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The dynamic growth of the online environment creates a range of new opportunities for strong competition in hospitality. With easy accessibility nowadays, the Internet is quickly becoming the most significant distribution channel for hotel revenue growth. It is predicted that, by 2009, more than half of all hotel bookings will be made online.
The Internet affords hospitality experts a great opportunity to control highly profitable revenue contribution and increased brand awareness. With the aforementioned new opportunities, however, comes a new range of risks.
Illegal or improper online activities by others can cost hotels revenue, profit margin, brand value, and goodwill. Hotel proprietors need to identify and address the transgressions of legal border crossings to better protect their assets, revenues, and brands, and also ensure that they do not run foul of the formal laws and informal ‘rules’ of online marketing.
Daily decisions about the online space, including what photos to post on a hotel website, what to name a new package or promotion, whether to bid on a competitor’s brand as a paid search keyword, should be made by business people who are mindful of the areas where trademark, privacy, contract and other branches of law might come into play. Hospitality professionals can protect their brands online more effectively and avert legal snares by adhering to the following guidelines of online marketing:
1. Clear your trademarks
2. Continually register your copyrights
3. Solidify your rights to your intellectual property
4. Publish a thorough privacy policy
5. Proactively register related domain names
6. Bid with caution on others’ trademarks
7. Adhere to proper search engine optimisation practices
8. Monitor the use of your brand name by advertisers on the search engines
9. Watch online travel blogs and review sites
10. Comply to CAN SPAM laws when conducting email marketing
1. Clear your Trademarks
Before creating and publicising a new name for a resort, hotel, or programme, hire counsel to ‘clear’ the name and evaluate the potential risk of infringing an existing trademark. Companies should seek to register new trademarks that are important to their marketing plans, such as the name of a new spa treatment, an exclusive hotel package, or the name of a kids-camp programme.
2. Continually Register your Copyrights
Copyrights protect original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium, such as work saved on a computer hard drive, written down, photographed, or recorded. Make sure to register copyrights for all commercially significant marketing materials. Such materials often include the creative elements that comprise the overall ‘look and feel’ of your website, individual graphic components, photographs, film clips, and so on. Continually re-register your materials when important new website content is added and when material design changes occur.
3. Solidify Your Rights to Your Intellectual Property
Companies should take steps to secure ownership rights or licenses for all content that is entitled to copyright protection, including content on their websites. Hospitality professionals need to ensure that all vendors, photographers, and web designers who create copyrighted material on their behalf sign over the rights to that material in a clear, written assignment agreement.
4. Publish a Thorough Privacy Policy
Hoteliers must develop and implement legally compliant privacy policies related to the collection and use of personal information. Every hotel should have a link to their privacy policy on their website. For hoteliers, pages on which to do this typically include the home page, reservation pages, website registration pages, and email collection tools. Implementing and adhering to the privacy policy are equally important. Make sure to designate and empower one or more employees to ensure a privacy policy is implemented.
5. Proactively Register Related Domain Names
To avoid cybersquatting and related problems, hoteliers should be extremely aggressive in registering a variety of domain names related to their own domains and future business ventures. Hoteliers should register the following types of marks for most top-level domains (.com, .org, .net):
- Common misspellings of trademarks
- Trademarks plus other descriptive phrases (e.g. brand + hotel)
- Trademarks plus common negative phrases (e.g. brand + sucks)
- Planned or possible future sub-brands in development at the hotel company (e.g. brand + express or brand + spa)
6. Bid with Caution on Others’ Trademarks
The relatively unsettled legal landscape of using others’ trademarks in PPC advertising has sparked a range of non-legal responses in the form of policies and contractual requirements by the major search engines, the hotel brands, and industry trade groups. Most of the major search engines have published guidelines on their corporate websites to communicate their stance on the various forms of trademark bidding. The search engines’ guidelines differ greatly, but all of them provide for some form of penalty for noncompliance. Self-imposed restrictions from the search engines fall into two general categories: first, rules about whether a third party’s trademarks can be the subject of bids; and second, restrictions on the use of a third party’s trademarks in the heading or text of an ad that appears in the PPC results.
7. Adhere to Proper Search Engine Optimisation Practices
Avoid being penalised and delisted by search engines for improper search engine spam techniques. Do not hide keyword-dense text on your website or repeat certain phrases within ‘hidden’ source codes for only the search engines to read. These practices are called keyword stuffing and, when detected, a website can be quarantined by search engines. Additionally, do not deliver one version of a webpage to a user and a different version to a search engine for indexing purposes. Creating a homepage with chunks of keyword-heavy text to increase your rankings on search engines and then redirecting consumers to an actual informative and engaging homepage is called ‘cloaking’ and can result in a site being delisted by search engines. Create web pages for users and continually optimise your site in accordance with search engine guidelines, which can be found on the various search engines’ corporate websites.
8. Monitor the Use of Your Brand Name by Advertisers on the Search Engines
Monitor who is bidding on or using your trademarks in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Competitors and third party intermediaries could be bidding on your hotel name and stealing part of your market share. Consistently monitor the search engines for these types of PPC advertising and determine if it infringes your trademark.
9. Watch Online Travel Blogs and Review Sites
Hotels generally lack control over the information that is shared about them online by the public. Stay aware of the ‘buzz’ that travel blogs and review sites are posting related to your property. Negative reviews can cost hotels thousands of Rand in lost bookings and decrease a property’s ‘star’ rating on various review sites. Negative statements about a hotel should be identified immediately and evaluated to determine if they are true, false, or possibly fake. Accurate, but negative reviews should be treated as a free focus group and used to fuel improvements at the property. False, negative reviews require recourse by pursuing the appeal or response process of the specific site. Most travel review sites have established processes for handling negative reviews. Some sites allow hotels to submit ‘management responses,’ which are posted alongside negative reviews, while others allow you to appeal a negative review and request its removal from a site.
10. Comply to CAN SPAM Laws When Conducting Email Marketing
Email marketing is an extremely valuable tool for hoteliers to communicate with potential guests and generate business through e-newsletters, email promotions, and loyalty programmes. Beware, however, that your communication is not looked up, or treated by servers, as spam.
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