Hotel sites getting more sophisticated

Portals offering hotel listings are attracting growing numbers of Internet users and becoming an important marketing tool for hotel owners, according to industry officials, while Web designers and portal owners see a demand for increasingly sophisticated services such as online booking. "We saw a 20% increase in visitors last month compared to January 2001, and I expect this trend to continue throughout the year," said Bolesław Fabisiak co-owner of hotelsinpoland.com. More than 200 hotels pay an annual fee to be listed on the site, which provides photographs, contact addresses and links to hotel Web sites. Hotelsinpoland.com can be accessed using the Internet and mobile phones supporting the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). According to Fabisiak, the gradual increase in the number of Internet users in Poland is boosting interest in the site, which saw its number of visitors increase from 240,000 in 2000 to more than 300,000 last year. More choices, more competition A widening array of Web sites is vying to provide tourists and business travelers with information on hotels in their chosen destination, and while the Polish tourist industry has fallen on hard times as the global economy continues to lie low, hotel portals are continuing to grow in popularity. But the burgeoning number of hotel portals means that online catalogs like hotelsinpoland.com are under increasing competition from a new generation of sites. According to Marcin Muś, co-owner of Kraków Web design firm Compass Internet Service Network (CISN), creators of the Hotels.Pensions.pl and visit.pl, portals that allow travelers to make credit card reservations over the Internet and give up-to-date information on promotions are now more likely to attract visitors. "Simply browsing through information about hotels is nothing new and is not particularly useful for customers who then have to call or email their chosen hotel," Muś said. "Newer portals have more extensive descriptions of hotels, take reservations and offer promotions and discounts, which makes them more attractive." One such site is Kraków-based portal visit.pl, an online travel agency launched in July 2001, catering mainly to tourists from outside Poland and offering accommodation in 120 hotels and guesthouses, castles and mansions as well as package tours and tailor-made holidays - all of which can be booked online. According to Agnieszka Sokołowska, the firm's director for strategy and development, price agreements with hotels mean that visit.pl can offer its customers discounts on bookings of as much as 70%, ramping up the number of inquiries generated by the site from its current average of 300 inquiries per month to more than 900 in the run-up to the 2002 holiday season. Straight to the source While independent hotel portals are growing in sophistication, there is a danger that travelers may bypass them altogether as hotel chains develop their own online reservation facilities. France-based hotel group Accor provides its clients with online credit card booking at 3,500 of its hotels worldwide using its accorhotels.com site, and it would like the site to play a much greater role in sales. "The site is responsible for 5% of reservations but the group plans to increase this to 25% by 2005," said Adrianna Mościkowska, head of Accor's Novotel and Mercure hotel chains in Poland.