© 1996, Cornell University

[Executive summary]

Many hotel managers and hotel-operating companies are attempting to use the internet and its worldwide web as an effective management and marketing tool. An exploratory survey finds thousands of hotel-related sites. Most such sites are hotel guides, chain hotels, and individual hotels, in that order. Current WWW hotel sites vary tremendously, from those with little more than a name and address to sites with features and information services for employees, individual and group travelers, travel agents, and business and convention clients. Available functions of a web page include: travel information, reservations and payment, special promotions, links to partners, direct consumer feedback, employment opportunities, audio and video ads, gift certificates, shareholder information, newsletters, frequently asked questions, and a list of and links to individual hotels. The costs of establishing and maintaining a web site vary considerably, usually depending on the site-owner’s commitment to the medium. The most effective hotel sites are those that give the consumer the easiest, most rewarding access to relevant and related information. They are the sites that permit enabling, engaging, facilitating, sustaining, and rewarding interaction between the consumer and the hotelier. For any web site, there are four important considerations for its successful management: defining the mission, addressing the mechanics, planning the marketing, and performing the maintenance. Today’s WWW sites are a starting point for analysis and research into the managerial and marketing applications of the internet.

[Text begins:]

The ballyhoo surrounding the internet continues to intensify. To determine how the hotel industry is using this potentially revolutionary marketing and management tool, we took an exploratory look at the internet and at worldwide-web hotel sites. We looked at the type of hotel-related sites that exist on the web. We also surveyed the sites via e-mail, and the responses we gathered gave us valuable insights.

Earlier we undertook a similar survey to determine the restaurant industry’s use of the internet and the worldwide web (WWW). Hotels have some similarities with restaurants, but the WWW hotel sites we surveyed offer many more features; there were 32 separate features for hotels versus 10 for restaurants in our earlier survey. [Jamie: Maybe part of the difference is due to the fact that the hotel survey took place more recently. Maybe some if not most of the restaurant sites now have as many features. Also, a more likely explanation is that you are comparing independent restaurants to chain hotel companies.—Fred] We analyzed the practicalities and purposes of the site features, charting which ones each hotel offers, and developed a picture of how specific hotels use their WWW sites and which features work best.

Many companies may be questioning whether their WWW ventures are worth the effort, either economically or strategically. A recent study by the Boston-based Yankee Group notes that the "hype-fueled stampede to the Web is already beginning to slow.ÉWhile the number of commercial sites grew at a weekly rate of 4.4 percent in the third quarter, that rate has slowed to just 2.8 percent in the fourth quarter as an increasing number of companies have begun leaving the Web."

A company’s good or bad experience depends on the amount of research it did before going on-line and its long-term financial commitment to maintaining a web site. Steve Franco, program manager at the Yankee Group, observes, "Few businesses have based their Internet investment on little more than a back-of-the envelope calculationÉ18 percent have done no analysis at all, while only 12 percent have justified their investment plans under the scrutiny typically required within an organization." In our opinion, a hotelier should think long and hard before going on the WWW.

Jim Van Deusen, director of sales for Harvey’s Hotel in Nevada, offers a sobering perspective on the use of the WWW: "It does not currently justify the resources necessary to initiate and maintain a presence. It is a toy and at the moment only duplicates the telephone and mail. I waste my time responding to reservation requests that should have come via phone and answering questions about the snow conditions. I am considering removing my e-mail address and inserting our regular 800 phone number. We have very effective systems in place to service customers, and this is not one of them. I believe the current best use of our home page is only as another advertising and marketing medium."

To have a successful web site and realize the potential of that tool, one must do some careful planning. As Michel Bouquier, executive director for Relais and Chateaux, states: "Being on the internet requires a full marketing strategy. You must know your own personal goals.ÉFor Relais and Chateaux those goals are to increase worldwide visibility, upgrade public relations and publicity, develop sales, and include new technology in internal communication."

Intranet. For Bouquier and other hotel-marketing practitioners, the internet also has a communication function for internal management tasks. Indeed, as Michael Lewinski of the Coburn Hotel in Boulder, Colorado, maintains, "The most valuable potential of the internet does not lie in better advertising and marketing for businesses but rather in new means of interpersonal communications." Managers can now communicate in a more timely, efficient, and cost-effective manner.

