This GDPR opinion piece by Hotelchamp CEO Kristian Valk originally appears in Tnooz.

Is that the sky falling, or just a new era dawning? If you believe the fear-mongers, GDPR is game-over for contemporary marketing techniques.

The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation certainly means a significant recalibration for anyone who holds or uses customer data – from May 25, use of that data requires explicit consent,

Hotelchamp has been awarded the “Red Herring Top 100 Europe” which highlights the top 100 most outstanding entrepreneurs and promising companies within Europe. Red Herring selects the award winners from approximately 2000 privately financed companies each year in Europe. Since 1996, Red Herring has kept tabs on these up-and-comers. The Red Herring editors were among the first to recognise that companies such as Google, Docusign, Twitter, Palantir, Salesforce.com and YouTube would change the way we live and work.

Starting today, Hotelchamp is introducing the ability to manage all your marketing activity through the Hotelchamp platform. As well as being the control centre for Hotelchamp’s signature website guest journey and conversion boosting solution, the platform now acts as a single hub through which you can manage an extensive range of your other marketing activities. Retargeting, review management, competitor & OTA rate-shopping, metasearch advertising, in-depth visitor analysis technology and more will all soon be coordinated from a single platform.

A website’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after only viewing a single page. Overlay this with the fact that more than half of the people who enter a website leave in less than 15 seconds and you start to see a concerning phenomenon – the ‘trampoline’ effect.

Is your hotel already making use of Facebook’s Dynamic Ads? Today we look at how intelligent use of these Dynamic Ads for Travel can better guide website visitors back into the right phase of your direct booking process.

Thinking of placing a price comparison on your hotel website? We look at the unexpected Do’s and Don’ts of the price comparison.

The Internationale Tourismus-Börse Berlin (ITB) is the largest tourism trade fair in the world – with more than 10.000 exhibitors and attendees from over 180 countries. In other words, ITB is big – so big that it feels like the conference hall is a city representing every corner of the world, set up for five days before disappearing like a mirage in the desert.

If you work in any area of tourism, then this is a must-attend event.

There are various internal and external factors that influence guests when evaluating a hotel, ranging from location, amenities, reviews and personal taste. A factor that arguably lies at the crossroads of all these factors is Price sensitivity.  Price sensitivity can be defined as the degree to which a customer’s behaviour is affected by the cost of a service or product – they may be convinced of the benefits, but need extra reassurance or reminding when it comes to the value they’re receiving.

Hotels have taken advantage of Black Friday and bargain hunting guests in a record day for direct bookings

Whilst many consumers are on the hunt for discounted consumer electronics, toys or clothes, Black Friday has yielded phenomenal results for hotels catering to deal-seeking guests.

Traditionally the chance for U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers to offer deals and discounts on a day that marks the official start of the holiday shopping period, Black Friday has grown over the past 2 decades to encompass businesses all over the world in almost an entire week of unmissable discounts,

On October 27 2017, the British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced plans to investigate third-party booking site practices and transparency. The investigation is the result of a year-long study conducted by the CMA that monitored digital comparison tools across a variety of different industries.

But what does this mean for the UK hotels that supply the inventory for these sites?

1. The good news for hoteliers is that it IS good news

The CMA’s decision to investigate the accuracy of booking sites comes at a crucial time for the hotel industry.