Bringing Online Visibility to Hotels with Schema.org and Multi-channel Communication

Now more than ever, it is becoming critical for businesses in the tourism industry to have a strong online presence. In order to achieve this goal, the proper use of multiple communication technologies and channels is crucial. This includes semantic annotations that can be understood by search engines, scalable multi-channel publishing, and feedback collection. We present our approach to improve touristic service providers’ online visibility with techniques comprising modelling by means of ontologies, particularly, schema.org, as well as multi-channel communication. Having implemented the approach for Tourismusverband (TVB) Innsbruck und seine Feriendorfer as well as hotel pilots, we describe how the above mentioned technologies are being used to achieve the set goal. Our findings and results show that already in the first few weeks of deployment, with eventual decrease of human social media work power in times, the use of schema.org and multi-channel communication solutions by a typical hotel increased its website visibility by 20 %, and the leads generated by social media platforms by up to 40 %.