Referred to as the intranet, the internal corporate or management applications of WWW technology are being billed as the most practical management application of the information superhighway. A recent report by Zona Research estimates that "more than half of the 250,000 computers supporting World Wide Web services today are posting data exclusively as corporate Intranet sites and that more than 15 million workers are linked using Intranet applications."

Tim Clark’s 1996 predictions perhaps best summarize the future of the WWW: "Business uses of the Web will far outstrip consumer activity. Not just the intranet for internal corporate use, but for collaboration, technical support and commerce with customers and partners." Intranet applications may hold the key to the development of the WWW as an effective management tool rather than just an efficient marketing tool.

In this paper we present some baseline data and methods that can help hoteliers make practical use of the WWW and may point to areas of future research. By analyzing the features of the existing WWW hotel sites and questioning the cyber-hoteliers, we provide both a snapshot of existing sites and a starting point for future research into how to use this efficient medium effectively.

On December 17, 1995, we used the keywords hotel, Florida hotel, Orlando hotel, and hotel reservation with five separate search engines (a search engine is a WWW site that looks for keywords in a stored database of millions of WWW sites). The search engines were the same four as in our previous survey plus AltaVista, then the newest and "best" search engine.

We then categorized the hotel sites based on their description or name or by actually visiting the site. We started from the top of each returned search list and worked our way down. While it is not a random sample, working from the top down on a returned list is the process many WWW surfers use. We categorized a site only once per search engine, regardless of how many times it appeared. We followed the same procedure on December 18 and 19 to check the search engine’s consistency and to determine the stability of the web sites, with the same results.

Twenty chain hotels and 16 freestanding hotel sites were analyzed to see what features they contained (see accompanying box for addresses of the sites). We recorded which of 32 different features were on those 36 sites. The different features were then placed into four broad categories: promotion and marketing, service and information, interactivity and technology, and management. We analyzed all sites twice to determine consistency, and the results for each coding were very similar.

Chain Hotels

[I removed "Alamo Car Rental" from this head because I didn’t know why it was there—Fred]

Note: We expected the search engines to discover sites for Best Western, Doubletree Inns, and Ramada, but no such sites were revealed.

We sent a standardized but personalized e-mail questionnaire to all 36 hotels asking specific questions about their WWW-site experiences (see accompanying box). Thirteen hoteliers responded; their insightful responses appear throughout this article. The response rate (36 percent) might have been greater except for these considerations: the timing of the survey coincided with winter holidays (late December); non-U.S. sites surveyed (Latvia, Japan, Canada, France, Italy, Austria) may have resisted spending resources on translating the survey [Is that what you meant?—Fred]; large organizations (hotel chains) included in the survey tend to ignore such requests for information; and the survey posed a set of questions that may have appeared to some to be overwhelming and hence the survey was ignored.

[Carefully inspect the way I’ve changed the previous paragraph. Did I capture your intentions accurately?—Fred]

(1) Are you happy you put up the site?

(2) Do you feel the site will be cost-effective?

(3) How many monthly hits do you receive?

(4) How many monthly e-mails do you receive?

(5) How many monthly reservations do you receive?

(6) How expensive was the site to create?

(7) How expensive is the site on a monthly basis?

(8) How many monthly person-hours does WWW-site maintenance take?

(9) What would you like to say to your fellow hoteliers about using the WWW or the internet in the future?

(10) Any other comments?

Technical complexity. This is an exploratory study of a medium that is growing rapidly. Lycos, for example, contained about 8 million URLs (universal resource locators, or WWW addresses) in November 1995 and about 16 million the next month. "Through November, the number of computers serving up at least one file to the publicÉreached 125,592,Éa fivefold increase from January when 26,168 computers were serving files to the public, according to Dr. Michael Maulden, inventor of Lycos’ World Wide Web searching technology." We made no attempt to randomly select sites or search engines.

Technical problems continue to hinder the WWW, and the future is unclear. Connection and transmission speed to the internet, evolving technologies, and browser compatibility are potential sources of problems. Each time a new or upgraded version of browser software is released, for example, it supports additional functions that may be incompatible with earlier versions or rival browsers. The latest experimental release (as of December 31, 1995) of Netscape, 2.0b4, supports new multimedia software plug-ins not seen on Netscape 1.2. Not only that but all technological pieces (e.g., browser, modem, WWW site, network server, transmission systems, and plug-ins) must work together.

