Hotel Quickly - Launch and expansion of mobile APP in the APAC region

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OTEL

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UICKLY

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USINESS

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ROJECT

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APAC

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ROJECT

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EPORT

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425

CEMS

MIM

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Spring 2013

Nova School of Business and Economics 2nd May 2013

2. Introduction ... 1

2.1. Client ...1

2.2. Market overview ...2

2.3. Current client situation ...3

2.4. Business Project Challenge ...4

3. Social Media Strategy ... 5

3.1. Approach...5

3.2. Research ...7

3.3. Social Media Roll-Out Plan ...10

3.3.1. Facebook ...10

3.3.2. Twitter ...12

3.3.3. YouTube ...13

3.3.4. Website and Blogs ...14

3.4. Changes over Time ...15

3.5. Main Limitations ...15

3.6. What could have been done differently? ...16

4. Learning Reflection ... 17

4.1. Previous knowledge ...17

4.2. New knowledge ...17

4.3. Personal experience ...18

Page 1 of 20

2. Introduction

In order to introduce the work done for Hotel Quickly, as part of the CEMS MIM Business Project, I believe is important to understand the reasons that lead me to prefer this project over the other available opportunities. When I arrived in Singapore, in the beginning of the Spring semester of 2012/2013, I felt that, although my Masters’ classes at NOVA had taught me all the theoretical knowledge required to successfully manage a company, I was lacking the practical experience necessary to be able to autonomously apply these ideas in a real business context. Because of this, I thought that the Hotel Quickly project would be the perfect fit for me, since it would allow me to contact directly and learn from entrepreneurs with several years of experience in the sector. Furthermore, it would also give me the opportunity to take more “hands-on” tasks in the most important functional areas of a start-up company. This work project report starts with a brief description of the Business Project context, where a strong emphasis is given to describing Hotel Quickly, the market conditions associated with its business segment and the main goals and challenges of the Business Project. Since describing all the tasks and functional areas studied throughout this project would not be possible within the length of this report, a deeper analysis of a specific segment, in this case Social Media Strategy, is then provided. Finally, the report concludes with an analysis of the Masters’ theoretical knowledge used in the Hotel Quickly Business Project and a personal reflection on the project experience and learning goals achieved.

2.1. Client

Hotel Quickly is a company that focuses in providing its clients, through a mobile app for both the Android and iOS operating systems, with same day booking discount opportunities (at least 20% below Best-available-rate) in luxurious hotels (three or more stars), within the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. Since the main objective of Hotel Quickly is to provide consumers with a tool that allows them to book hotels easily and quickly (only three steps necessary to book a room), a maximum of six pre-selected premium hotels is displayed for each city. This way consumers can be sure that Hotel Quickly already did the necessary research to guarantee the quality of the available hotels and so they don’t have to waste hours comparing hundreds of different possibilities as they know that, whatever choice they make, they will receive an excellent service. Moreover, as this is a company which focus on same day bookings, rooms can only be reserved on that specific date from 12 pm to 2 am.

Page 2 of 20 The same day booking business model that Hotel Quickly follows is a based on the processes used by similar companies operating in the United States and Europe. Hotel Tonight was the first of these companies and, after it initially launched its app in the United States, it achieved such a tremendous success (more than one million app downloads and over 25 million Euros of capital investments) that it shortly expanded to European countries, where a series of incumbent companies started to emerge to compete with it. The fact that none of these companies so far operating in the Asia Pacific region was the reason why Hotel Quickly’s founders, following a strategy similar to the one used by Rocket Internet (where many of them were previously working) , decided to take advantage of the immense potential of the APAC market and tried to apply Hotel Tonight’s successful business model to the region.

To be able to provide consumers with good deal opportunities, Hotel Quickly establishes partnerships with premium hotels via profit-sharing agreements. In these agreements, Hotel Quickly allows the partner hotels to use its platform to sell their excess inventory for the day in return for a fixed commission rate (normally around 12%) on the booking value. As most hotels are not present in the mobile sector, Hotel Quickly is able to create significant value by bringing partner hotels a completely new set of customers that would normally not consider these hotels under normal booking conditions. Furthermore, since bookings are only allowed on the same day of the stay, hotels can update on real-time room inventory, according to their needs, instead of having to set aside in advance rooms for last-minute bookings.

2.2. Market overview

Contrarily to other industries’ business models, in the Hospitality industry, fixed costs represent an extremely high percentage of the cost structure, as the main costs associated to operating an hotel relate to the initial investment in the building and the subsequent capital expenditures maintaining and revamping it. Since the variable costs an hotel incurs when selling a room are relatively small, it is of the hotel’s best interest to book every room available to cover fixed costs. This fact is especially important because bookings are time-dependent and so every vacancy automatically translates in a lost profit opportunity, as it is not possible to sell today bookings for dates that have already happened.

Although hotels are constantly looking to sell the maximum number of rooms possible, they cannot charge the low prices that would allow them to book all rooms, since they want to maximize their profits and this would reduce their margin below optimal levels. This trade-off, together with the cyclical fluctuations of tourism flows and rooms’ demand, leaves hotels with frequent excess inventory that they

Page 3 of 20 know in advance they are not going to be able to fulfil. Because of this, there is a huge supply of hotels interested in participating in the same day bookings’ business to get rid of their excess inventories. The Asia Pacific region is a specially good example of this. The massive growth in tourism inflows that the region has been experiencing in the last decades has lead to the appearance of a high number of premium hotels which, being not part of a global chain like Hilton or Four Seasons, want to establish partnerships in the last-minute market, to increase consumers’ awareness of their products.

