Matthew Walls: technology will change consumers’ experience of marketing

Matthew Walls of Hotels.com: ‘I expect the trend towards one-to-one marketing to accelerate. Consumers will take more control and filter out the broadcast, interruptive marketing that has no relevance to them.’ Photograph: Steve Dunlop Photograph: Steve Dunlop Photographer/Steve Dunlop

1. Can you tell us about your role as vice president of marketing, EMEA, at Hotels.com?
I own the profit and loss (P&L) for the EMEA marketing business and hence have responsibility for everything we spend and everything we earn in the region. Most of our marketing is run in-house and so we look to focus our effort across key marketing channels and our most important points of sale (countries). The Hotels.com EMEA business consists of 32 localised points of sale in 25 languages and so a large part of my role is setting the strategy in terms of in which markets we will really concentrate our resources.

2. With more than more than 85 Hotels.com sites worldwide, how do you adapt the customer experience for each country?
Ultimately, we believe that the problem we are trying to help customers solve – buying a hotel room – is a universal one, whether you are British, Spanish or Russian. The overall user experience is therefore common across languages. We then adapt the sites for obvious elements such as language and currency, but add more nuanced aspects such as which destinations we promote and, in some cases, which hotel types we favour. We also invest in the development of payment types which tend to be specific to particular countries. Russia is a good example of this, where we have recently launched Yandex Money– which is similar to Paypal – and Qiwi Wallet, which allows Russian customers to pay us in cash. For an online business, that is pretty cool stuff.

3. What impact does this have on the brand overall?
Our constancy of approach allows us to focus our technology investment on functionality that helps all users, rather than needing to maintain very different versions of the website. Our loyalty programme Welcome Rewards, for example, is a deliberately simple mechanic where, once you’ve collected 10 nights, you get one free. That is an offer that seems to appeal to everybody.

4. The Hotels.com apps have had more than 25m downloads. How did you achieve this and what lessons did you learn?
For a retail brand such as ours, a large download base only comes from the combination of two things: killer apps and a large investment in download marketing. Ultimately, if the quality of the apps is there – and hence both positive user ratings and a financial return from app users booking hotels – then a large investment in download marketing is sustainable. Despite attractive sounding offers from external vendors, we decided early on that we wanted our mobile technology built in-house. This has allowed us to keep improving the apps by responding quickly to the constant stream of feedback we receive from customers.

5. Along with a range of annual reports about travel trends, you’ve recently launched the Hotel Price Index. How does this fit into Hotel.com’s content strategy?
As one of the largest sellers of hotels worldwide, not only by total volume but also in terms of the 85 different markets in which we sell, we feel we are well positioned to comment on global hotel pricing trends. As a brand, our aim is to help make the job of booking a hotel as seamless and rewarding as possible. The data produced for the Hotel Price Index is hugely valuable to our customers, helping them to understand factors such as where prices are rising or falling, or where to get best value for £100 per night.

6. There’s been a lot of talk in the industry about brands becoming publishers. Do you view yourself as a publisher?
We are a retailer, but increasingly rich, relevant content has become vital to the online purchase process. Gone are the days when customers would buy from a site where the hotel content consisted of a couple of images of the outside and a few lines of copy about tea and coffee-making facilities. Now customers are demanding – and we are giving them – large numbers of photos covering every aspect of the property, detailed user reviews written by people like them who have actually stayed in the property, and supporting information about the location of the hotel and facilities available in its immediate vicinity.

7. What do you think marketing in 2020 will look like?
Very different. I expect to see the trend towards one-to-one marketing accelerate. Through technology, consumers will take more control over the marketing they will allow and filter out the broadcast, interruptive marketing that has no relevance to them. From a marketer’s perspective, the organisation and use of data will become paramount and the winners will be those who can strike the right balance between acquiring new customers at an acceptable price and retaining as many existing customers as possible.

8. Finally, how are you and your organisation preparing for these changes?
Loyalty and mobile are areas where we’ve invested heavily in recent years. Our Welcome Rewards programme now has more than 10 million members worldwide and that is giving us great insight into our customers and what they need from us. There is already a reality that the same customer will access Hotels.com across their desktop, tablet and smartphone during a single purchase cycle and hence being present in the platforms where customers want to be is vital. It is then the knitting together of this rich customer data with relevant marketing across multiple platforms that we consider to be the future of marketing in our space.

Quick questions

What time do you get up in the morning? 06.40

What’s the first thing you do when you get to the office? Eat breakfast and organise my day.

What do you do to relax? I love mountain biking and hiking. I climbed Kilimanjaro this year and it was amazing.

What app can’t you live without? Dropbox. I love taking photographs and it helps keep everything beautifully organised.

Favourite marketing campaign this year? We share offices with Cancer Research UK and I think their One day we will beat Cancer campaign is hugely powerful.

What campaign do you wish you had come up with? Three – The Pony. I remember being in the cinema the first time I saw it and the audience went wild.

Your single piece of advice for a new marketer? Stay alive to what’s happening outside of your office.

Matthew Walls is vice-president of marketing, EMEA, at Hotels.com