A plug-in is an additional software package that enables a browser to perform more sophisticated multimedia functions. The plug-ins new to Netscape 2.0b4 are Sun’s Java, Adobe’s ‘Amber’ Acrobat Reader, Corel’s CMX Viewer, Tumbleweed’s Envoy Plug-In, Visual Components’ Formula One/Net, NC Compass’s OLE Control, Object Power’s Openscape, Progressive Networks’ Real Audio, Macromedia’s Shockwave, VDONET’s VDOLive, and Paper Software’s WebFX; Apple’s Quick Time will be added soon.

Evolving multimedia features will make today’s best WWW sites soon seem primitive. At the same time, they will prove frustrating to site designers and users, owing to browser incompatibility, software requirements, and limitations on transmission speed.

Cyber-hoteliers such as Michael Lewinski, though, look forward to incorporating "new technologies (cable modems, AT&T Paradyne’s GlobeSpan, and so on) that will provide bandwidth for uncompressed real-time video over existing delivery systems, allow us to provide video tours of our properties, and allow for videoconferencing for reservations and queries."

Although our analysis of the various hotel WWW sites was objective, it reflects our experiences using our computer system in December 1995. Using another browser or computer system, or choosing a different time for the study, would probably give different results. Many of the sites continue to improve. While revisiting some sites in January 1996, we noticed that features not present in our December analysis are now part of those sites. Best Western was not in our original analysis but announced its WWW site in late January 1996.

We did not analyze the sites for "flow," a subjective term for WWW sites that means "fun, fast, intuitive, interesting, and easy to navigate." We do, however, comment on flow whenever appropriate.

AltaVista reported a mind-boggling number of sites—about 100,000—containing the keyword hotel. As Exhibit 1 shows, no matter which search engine is used, focusing the keywords by being as specific as possible fine-tunes the search.

Keyword Yahoo WebCrawler Lycos McKinley AltaVista

Hotel 754 6,397 1,676 >60 ~100,000

Florida hotel 39 641 83 >60 ~10,000

Orlando hotel 6 201 58 2 ~5,000

Hotel reservation 48 1,193 721 52 ~15,000

[Why don’t we have exact numbers for McKinley and AltaVista? Also, what’s the order of the columns based on? I suggest either ordering them alphabetically or by number of hits.—Fred]

Types of hotel sites. Over half the hotel sites that we examined are hotel guides (see Exhibit 2), such as Casino Tour Listing, British Travel Information, and San Francisco Hotel Reservations. Most of the guides are sponsored by entrepreneurs or tourism associations.

Yahoo Lycos WebCrawler McKinley Total

(N = 162) (N = 105) (N = 109) (N = 103) (N = 479)

Guide 46% 62% 61% 39% 51%

Hotel 19% 21% 36% 32% 26%

Conference or show 5% 5% 1% 19% 7%

Travel agency 12% 3% 0% 1% 5%

Product or service 9% 2% 0% 1% 4%

Game or humor 1% 2% 2% 3% 2%

Hotel school 4% 1% 0% 0% 1%

Mortgages [?] 2% 0% 0% 1% 1%

Miscellaneous 3% 5% 1% 4% 3%

Roughly a fourth of the web hotel sites are maintained by hotels—primarily hotel chains. The hotel sites vary enormously in content, quality, and flow.

Conferences, travel agencies, hotel schools, mortgages [meaning, mortgage lenders? offerings? financiers? partners?], and product or service providers account for almost a fifth of the sites. They are future partners for a variety of internet functions such as human resources, accounting, marketing, purchasing, and finance. [I’m not sure what you’re trying to say in that last sentence. Maybe an example would help.—Fred] As the technologies improve and hotels’ internet management evolves, hoteliers will increasingly and effectively use the net for purposes other than marketing.

