Loews Hotels & Resorts recently introduced Twitter to drive bookings but will it have staying power? Ritesh Gupta investigates

How to convert engagement on Facebook and Twitter into revenue is a puzzle the travel industry has been trying to solve for some time. Recently Loews Hotels & Resorts led the way by offering potential customers a chance to book a room via Twitter through its new tool.

It believes that given the active and conversational nature of Twitter, the micro-blogging site is a strong platform for transactions.

How it works

A consumer tweets to @Loews_Hotels and includes #BookLoews within the tweet. Then one of the firm’s travel planners in Nashville will engage in the conversation by replying to the initial tweet with a greeting. In this there is also a link to a secure ‘chat’ where the travel planner will secure reservation details. The consumer then receives a confirmation of their reservation via email - standard protocol for all bookings - no matter the distribution channel. 

Of the initiative which was announced in November, Piper Stevens, director of social media, Loews Hotels & Resorts, says: “As part of the broader Loews Hotels Social Media strategy, we wanted to actively engage guests and potential guests in a social manner during the booking stage of the travel continuum.”

Having witnessed a consistent number of tweets about reservations being submitted to @Loews_Hotels, Stevens observed that there was an opportunity to directly connect consumers with travel planners at the Loews reservation centre in Nashville, Tennessee. 

“Twitter seemed like the natural choice because of the nature of conversations that take place in the network,” says Stevens, “and we felt that we could assume conversations that were very similar to the offline exchanges that take place at our reservation centre”.

As far as timing is concerned, Piper believed that with the attention that Twitter was receiving with their IPO and the start of the holiday travel season, it was an ideal time to launch Loews Social Reservations.

Why Twitter?

According to Piper, the business use case for Twitter is growing. “I think the concept of transacting over Twitter via #BookLoews will spawn many other iterations over various industries and we are excited to be able to determine how best to utilise this channel to grow our distribution and customer base,” she says.     

As far as analysing performance is concerned, it is important to understand the real value to the business and to track KPIs regularly. “In addition to our current metrics, which measure our awareness, engagement, and post visits to our website, we will institute metrics to mirror some traditional hotel metrics such as conversion rate, the number of reservations, ADR, revenue from Twitter,” says Stevens.

Goal driven

Companies today are already using Twitter to support their brand marketing as well as delivering a real value proposition to customers – American Express is one example.  “We felt that by enabling our followers to transact directly with us on Twitter, a platform they were already using on a daily basis, would greatly increase our value for them,” she says.

But the move was clearly thought through, and followed a series of Twitter observations while tracking conversation topics coming through Loews’ brand handle. “We decided to move forward with social reservations over Twitter because it is such an active forum for conversation which we thought would help build traction quickly,” explains Piper.

Loews’ social media strategy is defined by clear financial goals. “We think many companies, including Loews, are still trying to figure out the true potential of Twitter in marketing efforts and how to turn social loyalty into revenue. But we feel strongly that Twitter Reservations will be one of the most direct ways to draw a correlation,” says Stevens.

Being prepared   

To prepare for Twitter was a team effort between the Loews Corporate Marketing team and the Loews Reservation Centre, but it wasn’t straightforward.

“Launching on a very public forum definitely made us a little nervous,” admits Stevens. Like any social media-based programme, the company wanted to ensure that it had a straightforward process in place and that everyone involved had a pre-defined role. “We wanted to be equipped to make lemonade out of any lemons that we experienced on the first day. As I’ve found in many launches throughout my career, when you are prepared from the start, panic rarely ensues.” 

Judging by the initial response, Stevens believes that the new initiative has “staying power” as the process is very simple and easy to use.

Other social channels

The team at Loews is constantly looking at all social networks and evaluating how it might be able to utilise each channel to aid the process of booking a room for consumers. 

“In order to decipher how best to use each social network to add value to our guests, we evaluate the primary purpose of why consumers are interacting on each individual network and then overlay the types of information that consumers want to have at their fingertips during each stage of the travel continuum,” says Stevens. She can’t rule out that we’ll move social reservations beyond Twitter at some point, but given the active and conversational nature of the network, believes that right now this is the best place for transactions to occur.

Lighting the way

While it may be too early to predict, some pundits have started to predict that other companies will follow suit. 

“We are certain that there are many smart marketers in the industry that will at least consider how to utilise Twitter differently than they have in the past because of this launch,” she says.  

Using Twitter to engage in real-time transaction opportunities by linking off to a secure, encrypted chat will certainly take hold with a variety of companies inside and outside of the hospitality industry.  For its part, Loews believes there are still more opportunities to explore and it intends to build a full marketing plan around #BookLoews for 2014.

Piper Stevens, director of social media, Loews Hotels & Resorts is scheduled to speak at the Social Media & Mobile Strategies for Travel 2014 conference, to be held in San Francisco (March 17 – 18) next year.