Hotel Lirico 3 stars Rome
Initial situation
Rome's Hotel Lirico initially gained its clientele mainly due to its convenient location with respect to the nearby Stazione Centrale, as well as through agencies and tour operators in other countries. The hotel already had an Internet site developed by a company from which it had also purchased search engine positioning services. However, the hotel was unable to sell its rooms in this manner and, instead, noticed that there had been an increase in reservations made through the websites of online intermediaries, for an average commission cost of 15%.
Goals
Faced with this situation, Hotel Lirico's main objective was to create, consolidate and expand its own sales channel in order to increase direct sales through its website. Additionally, the client wanted to expand its markets following the falloff of the American market after September 11, 2001, which had seriously hurt its distribution situation and, consequently, the possibility of filling the hotel.
The collaboration with Nozio
Hotel Lirico began its collaboration with Nozio in the spring of 2003 with a comprehensive project to create tools such as special offers and online booking in the following languages: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. After two months, the hotel had recorded an increase of over 30% in visitors to the site and, naturally, direct reservations. This led to the decision at the end of the year to add the Portuguese language in order to initiate an influx of tourists from those markets. The hotel opened 2004 by revamping all of its services and advertising campaigns within the Nozio Travel Network, but, most importantly, by further expanding its sales channel to include the Chinese market and conforming to the new search engine visibility standards with the incorporation of link popularity and third-level domains. At the same time, the hotel undertook a promotional activity on the Internet involving the combination of distinct key words in all of the relevant languages and added news items to the site to link the hotel to the city's main events and happenings. After a consistent increase in reservations following this last effort, a few months later, the hotel decided to further reinforce its sales channel by adding the following languages to the site: Dutch, Danish, Finish, Norwegian, Swedish, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Russian and Hebrew!
Results
In these two years of collaboration with Nozio, the hotel has reached some unimaginable goals in terms of increasing the number of rooms sold, creating customer loyalty and capitalising on the vast opportunities the Internet has to offer to the hotel industry. The hotel has succeeded in reaching an average occupancy rate of over 92%, with 4200 room nights sold a year through its sales channel.
Conclusions
The project carried out by Nozio has given Hotel Lirico access to an impressive flow of tourists in search of specific information on the Internet, and has ensured its visibility to them at the most critical moment. This has allowed the hotel to take real advantage of new business opportunities and has contributed to the revival of its image by building on its strong points. According to customer surveys, the synergy created with Nozio has enabled the hotel to brilliantly achieve its target objectives, leading to a consistent increase in overall sales.
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