Hotel-site features. We observed 32 separate features on the 36 analyzed hotel sites (see Exhibit 3). Typically, the opening screen of a web site displays the features available at that site (see Exhibits 4 and 5). E-mail and some type of travel information were the most common features, found on about seven out of ten sites. About half the sites had direct e-mail; in theory that provides for more direct communication between the hotel and the cyber-guest. A distinctive company URL address, on roughly half the sites, is another feature that shows the hotel’s commitment to the WWW (see Exhibits 4 and 5 for examples). [Jamie, I don’t understand how a company’s URL could be anything but distinctive—URLs are unique WWW addresses, right?—Fred] The chain hotels used that feature six times more often than the independent hotels.

Percentage Percentage of Percentage

of chains independents of total Classification*

E-mail 60 81 69 S, I

Travel information 60 81 69 S

Reservations offered 60 50 56 P, I

Own URL 75 13 47 I

Direct e-mail 60 31 47 I

Reservations functioning 45 50 47 P, S, I

What’s new 65 19 44 P, S

Special promotions 55 32 44 P, S

Group promotions 35 56 44 P, S

Links to partners 45 32 39 P, S, I

Feedback form 40 19 31 P, I

Frequent-visitor program 35 6 22 P, S

Reservation payment 10 31 19 P, S, I

Business-travel promotion 25 6 17 P, S

Multilingual site 15 19 17 P, S

Family or kids promotion 20 6 14 P, S

Download or view documents 15 0 8 P, S, I

Secure reservation payment 5 8 6 P, S, I

Employment opportunities 10 0 6 S, M

Audio 10 0 6 S, I

Video 10 0 6 S, I

Gift certificates 10 0 6 P, S, I

Shareholder information 10 0 6 S, M

Employee of the month 5 0 3 S, M

Safety and security tips 5 0 3 P, S

E-mail newsletter 5 0 3 P, S, I

On-line forum 5 0 3 S, I

Frequently asked questions 5 0 3 S

Restaurant promotion   69 S, I

List of all hotels 90   P, S

Links to individual hotels 80   P, S, I

Hotel-search capability 35   P, S, I

*P = promotion and marketing;

S = service and information;

I = interactivity and technology; and

M = management.

  Not measured.

[The former Figure 2 here.]

[The former Figure 3 here.]

[Jamie, in the next section I’d like to change all the percentages to raw numbers, since the "N" we are working with is so small in the first place.—Fred]

While over half the hotel web sites we looked at offered web users the means to make reservations over the internet, less than half had a functioning reservation system, only [seven?] suggested how to make payment for the reservation [did I interpret that correctly?—Fred], and only two of the 36 sites offered a secure (encrypted) method for making payment directly via the web site. There is a huge chasm between offering reservations and completing the transaction. Independent hotels seem more eager than chain hotels to encourage payment using the web (about one in three versus one in ten) [the raw numbers should translate as 6 of 16 chains versus 2 out of 20 independents], often by simply suggesting e-mailing, faxing, or calling-in the necessary credit-card information. [Did I interpret that last sentence correctly?—Fred]

Promotions such as special or seasonal (16 sites), group or conference (16 sites), frequent-visitor (8 sites), business-travel (6 sites), and family or children (5 sites) were also popular features, as was "linking" to the WWW sites of a chain’s individual hotels (16 of the chains did that) or linking to other on-line partners (XX sites [only chains, or independents, too?]). ("Linking" refers to clicking highlighted text on a web page to automatically transfer to another web site.) Two of the sites we looked at offered gift-certificates.

A few hotels used their sites for management activities other than marketing. Two sites listed employment opportunities and one announced the employee of the month. Two sites listed shareholder-related information.

Several sites experimented with some relatively new internet technologies. Over a third of the chain-hotel sites provided the means to search for and connect with specific hotels in that chain (via an interactive search engine). Roughly a third of the sites offered the opportunity to complete an electronic feedback form—a perfect example of a simple, effective use of the WWW that is a mid-1990s version of the decades-old in-room comment card.

Three sites provided the opportunity to either download or view a multitude of brochures. Two sites had audio capabilities and two had video capabilities. One site had an e-mail newsletter, and another had an on-line forum for travel discussions.

Having looked at the impressive array of features, we ask the obvious question: Are the features worthwhile? [Jamie: As I read on, you never really answer this question. Something needs to be rewritten: either answer the question, or change the lead sentence of this section.—Fred] If on-line reservations do not work, and if no one subscribes to the e-mail newsletter or watches the video, all that high-tech work and expense is for naught. What functions could and should the various features serve?

