Last Thursday took place HOTELtrack’09 within the framework of the Sitc (hospitality tradeshow), an encounter taken place in Barcelona and gathering more than 60 professionals from the tourism industry.

This year Hoobing had the opportunity to participate reading the paper “Intermediary Free Environments, an Opportunity for the Hospitality Industry”, and we had the pleasure to share table with Emilia Jódar, Yahoo! Search Account Manager and Ramón Solé, Product manager for Rumbo.es and Viajar.com. Unfortunately, Viçenc Martí, Vueling’s Marketing General Manager could not stay due to work compromises.

First of all we would like to thank Lluis Soler for organizing the event, both the topics reviewed – revenue management, innovation within the hospitality industry, online positioning, etc.-and the readers were excellent. Fernando del Corral, Asunción Zorrilla y Javier García Cuenca were superb in their presentations relating revenue management. Oscar Casasnovas clearly pictured how an independent hotel can innovate in social media marketing and showed the importance not only of listening but also of participating in the conversation, so being able to carry out improvements in the hotel service with the aim to loyalise possible customers.

We, on our behalf, wished to review the evolution of the distribution systems within the hospitality industry, before the internet era, during the first steps of online distribution, what is currently going on and finally, which are the latest trends. Following our motto Book directly | travel smart, direct sales are becoming more and more important, especially during hard times like today’s, a moment when there’s a tendency to cut down intermediary costs.

As a conclusion to HOTELtrack’09, in our opinion, not only innovation is important to generate revenues as Hosteltur online journal noted last Friday, the 17th: microsegmentation of customers is also essential for hotel-driven marketing campaigns to render really effective. To get to know the customer and send him the information he really needs is the best way to “hit the target”.