Early this August, Google made an upgrade to their Google My Business’s features for hotel listing, by allowing property owners to edit / customize their hotels’ services and amenities in a specific “Hotel attributes” section. Make sure your marketing teams don’t miss out on this small but powerful change!
First up, it’s important to note that hotels’ profiles on Google My Business had amenities list before this latest update was announced. However, these lists were generated automatically by Google pulling data from hotels’ sites. That’s why, very often, some newly updated amenities were missed, while outdated information were shown to the viewers. Fortunately Google finally fixed it and thereby making the platform more useful for hoteliers.
>> Check out Google’s tweet for the announcement and go to their Support for the ‘how’.
Why is this change noteworthy?
First, it is obvious for the accuracy and consistency of information.
More importantly, this addition turns Hotel Attributes into a potential targeting marketing tool for hoteliers, rather than merely for information purposes. Marketing teams can now customize the amenity list to match the behaviors of their target audiences. They can even use it as an experimental tool to see, for example, which combinations of listed services would bring the most reservations.
Given that 70% of hotel searches are for a particular amenity like “hotel with an indoor gym” or “hotel with meeting facilities”, it’s important for you hoteliers to:
1. Google your property’s name to check if you are using the new feature.
2. Sit down with your marketing people and see what could be done to get the most out of this Google feature.
3. This feature can also help hotels capture guests preferences and to better tailor and personalize communication.
Once captured, it’s important to store the data inside your CRM, to be able to build a rich customer profile.
