TODAY: World Cup highlights Russia’s tourism potential, Project-based business travel spend topped $45b in 2017 and If Conversion is King, Make Optimising the Booking Experience Your Focus.

World Cup highlights Russia’s tourism potential
Monday, 9th July 2018

World Cup highlights Russia’s Travel & Tourism potential Spending by international visitors to Russia is expected to grow by 7% this year.

Data produced by WTTC, in conjunction with Oxford Economics, has shown Travel & Tourism revenues in Moscow are set to grow at an increasing pace of 6.6% per year in the years to 2026, with tourism spending purely by foreigners set to rise by 9.6% per year on average over the next decade >>

Africa’s hotel sector offers potential for further growth
8 Jul 2018 : An increase in the number of foreign and domestic travellers, as well as an expansion in a number of hotel chains on the continent reinforces the hotel sector’s untapped potential for business growth >>

The Hotels Network launches Oraculo - the world’s first predictive algorithm for hotels
9 Jul 2018 : New software significantly boosts website conversions using machine learning to enable user-driven personalisation >>

New Zealand tourism and hotel market overview
9 Jul 2018 : The performance of the New Zealand hotel industry improved for the fifth year in a row in 2017, on the back of continuing strong growth in inbound international visitor arrivals, and almost no growth in room supply >>

Project-based business travel spend topped $45b in 2017
7 Jul 2018 : In 2017, project-based business travel spending reached more than $45 billion USD, comprising 15 percent of all US business travel spending, according to a first-of-its-kind study from the Global Business Travel Association, in partnership with InterContinental Hotels Group >>

HIGHLIGHT ARTICLE

If Conversion is King, Make Optimising the Booking Experience Your Focus
Monday, 9th July 2018

The two Cs that are often referred to in e-commerce are content and conversion, we may put them together and say: Good content that leads to conversion is king.

For hotels, the easier part of the task of customer acquisition is getting eyeballs to your website. Major brands like Hilton and Marriott have driven large gains in website traffic and sign-ups to their loyalty programmes in recent years thanks to major advertising campaigns >>

The Importance of Understanding Travelers' Motivation
Travelers make decisions for many different reasons, some rational and others more emotional, the complex web of underlying social and emotional drivers often collide with the more considered and rational impulses: What can the travel industry do to better serve travelers then? >>

To Scale or Not to Scale? That is the Question for Hoteliers
With unprecedented change rocking the hospitality industry to its foundations, many hotels are left wondering what their best course of action is. Large players, it seems, have been pursuing a two-pronged strategy: they’re getting larger via mergers and acquisitions and they are also creating an increasing number of what is termed ‘soft brands’, where independent properties join a large chain but retain a good degree of autonomy >>