Intent Over Attention: Direct Bookings For Hotels

the average customer journey consists of like 50 clicks of different pages dates rooms et cetera et cetera and this is the core difference how to identify among all that 30 50 clicks what is the real point of interest because you can have different rates you can have different offers you can have different specific bundles especially for resorts and if you don't know what is the intent you perceive all your visitors like the same people in hospitality we all feel it ota commissions changing algorithms new ai tools and at the same time guests expect everything to be personal frictionless and inspiring but the search journey is shifting from google to for example tiktok from classic ads to creators and maybe soon to ai agents that book trips for us the question is how does a hotel stay in control is the real battle now between otas and ai or between attention and intention welcome to the future of hospitality and today we're kicking off a new series called go direct a series about the people strategies and technologies shaping the future of direct bookings my name is alonso kouri and today i'm talking with sergey bitesnoi the founder of inside arc sergey helps hotels and travel brands understand real guest intent and act on it instead of renting attention from otas and social platforms we're going to talk about the new generation of travelers tiktok as a booking channel and how ai will change hotel distribution so sergey nice to have you here really excited about this episode so maybe let's just start about a little bit more about you can you tell me yeah i'm kind of curious how did you start inside arc what triggered you to start this yeah first of all thank you for the warm intro it's pleasure to me you know to participate in that podcast because it's really important the industry really driven by sometimes 20 years old technologies and principles of business so it's very important to talk about new shifts especially you know the new generations of clients i mean generation z how they called you know popular they become very economically active customers right now for hospitality so this is important to discuss so about me actually a max corporate guy who just built originally built this technology for my company than i ran before before that i ran like fintech company and then this ai shift happened this ai shift the same ai shift then openai started built their technology then google released their you know these tensors the technology that actually allows to to start all the shift right now in ai i started around the same time because this technology opens a lot of opportunities and what the story behind the technology what the story behind the product i understood in some day that these deep technological principles that engineers use in their job to build code to build engineering solutions to track between service iterations very similar how customers real people engaged with applications web applications websites et cetera so i get an idea like wow we can use same principle same technology just to help people to deliver you know to buy better to receive better experience to the companies to sell better more receive more conversion etc etc so this was like the story of how i started the prototype of the company yeah nice nice so that sounds pretty first of all pretty a lot of data a lot of ai a lot of technical stuff so can you maybe take us one step back and let's maybe talk about the shift that we were talking about in the introduction is that the shift of how people are going to search and how they're searching even right now so what do you see because i know for example when i was younger i talk about like like it's 50 years ago but okay like three years ago it was just google i will google a trip and you know go to booking.com maybe to other places and that's it but what what changed yeah actually if we speak about like a general attention channel let's call it in that way attention channel yeah that all the modern generations actual generations of customers they shift to mobile first experience first of all and the second they tired from traditional ways to communicate with environment with news you know all that classical tv shows or like even youtube actually seems a bit obsolete for them yeah because people prefer short forms of content they prefer very simple videos and tiktok gives the same so you did not destroy your brain reading hearing some smart guys you just you know scroll your line you know of news videos et cetera et cetera and the most important part between you know among all that videos smart companies like several years ago already started to implement their content in that of those form of of videos i mean it could be independent separate focused videos or natively implemented inside some kind of entertainment content so this is the most important shift then if we speak from perspective of hospitality most of industries still exist that somebody googles something visit websites open some kind of independent browsers like google you know search etc yahoo you know yahoo yahoo crazy it's like 20 years ago times you know but in reality the new generations of customers they literally open tiktok and literally search inside tiktok answers you know on their questions about school about university job how to do these how to cook that how can i travel where i can find something interesting in my destination point for example so becoming the number one really number one attention point not intention attention point nice that's a really and it's also if i can add something maybe i don't know how you see this but back in the days you used to think about okay i want to go for example to euro disney paris you look for euro disney paris and then you book a hotel that you like or that seems nice or the price is nice but nowadays i know for example i don't have instagram but my wife she's on instagram all the time so it's more that she comes across nice