Hotel Business Review Archives

Everyone wants to be famous these days. Maybe that explains the rise of reality TV shows. So don¹t you want your hotel to get in on the act and claim your 15 minutes of fame? One way to feature your property is with Digital PR or electronic public relations. Think of Digital PR just like you would regular PR except you are focusing on electronic media rather than print or TV coverage. So the goal is to get your hotel exposure in ezines, email newsletters, blogs and other online outlets rather than just the NY Times.

Despite the explosive growth and popularity of social media usage in hospitality, it’s the mighty good ol’ email that remains one of the most powerful and influential direct marketing tools that a hotel can use. Emails allow hoteliers to engage customers in a personalized and interactive relationship that’s mutually beneficial, increase conversions and sell more efficiently. But, to reap those benefits, your email actually needs to be opened and read FIRST. How do you win the right to be recognized and accepted into your customer’s overflowing email box? Here are my 7 steadfast copywriting rules to make your hotel emails worth opening.

Establishing a powerful online presence is a must for every business today, especially in the hotel industry. Developing even the most incredible website is not enough to generate or increase your business. Using a well thought out link building strategy can provide the necessary visibility for your site by providing more places for searchers to find your hotel property across the web, and boosting your search engine rankings so your prospective customers find you. Relevancy is the key to establishing a good link building strategy and establishing positioning in the Internet.

The social location space is shifting rapidly and bursting with innovation. Right now, it’s less important for a hotel marketer to know which social location app will lead, and more important to design a social location strategy that compliments the objectives of your loyalty program. In this article I review social media darlings foursquare and Yelp check-ins, and talk to Starwood Hotels and Resorts to learn how social location marketing is reinventing how they cultivate brand fans.

Recommendations from family and friends are the number one trusted source of insights and advice driving travel service purchase decisions. What are you doing to empower guests to spread the word about your property? Learn several easy and inexpensive ways to increase word of mouth and help drive bookings.

With social media being the most popular form of online activity (1 in 5 minutes online is being spent using social media), one can argue that your voice online is becoming the most important facet of your hotel’s online communication strategy. Gone are the days where push marketing is king. It’s all about the one-to-one dialog, personal relationships, and the way you are represented online. Providing guests with an authentic representative as community manager to give them the answers they are looking for in real-time is the new king.

If you have ever felt as though you and your sales team are on a treadmill, spending day after day and year after year chasing down new accounts, now, thanks to social media and review sites like TripAdvisor, you can focus a portion of your energy every day in helping your property enhance the guest experience, and maximize your revenue instead of just replacing it.

Stories are for sharing, as is social media, making a branded online community the ideal channel for Fairmont Hotels & Resorts to highlight its storied history and unrivalled collection of luxury hotels. Hayley Mitchell, Social Media and Community Manager for Fairmont shares the reasoning behind the creation of Everyonesanorioginal.com and how the online portal has provided a major international hotel brand with an intimate way to hear from brand advocates and share unique information and stories in a more casual environment than traditional websites.

Truly the online reputation of the hotel is influencing several aspects of the business: Operations can now better understand their product and service levels; investors and owners can measure what impact renovations could have on demand; marketing can analyse, influence, and respond through loyalty and CRM programmes, whilst distribution and revenue management can better drive revpar.

Both academic and industry research shows that social media has an impact on the consumers’ decision-making in relation to travel and hotel decisions and marketers are investing heavily in social media channels to reach customers. Though social media marketing $$ spend is comparatively conservative, time spent on constructing presence and customer communication is not!

The breadth of online guest feedback shared online is massive and is showing no signs of slowing down. Being able to mine the insight, extricate the rich details, and aggregate the feedback into industry-specific operational categories is a distinct competitive advantage. Only when armed with this information can hotel executives effectively determine how best to deliver an experience their guests will enjoy and, just as important, talk about.

Today, it’s clear that consumers are not only embracing, but engaging with new technologies in ways that are changing the face of travel. The challenge that comes with digital innovations is deciding which to lev¬erage, and how to leverage them effectively. Instead of launching one-off initiatives, the most successful brands are developing digital media programs that are holistic, integrated and strategic. ‘Going digital’ really means authentically interacting with an audience through all of the platforms that make sense, in order to reach the consumer in a way that is seam¬less, intuitive, enhances brand identity and adds value to the customer experience.

Over the past year, a lot has changed in the hotel reputation management industry. And these changes require a new set of buying criteria. We’ve seen social media tracking technology move from being simply a way to aggregate guest feedback into a powerful business intelligence tool that can provide deep insights into customers, business performance, and the competitive landscape. Managers throughout the hotel organization–from sales and marketing to revenue and distribution to operations and quality–all the way up to the executive suite and hotel management groups, are all using different parts of the tool to improve performance. With this in mind, let’s look at some of the criteria I suggest you use when shopping for a social media management tool.

PR is a very effective way of increasing awareness and developing a brand image. While more properties are using PR in their day-to-day marketing outreach, a very important aspect of effective PR is often ignored: a comprehensive media list. Even with the best press release and the best pitch ideas, you will never be able to generate sufficient media coverage if you are contacting the incorrect media. Therefore, creating an effective media list is one of the best ways to ensure that your PR campaign will meet – or exceed - your objectives.

The overarching web and social media presence of many hotel brands often don’t educate potential guests on the amenities that differentiate one property from another. Many hotel websites and their social media initiatives seem content to simply post photos in the appropriate site subsections and list a selection of their hotel’s perks on a standard Amenities & Services page. Then, they blindly hope that online consumers will find what they’re looking for. That won’t happen very often – not with today’s social media savvy consumer.