A lesson from Ibis in making your email addresses un-marketing friendly
by Martin Belam, 3 November 2006
I was staying at an Ibis hotel in Linz this week, and at the moment they have an offline promotion running for the fact that they are gradually rolling out 100% smoke-free hotels throughout Europe. The breakfast place-mats were advertising the programme, and as I was in Austria the focus was on the 100% smoke-free hotel in Vienna.
But look at the email address!
h3747@accor.com might be a perfectly good internal email address within the parent Accor chain where it might be disguised with an alias, but surely not as an email address being promoted to the public. Wouldn't you think that an address that included some if not all of the words "Ibis", "hotel" and "Vienna/Wien" might be more memorable to the visitor than h3747@accor.com
Not so sure. I reckon it's a lesson in pointless extra information.
Why would you ever want this hotel's email address? You'll book on their website, after all; and if you have any queries normally you want them answered there and then, so you'd not send an email (preferring to ring them).
If it were me, I'd remove that email address totally; and possibly replace it with a website address.
In transferring to a new server I managed to lose from the database an additional comment on this entry which agreed with James, saying something along the lines that it was clearly an internal address published unthinkingly.