In a bid to drive more direct bookings, The Accor Group is implementing a recommendation engine. It recognises that every visit to a travel e-commerce site of one of its hotels counts.

　　With over 100 visits to their flagship websites each minute, popular hotels are upping the pace to drive direct bookings.

　　In a bid to drive more direct bookings, The Accor Group is implementing a recommendation engine. It recognises that every visit to a travel e-commerce site of one of its hotels counts. Indeed all hotel companies must consider every metric that matters during the booking funnel - repeat visits, bookings, average time spent on sites, number of pages viewed during the visit and so on. A major focus for hotels today is to be more relevant and personal each time a loyal customer visits a site. Using analytics, hotels can be far more targeted in communicating offers that could reactivate members based on past behaviour.

　　The Accor group, which has well-known brands such as ibis, Novotel, Mercure or Sofitel in its fold, is in the process of incorporating a recommendation engine in order to dynamically personalise offerings. Our reporter talks to Diane Rémond, Accor’s CRM VP to find about how its new initiative can help hotels to differentiate their offering from OTAs.

　　How mature are personalised offers in the hotel industry today?

　　The maturity is not there. Actually there is a gap between the nice welcome that is sometimes perceived as a personalised moment by the client, and the effective and systematic use of the customer information along his journey and across the diverse touchpoints.

　　It becomes crucial to develop a personalised dialogue with the clients, who are over-solicited with offers and also using multiple devices to benchmark these and then change their mind. For one booking, a leisure traveller will compare on average 13 or 14 propositions on various websites.

　　Personalisation is at the centre of the battle between all players - and in particular hoteliers versus OTAs.

　　Tell us a bit about your recommendation engine…

　　Well, it’s a progressive deployment across all websites, Accorhotels.com and brands (today a few pages mainly on Accorhotels.com, but later on the brands’ websites). In such a complex environment featuring multi-brands and a worldwide presence, no personalisation can be delivered without a strong CRM platform, where we connect the client database to the recommendation engine. As a result, the Accor customer will be exposed to more relevant offers and therefore be able to find the right deal faster. When plugged in multi-channel mode, the recommendation engine ensures consistency and relevance, which is what customers expect.

　　How can the industry measure the performance of any recommendation engine?

　　The recommendation engine carries its own ‘efficiency tracker’. Basically we look at the level acceptance of each message (measured in terms of clicks) composed by the recommendation engine and we compare it to a ‘standard’ message.

　　Give us an example of how a recommendation engine can dynamically personalise offerings…

　　A customer who travels locally should be targeted with domestic offers. The recommendation engine will take into account the stage of the navigation on the website. If a customer is searching for an international destination then the right proposal will be pushed in real time.

　　Would you say that OTAs are ahead of hotels when it comes to personalised, customised offers?

　　OTAs have invested in recommendation engines for some time. They are focused on the simplification of the booking process and each day they question how to make the booking process easier. What they cannot offer, however, is a complete and consistent experience, including the stay at the hotel. This is exactly where we can make all the difference.