Ten standards for promoting your hotel online

New York – In contrast to the upside offered by the online channel, the dynamic growth of the online environment also creates a range of new risks and opportunities for strong competition in hospitality. TIG Global shares some valuable insights on how to meet these challenges.

With purchases of online travel continuing to scale at a feverish pace, the Internet is quickly becoming the most significant distribution channel for hotel revenue growth. It is predicted that at least 60 percent of all hotel bookings will be made online by 2009, and, therefore, the Internet affords hospitality professionals an immense opportunity to leverage increased brand awareness and highly profitable revenue contribution.

In contrast to the upside offered by the online channel, the dynamic growth of the online environment also creates a range of new risks and opportunities for strong competition in hospitality. When this competition crosses the line of legal propriety, hotel professionals should identify and address the transgressions in order to protect their assets, revenues, and brands. Illegal or improper online activities by others can cost hotels revenue, profit margin, brand value, and goodwill. Hoteliers themselves also should avoid running afoul of the formal laws and informal “rules” of online marketing. Missteps can be costly.

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, and how to write the title of a new email blast – 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. Proactive awareness can often avert matters that ultimately might fall into the hands of lawyers.

Hospitality professionals can protect their brands online more effectively and avert legal snares by adhering to the following guidelines of online marketing (summarized from “Profits and Pitfalls of Online Marketing: A Legal Desk Reference for Travel Executives” written by Mike Heilbronner, Sue Heilbronner, and Cindy Estis Green).

Clear Your Trademarks
Before creating and publicizing a new name for a resort, hotel, or program, hire counsel to “clear” the name and evaluate the potential risk of infringing an existing trademark. Several vendors offer comprehensive search services, and intellectual property attorneys regularly evaluate such searches and provide opinions about the risks associated with using new trademarks. Companies should seek to register new trademarks that are important to their marketing plans (e.g., the name of a new spa treatment, a unique hotel package, or the name of a kids-camp program at a group of hotels). Once a company is ready to use a new trademark, and after the trademark has been cleared, the company should file an application to register the trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Continually Register Your Copyrights
Copyrights protect original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium (e.g., a 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, etc. Continually re-register your materials when important new website content is added and when material design changes occur. Copyright registration is not mandatory, but it enables you to protect your creative material when someone infringes on it. Registration also offers valuable potential remedies in litigation.

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. The financial and other risks associated with copyright infringement are substantial. 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. Hoteliers also need to be sure that all vendors have cleared the rights to any photos or other intellectual property used on your hotel websites and in other marketing materials since, as an involved party, you share potential liability. Lastly, if you or your vendors take original photographs of recognizable people for commercial purposes, model release agreements need to be signed in order to protect your ongoing rights to the images.

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. The expense associated with registering additional domains (as low as $8 per year per registration) pales in comparison to the expense and resource drain associated with securing the transfer of a valuable domain from a squatter. 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”)

Get entire article on – Hotelmarketing.com

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