Light at the End of the Hospitality Tunnel

Left: The Sheraton Nanjing Kingsley Hotel & Towers: My local hotel, office, gym, bar, restaurant... Well, everything really! The Sheraton brand of hotels is an industry leader when it comes to innovation and resourceful marketing.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Whether you are in the hospitality industry and trying to ensure your hotel or motel keeps its head above water, or in the software development industry and desperately searching for hotels and motels to purchase your booking system, there looks to be light at the end of the tunnel! It may only be a small and flickering light, but at least it’s no longer a never ending pitch black tunnel of doom.

Now is the time to withdraw your ostrich-like head from the hole you have created in the sand and take stock of your current situation and take charge of your future opportunities. It appears that the upside of our current economic downturn is not too far off and you want to be (read ‘need to be’) the first hospitality business to switch from ‘survival mode’ to ‘all stations are go’.

A changed market

As you step into the sunlight, you will see that your market has changed considerably; and with it, your competition. Your prospective customers have a new attitude to spending, and the companies they work for are still holding on tightly to the spending reins; their values have altered; they now expect the best value, complete price transparency and uncompromised honesty.

No longer will they pay slightly above the odds purely for the convenience or to save time. No longer will they put up with receiving slightly less than they’d expected purely because it’s time-consuming to complain.

Also, many of your less market-savvy competitors have disappeared never to return; so, now is the time to embrace your new market and the new ideals of your customers and expand your market by adapting to these changes.

Rewarding loyalty

Start by rewarding your loyal customers; those that stayed in your hotel or bought your booking system during difficult times. Any marketing initiatives or reward schemes that were put on hold because of the recession; now is the time to put them into action. Ask for feedback, listen intently, and respond promptly; make them feel special and make them feel appreciated.

Let customers know you've done more than survive

You also need to increase advertising, once again. Let previous customers and prospective customers know what your plans are for the future, and how you have changed. Do you have an upgrade to your software package? Have you renovated your rooms? Now is the time to spread the word. Tell the world that not only have you survived these difficult times, but you’ve improved and grown! Tell the world before your competitors do; don’t blend in; be one step ahead. Shout about your achievements.

Train, train, train

Finally, if you didn’t continue to do so during the downturn (which I hope you did!) invest again in employee Training and Development. Your employees will be unsure about the market and even more unsure about their future; they need to be reassured and motivated. Without the reassurance that you are investing in their future, they are likely to head for the hills, or worse, your competitor. You need highly motivated staff to deliver your message to the market and promote your excellence; with lack of motivation and training, this just will not happen.

Be one step ahead

After so many months of cutting costs, putting initiatives on hold, freezing marketing budgets, and improving resourcefulness, it feels irresponsible and risky to start expanding and adapting to an improving market; but do it. You must stay two steps ahead of your competition in order to survive, and they are only one step behind you in firing on full cylinders… So, put your foot down and see where this exciting new road might take you.

In my next post, I will be providing you with more detailed findings from my booking system research. Watch this space for more information.

Best of luck!

Emma

If you are a small to medium sized hotel, motel or guest house, or a hotel booking system developer, in need of independent advice from an industry expert, please contact me on eharradine@hotmail.co.uk. Even if I’m unable to offer you the exact advice you need, I can put you in contact with a company that can.

Off Peak Discounts

Offering an ‘off-season’ discount is a concept that I’m sure you, as a hotel owner or GM, are all too familiar with. In fact, as you’re clawing your way out of a difficult off-season right now, I’m sure you’re keen never to return to such depths. You know your product is first class and your service top rate, so why should you have to lure guests with huge discounts and extra perks?

Well, I believe that off-seasons are a thing of the past. Off-seasons are the times when prospective customers least like to travel and therefore are much less likely to stay in your hotel, motel, or guest house. To entice these customers, hoteliers have turned to internet booking agents to offer unbeatable discounts as a last-ditch attempt to improve occupancy levels, but this has done little good for RevPAR.

So, what if you use your marketing skills to ensure that potential guests want to travel and yearn for a stay in your hotel. Sounds difficult? It doesn’t have to be…

It’s all about targeting; targeting exactly what within your hotel or surrounding area will attract your prospective guests; and targeting the correct words to use on your website and advertising to optimize your visibility within search engines.

Let’s start with the former marketing skill: targeting what amenities you can take advantage of in order to attract guests…

I’m searching on the internet for a guest house during the summer; a beautiful little cottage appears. I look at the amenities and discover that it is close to the beach, has a swimming pool, and is within easy walking distance of the local town, which has outside terraces and beachside bars. Perfect!

I’m searching on the internet for a guest house later that year. It’s snowing outside. I discover the same little guest house and check out the amenities. I’m told once again that there’s a beach, a pool, and outside catering. No thank you very much! It’s far too cold; I’d rather stay at home.

