Article

Brady Cassidy
Brady Cassidy 20 February 2014
Categories Advertising

The missed branding opportunity

It still blows my mind how many hotels charge for Internet service. I recently stayed at the Hilton Universal City in LA during part of my vacation. When I started up my laptop, I got the following page

It still blows my mind how many hotels charge for Internet service.
 

I recently stayed at the Hilton Universal City in LA during part of my vacation. 
 

If you are not a Hilton Honors member, you are forced to pay to access Internet services.

 

What Hilton didn’t know, was my intentions of going online. It wasn’t to browse the web, but simply to “check-in” via social networks. Now, think about this. Is the $10 of additional revenue worth the lost branding opportunity to my 600-700 Facebook friends?
 

Say, for example, Hilton had 100 guests access the Internet in one night. This translates into roughly $1000. At almost $300 per night for a room (excluding any other additional amenities purchased at the hotel), they would only need 3-4 guests to become aware of their hotel via social networks and visit at a later date. Think about this. If say only 10 of those 100 people “check-in” or do a relevant status update, at an average of 200 friends on their social network, this translates into 2000 people. All Hilton would need is a 0.2% conversion rate from word-of-mouth to surpass their Internet revenue.
 

Now, to be fair, with Facebook’s new updates your message or updates are only broadcasted to about 16% of your friends. Therefore, 2000 x 16% means 320 friends will likely see the messages. This would require a conversion rate of 1.25%, which is highly likely given the conversion rates with word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing.
 

Allowing free Internet to your guests, in my opinion, is a no brainer. The marginal cost of allowing a guest to access the Internet is negligible. At most, they would have to upgrade their bandwidth.

 

Possible Solutions:

1) Free Internet for guests – hotel is already paying for it anyways

2) Allow guests to have the first 15-20 minutes free of charge

3) Free Internet, but limit the bandwidth for each user

4) Pay with a post to a chosen social network (this is possible with several solutions available today such asJustUno or PayWithATweet

 

This article was previously posted here http://fixedsocial.com/missed-branding-opportunity/ 

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