stuff and then we want to go there but it's not that i want to proactively go there it's that she comes across content and then we want to go there i think that's also kind of shifted right that you just come across something nice and it triggers you and then you want to go there yes definitely actually it's better to highlight some numbers numbers because we just did discuss experience numbers tells more actually on the last data i saw from the market if we if we take several layers of audience on hmn yeah the most active part is people from from age like 18 24 if i remember right they takes around like 73% of that audience they presented on tiktok 73% of people if you take like more close to our age with you like 24 to 33 they presented around like 60% a smart share later you know ages of people they you know obviously they presented in more like smaller numbers but the most surprising thing if we take and take a look on the most fast segment fast developer fast growing segment inside tiktok you will discover that people older than 45 years for last six years this is the most active group who grows in 13 times so people in older categories they really watch videos and influenced by creators so that's true so the more we leave the more people engaged the more people go into that kind of channels you know entertain short form videos like yeah that's really true i know from my experience from my own experience my father is like 72 years old and once he sent me a video of tiktok and i saw that he has a tiktok account i'm like well how do you have a tiktok account i don't have a tiktok account but for sure but when we talk about tiktok and for example i have a hotel i'm a general manager of a hotel i guess that a lot of hotels they don't do a lot on tiktok it feels like it's a new social media what do i have to do how do they have to look about tiktok because i think it's very even for me like very very far away from me tiktok yeah sure actually this is a very broad question to be honest because it sounds simple but but in practice people trying to overcomplicate solution what is that classical principle how how hotels do solving this issue right now usually they go to some kind of big phases influencers asking them to create some kind of beautiful advertising style videos and actually they paying a lot of money for buying mostly irrelevant audience why irrelevant because these guys their audience mostly engaged with that influencer are driven by some kind of entertainment style content they're not specifically interested in your hotel and your property or if we speak about general hospitality in your restaurant for example that's why they driven by let's say more high quality luxury style videos where beautiful girls sell beautiful places in beautiful you know context of offers luxury style actually and this is the problem because if you go in that way you receive a lot of impressions but results in direct sales about zero because tiktok is very personalized style of content people have perfect recommendations in their tiktok account based on their interest so if the person living their normal life usual life usually usually they do not receive specific kind of video in their channel you know and this is the problem that the best way in my opinion the most economically effective way for the hotel is not going to some kind of expensive guys but really find some kind of normal regular creator from your local c region you know sphere invite him change for example for room invite for a hotel party or or cocktail party or paid like hundred bucks for free video technically free video because it's for for you it's nothing why it's important because for that kind of regular creators they need content they need cases with hotels they also interested to work with you same time you wouldn't pay like $5,000 for some kind of big names so it's win win you can create 3 4 5 videos from regular influencers and they perform much better than you can expect from any kind of famous guys this is the best advice i can for any hotel from the basics yeah that's i really agree with that that's kind of we that's how we are taught about what is marketing is to make something look nicer than it really is and to show you know woman like you said and everything is luxury and you know a little bit with photoshop and everything is amazing but it's not real it's not authentic and what you said is that when you have a smaller influencers like the real authentic creators you can better do 10 times smaller than one time big and nothing happens because it's not authentic and it's not real and that kind of stuff yeah definitely you know like a week ago i had a chat with a startup portugal company who specifically helps portuguese restaurants in low season to book you know empty tables and they just exchange these empty tables on review from local influencers and the main concerns all the hotel owners restaurant owners to told them like how this regular guy or girl can create some specific selling video for me if they don't have you know professional cameras light all the things you know some kind of guy from india coming in dubai restaurant and create on just on usual basic phone video and surprisingly it works much better because these people like that guy they watch his videos so it's proved it works much better you know than any that's amazing how that it's i know from my experience that it when it looks too good it looks like an advertisement advertisement and when it looks like an ad then you don't look at it so you know your brain knows how to skip it because you think this is an ad but when it looks kind of shit to call it like this it isn't shit but it looks too authentic then you think ah what is this then you look at it and i know that a lot of viral videos on instagram tiktok and that kind of stuff they are the videos that people even made they took their iphone they made a video they did did it without even thinking too much and those went viral got