Hilton’s Perverted Bedding Initiative

This morning I was stood up by my physiotherapist!! Why is it if we are late or miss an appointment, we still get charged, but when they are late, we get nothing?

Anyhow, while waiting I started catching up on a few email newsletters, and had a good laugh at the ironic relationship betwen two article titles. “Hilton’s bedding initiatives well underway” and “Hilton’s ‘perverted’ brand.”

The first article is innocent enough – the Hilton Hotel chain is working to provide their guests with an improved bedding experience – “Each of the bed types have been tested to ensure comfort and durability.”

Ok, perhaps I could have selected a less opportune quote, but I couldn’t pass that one up. Anyhow, Hilton hotels have learned that “50 percent of respondents reported capturing only six hours or less of sleep per night while traveling, which is two hours less than the average needed to function at peak performance.

“The Hilton Family of Hotels is dedicated to the entire sleep experience…” In a word, you need a good sleep to perform well at work.

I read this article after the “perverted” one, which perhaps made me more aware of the ironies contained in it. However, I also read the article from a search engine optimization perspective. It was well done. The key messages are clear, and should attract the proper searches.

The second article was about Hilton’s perverted brand. Of course, that title alone will attract attention! The article itself was rather innocuous, pointing out that Paris Hilton is no different from her Hilton ancestors. The difference being their exploits were recorded in the gossip columns, and included scripted photography, whereas hers are blasted around the Internet, and come with video or “caught in the act” photography.

But that started me thinking. What has happened to Hilton’s overall brand awareness since she arrived on the scene a couple of years ago? What about their bookings, are they up, down or unchanged?

I started at the simplest point, and looked at the data I could easily access. Here’s a snapshot of their traffic from Alexa: Hilton.com Alexa Traffic since 2001.

Now Alexa’s data is not something I would rest my case on, but it usually does show overall trends quite well. Obviously after September 11, 2001, all hotel traffic was off. Then Hilton,com’s traffic climbed back up to previous levels and stabilized from mid 2002 through to late 2003. Something occured in early 2004, and traffic plummeted, stabilized in March 2004, and then turned the corner in June 2004. Traffic has climbed ever since.

I then proceeded to check their press releases, and IR reports. Nothing of note in the December 2003 /January 2004 period to indicate why web site traffic plummeted. However, I did note that in mid April, record breaking sales for February 2004 were announced. Nothing else that I noticed provided much of an explanation.

What about Paris Hilton? It’s a lot harder to figure out what happened with her in the news, and when; there’s just been so much “Paris Hilton” news in the media.

So, I dug into newgroup postings, and found that in December 2003 the first sightings of her infamous sex tape with Rick Soloman were ‘broadcast’. (Seems like that happened years ago, but it’s only been 18 months!). Almost simultaneously, her “The Simple Life” TV show started airing. At that point she really had the attention from all the various media outlets working overtime! Interestingly, as the show gathered steam, so did the number of search engine queries for her name! Was that drawing traffic away from the Hilton Hotel web site?

Perhaps part of the challenge for the Hilton.com web site traffic, was that so many people who had previously search for “Hilton” now could not easily find the hotels! As a side note, bookings at the “Paris Hilton” apparently skyrocketed, as it became ‘cool’ for immature males to say ‘I spent the night in (the) Paris Hilton” Whatever.

Out of curiousity, I looked at Wordtracker’s data, just to get another quick piece of information easily. Wordtracker reports that there are 185,000 searches a day for the term “Paris Hilton”. Comparatively, there are 6,800 for the term “Hilton”, and just 1,750 for the term “Hilton Hotel”.

Obviously, Paris Hilton’s brand awareness is huge at the moment. But can that translate into sales for the hotel chain? Well, in marketing there’s a saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” It’s true to a point. In this case, do Paris Hilton’s gossip column appearances help the Hilton hotel chain? Yes, I believe they do. Her explosion on the scene has undoubtably raised the hotel chain’s public profile immensely. She’s become a brand on her own, but it’s constantly associated to the Hilton name.

I’m sure that quite a few people stay at a Hilton hotel today, just for the same patheitc reason people rubberneck at accident scenes. Curiousity.

Out of curiousity myself, I checked to see how many searches were being performed for Hilton portfolio hotels. Here’s the results:

• “Conrad Hotels” – 60 / day
• “Doubletree” – 1000 / day
• “Embasssy Suites” – 2500 / day
• “Hampton Inn” – 5,000 day
• “Homewood Suites” – 750 / day
• “Scandic hotel” – 50 / day

It is interesting to note that both Embassy Suites and Hampton Inn are searched for more often than “Hilton Hotel”, considering that all three are two word phrases.

From a search engine optimization perspective, none of these terms are in saturated marketplaces, (quite surprisingly) In fact, in relation to much of the market, the number of pages competing for their existng key terms is low.

What is surprising, is that their sites perform extremely poorly across the board when competing for the generic hotel terms. They perform well, as expected under their brand names, but not under hotel searches in general.

This lack of performance shows that in spite of them having one of the most important lessons in Internet Marketing occur to their brand name – the impact Paris Hilton has had on the Internet – their marketing efforts have not taken note or advantage of the opportunities which this heightened overall brand awareness has brought.

The Hilton hotel chain has seen revenues grow nicely in the last year, but they really have not ridden the Paris Hilton coattails very well. I’m by no means advocating that they need to take advantage of her more salacious moments. But the brand name Hilton is in every person’s head more commonly than ever before. Anything published with the word “Hilton” in it gets some attention.

It is likely that many people will glance at this post just because it utilizes the term “Paris Hilton” a few times. Hopefully someone will find it interesting from a marketing perspective. The point is, the Hilton name is hot in popular culture today. Hilton hotel’s has done surprisingly little to take advantage of this from an online perspective. With so many searches being performed for variations of their name, you would think that someone in their marketing departments would look at ways of capitalizing on that traffic. If you were searching for “Hotel in Kansas City” and saw “Hilton Hotel” you would likely click on the link. Hilton Hotels does not seem to get it. I’m quite surprised that of all the chains they would not have realized by now how powerful the Internet is as a marketing tool, and get their web site properly optimized, so that people who are planning trips can find their properties more easily.

So far the only chain which has done a good job of optimization across the board is Fairmont. Fairmont is a very small chain in comparison to Hilton, but it understands the value of SEO service and a solid optimization strategy. A properly optimized Hilton chain would crush the market, and getting a good orgainc SEO service in place would not cost them all that much.

In fact, the costs from a proper SEO service would likely be recovered just from the increase in direct online bookings, and related proportionate overall drop in bookings via (and commissions paid to) Expedia and its affiliates.

I guess it just goes to show, the horse can be right at the waters edge, but still not drink.