Being one of the most densely populated regions of the world the Asia Pacific region also represents a massive demand for the same day bookings. Furthermore, the recent expansion that has occurred within the region in the travel and mobile industries (more than 20% CAGR in the most recent years), expands even more the target audience of Hotel Quickly’s services. Finally, this is a region which seems to fit this type of product, as there is a relatively high number of people that fit one of the target consumer groups that use same day bookings.

In Thailand there are a series of “thrill seekers” that travel just for the adventure of discovering new places and, consequently, just book rooms on the same day, as they never know where they will be tomorrow. In Hong Kong people give a lot of importance to money and so there is a high number of “spontaneous bookers” who are just looking for a great deal opportunity at a large price discount. Singapore, due to the high uncertainty avoidance of the population, creates a significant market for couples that want to enjoy a different experience but don’t want to risk travelling to a different country and, thus, opt for a staycation in a nice hotel. Finally, Japan is also a high potential marker, as there are a high number of workaholics who just need to book a last minute room because a meeting run late and they need to be back in the office soon in the morning.

2.3. Current client situation

Although, when we started the project, Hotel Quickly was simply a “start-up” company planning to launch its last-minute mobile app in the Asia Pacific region, its situation has greatly evolved since then and it is currently a company with over 30 employees and 200 hotel partnership (many of which with exclusivity contracts), operating in fifteen cities across seven different countries. Presently it is also the market leader in the last minute booking industry in the region, having as only competitor CheckInTonight, a smaller dimension Cambodian company also operating in seven Asia Pacific countries. For the moment Hotel Quickly is the only same day booking provider in Taiwan but has to

Page 4 of 20 compete with CheckInTonight for the Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Indonesia markets.

Hotel Quickly launched its product in the market on the 21st of March, during our seventh week of Business Project. Since then Hotel Quickly has guaranteed 500.000 dollars of venture capital investment, achieved more than 10.000 downloads, only for the Android platform, and around 6.500 likes in its Facebook page. These results place it in a strong market position to further expand its deal opportunities to other Asia Pacific countries. Consequently, Hotel Quickly’s current core activities focus on the optimization of the whole booking processes with existing hotels and the prospection of the feasibility of expanding to new markets, such as Philippines or Australia.

2.4. Business Project Challenge

In the current mobile industry business environment, where millions of mobile applications are available, a company cannot afford the possibility of committing a single mistake, as there are simply too many alternatives in the market for someone to be willing to give a start-up a second opportunity after a negative costumer experience. Because of this, companies must take into consideration the functional aspects of all of its divisions before launching their products in the market, as a problem caused by the poor performance of a single aspect of one of these divisions (e.g. wrong billing transaction process from the Finance department) can lead to a “snowball” of negative Public Relations (PR) that puts in jeopardy the normal functioning and future expansion of the start-up.

Taking this into account, the main challenge of the Hotel Quickly Business Project was to help the company’s founders and chief executives in successfully tackling all the necessary variables that needed to be considered before launching the app and, later, for expanding the business into other Asia Pacific countries. To achieve this thorough research of market data and best business practice techniques for areas as diverse as Legal, Finance, Analytics, Sales, Strategy, Marketing and Human Resources had to be done. Furthermore, since Hotel Quickly was working based on a bootstrap structure, across six different countries, and planned to launch in each of these countries the cultural differences between each of these markets and the way how communication would flow within the whole company also had to be considered. From the thirty-one different tasks performed during the Business Project, the most important ones for Hotel Quickly were the Sales Tracking tool, the Public Relations strategy, the Social media roll-out plan, the credit card fraud and the business intelligence tool. All the tasks, linked to the respective functional area with which they were more closely related, can be seen in Appendix A.

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3. Social Media Strategy

Although throughout the Business Project a series of tasks for the different functional divisions of Hotel Quickly was performed, due to its high level of importance for the company, this work project report will focus uniquely in describing the approach used for developing the Social Media strategy.

Traditionally, Social Media was considered to be a part of marketing and, thus, simply analyzed as an additional marketing tool. Nevertheless, contrarily to marketing (which focus on advertising), social media should be seen as a mean of communicating a message in a way that creates credibility through publicity (other people talking about your company) instead of advertising (a brand talking about itself). This, together with the importance that it currently has for start-up companies and, specifically, for Hotel Quickly’s overall strategy, was why it was considered an independent division in the Business Project. Although Social media platforms provide start-up companies with a cheap and accessible way to connect more personally with clients and spread their value propositions, it is crucial for Hotel Quickly to know all the necessary tools that it can use to effectively engage potential users and measure its social media initiatives. Taking this into consideration, before developing a social media strategy, significant research done in all of these areas. Below is possible to observe in greater detail how the initial approach was designed, the methodology used for researching data and the work plan created for Hotel Quickly. Later an analysis of how this approach evolved over time, its main limitations and possible mistakes is provided.

3.1. Approach

To develop the approach that Hotel Quickly should take for its Social Media strategy, the first step taken was to research which guidelines should be followed to create an effective mechanism for engaging potential customers across all the available platforms. Based on this, the basis guideline that was recommended to Hotel Quickly was not look at different social media networks as independent tools. Each of the available platforms fulfils a specific purpose in the way how people community in the web community. As a result Hotel Quickly should not be repeating the same messages across all of them, but rather plan its communication in a way that the “big picture” connecting the different initiatives followed in each network allows them to create synergies by targeting different user groups.

