Online Distributors Speak: Exclusive Interview With Venere.com's Seo Manager, Susan Geraeds

Today we are interviewing Susan Geraeds about Venere.com, one of the most successful player in the online hotel reservations industry.

Susan will talk about her company, what SEO's strategy and operations they've implemented so far and are looking to develop in the future Travel 2.0 scenario.

Venere is quite an exception in the European online scenario: an Italian company, and not a mega-OTA coming from the States, neither an online extension for exisiting travel operators. Can you tell us something about the uniqueness of Venere's story and were you stand today as a company?
Venere.com was founded in 1995 by 4 friends with their first beta booking engine for hotels in Rome and Florence. Now, 12 years later, Venere.com is one of the leading worldwide players in the online hotel reservations industry with 9,000,000 unique vistors per month and 16,500 contracted hotels in over 4,500 international destinations.

Venere.com is proud to be one of the few Italian companies with an international success story in e-business. Our main focus is on the European and North American markets. In December 2006, Advent International Global Private Equity acquired a majority stake in Venere.com in partnership with Venere's founders who are still members of the Board. Venere employs 160 members of staff.

What are the advantages for hoteliers to be on Venere?
There are plenty of advantages to be enjoyed by hotels publishing their property on Venere.com. There are no rate restrictions and no minimum allotments. This means that hoteliers have complete freedom over their room inventory: they can allocate as many or few rooms they wish and at the price they decide. Moreover, hotels do not pay commission on no-show bookings.

How do you differenciate yourself from the other OTA's in terms of customer experience? Is there any specific functionality/content that is particularly appreciated by your customers?
Venere.com adopts a significantly different business model than most competitors. On competitor web sites that use a merchant model, users must pay for their full stay at the moment of booking. On Venere.com users pay directly at the hotel. They don't pay in advance, they pay when they stay at the hotel. There are no taxes, no booking fees and, very important, there are no cancellation fees.

Moreover, on Venere.com users have the help of over 350,000 hotel reviews, written by other travelers that booked on Venere.com and have already stayed at the hotel in question.

How has the introduction of customers'reviews helped or changed your business? How do you monitor or guarantee the quality of such user-generated-content?
Venere.com was the first online travel agent to include user hotel reviews on its web site. This has significantly improved the overall user experience and credibility. User hotel reviews are not censored, but they are moderated by our customer service team to remove any abusive or obscene language. Reviews by users that booked but then cancelled and didn't stay at the hotel are also removed.

Let me play the devil's advocate for a second... We strongly encourage hoteliers to invest in direct marketing via their own websites as the most efficient way to distribute their inventory. In fact, I think that many hoteliers need to re-balance their distribution costs and to shift some money from paying an intermediary to market their own online presence, and to regain control of their rates and visibility. What is your "defence" against this argument?
I don't think we really need a defense because one does not exclude the other. The hotel can invest in its own web site and still receive bookings from online travel agencies. The problem for small or mid-sized hotels is that they have a relatively small budget to invest in marketing.

Being featured on a hotel booking site with high traffic is an excellent approach in addition to the hotel's own web site. From my own experience in the hotel industry, it is difficult to sell all available rooms with the hotel web site alone, and online travel agencies are a great and cost effective way for hotels to rent out unsold room inventory.

You have chosen not to add any complementary service (flights, car-rental etc) to the pure hotel booking. Why this, and are you going to keep it that way?
Venere's mission and vision is to be a specialized service for hotel bookings, without other distractions for the users.

How important are search engines for your business?
Search engine traffic is important for Venere.com like it is for every e-business. Venere.com has very diversified sources of traffic, among which an affiliate program with 3000 partners, an offline travel agent program with more than 1000 travel agents selling Venere hotel room inventory, online marketing campaigns and organic search optimization.

As a SEO manager you face a hard challenge: how do you keep pace with the fierce (and growing) competition on the search engines?
Being on top of things is necessary to stay up to date on the latest developments in the search engine industry. Fortunately, I can also count on my long experience as a search engine marketeer. Prior to joining Venere.com in March 2006, I have worked as a search engine optimizer in the hotel industry since 1998 so that gives me a bit of a head start.

At Venere.com we have a young and enthusiastic team full of ideas and creativity. Regular brainstorming sessions help us to continuously improve accessibility, on page content, web site architecture and the overall user experience.

What is travel 2.0 for you? And how do you see search engine marketing evolving in the next future?
Travel 2.0 for Venere.com means interactivity. We were the first online travel agent to include interactivity on our web site by publishing user feedback on our hotels. Since a few months we also publish photos of the hotels made by guests that booked through a Venere.com booking. The next step in user generated content on the Venere.com site will be video feedback.

P.S. You can visit Susan's personal blog at blog.superzu.com

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