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HOTELS
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Hoteliers’ 3,000 job plan T
Entry level Irish workers ‘being excluded” by lack of training opportunities
he hoteliers of Ireland were in their most upbeat mood in four years as they gathered for their annual conference in Killarney. Michael Vaughan’s big idea at the conference was to provide 3,000 people a year with entrylevel employment. The hoteliers argued that entry level Irish workers were being excluded from the sector due to a lack of training opportunities. The inaugural president’s award at the IHF Gala dinner was awarded
Miriam O'Callaghan, Tim O'Connor, John Hennessey-Niland, Niall Gibbons and Shaun Quinn discussing the Gathering at the IHF conference to Martin Naughton for his role in bringing 35,000 Americans to the Navy-Notre Dame match in September. A spicy debate erupted over the role of OTAs and peer-review sites. CEO of
the German Hotel Association (IHA) Markus Luthe outlined how first OTAs and now search engines have moved from supplying search facilities to what he called “customer-napping.”
He told delegates: "We asked Google hotel finder where they get their rates, they said: ‘We don’t know.’” He also warned at how Google was selling a greater proportion of their
results to OTAs and to boost is own advertising: “This is a promotion tool and no longer a search engine. I call this the end of independent search on the web.” He concluded: “we are not against OTAs, we have to stop them taking over our customers, binding themselves to them.” Leo Varadkar told hoteliers the VAT reduction costs the Exchequer €350 million a year. “That’s a lot of money. What I need from you is evidence that this policy has worked, and the number of people employed
in the sector is increasing. What I don’t want to hear is special pleading about how the industry is in trouble. Every industry is in trouble.” Shaun Quinn at IHF said that road signage is “the number one negative” that Fáilte Ireland hears each year in its visitor attitude survey. So far, 75 hoteliers have contacted Tourism Ireland asking them to take Tripadvisor links off the newly launched Discover Ireland website and Niall promised a meeting with hoteliers to discuss the issue.
‘ANONYMITY IS THE CULTURE OF YOUR COMPANY’
T
he liveliest moments at the IHF conference came after Sarah Mathews’ presentation on Tripadvisor when Simon Haden from Gregan’s Castle mentioned the A-word, ANONYMITY. Simon Haden: Last week in the New York Times newspaper, the CEO and founder of Tripadvisor Stephen Kaufer said that when he started the company his wife said to him: ‘Just keep it easy to use, and honest.’ And I’d just like to ask you where is the honesty in a company that publishes malicious and libellous re-
views of hotels, and when your company is offered evidence to the contrary, that you refuse to remove those reviews. When is your company going to make its reviewers identify themselves, because that is the only solution to this problem, and it is not going to go away (applause). And we realise that Tripadvisor is here to stay and that it has become very powerful and this is why it is an important issue for us. Sarah Mathews: I can empathise that if you get a bad review it is very hard to read. If you receive a bad review the
question is: have you reported it? Because the community only works if you report it. We have a team around the world that will investigate the review itself to find out what’s going on with it, whether it is genuine or not, and reviews if they are deemed to be not genuine have been removed. If in your case you are talking about a review that hasn’t been removed, we have a system of checks and balances in place to see where the reviewer is, there are a whole range of things we run. There is a whole range of things we
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look at. If the review isn’t right and you reported it, the investigation deemed it right, then of course it will stay on. Simon Haden: I’m sorry when you report a fake, suspicious, malicious review, you are given 500 characters in a box. When you get a reply you get an anonymous reply which is the culture of your company, with nothing specific to explain why the review is going to remain on your website. Sarah Mathews: In the help centre there are a number of documents to tell you why a review may stay on and why a
review is taken off. There is quite a lot of documentation in the help centre that will advise you why a review stays on. Miriam O’Callaghan: To be fair to you, you are only one person in the company. It is a huge, huge issue, and the fact that a lot of the time it is anonymous. Where people can post things and do not identify themselves, it can actually destroy your business. Sarah Mathews: Our reviews are mainly positive. The ones that are negative, there are different ways you can look at them.