Page 6 of 20 Furthermore, Hotel Quickly’s approach should not be aimed at dominating the market place but rather at creating the necessary environment for others to feel comfortable engaging in two-way communications (instead of just receiving a message, the recipient also gives feedback) with the company. In this sense, the designed strategy should try to put others at ease, so that they feel that Hotel Quickly is being completely sincere when asking them about how can it better create value by addressing their needs and solving their problems. Only with this type of mindset can the company start and maintain friendly conversations with its clients that allow it to truly understand which offers better suit its target consumer base and create genuine connections with them. An example of the application of this concept would be to post specific simple questions asking for followers’ opinions, instead of making statements, or mentioning a specific person through an hashtag, instead of replying to an undefined audience.

Another very important aspect when devising the social media plan is that the way of communicating is consistent over time. This means that it is not only important to define a regular schedule when posts and tweets are answered, so that customers don’t have to wait much time to see their doubts answered and feel there are being paid attention, but also to keep the same tone of communication throughout different posts. The consequences of not complying with this are that, if social media is only accessed on a sporadic basis, customers will feel that the company does not really care about them and stop interacting, and, if the company changes from a informal and funny type of communication to a more serious one, they will feel confused and not take the message transmitted seriously. Furthermore, posts should be kept strictly to matters related to the Hotel Quickly’s main value proposition and not spread into other non-related off-topic discussions, as this will be seen as “spam”.

One mistake that many companies make when developing their approach to social media is that they try to do direct sales pitching when posting and tweeting, by constantly mentioning product specials and promotions. Since no one likes to conscientiously know that he is being sales pitched, this approach turns costumers away from the brand. In this sense, Hotel Quickly was recommended to post travel and hotel advice related to their offers in the social platforms, instead of directly mentioning the deals available and discounts. Since it is of Hotel Quickly’s main interest to gain a few number of loyal customers, rather than have a high number of likes/followers, this approach will allow it to gain credibility over the long-term, as people will progressively confirm the truthfulness of its advices. Finally, the last guideline that any social media strategy should follow is that all its networks should be interconnected. Since one of the goals of social media campaigns is to get people back to the website so

Page 7 of 20 that they can learn more about the company and engage into deeper relationships then posts on forums, Twitter or Facebook should include a link to the website. If this is done then it will be much easier to build the brand’s image, as many of the doubts costumers might have are already replied in “FAQ” section of the website and so the person responsible for replying to customer’s requests can spend more time creating meaningful relationships with them, instead of always answering to the same questions.

3.2. Research

Knowing the base guidelines that the social media strategy should follow and the main goals that it aimed to achieve, a deeper focus was given to researching and analyzing the practical aspects, associated with the APAC region, that needed to be considered before designing and implementing a complete social media roll-out plan for Hotel Quickly.

Since the target audience were the consumers present in the six countries where Hotel Quickly was launching (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand) and the ones where it planned to expand in the future (Japan, South Korea, Australia and Macau), the first thing that was done was to research the top social media platforms in these countries. In Table 1 it is possible to see that, although losing market share, Facebook is the leading platform, followed by Youtube and Twitter, which take alternate ranking positions according to the different countries. Because of this information, the developed social media roll-out plan focused mainly on these platforms.

Table 1: Social Media platforms market share

The ability to spread brand awareness quickly in the web community through social media platforms is highly dependent on having a set of followers willing to recommend the company’s product to their friends. Due to the lack of awareness of the Hotel Quickly brand within the APAC region, one of the main challenges that the company faced was to be able to find a significant group of first followers that

Page 8 of 20 then publicized the company through “word of mouth” to their friends. Since people tend to respond better and engage into more meaningful relationships with companies that they discover through their own searches than with companies that directly advertise themselves, a research was conducted on the top discussion websites, forums and Facebook groups/pages in which Hotel Quickly could participate and, thus be seen by potential followers.

Facebook groups and pages are many times created to advertise parties and events in a certain region. Since often after these parties people are not in the necessary conditions to drive back home, these events can be an excellent source of customers for Hotel Quickly’s last minute bookings. As a result, as it can be seen in Table 2, the top 10 groups and pages found, in the region, relate to this category.

Table 2: Top Facebook Groups

Regarding the top discussion websites and forums, many of these related to general topics and not to a specific category like tech or travel. Because of this the research done targeted on the ones with the highest Alexa’s ranking or number of members, so that Hotel Quickly could focus their efforts in participating in them. In Table 3 is possible to see the top 3 forums for each of the launching countries. Besides participating in forums or Facebook Groups, there are other means available in the Internet that Hotel Quickly can use to promote its image and obtain an exponential growth after launching. Taking this into account, a strong emphasis was also given to researching the most read bloggers in the APAC region, so that Hotel Quickly could contact directly with them and try to get a post published about its app. Furthermore, free app promotional websites, such as a news feed where everyone can post their own articles, were also researched.

In what concerns blogs, the most followed top bloggers are usually specialized in a specific category and not in a local. Nevertheless, there are still some bloggers, in either Asia or the launching countries, that focus on Lifestyle, Travel and Tech. The top blogs for these categories can be seen in Table 4.

