Report: Hotels' digital prowess brings higher stock price and room revenue

Does a hotel's overall digital competence translate into more revenue per available room and a bump in its stock price?

A new report from digital-best-practices firm L2 and Buddy Media suggests there is a positive correlation between the 350 data points that go into their digital competence metrics and both RevPar and stock price.

L2's Digital Index Hotels, the second in an annual series, pinpoints the correlation in the following two charts:

In other findings, the study concluded that:

Hotel websites with user reviews gave up 38% less traffic to online travel agencies than did sites without such user-generated content;

Users of hotel sites with "local, curated content" spent an average of 16% more time on these sites than customers visiting hotel sites without such content;

Large hotel companies with multiple brands had higher digital IQs on average (109 out of a possible 150) than did independent, private hotels (92) and independent brands which are public companies (87);

95% of the brands studied deployed both global and property pages on Facebook in 2012, up from 73% a year earlier, and 70% participated on Twitter, compared with 56% a year earlier;