Best Western Bets Big on Web Globalization

by

The hospitality industry is embracing Web globalization in a big way these days, and that’s a very good thing, because the world is relying on the Web to book hotel rooms and flights like never before.

Here’s a press release from Best Western announcing a major boost in their global Internet presence. According to the release, “100% of the company’s online hotel and booking information is now available in French, German, Italian and International Spanish. Additionally, all Asian hotel property listings and reservations web pages are available in simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean.”

(NOTE: I always cringe when I see the term “international Spanish” used in a press release; it’s like saying “International English.”)

So here are the interesting details from the press release:

  • Internet bookings comprise 44 percent of all Best Western reservations. “The Internet is our fastest growing distribution channel,” said Ric Leutwyler, senior vice president of brand management and member service.
  • Best Western’s global Internet bookings have grown an average of 54 percent per year over the past five years.
  • The Web globalization project lasted eight months and consisted of the translation of more than 4.2 million words.
  • Globalization vendor SDL managed the project. SDL is included in our 2005 Savvy Client’s Guide to Translation Agencies.
  • On-going translation requirements are estimated at 10,000 new words per week; a continual process that will be managed by SDLWorkFlow.
  • Best Western made use of SDL’s machine translation engine to help keep translation costs to a minimum.

So how good is the Best Western site?
In our 2005 Web Globalization Report Card we evaluated 14 Web sites in the hospitality/travel industry; unfortunately, Best Western was not one of the sites evaluated.

So I took a brief global tour of the country Web sites and was happy to see them all using a generally consistent global template. I would have liked to have seen a better global gateway on the .com home page. The “Global Web Sites” button, shown below, is not the best way to direct non-English-speaking users to their Web sites:

bestwestern_gate.jpg

Overall, I’d say Best Western is doing better than average, and certainly better than the likes of the Four Seasons and Omni Hotels. And as the world’s largest hotel chain, Best Western is signaling to the industry that Web globalization has migrated from luxury to necessity.

(Visited 25 times, 1 visits today)
John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
Tweet
Share

1 thought on “Best Western Bets Big on Web Globalization”

  1. Hi John,
    Regarding your article in Corante from 4/18/2005 titled “Best Western Bets Big on Web Globalization”…

    The navigation you went (left-hand side, called “Global Best Western Sites”) was not the official global web booking site. Rather, to navigate to the other languages to book a reservation in, go to the middle of the page on http://www.bestwestern.com and it is underneath the red “NEW!” heading. This will take you to the SDL translations of dynamic web content. Please take a look at these translations and see if they fare better than “better than average”. It is a completely hands-off translation environment, meaning that when our internal staff change the english text for a certain piece of content, it is automatically sent and retrieved from SDL with no human intervention needed intp all of the targeted languages for that piece of content.

    The site(s) you went to are static pages which are maintained by our myriad of affiliate sites, some of which “link” into our global booking engine site at some point in their process.

    It may be a usability issue on BW’s part in that you navigated to the wrong area. Our bad.

    Thanks,
    Kate Johnson
    Project Lead for Globalization

Comments are closed.