Country Type Group name Category Members/Likes

Thailand Page Bangkok Club Events Clubbing 7346 Singapore Group Hazel's Guestlist Parties and clubbing 7268 Indonesia Page The Bali Party Parties 5716 Hong Kong Page Hong Kong Events Events 4072 Indonesia Page Jakarta Events Events 3921 Thailand Group Bangkok Party People Parties 3838 Hong Kong Group Hong Kong Party Club Parties and clubbing 3766 Singapore Group Singapore Parties Parties and clubbing 3343 Thailand Page Bangkok Live Music Events 3167 Thailand Group Pattaya Expats Club Events 2274

Page 9 of 20 Table 3: Top forums in launching countries

Table 4: Top blogs in launching countries and Asia

The most useful free app promotional websites can be divided into three main categories: the news/press releases websites, the app reviewers websites and other tools. In terms of news and press release websites, the most well-known, and where Hotel Quickly should post its articles, are Digg, Reddit and PrMac. In terms of app reviewer websites, the ones with a highest number of followers, where it is possible to submit an app for review for free, are AppStorm, MacWorld, AppAdvice, AppStoreApps, Tuaw, iPhone App Review, SlapApp, AppChatter and WhatsonIphone. Finally, other tools that can be interesting to achieve free promotion on the web are RippleFire’s free version, which allows to share

Country Name Ranking or # Members Language

Hong Kong Weibo 12th Alexa for HK Chinese Hong Kong Discuss 14th Alexa for HK Chinese Hong Kong NetEase 17th Alexa for HK Chinese Singapore Warrior 39th Alexa in Singapore English Singapore Weibo 50th Alexa in Singapore Chinese Singapore STOMP 55th Alexa in Singapore English Indonesia ForumPonsel 102.695 members Indonesian Indonesia Kaskus 176.431 members Indonesian Indonesia Indosiar 57.003 members Indonesian Thailand ThaiVisa 99.080 members English Thailand Pattaya Addicts 25.246 members English Thailand Sanook 9th Alexa in Thailand Thai Malaysia Cari Forum 15th Alexa in Malaysia Malay Malaysia Lowyat 16th Alexa in Malaysia English Malaysia Busuk 47th Alexa in Malaysia Malay Taiwan Pchome 10th Alexa in Taiwan Chinese Taiwan Eyny 11th Alexa in Taiwan Chinese Taiwan Mobile01 14th Alexa in Taiwan Chinese

Category Region Blog Name Popularity

Travel Asia Ytravelblog #1 Asia Travel Blog Lifestyle Asia Jenniepperson #1 Asia Lifetyle Blog

Tech Asia Asiajin Top Ranked Asia Tech blog Tech Asia Thisweekinasia Top Ranked Asia Tech blog Travel Hong Kong Thisisglamorous NYTimes Top 50 Blog worldwide Lifestyle/Tech Indonesia Indonesiamatters #1 Blog in Indonesia, Alexa Ranking 98,492

Tech Malaysia Blogserius #6 best blogger in Malaysia, Alexa Ranking 23,698 Travel Malaysia Vkeong 100,000 unique visitors/month with 80% malaysian viewers Travel Singapore Mylovelybluesky 1100 facebook likes

Travel Singapore Xiaosaujun 76 facebook likes and Best Travel Blog 2012 award Lifestyle Singapore Omy 2010 Best Travel Blog Award

Travel Taiwan Hungryintaipe #1 Award 2011 Taiwan Travel Blog

Travel Thailand Oknation (wintawan) Best Travel/Photo Blog in Thailand with audience of 181,221 Travel Thailand Oknation (chartsiam) #2 Trave/Photo Blog in Thailand with audiene of 236,095

Page 10 of 20 videos across the major platforms and websites, DMOZ, which is a directory database, and AWeber, which is a tool for creating and automating email marketing campaigns.

Finally, as being able to manage the social media platforms efficiently and measure the impact of the social media strategies followed is extremely important for a company to be able to make decisions based on more than pure intuition, a research was also conducted on the free twitter tools available in the market. The main tools found were Twitter Search, which allows to search Twitter in real-time based on specific keywords, Twilert, which sends an email whenever a pre-defined keyword is mentioned, TweetDeck, which facilitates the task of managing and scheduling contacts with followers, and GroupTweet, which allows several users to tweet from the same account. In terms of searching the most influential people, Twitter Counter, Klout and Tunkrank, which give a ranking of the most influential tweeters based on a series of criteria like number of followers, can be used. If the objective is to find experts in the different categories (travel, start-up, etc.) then, Topsy, Wefollow, Twellow or JustTweetIt are good options. Finally, if the region where followers’ tweets are coming from is important Twitter Vision, which combines Google Earth with Twitter, is an excellent tool.

3.3. Social Media Roll-Out Plan

Using the guidelines defined in the initial approach for the social media plan and leveraging on the knowledge obtained through the research of the most important players in the different networks, a social media roll-out plan was devised for Hotel Quickly. This plan consisted of social media strategies that Hotel Quickly should implement in the period comprising some days before the launching event and, thereafter, on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. The developed action plans also included event driven actions (e.g. what to do when a new hotel becomes part of Hotel Quickly) and targeted mainly the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Website/Blog platforms.

3.3.1. Facebook

For Facebook it was proposed that, in the days leading to the 21st of March, a “count-down" campaign should be done, where each day before launching a picture advertising one of Hotel Quickly’s launching countries or hotels was posted. Thereafter, on a daily basis, Hotel Quickly should try to make posts about at least 3 partner hotels, where it can take advantage of the different countries’ time zones to spread the posts throughout the day and prevent people from feeling overburdened with information. Furthermore, these posts should be targeted at the hotels that, at that moment, have the highest vacancy

Page 11 of 20 rates. Nevertheless it mustn’t be forgotten that hotels should not to be repeat within short frames of time (e.g. same week), to not annoy Hotel Quickly's followers with repeated information.

Every week, Hotel Quickly should try to organize a Facebook contest that induces people to share the Hotel Quickly page with their network of friends. This could be optimized by focusing in the target consumer group of each country (e.g., if in Singapore target users are staycation couples then offering a night in a 5-star hotel in Singapore to the couple who gets the most number of likes in a picture of them next to one of Hotel Quickly partner hotels is a good option as, this way, both Hotel Quickly and the partner hotels are promoted) and by changing the country of the promotion each week (e.g. first week - Thailand, second week - Hong Kong, third week - Singapore, etc.). Furthermore it should follow the Facebook groups researched to check for new threads where it would be interesting to participate.

