Mr. Dauner

Sales & Marketing

Destination Marketing: Selling Your Destination to Increase Room Sales

By Bob Dauner, Vice President, Sales & Business Development, BeDynamic, Inc

Have you ever asked your guests why they are visiting your city? Beyond just casual conversation at check-in, are you actively documenting the specific activities that bring your guests to town?

If you're not, you should be. Marketing your destination as an attraction is just as important as marketing your hotel. If you do document guest activities, is everyone trained on how to enter the information and how to utilize that information to market to that guest for a future visit?

Most hotels are focused on marketing their property on price and amenities like on-site fitness centers, four-star restaurant, plush pillows, and other services. While your guests are in town for a specific purpose - a business meeting, a visit to friends or family, vacation, or some other specific event - chances are they are also looking to enrich their travel experience with a visit to a cultural or historic place such as a museum, theater, nightclub or even a sporting event. Whatever brought your guests to town, you should take the opportunity to learn more about what your guests are doing once they walk out your front door. By not proactively seeking out this information, you could be missing out on an opportunity to increase hotel room sales by leveraging regional events and activities for the guest to attend and therefore extend their stay.

An Emerging Market: The Cultural Traveler

Over the past few years, a new market segment has emerged: cultural tourism. Travelers who make up this market typically include cultural, arts, heritage, or historic activities as part of their itineraries. These are travelers who love history and culture and tend to spend more and stay longer than average tourists. According to a recent study by the Travel Industry Association (TIA), 61 million travelers cited a cultural event or activity as a reason for taking a trip, while 35 million travelers say their choice of destination is influenced by a cultural event. Also significant: TIA's research has found that 40% of cultural travelers, or 47 million people, added extra days to their trip for a cultural-related event - that equals more nights in your hotel.

This growing market creates great economic potential for the travel and tourism industry, and a unique opportunity for hotels to increase revenue by leveraging cultural tourism as a way to market destinations.

Ways to Market Your Destination

Find out what is happening in your city and proactively market those activities to your guests, which will help increase hotel room sales. How? Here's an example: You know of some great exhibits, festivals, plays or musical acts coming to your city. Communicate that information to your guests well in advance of those dates to encourage them to plan a trip for the event and stay at your hotel.

How to Implement Destination Marketing Within Your Hotel

Implementing a destination marketing program as part of your hotel's overall marketing efforts sounds like a great idea, right? While communicating cultural events and activities sounds simple, it's not. Your hotel staff could spend hours or even days pulling together lists of events and activities. But schedules change frequently and new shows or events are happening every week, meaning there is no possible way your staff can stay on top of everything going on within your city. So how can you create an up-to-the-minute knowledge base that includes arts, theater, festivals, visual arts, museums, and other events?

Travel Content is Key Differentiator

Forrester Research has cited two types of travel information that travel companies should embrace: transactional and descriptive content. While transactional content is directly related to purchases, descriptive travel content about local activities, photos, maps, or links to outside venues is very important. In fact, research results from Forrester's Consumer Technographics, August 2004 North American Travel Online Study, shows that more than half of survey respondents cited destination activities and events information as critical in making a decision on travel.

Implementing appropriate descriptive content about your city's activities can help influence uncertain travelers or even impulse travelers. To effectively implement destination marketing, you need quality, actionable content, which can be a key differentiator. In most hotels, sources of destination information are static, fragmented and incomplete. While information about your city's events and activities is likely pulled together by someone on your staff, this information tends to lack timely, relevant destination information - making it impossible for you to respond to guest needs or requests for information.

To deliver quality information to your guests, partner with a content provider that delivers up-to-the-minute, detailed information on your city's arts, cultural, sports and entertainment events and venues that can help your guests plan their trips. This rich, relevant and timely content should be provided in an easy-to-implement database format for Web and dimensional marketing applications.

As competition for tourist dollars heats up, make your hotel stand out from the crowd by leveraging your city as part of your marketing efforts. Create reasons for them to stay with you. Reach out to organizations and businesses in your city and make sure your team is knowledgeable about what art galleries are exhibiting, what plays are opening, which sports teams are coming to town, which luxury spas might be offering specials, and use these opportunities to reach out and communicate with your guests. In short: start making it your business to know what's going on in your city and understanding your guests' preferences for greater success rate in your hotel room bookings.

Bob Dauner is Vice President, Sales at BeDynamic, Inc., a content management solution provider for the destination sales and marketing industry. He has more than 20 years of experience with Hyatt Hotels & Resorts and Starwood/Westin Hotels & Resorts in a broad range of sales and marketing positions in on-property, regional, national and global levels. He has led teams in the destination sales and marketing industry, and provided thought leadership, practice direction and key account sales management in the Customer Relationship Management consulting practice of Cambridge Technology Partners. Mr. Dauner can be contacted at 408-358-8603 or bobd@bedynamic.com Extended Bio...

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