Ritz-Carlon/Renaissance, born of the new concierges?

ACCOR VS NOWNESS

Luxury package hotel including "Twitter butler"

It seems that the concept of social media manager for the companies get extended to hotels with the idea of offering a social media butler in an expensive package at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C.

For a fee of 47,000$ for 4 days during the Barack Obama’s inauguration, besides a private Lincoln Town Car and driver, a tour of D.C., a $5,000 shopping experience at Brooks Brothers, and a couple's massage, among other luxuries, the hotel offered a personal social media butler.

So what is a social media butler ?

It is a dedicated staff member who follows the guest around with a camera and document the adventures in real time on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

The main marketing idea to sell this service is that « From Tweeting and Facebooking to Instagramming and Pinning -- we're ready to record the memories in real time as the Social Media Butler for the friends and family of excited attendees so they can enjoy the moment," according to the marketing agency that will staff the program.

How does it work concretely ?

Guests can control the experience, deciding how frequent status updates should be, designating which social networks are included, curating the content of their tweets

Guests can also leave the butler with their social media account information, periodically text messaging over photos to be uploaded remotely. This way, VIPs can make use of the service without having a stranger following them around Washington at all times.

Is it really a good concept ?

This sounds like creating and having a private paparazzi who will posts the most « amazing » updates, showing how cool and « in » the guest is.

The hotel tries to justify this « luxury service » to the guests by explaining that many companies are having social media strategists and that they are just applying th same «successful » concept to hospitality.

We can wondering ourselves, why being on social media (that will imply necesseraly personal level) if it is not to make it personal and enjoying the fact to share pictures, posts…

It became a little bit insane to need an assistant to talk about your life, what you think and the pictures….if the customers can send pictures to the social medi butler, why not posting it directly ??

If the concept of social media strategist is a good strategy for companies, 

I don’t believe in the success of a social media butler.

Besides, it reduces even further the concept of privacy !

SoLoMo MacDonald's study case

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4nR4Q2R-wRuUXZIYnVpVDJRQU0

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Luxury Dream Hotels

In the booking industry, a new French company is born: Luxury Dream Hotel.

Even though she is presenting herself as a media platform for hospitality, she has all the characteristics of an OTA: the customer can book on the website and the hotel has to pay a commission.

So, what is making a difference with Luxury Dream Hotel???
The best advantage of this new born is the fact that the hotels referred are presented by video. More than 500 hotels (included the most beautiful in the world) have been recorded and at the charge of the company. The hotels would have the choice to use the high quality video for their own website or their communication.

How does it work for the hotel?

The room booked is paid directly to the hotel who pay back Luxury Dream hotel. The hotels don’t have to pay anything for the video, they just have to pay a commission of 15% when a room is booked and the cancellation policy is fixed by the hotel.
Even though, the website seems to be more “hotel friendly”, the customers will have access to the best rate and moreover to a special selection of high end hotel.

Also, the videos are not just video clips of a hotel, they are presenting the history of the hotel, a presentation of its architecture, services, an interview of the director…this is a real movie that permit to the customer to have an overview of the hotel and all the features before booking.

So, it is their real first contact with the hotel and the customer can also read the blog written by journalists with the new trends, interview of designers and chefs.

Good idea or not?

I believe that this is a good idea for hotels who don’t have any real designed portals and who wants to try their booking with a smaller OTA. But, in reality, I’m not sure that this company will really last. Indeed, more and more hotels understand the importance of having a real interacted portal and at our time, the video is not the one and best tool to reach the customer.

Hoteliers have to reach the customers through the social media (which doesn’t cost anything like you tube, facebook, pinterest, instagram…) and if you really think about it, the human ressources of an hotel are moving very fast, so having an interview of a director who is not here since a while and is now a director of a competitor is not really valuable.

Let’s say the customer watch the video and, once in the hotels, wants to speak to the director and realize that the one on the video was here 5 years ago, that would give the image that the video and the website are not updated. Besides, we could have expected to have a real tip giver blog, which is not really the case, the journalists are just promoting some hotels, beautiful of course, but it is not really interactive with customers.