Regarding monthly targets for Facebook activity, a "Country of the Month" should be implemented, where each month Hotel Quickly will give special attention to a specific country, posting videos and news about that country: places to visit, restaurants to go (chose the ones closer to partner hotels), things to do (if possible related to the partner hotels), top hotels to stay (obviously choosing the independent news articles that give more attention to partner hotels). Since Hotel Quickly is selling a luxury experience, this will highlight all the wonderful experiences customers can have if they chose to book through Hotel Quickly. Furthermore, a " Customer of the Month" contest, where people that register in Hotel Quickly’s app through Facebook get points according to the number of bookings done, should be organized. The winner of the month (or top 3) will then receive a pre-established prize. This will had a fun and competitive component to booking through Hotel Quickly, what will not only lead more people to register using a Facebook account (thus allowing Hotel Quickly to collect personal data about their customers without them being aware of it) but also increase the loyalty of last-minute bookers to the app.

In terms of event driven actions, whenever launching in a new country or city, a contest should be created aimed at publicizing Hotel Quickly among residents of the country or city where the app is going to be launched. Furthermore, a countdown “campaign" two or three days before launching posting interesting places to visit in the country and promoting the hotels that are going to be in Hotel Quickly would also be interesting. Launching a new hotel partnership is also an important event. Consequently, some pictures and articles about the new hotel should be posted on Hotel Quickly’s Facebook page on

Page 12 of 20 the day of launching and during the first week after its joining to Hotel Quickly, in order to increase users' perception of the new partner hotel.

In terms of awards, whenever a partner hotel receives significant recognition, Hotel Quickly should post a link to the article where the award/recognition is being mentioned, emphasizing its ability to always choose the best hotels available. Furthermore, when Hotel Quickly achieves significant targets (e.g.,1 million app installs) a short contest to celebrate Hotel Quickly's achievement should be organized.

3.3.2. Twitter

Since Twitter is the most short-term focused platform, the social media roll-out plan for this network didn’t include monthly targets, with a greater focus being given to daily and weekly initiatives. Before launching, Hotel Quickly was advised to increasingly tweet on a regular basis until the launch of the app (e.g., " Getting ready to offer you the best #last-minute #booking platform in the market!" or "Fine tuning the last details to bring you the most #user-friendly #hotel #app in #Asia"). It should also try to participate in some of the Twiends groups related to the company’s main categories of focus (travel, tech, start-up, etc.) and start optimizing the hashtags used in the posts so that an increasingly number of people are able to find Hotel Quickly in their searches.

On a daily basis, Hotel Quickly should try to tweet at least five times a day about the best offers that Hotel Quickly has for that day, mentioning number of rooms left to give its followers a sense of urgency and try to induce impulsive bookings. Since to have loyal followers it is important to have reciprocity in tweet participation, Hotel Quickly should try to retweet every comment made about it and do a daily search through the posts of some of its most active followers, to see if there is any topic where Hotel Quickly can reply and participate.

In terms of weekly targets, the company should try to have at least one weekly comment in a Twiend related to each of the main areas where Hotel Quickly operates (Asia/Hospitality/Mobile Apps). Furthermore, if the " Customer of the Month" initiative on Facebook goes through, it should tweet about the weekly progress of the different users to create a feeling of activity in the contest. Finally, two on-the-spot contests spread throughout the week, where people are incentivized to tweet about Hotel Quickly and promote the app, should also be organized.

In terms of event driven actions, whenever launching on a new city or country, Hotel Quickly should tweet updates of the progress until the launch, in order to promote interest in existing and potential users

Page 13 of 20 about the new booking opportunities (e.g. “In trouble because your #flight just got cancelled? Don’t worry! In 4 hours you will be able to use #Hotel #Quickly to book a wonderful #hotel in #Seoul!"). Regarding the launch of a new hotel, a tweet should be made once the agreement has been settled (e.g., "Today #Hotel Quickly's management just closed another #exclusive #deal for you! In 2 days start enjoying #last-minute #deals at Hotel Y !") and once the hotel is available for booking (e.g., " Looking to spend a wonderful #night at #Hotel Z for half the #price? Today is the day we make your #dreams come true! Start #booking now with #Hotel Quickly!").

In terms of awards, whenever a partner hotel receives recognition, tweet about the award or recognition in a way that induces people to book impulsively the rooms available. Furthermore, if Hotel Quickly accomplishes important targets, tweet about the achievement and thank all the followers and users for making it possible.

3.3.3. YouTube

Taking into account the fact that producing a good quality advertisement video can require significant capital expenditures, Youtube was not considered as one of the main social media platforms for Hotel Quickly. Nevertheless, due to the high market share of this platform in launching countries and the strong potential for virality of videos, it was included in the roll-out plan.

Before launching, if Hotel Quickly has a promotional video, it should post it on its YouTube channel and link all the other social media networks to the video so that the channel gains awareness. If available, promotional videos of the hotels and countries where the app is going to be launched should be posted. Other possibility is including videos explaining the last minute booking industry and how easy it is to book a hotel with Hotel Quickly.

Since YouTube channels are supposed to work as long-term databases of videos, no daily targets were defined for this platform as new interesting videos are usually not found under such short time periods. In terms of weekly performance, Hotel Quickly should publish at least one video advertising a specific country, city or hotel, according to Hotel Quickly's main operational targets for that week. Furthermore, if the contest organized on Facebook involves the creation of a short video by participants, these should also be published on the YouTube channel and the number of views taken as one of the winning criteria. Finally, regarding monthly targets, Hotel Quickly should try to get covered by one or more top video blogs who specialize in the technology, travel or start-up industries.

