This is a brief study on how travellers self organise their path of decision making through Social Media

1. Issue #2
The closest thing resembling to the function of Social Media is actually the table. Social Media
swapped the table and serviced the needs of humans to communicate, connect, learn, share
and form communities. Why did this happen now? Simply because technology allowed it now.
The only thing that has changed is the way humans’ filter and process information. In fact
Social Media have helped humans to do whatever they have been doing since the beginning of
time that is “word of mouth” decision making but in a worldwide and enriched manner.
Up until recently communication and marketing was one way, consumers passively received
messages and made purchase decisions in an almost linear fashion. This is not the case
anymore since consumers or Travelers in our hypothesis tend to self
organize their path of decision making through the help of Social
Media. Part of what they do with the assistance of the various
Social Media platforms is researching, discussing, evaluating,
validating and selective purchasing.
• Researching
The majority of Travelers (9/10) start researching online when it comes
to planning their vacations. It should be noted that search engines (62%) and
Hotel websites (55%) are the main online sources that leisure Travelers typically use to
plan their trips. Notwithstanding, if we take into consideration that only 14% of the
consumers trust adverts whereas 77% trust each other, we can understand that
information across the Social Media is far more valued by the customer than the one from
the 2 main sources above..
• Discussing & sharing
Markets are converged online and interconnected by conversations. They are so
congregated and socially propelled that it is no use anymore to segment. It is nowadays
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2. suggested to start perceiving markets as conversations divided into subjects. Discussions
and sharing of information are and will be induced. If you do not participate in the
discussions as a company you are not actually going to penetrate the markets and you’ll
finally lose on marketing, sales and obviously revenue.
• Evaluating
By engaging into discussion and drawing actively information, the Traveler becomes
smarter and more organized. The same do the markets that the Traveler
belongs to with the added benefit of encompassing increasingly “healthier”
content as it is constantly filtered, revised, broadened and updated.
Conclusive Social Media become and will continue to be the strongest
evaluation tool of a Traveler where nothing can be kept secret good or bad.
• Validating
Hospitality services are elusive, meaning that there is little to experience beforehand, as
they cannot be sampled or physically examined on a shelf. Taking into consideration that
Travelers invest big amounts of money and time on their vacation,
it is wise to say that it is a high-risk decision. According to
Google research in 2012 Travelers take a shortcut to security
as 50% of them based their travel plans on other people’s
reviews and experiences. Also, Social Media can have serious
post purchase impact. Travelers may validate their choice or
otherwise cultivate a remorse effect that can even compromise
their experience, i.e. by not receiving the expected positive response from their friends.
• Selective purchasing
Travelers based on individual drives can dig in intelligence and create added value by
steering their purchases to wherever they believe they can gain more value. In simple words
they may choose to book a hotel through a travel agent rather than directly simply because
the travel agent provided successfully other Travelers with additional
services regarding the destination (i.e. car rental, tours, etc.) or because
the travel agent is linked to a local festival. Some hospitality enterprises
have already been appealing to this partiality by introducing concierge or
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3. guest relations to their Social Media either by presence or in content. For example,
Marriott International has launched an online concierge service through Twitter while IHG
created a “Social Media Customer Care Team”.
Online reputation, presence and active participation in Social Media is not a fab, it's the new
way of conducting business. It is cheap to operate and if used cleverly, it can help beat
competitors that are way more powerful. Size and resources do not mater. What matters is
presence, interactivity, focused strategies, good quality content and imagination. In Social
Media you do not have to be a giant to be giant, you just have to be clever and love your
friends to become one.
There are many more points to make regarding the significance of Social Media for hospitality.
Certainly, there is no right or wrong answer and I encourage you to respond to this post and
add your crumb of knowledge and opinion. You may leave your comments and access the
previous issue of Hospitality Mindsets on www.slideshare.net/VassilisXenoudakis.
Thank you for reading!
Vassilis X.
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