Hilton beats online booking targets with local web project

International hotel chain drives ecommerce strategy with local web content project

Global hotel chain Hilton International has hit its online booking targets ahead of schedule by creating a localised ecommerce strategy.

The company embarked on a programme to overhaul the process of publishing tailored local comment to each of the hotelier’s country web sites in 2003 when it realised the internet would play a key role in changing travel buying habits.

Ian Sloan, director of content management for Hilton International, says the rapid success of online travel retailers such as Expedia and Lastminute.com made the company realise it needed to improve ways of capitalising on increased internet travel spending.

‘We wanted to grow our online business to over 20 per cent of the individual reservations or revenue per reservation booked versus offline bookings in less than five years,’ said Sloan.

‘But we reached that target in less than half the time we initially expected it to take.’

The challenge for Hilton International was that it operates 400 hotels across Europe and Asia and needed to develop highly localised content simultaneously in seven different languages.

The company developed an automated, decentralised content management system from software vendor Interwoven and used a translation language service from Translation.com.

‘We wanted to provide a content-rich reservation and booking online channel with localised relevant information delivered to the customer throughout the booking process,’ said Sloan.

Local, hotel-based content managers can now publish up-to-date content simultaneously in their own language to their country site and to the main, English-language site.

Sloan says added benefits are the ability to react rapidly to local changes in the market and capitalise on local expertise and knowledge, while central sales and marketing teams can develop more targeted delivery for special offers and promotions.

‘The new content and translation system allows us to track and audit content much more easily,’ he said .

‘But we had to develop processes carefully to make sure we safeguarded a consistency of style and language. And we had to make sure the system was user friendly given the high levels of staff turnover there is in the hospitality business.’