Page 14 of 20 In what concerns event driven actions, such as the launching of a new city, country or hotel, Hotel Quickly should research if there are any videos promoting them and publish the ones that are in line with the brand’s value proposition. For awards or targets achieved, unless there is an interesting video talking about them, no actions should be taken.

3.3.4. Website and Blogs

In what concerns Hotel Quickly’s website and the blog section included in it, before launching, the home page should have a “count-down” with the number of days and hours for launch of the app and the company should try to contact local press and specialized magazines or blogs to publish an article about Hotel Quickly.

Due to the more static role of the website in the social media plan it should not be updated on a regular basis, so that people have a stable source where they can easily lookup information. As a result, thereafter, the main daily objective for this type of platforms should be to do a general search through the daily posts of the main blog communities and forums dedicated to the app, hospitality and tourism sectors to see if there is some topic where Hotel Quickly can participate and increase its visibility in the online community.

In terms of weekly targets, the company should try to have at least one weekly comment in one of the researched top blogs or forums. On a monthly basis, the website should also be updated with the main events and contests that Hotel Quickly is organizing in the following month and the main celebrations and events that are going to happen in the cities and countries where the company is present.

Since Hotel Quickly’s website is not supposed to be constantly changing, whenever launching in a new country, city or hotel, the only change that should be done on this platform is to update it with the new information. Furthermore, if there are specialized blogs or forums talking about these countries or cities, Hotel Quickly should try to either participate or get mentioned in them.

Regarding awards and achievements, they should only lead to a change in the website if the partner hotels or Hotel Quickly want to take them as part of their trademark. In the hotels’ case, a logo of the award should be placed next to their name and, in Hotel Quickly’s case, a small sentence should be included in website’s home page (e.g., “ Providing last minute rooms to more than 1 million satisfied users in the Asia Pacific region!”).

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3.4. Changes over Time

One or two weeks after launching, by analyzing the different social media performance metrics, it was possible to see that the social media plan initially purposed was not being enough to promptly increase Hotel Quickly’s brand awareness in the web community. Because of this, a slight shift in focus was operated, to research more direct ways of engaging in connections and long-term relationships with individuals that already had a significant importance in the social media networks. This could be of interest for Hotel Quickly because, due to their massive follower base, whichever posts they make can provide significant free publicity to the app.

Using some of the free Twitter analysis tools aforementioned, a thorough research was conducted of the top tweeters in each country for each specific segment related to Hotel Quickly’s product (travel, tech, start-up, hotel, hospitality, news and business). This research also included some local celebrities with a huge number of Twitter followers that Hotel Quickly could use in their Ambassador program to sponsor its brand. The top 5 tweeters and celebrities for each country can be seen in Appendix B .

Furthermore, it would also be profitable for Hotel Quickly to be able to track and reply on real-time to hashtags from other people, as this would give a good way to justify engaging in direct communication with them (e.g., someone would post “Just arrived at #hongkong!” and Hotel Quickly would immediately reply something like “ Hope you have fun! Already know where you staying tonight?” ). For this to be possible an analysis was done of the tools that were able to track hashtags on real-time. A table with the top tools can be seen in Appendix C.

3.5. Main Limitations

The main limitation of the Social Media strategy developed for Hotel Quickly is that its method of acquiring loyal users and costumers does not allow for an initial viral expansion of the brand. Instead, the company must incur into the extremely time consuming activities of gaining its followers trust by engaging into meaningful two way communication processes that make consumers feel that they are useful to the company and that their ideas are being listened to. Because of this, the company might take more time in its initial stage of development than if it advertised its brand unselectively throughout the web platform.

If the company possessed a higher budget for advertisement expenses then it could possibly incur into other type of paid campaigns that would achieve a higher number of downloads and followers in a

Page 16 of 20 significantly shorter amount of time. Although many of the new users obtained through this channel would not be loyal users, this strategy could help the company achieving a faster initial brand awareness in the market. Based on this awareness, the company could then leverage on its reputation to make use of its social media presence and gain the loyalty of the existing and potential costumers who were really interested in continuing using the product over the long-term.

Despite the apparent initial advantages of incurring into costly advertisement c(Alexa's ratings s.d.)ampaigns, it could be later be difficult for Hotel Quickly to transform the new costumers obtained through this channel into loyal users. This is why, despite knowing the limitations for a start-up company of slowing building its social media presence through trust and “word-of-mouth” reference, the recommendation done to Hotel Quickly was that it should engage in this type of Social Media strategy.

3.6. What could have been done differently?

When it comes to Social Media strategy, one of the important things to do when launching a brand is to have already a significant group of people that is interested in the company before it launches its product in the market. This way, when the launching actually takes place, the people that were already following the company feel as if they are a part of the company, as they were the ones who took interest in it before it was even operating in the market. As a result of this stronger loyalty, there is a higher probability that people will share and recommend the product to their friends, thus increasing the growth of the brand’s awareness in the moment it joins the market.

Taking this into account, one of the things that Hotel Quickly missed to do was to develop a strong connection with a small group of industry experts before launching its app in the market. Although looking back this seems like a relatively simple initiative to undertaken that could have yielded significant positive results, the fact is that, due to the incredibly fast pace and high competitiveness of the start-up industry, Hotel Quickly, by making public that it was planning to launch this type of app, could have risked the appearance of incumbent companies while it was waiting for these connections to be established. In this sense, the fact that Hotel Quickly’s management decided to skip this initial step of building social media presence before launching and, instead, focus all their efforts in guaranteeing that the app would be ready to work without problems when launching, is also an acceptable decision.

