Hilton to launch new website for leisure travelers

January 19, 2004 |

Hilton Hotels will launch a new website targeting leisure travelers. The site will be branded as MyLeisureTrip.com, and will be launched on January 22.

Hilton Hotels Corp. will launch a new website targeting leisure travelers, as the hotelier spends millions of dollars to continue luring a group that helped the industry maintain occupancy levels during a three-year downturn.

The website MyLeisureTrip.com will hit the World Wide Web on Jan 22, allowing customers to pick a city anywhere in the U.S. or Canada, and be connected to links on various recreational activities available in that area. Based on the activities available, a Web-surfer can decide on a destination, and then book a room at any of the Hilton brands.

“We want to ensure that when people think about leisure trips, they think about the Hilton family of brands,” said Tom Keltner, executive vice president at Hilton Hotels, which owns the Doubletree, Hampton and Embassy Suites brands.

But some analysts were skeptical of the move after prolonged weakness in the recovering sector.

“They should have done this two years ago, when travel was extremely weak and the economy was down. But now is better than never, because use of the Internet for leisure travel-planning continues to increase,” said William Marks, analyst for JMP Securities.

As the economy suffered and corporations cut back on spending for business travel, room pricing remained under pressure as the industry relied on vacationers to fill rooms through the Sept. 11 attacks, SARS epidemic and the Iraq war.

Since leisure travelers pay less than business travelers for rooms, creating lower revenue per available room—a key measure of health in the lodging industry—Hilton is hoping for a pickup in business travel to offset the lower room rates and maintain profit margins.

But business travel will only start picking up in late 2004 and into next year, according to Marc Falcone, analyst at Deutsche Bank. “Until then, the company will not be able to raise prices or drive margins as much as it could with a business customer,” he said.

Despite the absence of an immediate recovery in business travel, the company expects a significant increase in that sector and hopes to lure leisure customers to fill periods that are typically weak on business travel, according to Marc Grossman, senior president of corporate affairs at Hilton.

“We want to see Saturday nights, our long weekends, and summer periods get stronger,” he said.

The Web site should improve the company’s margins over time, according to Marks, at JMP Securities. “This way, they don’t have to pay a third party for reservations,” he said.

The company, which gets 20 percent of its revenue from the leisure traveler, said in October it expects 2003 revenue per available room to fall 3 percent to 4 percent, but climb 3 percent to 4 percent in 2004.