The Hotel Marketing Blog from HotelSphere

Imitation is supposed to be the most sincere form of flattery.

Sitting in HotelSphere towers, looking at the behaviour of the businesses I can see, it's clear that there's a lot of imitation going on.

Times are hard. When times are hard different people respond in different ways. As such, we should be seeing lots of different ways of responding to the challenges 2010 will bring.

Today, I want to talk about just one of them...

Continue reading "When I grow up I want to be just like you..."

Posted by HotelBlogger

"Valentines weekend is going to be a disaster this year!"

Exclaimed the hotel manager.

"It was rubbish last year and we've got no bookings this year." He moaned...

So what's going wrong?

- Has the recession led to a reduction in romantic interludes?

- Has libido reduced in line with bank assets?

No. Love and romance are both alive and well. Couples all over the country are looking for an opportunity to spend some time together.

The problem is twofold - (1) hotels aren't designing Valentine packages people want to buy and then (2) they fail to reach out to people to tell them what's going on.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy. It'll be rubbish because you're not producing what people want, and even if you do hit on a winning formula you'll keep it a secret. Just because your target market is in love doesn't make them clairvoyant...

Continue reading "I hear Valentines weekend is going to be a disaster this year"

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Valentines weekend is fast approaching.

So this means there are special offers popping up here and there for Valentine weekend breaks. Some hotels have put a lot of thought and effort into their packages. But it's important - as a marketer - to make sure that everyone in the team understands how important it is to take the bookings and have happy customers. Otherwise it can all go the way of the pear. Just like it did for the hotel in Oban, Scotland - where my brother-in-law booked...

Continue reading "You go to all that EFFORT - and then it all goes wrong"

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This morning in the HotelSphere office, we were doing a bit of benchmarking.

It's good to look at the opposition and see what they're up to. It's also good to look at business practices of other operators to see what they do and try to figure out what works for them and what might work for you.

Copying isn't the goal - looking for ideas and different approaches is the objective. It also lets you see where you are relative to other players.

This morning we were looking at "award winning" websites. One in particular, caught our attention.

It's a website for a hotel business, which won an online marketing award.

It doesn't have any method to allow visitors to book online. No booking system at all. Nothing whatsoever.

So it can't automatically convert visitor traffic into bookings.

I wonder how it managed to win an award for online marketing?

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It's an expression that never looks quite right to me.

"Hand picked".

At least, not when it's used in the context of a "specially selected" hotel.

It just looks wrong. When you think about all the things that can be hand picked: Mushrooms; daffodils; firing squads; noses...

Does that expression really send the right message out to your customers? Do they "hand pick" a hotel?

...they must have big hands...

I have a dilemma.

Continue reading "Is your hotel "hand picked"?"

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Happy New Year!

Over the past few weeks, lots of emails have landed in my inbox from people offering their opinions on all sorts of subjects. From what trading conditions are going to be like for 2010, through to their top ten "do's" or "don'ts" depending on their point of view.

There's no reason why 2010 should be a bad year for your hotel business. You've just got to get a few fundamental things right -and one thing in particular...

Continue reading "It's 2010! What am I going to get?"

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I've lost count of the number of times I've seen this. It is tooth-grindingly annoying to find that it still happens. There's lots of great advice about how to do Google Adwords campaigns available to you as business owners and managers - if this happens to you, it is easy to fix.

What's the problem I'm talking about?

Google adwords campaigns based on keyword sets which include the business name.

But it's not the businesses themselves who are mounting these campaigns - it's so-called experts. People who should really know better.

Continue reading "Adwords Campaigns for Hotels - the Camden Town hotel test"

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Every business is different, yours is no exception.

What is it about your business that makes it different?

What is it about your business that means people should buy from you instead of any other business?

Often, we don't work hard enough to demonstrate why we're different and why people should buy from us.

This is an essential marketing task - when it is done well, a business can flourish. When it is done poorly (or not at all), a business continues to plod along, or down.

Uniqueness is a difficult concept to grasp and communicate - so it's not easy...

Continue reading "It's not easy, being unique"

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Recent apparaisals of the likelihood of a recovery for the hotel industry have started to predict that things will get better in 2011.

You'll notice that the pundits have stopped short of suggesting things might get better in 2010.

That's because they won't be getting better. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest we're going to see things getting worse...

Continue reading "The Economy - Signs of the second dip"

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Do you know what it costs to get a customer to book at your hotel?

Do you know how much it costs to make someone aware that your hotel exists?

Do you know how much a customer is worth to you?

This month, why don't you try an experiment...

Continue reading "How much does it cost to acquire a customer?"

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I like revenue management. It’s a fascinating discipline. At its most extreme it can get really, really complicated. Complicated is good, as long as complicated is getting the job done.

For most of us, true revenue management is something other people do. I know quite a few revenue managers and most of them, by their own admission, aren’t using all the bells and whistles they could be using. Mainly because they’re just too complicated to use and you get to a point where spending 10% more time and effort on more analysis won’t bring in any more business.

Today – not for the first time – I saw revenue management being abused. Someone set out to make things much more complicated than they should have been. The result was a hotel that pointed itself in completely the wrong direction. The hotel was pointing at its selling price, not the customers.

Continue reading "Rate Optimisation - it's not marketing"

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I never thought I'd ever say this - at least not out loud - but I like Ryanair.

I've flown with them three times now. The first trip several years ago - out to Germany which was fair enough. There should have been a return trip of course, but it resulted in such a mess that I was left stranded and I vowed never to darken their door again.

I was wrong of course, the lure of "cheap" is a powerful one. I'm just back from a holiday in Portugal - Ryanair flights out and back, blighted only by a technical failure on the homeward trip which could happen to anyone.

With Ryanair, you need to be aware of what you're buying and WHY you're buying it...

Continue reading "Ryanair - I like it"

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I was intrigued by a comment made in an interview I saw recently. The interview was about an “Olympics” style sporting tournament for children, designed to give every child an opportunity to compete in a sporting context.

“I believe there is a place in sport for everyone”, said Dame Kelly Holmes. But the comment that really caught my attention was,

“Children need to learn how to fail”.

Continue reading "Failure makes better hotel marketers"

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This is an old golfing analogy. Simply put, it means the great big long shots which look really impressive (especially on the telly) mean nothing compared to being able to putt. It's putting that wins the game. The ability to putt earns the money.

The expression popped into my head this morning as we compared two websites: One the result of nearly £10,000 in designer and developer time, the other the results of £3,000 of marketing time.

The former looked lovely, but has a look to book conversion ratio of less than 1% (what we in this country call "all fur coat and no knickers"); the latter has a look to book conversion ratio of about 20%.

There are more differences:

Continue reading "Drive for show and putt for dough"

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If you follow the writing of people like Seth Godin, especially his work on viral marketing and "Tribes", you might be interested in this blog John Sviokla's blog

Take a look, you'll find out about a website called Groupon.

You know how I'm always banging on about boring websites? This one certainly isn't!

Continue reading "Attract new customers! Be different, be fun! Here's how."

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