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4. Learning Reflection

4.1. Previous knowledge

Due to the more practical context of the Hotel Quickly Business Project, in terms of Masters content directly applied, there were only two tasks where I used an approach based on the theoretical frameworks and methodologies learned in class. When developing the Sales Tracking tool I followed the same approach that I learned in the Modelling Business Decisions module for analysing business variables. In this sense I created a section where the sales staff was able to input the contract details of the different hotel partnerships and then modelled a separate section where the required data was treated and analyzed until it was in a format that was fit for displaying in a dashboard of graphs.

For the social media plan, described in this report, I also used directly what I learned in the managing across cultures class. When addressing and trying to understand which type of target consumer groups might be more preeminent in each country, it is crucial to understand the differences in terms of cultural dimensions scores for each culture. In this sense the fact that Singapore scores high in the uncertainty avoidance of the Hofstede framework allowed to conclude that the target consumers from this country would be people looking for staycation who didn’t want to venture into new countries. Furthermore, the fact that Hong Kong scores high in masculinity also allowed to conclude that they give a great importance to money and, consequently, will be attracted by great price discount deals.

Regarding masters content adjusted, for the exclusivity task, I took into consideration the knowledge that I obtained in the pricing strategies and negotiation strategy classes, of not focusing negotiations on prices and try to find alternative package deals. In this sense, when performing the task, I adjusted the previously learned framework to the situation and, instead of suggesting that Hotel Quickly should offer lower commission to guarantee exclusivity with partner hotels, I suggested that it should create a package of premium services that it would only offer to exclusive hotels. This way Hotel Quickly maintained its profit margin and partner hotels with exclusivity benefited from the added value of receiving preferential treatment over non-exclusive hotels.

4.2. New knowledge

Due to the diversity of the tasks performed, I was able to acquire significant new knowledge in the different functional areas of a start-up company. Just to understand Hotel Quickly’s mobile app

Page 18 of 20 business, I had to understand all the specific terms and frameworks used for evaluating performance in this type of business. As a result, terms such as bounce rate, up-time and failure rate, click-through rate and cost-per-action became familiar to me.

Later, to develop the social media plan described in this report, I had to learn and understand a significant number of new concepts associated with social media platforms and leverage on the existing frameworks used to analyze them. This included learning performance metrics such as number of followers, levels of activity, cost-per-download and consumer-acquisition-cost.

For some of the other tasks performed during the business project, the acquisition of new knowledge was even more significant, as there were some areas where I had could not use any previously learned methodology or framework, since I had never studied them before. In this sense, the legal requirement task for the different countries allowed to understand in greater detail the way how commercial law is organized in the different countries and create ways to efficiently search the regulations directly applicable to a certain type of companies. Furthermore, the credit card fraud task allowed me to understand how the complete chargeback process takes place and, consequently, develop a methodology to address eventual problems that might come up in this area.

In terms of IT knowledge, the task for the Business Intelligence tool forced me to investigate the way how information is transmitted throughout the different stages of the analytics process, from the moment a user installs the mobile app to the moment that a dashboard is created with all the available information. This task required me not only to study a completely new framework of how the different databases of a mobile app company transmit information between themselves, but also the understand formats in which they do this.

4.3. Personal experience

I really enjoyed the opportunity to be part of the Hotel Quickly Business Project, as I believe it gave me valuable “hands-on” experience on all the areas required to set up a new venture and it allowed me to develop a mentality set that can be extremely useful in my future international career.

Every week we were usually assigned three new tasks. Since all these tasks required at least twenty hours of work, there was no time for everyone to work on all the tasks so what we frequently did was assign each member of the group a separate task. Because I had a more analytical financial background then the rest of the group and I was the one more interested in these areas, normally the tasks that

Page 19 of 20 required a higher knowledge of analytical tools, such as the recommendation for the Business Intelligence tool and the development of the Sales Tracking tool, were done by me. I believe this was probably my greatest strength in the project, as a person without such analytical skills would simply not be able to provide the same high quality result for these tasks.

Although during the week each member was focusing on a separate task, the cooperation and support within the team was extremely strong. Whenever a member felt lost and not able to address a certain problem, we would all meet and go through the different requirements of the project together until we found an approach that could achieve the desired results. As a result, despite not having worked on every task, I was always following and learning from what the other group members were doing. In this sense, I believe the group work method applied throughout the semester was the best one, as it allowed us to keep the deadlines and succeed in the frenetic pace of a start-up company, while providing everyone a complete learning experience where no one felt overburdened with work.

In terms of cultural experience, it is also my opinion that this was an extremely rewarding Business Project. With all the group members having a different cultural background (Portugal, Netherlands and United States), we had to respect and find compromising solutions between the different time-schedules and working methods of each member of the group. This for me was one of the most valuable learning experiences of the project, as it made me aware of cultural biases I didn’t know I possessed and made me more open to understanding and learning from different cultures.

Throughout the project I believe my main weakness was not being used to dealing with subjects completely out of my area of expertise. As a result, when I was given three to four days to perform tasks that required advanced knowledge of IT and Legal issues, sometimes I felt hopeless as, after several hours of research, I still felt that I had not completely understood all the basic variables of the underlying problem. Although, in the end, with my colleagues’ support I was always able to come up with an efficient approach to tackle the problems and provide good solutions, I believe this is an area where I can still improve. Consequently, in the future I will try to work more frequently in areas out of my comfort area so that, when I am faced with a completely unthinkable problem, I can keep calm and solve it easily.

