He couldn’t give an answer straight away but he did a random poll around the table we were at. Out of eight hotels, only one was still charging – a property in Christchurch where recent experience tells me that hotels in New Zealand charge per minute up to a maximum 24-hour charge and a limit on bandwidth.

“Imagine if SLH became the first marketing organization to claim all its members did not charge for Internet,” I asked Kerr.

“It’s the way to go, they should but unfortunately they don’t,” he said. It’s clearly a matter out of his hands. His members are independently owned and each owner has his own take on things.

SLH, which is celebrating its 20th year, is a group that’s putting more resources in the social and mobile web.

“We are getting our hotels to understand there’s a huge choice out there – choice of booking platforms and choice of products and prices. So we have to make sure we give them the choice of products and prices and a choice of booking platforms too and do it in a way to help them make better decisions.

“We are finding that customers want to book using mobile, they are searching and researching online and booking online. We had 65,000 downloads of our app – that’s equal the number of our printed directories and it costs one-fifth of the price.”

Having said that, he said luxury customers still like to touch and feel and he doesn’t see SLH giving up altogether on printed directories but it is printing fewer numbers than before. It used to print 300,000 copies, he said.

To celebrate its two decades, it launched a Gold Coin competition in which players have to find 20 gold coins. There’s a monthly draw and a winner gets to win 20 room nights once a month. “One minute of soft launching, a man from Calgary entered,” said Kerr.

SLH can afford to give away gold coins again because the luxury market is back, said Kerr, and it’s back in greater force in Asia than in Europe where demand remains sluggish still.

“In the first three months of the year, our hotels are doing so much better than during the same time last year,” he said.

Website direct business now stands at 26% and is on the increase, thanks to a self-designed and built Internet booking engine. “We have a conversion rate of over one percent which is very good for the luxury market,” said Kerr.

He noted that it was interesting that with the proliferation of smartphones, customers were calling again to make reservations and what SLH was doing was to move call centres back to the heart of the city in places like London, Singapore and New York.

“We are moving straight back to the roots of the hotel business, and this is being driven by mobile and web.”

China will be a key focus of marketing efforts this year, said Kerr, and SLH has appointed Dragon Trail as its social media agency for the mainland and was looking to appoint a public relations agency there.

“We have to push the web as much as possible, that’s the future,” said Kerr, pictured below with his team and hotel members at the lunch.