a lot of views and a lot of stuff so that's super nice now i know that that you talk about intention versus attention can you maybe explain a little bit what is the difference here for because you know there's kind of a mindset about this i'm pretty sure how to look at it definitely you're right actually it's the same from one perspective it's very simple yeah attention it's what you to show the person or the visitor intention is answering the question why person came to your website this is a huge difference from commercial perspective you know how the stand behind how you can turn your campaigns social media campaigns into sales engine because it's no matter what to show the matter why to show some specific content to very specific person because if you take you know any complex website from you know for a glance it looks like the person visits it just because to book the room for example but in reality every specific visit has some kind of context behind that for example person could be business traveler and the context like business visit because of conference in the same location or the person could be just an entertaining traveler you know blah blah blah and this is absolutely different reason to visit so you should have absolutely different content for that and you position this person differently this is what gives you conversions this is what gives you personalization because you know i must three years probably from d2c brands to hospitality everybody talks about we need to go to personalization but people in reality can't understand that personalization do not start from using like name or some generic things or more emails to the person inbox personalization is about reducing contact rate but making these contact rate the maximum quality for that specific cohort of visitors this is the difference between intent and like intention and attention actually yeah amazing my technology this is i'm working about to help hotels to discover intents and build cohorts profiles around these intents so what kind of intent can you seek i'm pretty curious like what can you see for example can you see this is a business profile this is a local this is so what can you see what kind of intents are there actually it depends on the specific hotel or hotel group property or hospitality experience because every visitor if you represent you know just a broad explanation probably but i will try to explain it easy you know if you imagine that every person visit the website the the visitor makes a lot of actions usually like the average customer journey consists of like 50 clicks of different pages dates rooms etc etc and this is the core difference how to identify among all that 30 50 clicks what is the real point of interest because you can have different rates you can have different offers you can have different specific bundles especially for resorts and if you don't know what is the intent you perceive all your visitors like the same people yeah this is the core tv so we identify what is the specific intent based on first party data of the website and help hotels to own the data splitting you know the general flow on the website on that micro segments to help personalize experience through social media channel wow that's really nice that the context makes all the difference that's real personalization it's like for example i'm from israel i eat kosher so when i when i go to and i see restaurants all about non kosher for example you know non kosher food and but if they show me we have kosher meals they got me they got me straight away this is just a really specific example but i know that i used to work in online gaming industry and i know that the gaming companies they are they are amazing at this what you say right now to know exactly if this guy likes to play slots likes to play roulette likes to play whatever it is and they know to segment it in niches and sub niches and sub sub niches to make the advertisements more relevant that's it right that's what you mean yeah yeah definitely definitely you showed the example of the most advanced industry i suppose and personalization because i talk with a couple of gaming companies and they have around like 600 segments at the same time you know it's crazy crazy engines but mostly it's like artificially driven not by ai because they know these rules and they know the psychology behind the purchase process of that people in ai age it helps to own very similar approach to the any average company this is the point it's a great example by the way yeah thanks and that's really nice because you can of course you can go deep and deeper and deeper and to maximize one conversion is always a lot of money but what you say because hotels a lot of hotels don't do anything so if you only segment for example what you said this is a business guy this is a leisure guy if you only do that you'll see conversions i don't know x amount higher so even if you do a little bit it can make a big difference and of course you can tweak and tune it as you can say with ai makes it even more easy right yep absolutely and there is another important point that a bit styling of travel a bit changed because hotels right now then especially when we talk about direct bookings very similar to d2c brands in terms of approach to sales because if you especially go into social media it's like e commerce style of sales and the specifics of of the business right now that every business has a very short demand window if on the previous years even like 10 years ago 15 years ago people operate by windows like a week two weeks of you know then you buy audience from some kind of audience or advertising company they usually deliver you audience two years or sorry two two years two weeks ago because they collect this general search interest from google you know from the search engines and sell you a list of people who probably buy your product right now people think by like day demand window if you reconnect person in a week you already