To conclude this section, I would like to say that for me the main highlight of the Hotel Quickly Business Project was when the company launched its product in the market. Never having worked on a start-up company before, I had never experienced the feeling of seeing an idea grow from a simple

Page 20 of 20 thought to actually being transformed into a product available for a community of millions of people. In this sense, the opportunity to observe something that I had helped build take real form gave me a priceless feeling of accomplishment.

4.4. Results and Main Insights

As the moment of the writing of this work project report, Hotel Quickly was a company which had legal entities established in seven different Asia Pacific countries, a totally automated and secure channel of inbound and outbound payments, around 200 hotel partnerships, 1.143 twitter followers, 6.503 Facebook likes and over 10.000 installs only in the Android platform. Furthermore, during its 40 days of existence it achieved the top 10 in the App Store for Singapore, it organized four Facebook contests and it received coverage from twelve different press sources (blogs, specialized magazines, etc.).

One of the motives that lead me to choose this Business Project was that, since Hotel Quickly is a small start-up company with restricted capital, the opportunity to perform tasks that actually contributed to the company’s strategic decisions and added value was much higher than in other projects with bigger companies. Based on the feedback we received throughout the project and the social media initiatives implemented by Hotel Quickly, I believe the tasks we did that added most value to the company were the Social Media roll-out plan and a VBA Sales Tracking Tool we developed to keep track of all the details of the hotels’ partnerships.

Overall I think that everything during the project went smoothly, as the fact that Hotel Quickly’s CEO several times praised the group’s performance shows. During our many weekly Skype meetings, we were always told that, if Hotel Quickly was achieving such great result under a such short time period, it was in big part because we were working so intensively on all the tasks and always providing them with valuable advice. As a result, I like to think that the values mentioned in the first paragraph of this section also reflect in some part the quality of our Business Project. Finally, although some circumstantial decisions are always debatable, I cannot think of anything that, throughout the project, should have been done differently on a consistent basis.

5. References

December de 2012. http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2178428/14-social-media-roi-metrics. Alexa's ratings. http://www.alexa.com/.

Big Boards. http://rankings.big-boards.com/.

Gannon, M. J. Understanding global cultures: Metaphorical journeys through 28 nations, clusters of nations, and continents. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.

Hall, Starr. The Social Wave. 2012.

Hofstede. National Culture for Singapore. 2013. http://geert-hofstede.com/singapore.html.

Hofstede, G. Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations across Nations - 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage, 2001.

Hotel Quickly. www.hotelquickly.com. Klout. http://klout.com/home.

Singapore Blog Awards. http://sgblogawards.omy.sg/. Tunkrank. http://tunkrank.com/.

Twitter Counter. http://twittercounter.com/. WeFollow. http://wefollow.com/.

6. Appendix

6.2. Appendix B – Top 5 Twitter accounts per country

Country Category Twitter Name # followers # tweets

Singapore News GMA News 1.295.378 131.611 Singapore Business Merry Riana 1.104.951 35.897 Singapore Celebrity Aaaron Aziz 1.070.730 7.466 Singapore Livestyle WTF Online 451.363 828 Singapore Travel TravelCasts 417.317 6.697

Malaysia Media/Celebrity Officialzizanrack 1.170.705 5.829 Malaysia Livestyle/Celebrity Shaheizy Sam 958.476 7.299 Malaysia Livestyle/Celebrity Liyana Jasmay 881.661 12.289 Malaysia Livestyle/Celebrity Awal Ashaari 822.733 8.066 Malaysia Media/Celebrity Azil Nawawi 737.909 36.719 Hong Kong Business Kevin She 159.912 12.397 Hong Kong Start-up Sté Kerwer 146.791 10.167 Hong Kong Media Iam Kamsai 146.284 12.035 Hong Kong Start-up Arnold Aranez 129.144 30.324 Hong Kong Start-up Stanley Tang 91.926 3.507

Taiwan Business HTC 497.336 39.343 Taiwan Livestyle AnnLi 136.448 10.446 Taiwan News TW next media 133.296 27.855 Taiwan Business Mark Hirsch 47.553 10.210 Taiwan Star-up Zuola 45.961 28.336 Indonesia Celebrity Agnes Monica 7.132.913 11.222 Indonesia Celebrity Sherina Munaf 5.619.891 11.899 Indonesia News Detik 4.552.193 382.193 Indonesia Celebrity Vidi 4.479.142 22.379 Indonesia Celebrity Luna Maya 4.376.380 8.543

Thailand Celebrity Araya Hargate 603.036 677 Thailand Livestyle Major Cineplex 419.365 21.571 Thailand News Suthichai 396.182 82.164 Thailand Media/Celebrity Nui_EFM 282.073 31.437 Thailand Media Cutto 205.463 23.447

6.3. Appendix C – Hashtag tracking tools

Tool Name Facebook Twitter Live-track Auto-response Export Price

Hashtags No Yes Yes No CSV, XML, JSON + dahsboard

$99/month for 8 hashtags $189/month for 20 hashtags $349/month for 40 hashtags

Hootsuite Yes Yes Yes No

Yes + dashboard view

$10/months for pro -custom pricing for enterprise

TweetDeck No Yes Yes No Live dashboard Free

Trackur Yes Yes Yes No Live dashboard

$97/month for plus (recommended) $197/month for premium

Simplymeasured Yes Yes Yes No

Excel and dashboard

Free plug-ins

Request prices for advanced tools

Tweetattackspro No Yes Yes Yes Software 149/one time purchase Twithawk No Yes Yes Yes online tool 5cents per tweet/reply