The Email Wars

Hotels: Long the source of good and bad experiences, wild nights, hallway yellers, desires to not get up as early as you normally do and just lay in bed a little while longer… places of things that you share.

So why is this relevant? Well we have long seen online retailers focus on driving customer reviews and sourcing their community to rate products they have bought – but pulling it out into a hotel chain newsletter is a great idea. Sure travel aggregators like Travelocity have done it for a while, but rarely do I notice hotel chains doing it. (would love to see car rental companies do it by airport code)

But Tablet Hotels had recently added Guest Reviews next to the view details text call to action. One might think that you would be more prone to asking them to book now OR make a reservation – but the fact is that they are giving their travelers the ability to influence a booking. Great idea.

Also not that when they are introducing their new properties they are taking a different approach to those and leading with price and rates as opposed to starting rate and offers/value prop. I think not using the review on new properties is a safe approach as when opening anything new you need to get your sea legs under you before you have everyone firing on all cylinders. Give them some time to get a collection of Guest Reviews before you open them up to lead with in your email campaigns.

This brings into question if you did a program like this would you be transparent and allow everything to go free on these reviews (answering publicly those that are bad and making amends)? I put this out there as I would say yes but I can see legal and the

C-level place the kibosh on the level of transparency. I like to always err on the side that people and companies that bang the drum of transparency are actually as transparent as convenient. Having been around the block long enough I know this to be true.

Best part of this WHOLE email? The footer? Why? Well they are unleashing a game changer on changing preferences of when you want to hear from them. Now they are not saying change your preferences and start only following us on Twitter – but what they are saying to me is “if more timely information from us would help you, you have the option of using Twitter to receive that information as we release it. Great approach as travelers are evaluating and making decisions all the time and not just when your email hits the inbox.

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