To assess the functions and potentials of the 32 features, we divided them into four nonexclusive categories: promotion and marketing, service and information, interactivity and technology, and management (refer back to Exhibit 3). Ten of the features serve three functions, and most of the other features serve two functions. Web-site design, though, should focus not on multiple-function features (i.e., lots of bells and whistles) but on the mission of the site. At present, management functions are the least utilized, and service and information functions are the most common. As hoteliers realize the WWW’s potential as a management tool, site features and functions will evolve.

Using the various features, we determined which of the surveyed hotel chains made the best use of the WWW site for the four separate functions (see Exhibit 6). [Jamie, would it be better to say that you determined which made the most use, or the most complete use, rather than the best use?—Fred] As this study uses exploratory methodologies, the ratings are by no means definitive. Delta, Grand Heritage, Hilton, and Outrigger scored well on three functions. We did not, however, analyze the sites for flow, and as we noted earlier, the WWW does not always work smoothly. Surfing the WWW is sometimes exciting and sometimes frustrating. A poorly designed, slow-to-download, boring site gets little repeat business. The bells and whistles one does choose to use are of little use if the site does not flow.

Delta • • •

Grand Heritage • • •

Hilton • • •

Holiday Inn •

Hotel Equatorial • •

Marriott •

Outrigger • • •

Promus •

Radisson •

Relais and Chateaux • •

Westin • •

Respondents reported that they received from less than 100 to about 100,000 monthly "hits." Monthly e-mail messages received ranged from one (Michael Lewinski says: "Thus far, a grand total of two counting yours. We have not yet actively marketed our site, as we are working to get [visual?] images of the hotel up.") to about 400. Most cyber-hoteliers reported 30 to 60 e-mail messages a month. Monthly on-line reservations varied from none up to about 200. Novotel, for one, does not feature reservations via the web site, because, as Thomas McCaffrey of Novotel North America, said, "It isn’t fair to our travel-agent partners."

The reported cost of creating a site ranged from $120 to $15,000, and the monthly costs ranged from none to about $1,000. Time spent on site maintenance each month varied from "almost none at this time, but we want to do more interactive stuff, which will take time" to 50 person-hours. Jim Van Deusen noted, "As we implement additional enhancements, maintenance could increase ten- to twenty-fold."

The cyber-hoteliers’ comments to their fellow hoteliers about the internet’s future were frank and mostly optimistic:

• Joe Durocher of Outrigger Hotels says: "While the direct business resulting from the web is small today, we expect it to grow. As the number of sites increase, it will become harder to break through the clutter and catch the user’s eye. Those on early will have a distinct advantage."

• Thomas McCaffee advises: "They should stay away from it at all costs! I don’t need the competition, thanks! Clearly this is the most efficient way of getting to an enormous segment of the worldwide marketplace, and the future looks to be unlimited."

• Charles Lim of Hotel Equatorial says: "It will be a new way of reaching out to the customer, something to consider besides print, television, radio, and other [traditional] media. The internet creates a level playing field where size is no longer apparent; a small group can appear to be as big as a large group."

• Scott Allison of Delta Hotels looks to the future: "The internet is increasingly becoming the source of information for a growing segment of the customer base in today’s economy. The increase in bookings and requests for information through this new medium is surpassing expectations, and the volume is growing every day. Delta Hotels is committed to establishing a leadership position in this important new medium."

The new character and capabilities that the worldwide web offers have marketing theoreticians grasping for new concepts and paradigms. Hoffman and Novak have introduced the concept of "hypermarketing" to help explain the peculiar aspects of conducting business in the new computer-mediated environments (CMEs). They argue that "the hypermedia CME presents a fundamentally different environment for marketing activities than traditional media and interactive multimedia" and that the "differences are so great that conventional marketing activities have become transformed and cannot be implemented in their present form."

They go on to say: "Most important from a marketing perspective, however, is the manner in which the hypermedia CME transforms the marketing functionÉ[and] turns traditional principles of mass media advertisingÉinside out, rendering application of advertising approaches which assume a passive, captive consumer impossible. Thus, marketers must reconstruct advertising models [because] Éconsumers actively choose whether or not to approach firms through their web sites, and [the consumers] exercise unprecedented control over the management of the content they interact with."

