Hotel Marketing

"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"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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?

Posted by HotelBlogger

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"?"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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?"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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?"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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"

Posted by HotelBlogger

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."

Posted by HotelBlogger

If you subscribe to online marketing newsletters, you'll be familiar with all the things that are going to happen tomorrow. Predictions are everywhere:

- People will only book hotels using their mobile phones.
- Social networking will dominate booking and destination research behaviour.
- 75% of all travel bookings will be made online by the time I'm drawing my pension.

You know the sort of thing.

Continue reading "Manana, manana"

Posted by HotelBlogger

I get a hard time from some of my colleagues about my attitude to Twitter (and not just Twitter, I have the same problem with a lot of online social networking tools). I can see how it could be useful, but I keep finding that it takes so much effort that it can generate a lot of heat and very little light.

In other words, it just doesn't generate the results I'm looking for. I can spend my time much more profitably doing other things. I'll get around to it one day, but at the moment I need to do other things.

One of the problems I have with social networking is that it's all about...

Continue reading "Twit-to-who?"

Posted by HotelBlogger

I'm just back from an interesting little conference about the opportunities for hotel marketing online.

Towards the end of the day, lots of hoteliers were milling about, excitedly twittering about how they were going to get stuck right in to blogging, FaceTube and social networking in general.

There was a lot of "we will build it and they will come" mentality in the room. When I asked people what sort of things they were going to say when tweeting on MyBook the answers left something to be desired. When I asked how they planned to measure the performance of their efforts I was obviously speaking in the wrong language.

So gentle reader, here are five essential steps you need to take if you're going to reach marketing heaven...

Continue reading "Five steps to hotel marketing heaven"

Posted by HotelBlogger

The recent publication of the Hotels.com survey of hotel prices caused a bit of a furore in our local newspapers: Journalists delighted in pointing out that hotel prices appeared to be descending through the floor; hotel managers felt compelled to demonstrate that their chosen business strategy was the right one.

It was in the newspapers last week, it'll be wrapping up fish suppers this week.

Of course, this is more of a publicity exercise for Hotels.com than it has to do with accurately reporting hotel prices.

Continue reading "Much Ado About Nothing (the Hotels.com survey)"

Posted by HotelBlogger