lost person so this is important to identify person in real time and engage as soon as you can this is that's really important that's really i really believe in that that you have to be like you said now because when you and the faster you do it if you do it the day after it doesn't make i i myself i also feel that because the like you said the memory it's like shorter you you you your cache is just for one two days and then you delete it and you start like over again and really believed it and if we talk about because i know that a lot of a lot of people also on linkedin i see it and i know myself i got also triggered by it that people are kind of afraid that ai will take over everything and everybody will search for into ai and if my hotel isn't findable in ai then my hotel won't exist and i don't need a website anymore because everything is via chatgpt and they will book via chatgpt so so how do you look at that side because when you hear it it's kind of scary like why do i need a website and then you say like in here everything is changed great question actually yeah because the world right now split it on tumors ai tumors and progressive part of society i mean just like 100 years ago with electricity or steam machines i think actually it's a bit exaggeration that ai very quickly ai chats will take demand because if you take on real data actually i prefer to use the statistics you know the experts from the market one of famous experts like ben evans was a sequoia analyst venture capital firm who was responsible for all that reports starting from like 90s you know the who provide reports around like software it's the world he changed his report on ai it's the world and in in fact that what we see that split between generation of people like 35 or 45 like active economical split of society and who below that age like early generations you know the next upcoming generations economically active customers the usability by them the chat gpt absolutely the same so the next generation of customers they don't use chat gpt more often they don't use google search more often it's absolutely equal splits of search but what i really believe from like a practical perspective technological perspective that bigger brands they have really unique opportunity to seize this channel just because they have more two important factors that will stop on their you know to to seize this channel for them first of all they have a lot of property coverage that follows by a lot of internet requests i mean search requests chatgpt request because the logic of how to make your hotel property show more often or chatgpt answers you should have two things chatgpt is very let's say intent driven taking the five minutes our chat driven so chat gpt trying to deliver response on very specific question of the visitor of user so you should have first of all very detailed explanation on your website about that specific user request this is the factor and the second factor you should have enough questions requests from chatgpt users addressed this specific intent so the average property has no such high frequency requests and very detailed explanation in their blog post you know any kind of data across the internet so big companies big brands i mean mostly obviously ota aggregators yeah they have this kind of marketplaces they can manage it all other guys i think for them it's not the game because it's quite difficult for independent property or even hospitality management company to run this campaign because it's some kind of artificial a lot of artificial job should be done to promote your specific hotels in specific locations relevant to specific audience so i understand there is a big strategy for example if your hotels connected deeply with some kind of specific magnets of publicity for example you provide locations or accommodation for marathon runners in boston for example yeah so a lot of guys research find me hotel near the marathon in boston blah blah blah blah blah you can play around that topic but for most of hotels if you don't run specific locations connected to some kind of big events it's quite difficult for you to reach enough number of outside requests to your property to search on higher rates you know in that list i know what you mean because the requests are low amount of requests yeah can take display you know in your location because you should compete with hundreds of property in your specific locations that's why actually social media this is a unique channel for hotel because otas can't compete with you because it's very personalized channel they can't buy demand how they traditionally buy you know on google paid channels meta search etc that's why the hotel should play in that game this is the strategic leverage for them yeah because that's the real differentiator yeah yeah nice i also read that for example gpt and all other ai companies they take data from for example reddit and they take it from you know authentic conversations not like you know you tell gpt make a blog and then he makes a blog and then you put it on the website and then he takes the blog that he made that's like you know he doesn't need to to crawl his own data but you posted it but so i think also the more authentic conversations are you know for example reviews i think that are becoming really important because i think that i will scrape for example the last reviews on i don't know tripadvisor google that people talk about your hotel so i think that also if i think that hoteliers my 2 cents then it's first of all need to understand a little bit just a little bit to understand how it works because when you know a little bit how it works then you can take better steps into your strategic alignments yeah absolutely you mentioned very perfect example how the search of any language model works because you mentioned like social driven platforms like reddit or tripadvisor and by the way very few people are probably not a few people do not think about google maps because