To the point, in the immediate interactive future, hotel marketing will need to pay homage to more than just the marketing concept. In addition, as Hoffman and Novak decree, the marketer will also need to engage "the Hyper-Marketing Concept, [wherein] the firm not only attempts to uncover and satisfy customer needs at a profit, but also engages in marketing activities that contribute positively to the development of the hypermedia CME itself, by developing new paradigms for electronic commerce."

In our evaluation, the hotel sites that are on the forefront of defining those new paradigms of electronic commerce on the WWW are those that give the consumer the easiest, most rewarding access to relevant and related information; take a personal its approach; and facilitate the exchange of mutually beneficial information. In other words, they are the sites designed and developed in accordance with what we define as the communication concept: enabling, engaging, facilitating, sustaining, and rewarding interaction between the consumer and the hotelier.

In our marketing future, conversation with one’s customers will prove the key to conversion: "Successful advertisers will have to stop their frenetic shouting at customers, and will instead offer polite invitations designed to initiate or continue individual customer dialogues. Starting a dialogue, either with a current customer or with a potential new customer, will be the primary goal of any marketer hoping eventually to sell products or services. Advertisers will no longer find it beneficial to irritate viewers into remembering their brands. Not only is this a bad way to begin a dialogue, but it is very likely that in the interactive future a consumer who feels irritated with a certain ad or brand will be capable of forbidding that brand from appearing on his own set again."

M, M, M, and M. The importance of regular and meaningful dialogue with one’s customers (as well as with one’s employees, suppliers, and investors) should be apparent. As it is, the WWW provides the hotelier with a unique channel to extend and improve that dialogue. Accordingly, internet-savvy hoteliers will ensure that the communication concept is adhered to as they go about defining the mission (the web site’s objectives and constituencies), addressing the mechanics (its design, features, and content), planning the marketing (both internally through related web sites and externally through traditional media advertising), and performing the maintenance (the ongoing construction and improvement of the site).

Hoffman and Novak admonish those who do not have that enlightened perspective: "Marketers must focus on playing an active role in the construction of new organic paradigms for facilitating commerce in the emerging electronic society underlying the Web, rather than infiltrating the existing primitive mechanical structures. This means that the effective marketer on the Web will not be the one, for example, who posts ‘politically correct’ advertisements on Usenet Newsgroups in order to avoid repressive negative word-of-mouth ‘flaming.’ Rather, the effective marketer will be actively constructing new models for marketing on the Web, based upon an increasingly diverse and complex virtual society. Such efforts will contribute to the establishment of organic solidarity within the heterogeneous market defined by segments of consumers and firms doing business in the hypermedia CME."

The WWW offers the cyber-hotelier a revolutionary management and marketing tool. As the web evolves, it will offer enhanced features, an expanding base of users, and better site-development tools. While it will not entirely replace traditional means of management and marketing, it is the wave of the future and brings with it new rules of communication. Most of our respondents indicated positive experiences with their web sites and a commitment to this new means of commerce. They realize, however, that successful WWW marketing requires not just the initial creation and steady maintenance of their site but also the willingness to adapt to this evolving environment.

"In this digital economy, individuals and enterprises create wealth by applying knowledge, networked human intelligence, and effort to manufacturing, agriculture, and services. In the digital frontier of this economy, the players, dynamics, rules and requirements for survival and success are all changing."

Since little research has been done on the hospitality industry’s use of the new internet technologies, there are a multitude of research possibilities. We believe that business functions such as human resources, finance, accounting, purchasing, real estate, insurance, and management-information systems on the internet will prove at least as beneficial as the currently predominating marketing function. Kimberley Harris and Joseph West provide an excellent reference for the human-resources possibilities of multimedia in their article "Using Multimedia in Hospitality Training."

We did not look at hotel-guide or hotel-listing sites, although they make up most of the hotel sites. Questions about the nature of the site owners and the cost and benefits of the sites need to be discussed. Travel-agency sites and their relationship with hotels would also fit in with an analysis of hotel-guide sites.

