The Guestbook

Hi Johannes,

We’re currently using Guestbook at two of our properties (mosaichouse.com and themanes.cz)

Overall, it has been working well for us, and we’ve seen a noticeable increase in our direct booking share since implementing it.

There is however some additional administrative work involved. Each eligible booking needs to be manually approved by the hotel on a daily basis, which means handling approval emails every day.

One aspect that turned out slightly differently than we initially expected is the cashback concept. It’s not a direct cash refund, but guests earn points after completing their stay, which they can then redeem for gift cards (e.g., Zalando, PayPal, Amazon, Apple, Tesco, etc.).

So far, we haven’t seen a significant number of new guests coming to us specifically because of Guestbook. It seems more that we are bringing our own guests into the Guestbook ecosystem. However, since it positively impacts our direct booking conversion, we’re satisfied with the overall result.

In our view, it’s a good option especially for smaller, independent hotels that don’t have a custom-built loyalty program.

Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to explore further.

HI ​@Jan_Pacal thank you for the Feedback… we are not quite sure if we need it or what the benefits are as we already have a partner in place for google ads and so on.

Hello!

We have been using it for a while now. For us the impact is less obvious, but we want to support something that in the long run makes sense to strengthen the position of independent hotels in relation to loyalty offers from OTAs or chain hotels.

Currently, only a very limited number of hotels in Europe is participating, but growing slowly… this is important since the greatest benefit (up to 15% discount on future bookings, paid for by the loyalty program) is for another hotel a certain minimum distance away. An for the guests that only makes sense when there are enough attractive hotels available everywhere they might go. So everybody join now ;-) 

There are a few things I would like to share:

• they integrate with some booking engines to signup guests right there during the booking process.However, in our case at least the grabbed the email of ALL guests making a reservation, no matter if they agreed to (ticked a box) or not.  In addition of this maybe being a data privacy violation, I believe this resulted in overcharging us quite a bit for loyalty commission for guests that did not want to join, did not join, and were not aware they joined, and probably are not aware of the benefits. I reported this after placing a test booking and it was resolved, resulting in lower enrollment numbers and much lower monthly bills. So be careful - the said it was a technical error and they fixed it.
• Payment for their commission is either done via credit card (you need a big available amount) or bank transfer to a - last time I checked - UK bank, causing international wire transfer fees of quite substantial amount. No SEPA Payments available.
• It’s a US company.

I genuinely would be interested in similar European alternative solutions. The concept itself is good, just needs to be more popular and more adapted to the European Market, I think. Any ideas out there?

Kind regards,

Jean-Philipp.

​@j.spiess waited for your feedback as they show your hotel as reference on the emails received. 
we already decided against a demo due to some facts you mentioned before. 

​@Johannes Rott 

Great that I could support your decision ;-)

Are you evaluating any other solutions?

JP.

Hi ​@j.spiess, yes we decided not to partner up with them! Even with their Guierilla Marketing. At least 10 of us received their emails.
No we are not … it seems more like a loyality programm but thats nothing we have on the roadmap for now.

We do have THN and triptease as partner for direct bookings. what about you?

​@Johannes Rott 

Hello! Yeah, we have Triptease (Messaging, PaidSearch and Retargeting, PriceWidget on BE), too … we had TripTease PriceMatch (where they try to dynamically discount rates in case OTAs are lower for some reason) but stopped using it because the ROI was not there for us… I thought it was a very good product idea, but it was a pain to setup and maintain the discount code in the BE. Hence we now try to monitor parity with lighthouse and through manual random checks …

Basically, with theGuestbook we try to mirror the OTA sponsored discounts and loyalty programs, just to have something without steep direct discounts - it’s a band-aid though, I think… 

From THN (now part of Lighthouse) we are evaluating ConnectAI, but at the moment it’s not impressive, or rather it’s not yielding any measurable effect (yet?) - I hope that it gets some steam, we’ll see… pretty quiet around that at the moment.

The PaidSearch part of TripTease works OK, but it feels like it’s only a small improvement over doing it ourself. I’d love to see an advanced, AI enhanced, PaidSearch Campaign management solution that is affordable, self-optimizing, little maintenance and ROI optimizing, while incorporating OTB data and market data to optimize campaign messaging, timing, and bidding. I had an interesting conversation around that with lighthouse (as they have all the data to base decisions on), as they are exploring how to deploy AI where it’s really helpful… As we know booking.com et al. are spending huge amounts on paid search, so it’s really really hard to compete with them in bidding and to make any sense at all, I believe it must be really really done in a very very smart way, something that small/medium properties probably are not really able to do at the moment. Therefore we strictly limit our paid search budget to avoid overspending against an much bigger player… but it’s just a shame, when you think about the budget that could be allocated from OTA commissions if paid search bidding would promise to convert better with AI driven campaigns. Wishfull thinking? Maybe :-)

Just my 2 cents… ;-)

Regards,

JP.

We use a lot of tools by THN at the moment, connect AI, predictive personalization, bench direct and so on but we might move one hotel to triptease to see what the difference in outcome and costs are. We will for yure not use the price match as we have some steps internally to avoid miss matches which do work quite good. and we do have lower rates on commission especially for booking.com in Salzburg.

For google hotel ads we have used rate gain for over 6months but the haven´t been able to get it up and running properly so we moved to triptease 2 months ago except the vienna colleagues as the are happy with rategain .. (only property with workin hotelads .. by now...)

Of course lighthouse is used as well, on property will go ahead and start the new pricing manager which is pretty impressive but needed? RMS´s we have atomize & happy hotel. Our tech stach is growing over the last two years and of course is changing from day to day...