Booking.com executive interview reveals confidence in the future

Booking.com may have become a global behemoth in online tourism, but its goal is to significantly expand customer coverage and product volumes.

Booking.com's chief marketing officer, Paul Winery, received a travolution visit to the first brand advertising campaign they launched in the UK last week. In his speech he showed confidence in Booking.com's future.

The British version of the 1 premiere television commercials on ITV in late Sunday was adapted from last year's American version of the advertisement. The ads, launched last year in the United States, mark the beginning of Booking.com's massive branding campaign.

"We have very cool, very good products, and we want the world to know that." Search engines and parity shopping sites apply only to certain niche markets. "Winery said.

"We want to be able to cover more market segments. These (search and parity) engines have a very good effect at the end of the sales funnel (the deal phase), but we are also concerned about the planning and dreaming stages of the tour. ”

"To achieve this, we need to go up a bit on the sales funnel, and we believe that brand marketing is an excellent funnel-top activity." ”

Winery says the difference between Booking.com and the Priceline Group's sister web site is that kayak is positioned at the price Search service, Booking.com focused on product value and relevance.

While it may be difficult for ordinary consumers to understand the difference between Kayak's meta search and Booking.com's marketing platform model, winery says: "I think they are different." We are a subsidiary of the same group, but I think our customer base and value orientation are different. ”

The meta search site, in broad terms, is more of a discount search and distribution platform for air tickets, car rentals and hotels. ”

"The service provided by Booking.com is a complete end-to-end experience, which may start with search, but not necessarily price based." ”

"It may be based on comment scores or other important elements that can help consumers book products so they can share and write reviews, even recommended destinations." ”

"There are some differences in loyalty," he said. Our customers will be repeat customers. ”

The Booking.com is already very impressive, with a daily trading volume of 555,000, with an average of 1 million users living on a daily basis through the site.

Booking.com also said that the site currently provides 424,000 accommodation products worldwide, of which 14,600 are in the United Kingdom, the type of accommodation products are 25 kinds.

However, perhaps to cover up the boast in the speech, winery said, from the product level, Booking.com just "touched the tip of the iceberg," he also admitted that many consumers have not heard of Booking.com.

Booking.com's future plans include expanding product mix, adding more b&b products and even country vacation villas, and doing everything in their power to create the best tourist shopping platform and win customers.

By matching the special requirements of the user and the known destination features, Booking.com will also be more to help users find the ideal destination, not just accommodation products.

The sheer scale also gives the company the possibility to get more user data, which they can then optimize for their products.

Booking.com's 25 million "real, meaningful, and fresh" user reviews, combined with data they've mined from social media, mean that Booking.com has a product and consumer data eight box.

As the intermediate platform between suppliers and consumers, winery realised how important it was for booking.com to be as happy as both sides.

Booking.com thinks he has a "symbiotic" relationship with thousands of room vendors, and how to use the platform depends on the vendor itself, and the vendor is more booking.com as a marketing tool than an OTA retail partner.

However, in the Mobile world, winery says Booking.com will allow consumers to make the most appropriate decisions, such as whether to log in to the account to get more personalized service, either in advance or when they are checked in.

Booking.com was first based on the "book Right now, check in payment" model developed, there is no cancellation fee. Although the site will be used in other ways, as long as consumers need this model, it will continue to exist.

Winery says consumer services are embedded in Booking.com's DNA, and the company has launched a "voice of the brand" service to communicate with consumers on a more humane basis.

"Our old customers more often think of us as a utility than a commercial brand." ”

"This gives us a lot of help, it gives us a voice to speak, an emotional connection." And that's very consistent with the nature of our DNA service. ”

So, what stage is booking.com now? "We are definitely in the take-off phase, or very early." ”