Log files are the recorded behavior of site visitors. Unlike questionnaires about usage, log files show exactly how long a visitor stays on each page of a site. They also indicate the visitor’s country and domain. [Jamie, let’s explain what the domain is. For example, is "Cornell" or ".edu" my domain?—Fred] In addition to a statistical analysis of the visitor, controlled experiments with page design (layout, graphics, color, interactive features, and so on) would aid in future site design.

Ours was a rudimentary, exploratory content analysis. Sophisticated content analysis and random-sampling techniques should be applied to the hospitality-industry sites on this revolutionary new medium. The various features on a WWW site and their subsequent functions should be studied. Some features (file size, e-mail, video, audio) can be objectively measured, while others (flow, navigability, graphics) are more difficult to assess. What functions a feature serves and, more important, what mission a site serves should be investigated. As base-line data are established, trend analysis becomes possible. CQ

It is tempting for today’s hotelier to be seduced by the information superhighway. Tom Forester, in "Megatrends or Megamistakes? What Ever Happened to the Information Society," a short, entertaining, and perceptive article about predictions on technology’s effects on our society, touches on such topics as the robot revolution, the paperless office, the leisure society, and the fully automated factory. The prognostications, he says, often miss the mark by a wide margin, because the prognosticators are seduced by the technological wonders.*

The internet will affect the way the hospitality industry operates in the future and, as such, hoteliers would do well to join the 21st century now, go on-line, and see for themselves. They must keep in mind, however, that the four Ms of internet management—mission, mechanics, marketing, and maintenance—must guide the WWW site strategy. Also, while there are benefits to using the internet, electronic communication will not supplant tried-and-true management principles. Instead it should abet good management.

A hotel manager may not have the time or the inclination to personally take the hotel on-line. The speed of change in the technology and the seemingly endless possibilities can be overwhelming. However, it is important to be aware of new developments and to have a working knowledge of the technology. It is here to stay. If your hotel does not keep pace, the added success the WWW can offer will pass your hotel by.

What is a hotel manager to do? Here is a brief checklist for the hotel manager who wants to enter his or her hotel into the world of cyberspace.

Define the mission. Set objectives with your hotel’s owners, corporate office, and executive committee. What do you want to accomplish by going on-line? Here are some possible marketing objectives:

• Improve sales by increasing communication with meeting planners, incentive markets, corporate business travelers, travel agents, and associations

• Expand public relations and publicity

• Offer special promotions to frequent, special, or seasonal guests

• Make available a guest newsletter, brochures, and on-line forum for travel discussions

And some possible management objectives:

• Improve internal communications with the management team in your hotel, other hotels in your company, and the corporate office (could include internal memos and follow-ups to personal conversations)

• Transfer data, for example, financial reports and purchasing information, in a timely and inexpensive way

• Notify the management team and other hotels of security-related issues

• Broadcast human-resource issues and announce the employee of the month and other quality-team members

• Increase the speed and accuracy of purchasing and working with suppliers

A hotel may want to start with only a few objectives. A prudent approach may be to consider objectives that best fit the needs of your hotel at this time. Gradually increase the number of functions your system is capable of as your management team acquires the skills and knowledge to use them.

Study the mechanics. Look at the costs associated with designing the system you need to accomplish your objectives. Do you have someone on staff who can design a system for the hotel and train the managers to use it? If not, hire a consultant who is familiar with hotel operations and computer technology, knows how to integrate the objectives, and can train the staff.

Plan the marketing. If your hotel’s internet and WWW objectives include marketing, the hotel’s overall marketing plan or strategy must incorporate those objectives. If you have selected management objectives, they must be fully integrated into the hotel’s business plan. The internet and the WWW, to be most effective, must be marketed internally and externally with the entire hotel, as part of the overall marketing package.

Schedule maintenance. Every good hotel manager has a preventive-maintenance plan. Technology also needs maintenance. Every system has glitches and requires improvements to enhance its efficiency, and better options become available every day. A hotel will not want to change its system every day, of course, but it is important to stay abreast of ways to improve it and to maintain the easiest, most personal, and relevant access possible.—J.M., E.J.F., and C.E.W. [What about R.B.?—FC]

*Tom Forester, "Megatrends or Megamistakes? What Ever Happened to the Information Society," Information Society, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September 1992), pp. 133-146.