Actually, the guesthouse was close to a mountain with great winter sports and hiking available. There are lodges nearby with spas, which serve good hearty winter roasts, and the guesthouse has a great indoor sauna area… But I wasn’t told any of this. The guesthouse owners have marketed themselves as a great summer getaway and in the process have marketed themselves an off-season.

Your marketing must be constantly evolving in order to attract guests through each ‘high-season’ available to you. This might mean finding seasonal activities for every season and highlighting the benefits of avoiding the crowds, but no matter how you do it, you’ve got to give them a reason to want to travel off-peak.

Next, we’ll tackle the second marketing skill: optimizing your visibility in search engines to attract the right guests for the right seasons; another ever-evolving task.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click Ads (PPC) are vital tools if you’re going to attract guests all year round. And, there is no excuse for hit and miss website marketing anymore. With analysis tools, such as Google Analytics, it is easy to see which key words generate the most traffic to your site and pinpoint consumer trends during certain times of the year.

Once you have analyzed the data and know what consumers are looking for, it becomes easier for you to emphasize your unique selling points (USP) during each season and give your guests exactly what they want, not just what you think they want.

To summarize, it is possible to manipulate seasonality in order to gain conversions, and if you use your website marketing strategically, you can make the concept of an ‘off-season’ completely obsolete. Just don’t expect to build a website and be able to leave it untouched for a year… As the market evolves, you need to as well.

Thanks again for reading,

Emma

I am still on a search for the best hotel booking system for small to medium sized hotels. If you know of hotel booking software that can beat HotelSystems.co.uk for ease of use and functionality then please contact me on eharradine@hotmail.co.uk

Photosynth for Hospitality Industry

Ensuring that your hotel, motel, or guest house is enticing to prospective guests is vital. I know of a number of occasions when a hotel has been well situated and has received rave reviews, but guests have been reluctant to book due to the terrible photographs on the hotel website. The photographs make the bedrooms look small and dingy, the carpet grimy, and the bathroom moldy. Would I like to stay there? No thank you!

However, it is also important to be realistic. How many times have you looked forward to the bright blue, luxurious, fifty meter pool only to discover a ten meter bathtub upon arrival?

When consulting a small to medium sized establishment on marketing and customer service, one of the first items on the agenda is the website, and most importantly the way in which the hotel or guest house is portrayed by the website.

If the photographs do not tell the real story, I source a photographer to provide the hotel with the shots they need to advertise their product and services, and to entice guests with ease. However, this can be expensive; the shots can still be unsuccessful, and the true story is rarely ever told. Whether we like it or not, photography has its limitations.

Until now…

I have been playing with a gem of an idea called Photosynth by Microsoft Live Labs. It allows you to share places and things using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the detail of the real world. With a collection of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience for your prospective guests.

Photosynth provides the ability to reconstruct a scene or object from flat photographs, and then uses technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.

The Photosynth website says,

“Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.”

At the moment the technology still feels somewhat infantile, and I’d love to hear if there is more advanced software out there, but I really do believe that this could be the answer to a hotel marketers prayers.

Take a look for yourself here!

Best regards

Emma

I am still on a search for the best hotel booking system for small to medium sized hotels. If you know of hotel booking software that can beat HotelSystems.co.uk for ease of use and functionality then please contact me on eharradine@hotmail.co.uk

Empowering Employees

In yesterday’s article I touched on the idea that disempowering employees leads to poor customer service and lack of product / price / service flexibility. I have experienced this phenomenon twice today.

My first experience occurred during my daily visit to Costa Coffee in my home city of Nanjing. I ordered my usual Café Latte and requested a glass of cold water. The look on the cashiers face was priceless. “Cold water?” she asked. “Yes”, I replied, “cold water!” “Do you mean a bottle of water?” “No”, I replied, pointing, “I’d like a glass of cold water from your water machine over there”. The cashier huddled in the corner with her manager for a number of minutes before the manager wandered over to confirm that I was in fact requesting a FREE glass of water to accompany my overpriced coffee. The manager, looking very pleased with himself, ordered the cashier to pour me a glass of water and went back to pretending to look busy. During this process, I was extremely tempted to walk out and never return. The cashier wasn’t even allowed to provide a free glass of water without first checking with her manager!

The second occurrence was later this afternoon when conversing with a client and his employees. I gave a thirty minute presentation to the middle management of a medium-sized Nanjing hotel and after the presentation I asked the staff a number of questions to clarify the message I had delivered. Before any employee answered a question, they would first look at their manager for permission to answer and would never do so until they had received the obligatory nod. In a business where I have been hired to consult on CRM issues the General Manager could not understand how this lack of empowerment was hindering the hotel’s relationship with customers.

I found an interesting article by Mike McDaniel on Ezine discussing this exact problem:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Empower-Employees-to-Keep-Customers-Happy&id=1614535

I’d be interested to hear stories from readers related to hotel staff providing poor service due to lack of empowerment. Especially stories related to hotel booking systems and CRM systems.