PhoCusWright@ITB08: Jury's out

Jurys Doyle Hotel Group CEO Bill Walshe started his session at Europe’s leading travel technology conference by saying that he wasn’t going to talk about travel technology.

True to his word, he didn’t, much. But that’s not to say that his overview of the ‘comprehensive repositioning’ of the Jurys Doyle brand didn’t have some very strong resonances for the delegates in the room.

Such as:

• put the customer at the heart of the everything
• know exactly where you sit within your competitive set brand matrix and deliver accordingly
• don’t bother with 15 minutes focus groups. They come in, look for the free gift and tell you what they think you want them to say to get the aforementioned free gift. Get a marketer and a psychologist to run them
• think about replacing ‘employee of the month’ with ‘innovator of the month’
  

He did say that 30% of Jury Doyle’s business is coming through third party online intermediaries.

Interesting to see how this changes when the comprehensive repositioning of the brand is completed. It seems as his desire for ‘the brand proposition to be delivered at every customer touch point’ is incompatible with a quick and dirty bedbank.

Martin Cowen, chief writer, Travolution