us some interesting insight into what’s stimulating hotel guests to book their hotel.

We did a similar survey last year and while the differences aren’t huge they are interesting.

Here’s a comparative table to last year’s survey.

Category
 2011 2012* Change
Friends and Family
24.1%
22.9%
-1.2%
OTAs
20.2%
20.7%
+0.5%
TripAdvisor
16.0%
18.2%
+2.2%
Other
17.2%
17.0%
-0.2%
Repeat Guests
11.8%
12.3%
+0.5%
Travel Agents
2.7%
3.1%
+0.4%
Magazine
2.1%
2.0%
-0.1%
Facebook
2.0%
1.6%
-0.4%
Blog
2.7%
1.5%
-1.2%
Guide
1.0%
0.5%
-0.5%
Twitter
0.1%
0.2%
+0.1%

 

The biggest change is TripAdvisor which increased by 2.2% and is in third position compared to last year (4th position).

Interestingly Travel Agents are moving up, which indicates lower rate parity between GDS and hotel websites.

Social Media isn’t winning at this race which points to the low level of ROI on social media marketing. As we have indicated several times there are two aspects to this. First off Social Media isn’t a good marketing tool, but it’s a great public relations tool and hotels must use it as a channel to communicate to guests and potential guests. Secondly while Friends and Family lost a fair share of its influence as a stimulus it is also very likely that sharing one’s stay on social media is being recorded in the guests minds as Friends and Family and not social media. Just like nobody is saying they heard about the hotel from emails.

We hope this helps hoteliers and marketers around the world to hone their marketing tools and help hotels increase their bookings by being more relevant. If you have further questions drop a note in the comments below and we’ll try to reply as quickly as we can.