Shane Cleghorn is the Ecommerce Manager at G6 Hospitality for the North American region. And unless you work in hotel e-commerce, you may not be familiar with content scores, but they play a huge role in the visibility and demand for hotels today.
In this case study, Shane explains what content scores are, and how he managed these at scale with Shiji Group for G6 Hospitality, the parent company of economy lodging leaders Motel 6 and Studio 6 brands. When Shane Cleghorn was recruited to G6 Hospitality in 2019, one of his responsibilities was making sure the brand’s photography scores improved.
Limitations in Visual Content Distribution
It was a huge job. “We needed to overhaul our process, procuring professional photos and tagging them appropriately - and that’s a ton of work,” he told us. “For example, a Motel 6 location has a photo of a queen bed and I upload that to Expedia. Expedia doesn’t know it’s a queen bed. It’s up to us to dictate what the image is. I needed a way to tag images, whether it was a queen bed, micro-fridge, or non-smoking room. I had to match up all the photos with the correct room type.” Doing all of this for 1,400+ hotels represented a lot of work for a small team. “Our team is small but mighty. We not only run the website but also all of our content, including photography. We needed to bring in extra help with the details of tagging and making sure that photos were reviewed from a brand perspective before getting uploaded.” The brand’s quality scores suffered as a result, dropping to just 66 on a 100-point scale in 2021.
It was hurting the demand for our business quite a bit”. G6 had been an IcePortal customer (a Shiji Distribution Solutions product) for several years, and Shane reached out to them for help and to understand what it would take to get their content scores up. After speaking with the Shiji Team, it became clear that the Shiji SmartX for Visual Distribution solution - an offering designed to reduce fixed labor costs, maximize efficiency, and unlock the potential of hotel brands on distribution channels by providing optimization services - would be the best fit. “We ended up working out a deal where the Shiji’s SmartX Team did the curation for six months. I knew they could do the job from their track record as an organization with us over the years
Shane said.
