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Lodging Interactive Brings Big Ideas to Smaller Properties

Sometimes, little things can make a big difference.



When a guest who booked through a third-party site checks into a hotel, the front-desk receptionist can hand him a card that

says, Next time, please book through our site. Here s a corporate code for a 10 percent discount. Chances are the guest will become the hotel s customer, rather than the third-party site s. Printing the hotel s URL on the key card helps, too.



Front desks get busy, and things fall through the cracks, said D.J. Vallauri, president and chief executive officer of Lodging Interactive. A busy receptionist might forget to collect e-mail addresses from customers, for example. A hotel should set up a system to ensure that addresses are collected to take full advantage of e-mail marketing and customer relationship management.



Those are the sorts of tips that Vallauri has picked up over a 20-year career in the hotel business, most recently as Prime Hospitality Corp. s vice president of e-commerce. But Lodging Interactive s mission goes much farther than helpful hints: It provides a full menu of Internet services, including strategy, online marketing, customer relationship management, reservation services and Web site design and hosting.



It was while Vallauri was at Prime that he saw an opportunity for a company like Lodging Interactive. Lodging Interactive brings big ideas to smaller properties Even with all of Prime s hotels and all our resources, we still needed a lot of guidance, he said. I wondered, what are the smaller guys doing



So about three years ago, Vallauri founded Lodging Interactive and operated it as a part-time sideline. A year ago, he left Prime to pursue the business full time.



The company is still relatively small, with a staff of eight, most of whom are optimization experts. We ve invested a lot in technology, Vallauri said. We have many proprietary systems and have tweaked off-the-shelf systems. Technology does the heavy lifting. While hotel brands do as much as possible to promote their brand.com sites, they don t often apply their marketing dollars to promote a particular hotel on the brand site. So an individual brand property out in the middle of nowhere is looking for ways to get new business, Vallauri said.



For these properties, Lodging Interactive develops vanity sites - highly optimized Web sites that provide value to consumers, he said. The company develops rankings for key words that increase traffic to these sites.



But when it comes to booking, they all take you right into the brand.com site, he said. We never bypass the brand.com booking engine, and we work within brand standards. Playing by the rules has its own rewards, Vallauri said. Lodging Interactive is in discussions with several hotel groups to be named a preferred partner for their franchised properties. The hotel companies like the idea of a partner that would funnel more reservations through their lowest-cost channel. Lodging Interactive also guides hoteliers through the process of working with third-party distributors. For example, when a hotel gives a net rate to Travelocity or Expedia, it should opt out of their corporate programs if it has negotiated rates with corporations. Vallauri believes it s important to show the hotel client how various programs are working. Most of the stuff we do is completely trackable, he said. A hotelier can see, for example, just how much revenue was generated by a particular key word. We can track it all the way through, Vallauri said.



A key trait of Lodging Interactive is that we focus only on hotel and lodging, Vallauri said. I started working in the hotel business, and I understand what the hotelier is going through. That s a huge advantage over our competitive set. And the fact that we have not lost one renewal speaks loudly to our value.

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