Dubai: Musafir.com, the UAE's premium travel website, has introduced Musafir Plus, a unique online travel service for companies aimed at making corporate travel easy and convenient.
Musafir Plus offers clients a unique Musafir QuickSearch desktop widget which can be used to search for trips from the comfort of a desktop at the click of a mouse. Musafir Plus is presently active for companies and will soon be available to travel agents.
The service is designed to intelligently track and maintain records of a company's negotiated rates and highlight them enabling travel managers to make quicker and better choices, in addition to savings on the travel budgets.
Albert Dias, Technology Director — Musafir.com explained, "Booking a trip through a typical travel agent can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few days, during which time customers often lose deals. Musafir Plus allows different departments in a company to collaborate online when it comes to travel, saving paper, middlemen and most importantly, time."
Dubai As tourism turns to the online world, so does Dubai. The city's growing reputation as a tourist hub has prompted online agent Expedia to set up shop here.
In its wake, local hotels, flight and tour operators are being made aware of the importance of online marketing.
"There's been a transition from offline to online from both a customer and a hotelier's perspective," said Expedia lodging emerging markets vice president Murad Hajeebhoy.
"Expedia is close to 40 per cent growth year on year in Dubai and in the first quarter of this year, we are already close to 40 per cent growth."
Connect CEO Alexander Rauser heads an interactive agency which is described as providing a service for web design campaigns and online marketing.
Rauser found after doing some research on online search patterns that the UAE and Singapore were two of the most searched term for potential travellers.
"An increasing number of people are already researching online across the industries, but especially in the travel industry," Rauser said.
"There is a lot of potential to market brands for travel and tourism in the city."
Expedia market management in the Middle East and Indian Ocean director Walter Lo Faro said in recent months, hotels had increasingly been seeing the need to market themselves more aggressively online.
"There's not been one hotel which has opened in the past 18 months that hasn't run a campaign on our site," Lo Faro said.
"We currently have about 60 million unique users every month on our site and operate in 80 countries so hotels have a reach of a much broader and more targeted audience."
The site is described as showcasing approximately 85 per cent of the accommodation inventory of Dubai, and books approximately 15,000 rooms online in the city each day.
Accor Hospitality Middle East managing director Christophe Landais said the way people made hotel bookings was also changing.
"If you look back 10 years, the internet generated just under five per cent of reservations in the Middle East," he said.
"Today the internet generates 60 per cent of our reservations. It is one of the most important distribution channels of the hotel business."
As online marketing became more sophisticated, companies indicated they were reaping the benefits.
Tools such as Google Insight which shows you the search volume for certain search terms for a region, could be very useful in helping companies to direct their marketing effectively. For example, with hotel bookings, the tool could show what other terms people were using to search.
Rauser said this could give companies an idea what people were looking for and where they were looking, he said.
Other websites such as compete.com could give a company comparisons with your competitors through sample data of their traffic compared to yours, and what keywords they are found under.
A further advantage of going online is the flexibility hotels have to change according to changing market needs.
Rauser said: "You can measure your budget more effectively which means you can allocate the budget more efficiently."
"It's also a lot less static. With offline if you book an advert it stays the same for a set period of time. With online you can allocate budgets in almost real time depending on how you allocate the budget," he said.
Hajeebhoy said hotels that advertised on Expedia were able change the number of rooms they gave at any given time.
So if the market changed they could quickly adapt their rates accordingly.
"As a hotel you want to make more money in the high season and fill the rooms in the low season but you want to fill them in something that is viable to you," he said.
"If we negotiate a rate that is flat throughout the year there's no incentive after that. You have to fit into the market changes."
The new online marketing forum has also introduced customer reviews — which Hajeebhoy said was the best thing to happen to the tourism market.
"Very often travel agents haven't been to hotels so aren't able to give good reviews," he said.
"Now you can read reviews and filter them, assessing whether the customer is the same type of person as the reviewer.
"Customers want different things out of hotels if they're single, travelling as a family. And for us it allows us to retain partners that our customers like the best."
Adapting websites to be compatible with mobiles was something that may take more time to adapt to here, Rauser said.
"So far Emirates is the only website that is mobile compatible," he said.