do you know that gemini like google product driven by reviews on google maps so the hotel should own that reviews of their customers that's huge yeah so tripadvisor google maps social media gc just ask your visitor guy please record 15 seconds video for us for we give you like some kind of voucher for example it works much better because it would be immediately searched you know by any kind of engine this is what those really can manage wow that's that's amazing it's what you said with gemini is from google so google maps so they they are searching in that machine yeah that engine it's yeah amazing nice and what about if you take another step forward because i know that ai agents that's kind of the the future what i believe as well of course and i don't know in what sense but how will it work if for example yeah you tell the agent you know i want a trip i have a family you know for example my gpt he knows my my my kids my wife he knows everything about what i like what i don't like he knows everything so i just can tell him in the future maybe you know look at the nice hotel for me give me some options i don't know in italy and then he will look and maybe he will even book it for me so how do you think that that will affect the the whole shift in regards to because they can also book it i don't know if i would make an agent book for me if i didn't even look at it but i'm pretty sure that they can the research part they can skip a lot for me actually you raising the question contains of two big trends on the industry yeah first of all a lot of venture capital firms believe that we live in a book of personalized experience around where a company creates oh sorry not company a person creates the family level or personal level software which knows all the context knows all the experience of that person without purchasing generic video or generic application from the app store or something like that from another side obviously all that applications will have in the backend any kind of language model mostly some kind of open source because it's a it's a trend among ai developers they use open source solution not chatgpt mostly because because of due to different reasons actually and this would be their you know consequences because if you use some kind of the same level of language model you have the same limitations so this language model would be trained on the same content trained on large brands trained on with access on ota aggregators so probably you will miss a lot of very authentic local experience you can find through you know specifically like google or something like entertainment channels yeah usually built on your recommendation engine so actually the answer is this ai concierge would work perfectly if behind ai concierge they would have a native recommendational engine similar tiktok has google has without that you will have a very basic solution that i'm not sure would work perfect on your personal level yeah that's really nice so you basically say gpt knows a little bit about us for example the basic data but the real intent like you said before of how we behave on social media because then you show social media companies what we like we like these kind of videos we like this kind of content and they know better who we are than chatgpt knows although social media doesn't maybe know our i don't know how many kids i have but they know way more how i behave and what i like and that that intent that's what in your opinion makes a difference right that's yeah that's a different trait absolutely absolutely taking a step back like 15 minutes back in our chat chat gpt owns only 20% of your like a human research data all other data behind chatgpt that's why it's obviously limited for you like a personalization tool nice love that okay cool and then in regards to probably the last question the podcast is called the future of hospitality so you probably know what i'm going to ask how do you look at the future of hospitality so let's say five years from now what do you think will be the new luxury or the new i don't know the future yeah i would love to say that everybody would be in digital driven by robots etc but to be honest i don't believe in that despite i have a lot of guys who develop some kind of specific solution for hospitality for example two days ago i talked to the guy who developed the human robot literally and one of his thoughts to deliver these robots to hotels to make some kind of routine job in room service etc addressing the really huge problem but in my honest opinion this digitalization will work only on low cost segment or some kind of high turnover segments of hotels like motels hostels etc where people paying for like basic service but not the quality not experience all the industry believe would be human first no robots the best service no generic experience only personalized experience you know then deeper we will move to era of robots ai agents digital etc the more expensive and more valuable would be real human touch you know touch points and experience that's why actually i believe in digital on the top funnel like acquisition channels sales channels marketing branding acquisition but bottom part of the funnel obviously should be human driven human nice yeah i love that explanation that you said on the top of the funnel it's digital digital digital until we get to the moment now we have to experience something and then we skip the digital and we go human to human that's an amazing explanation loved it so sergey we're kind of out of time i really want to thank you for your time for your energy for your insights and really appreciate it and yeah thanks again man loved it thank you for the invitation alon thanks for having me here hope it would be great a great example in your collection of that podcast probably your audience will hear something new and it would push them to try to create some new experience for their customers and their hospitality experience thank you amen amen thanks sergey