If taken out of context, this comment made last week by InterContinental Hotels Group Americas vice president of distribution and marketing Dell Ross could have caused heart attacks among investors. But his point, that customers have no loyalty, is increasingly challenging to travel suppliers.
“A couple of years ago I asked our analysts to give me a profile of our Web customers' booking behaviors, and they came back to me a couple of days later and said that they were having a problem: 'We don’t have any customers,' " said Ross. "I said, 'What are you talking about? Of course we have customers.' We are doing 2 billion Web bookings a year, but turns out none of them are ours. Every single customer uses every possible way to book, depending on the circumstance."
"The premise of a Web customer vs. a third party customer didn’t exist and that was huge light bulb moment for us. So we have changed our philosophy and we actually try to optimize use of intermediaries to expand to new markets to create brand loyalty. Then the brand-loyal customers are going to book direct using the Web and possibly over the phone,” Ross said during a panel discussion at New York University's International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference.
“We’d love to be able to choose where our customers book," Ross continued. "If we could do that then we would say, ‘Everyone book through the Web because it is the lowest cost of delivery at a very high rate’ ... [on] our own Web sites, by the way. But it’s not really up to us.”