Europe: E-Commerce drives advertising growth
November 09, 2006

According to the “European Online Advertising Forecast, 2006 to 2011,” released by JupiterResearch, search engine marketing expenditures in Europe are rising, and for the best of all possible reasons - Europeans are buying more online.
Internet Retailer estimates that as the Internet becomes mainstream in Europe over the next several years, by 2011 European marketers will spend Eur83 billion on online advertising, representing 8.3% of all European advertising spending.
Search engine marketing (SEM) will account for the largest part of that growth, increasing from 41% of total online ad spending in 2005 to a projected 49% in 2011.
In fact, already last year, in order to reach the increasing number of European online shoppers, 65% of the search marketers Jupiter surveyed said they had upped their paid search spending.
In addition, new advertisers are coming online — following the consumers. As Jupiter analysts wrote, “Internet penetration grew from 46% in 2004 to 49% in 2005, and will reach 58% in 2011.”

My opinion:

I think this article is really relevant with the hospitality industry. In fact the e-commerce will change the entire organization of the marketing and sales department in the hotel. This fact is known since few years but apparently hotel companies had difficulties to stay connect with this evolution. Today, the using of advertising for hotel on internet is still very slow in Europe and especially in France.
Company has to change all the method of sales. It’s not anymore a face to face relation with the customer. Now they have to sell differently.
If the using of internet is increasing, companies need to attract the customer online. They need to promote the hotel, to improve the company website front page.
It’s mean also that employees need to get new training on the IT system.

The other relevant point is the Tour Operator, today more and more of hotel rooms are bought on internet and directly on TO website like Opodo or Voyages SNCF. Customers are using this link to book the hotel in same time with the train or airplane. If this way allows hotels to sell more room, it’s also a sell at a cheaper price.

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  What will happen if every customer buy the room night by those TO and not anymore with the hotel directly?
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  How hotel will fix new sell price for the room?