Hotel Blogs - When Hotel Marketing gets Social

Amadeus Hotel Roundtable 2011 (video) part.1

Back in June, I was invited to participate in the Amadeus Hotel roundtable organised by Simon Taylor who heads up Product initiatives for hotel distribution in the UK. The panel was very interesting with executives from Premier Inn, HBAA, The Goring Hotel, Conferma, NetTrans, Great Hotels of the World, Total Revenue Solutions and of course Amadeus IT.

This is the first part of our discussion: enjoy and sit back as it is one hour long!

The 7 Fatal Mistakes Hoteliers Make In Getting More Business

Are you letting new business opportunities slip through your fingers?

Do you struggle to bring in business at certain times of the year?

Are you unsure what marketing you should be doing and want to know how to make your marketing budget go further?

Do your guests seem to have a good time, but you still don’t get much repeat business?

Are you fed up with other hotels under cutting you and forcing you to reduce your rates?

Hotelblogs meets with Patrick Fothergill from Mosho.co.uk

Mosho is a UK company specialised in mobile development for the luxury market. One of their competencies is to develop successful mobile channels to promote and sell you product on the phone.

Hotels are starting to understand the importance to make their website mobile friendly and hotel groups look at developing their mobile application on different devices like the iPhone, Blackberry or Android.

I met with Patrick Fothergill who is Business Development Manager at Mosho. It's always interesting to hear different views from somebody outside the hotel industry.

London Boutique hotels development in full power #bohosummit

Tim Smith from HVS shared an interesting map of Central London transactions in the Boutique hotel sector at the 1st edition of the Boutique Hotel Summit held in London earlier this week.

 

8 properties are in development (in brackets the estimated opening time):

The Boutique Hotel concept: How did we get there? #bohosummit 2011

HotelBlogs was attending yesterday the 1st edition of the Boutique Hotel Summit held at the St Ermin's Hotel in London. Overall it was a successful event for a first edition and more than 100 people attended the event through the day. Congratulations to Piers Brown, his team, the speakers and the sponsors to make this event to happen.

The first panel was giving an introduction to what exactly is a Boutique hotel. How do you differentiate a Boutique hotel from a Lifestyle hotel.  Many definitions were given and we couldn’t really grasp one unique answer to this question.

HotelBlogs will be at the Boutique Hotel Summit tomorrow

HotelBlogs will be attending the Boutique Hotel Summit tomorrow held at the St. Ermin's Hotel in London.

There are only 4 tickets left to the event. So hurry! 

HotelBlogs will be covering the event live (pending the hotel WiFi is free and working).

HotelBlogs meets Ciaran Delaney from Meetingsbooker

Meetingsbooker, an Irish company led by Ciaran Delaney, allows hotels to make their meeting rooms available online on one single website. Meetingsbooker is mainly used by corporate who are looking to book simple meeting rooms across 100 countries. The company offers more than 50,000 meeting rooms loaded on their inventory platform.

Hotel Napoleon Paris hosts innovation roundtables

When your hotel is located in a crowded and competitve market like London, New York or Paris, it's best if you find your niche to raise your profile and awareness.

Napoleon Hotel in Paris has hosted several innovation roundtables (only in French) at their property. Now the event is becoming monthly and this evening the theme is about Tourism. The roundtable this evening will be led by Fabrice Afuta, deputy director at the Napoleon Hotel with Monique Large from Serendipity Consulting, Matthias Pappet from HolidayCheck (recently recruited from Google) and Olivier Brion from Lofty (the new marketplace for vacation rentals).

Register to free seminars at Eye for Travel London

There is nothing better than free lunch...actually no... free seminars are much better where you can learn stuff.

Make sure you sign up for the free seminars at this year’s Travel Distribution Summit Europe in London on 10-11 May. Eye for Travel team has lined up 35 travel industry focused seminars on Revenue Management, Distribution, Mobile, Social Media, online payments and fraud and much more.

Sign up here to choose your free travel seminars:  http://events.eyefortravel.com/travel-distribution-summit-europe/workshops.asp.

Take a half-day out of the office and learn

As you know, online distribution in the hospitality industry is constantly evolving and you need to be ready to grab what's new and how you can market your properties more effectively.

There is nothing better than to get out of your comfort zone /  bubble and spend half a day with your peers and learn how innovative companies can help you to differentiate yourself from the competition and reach a global audience to your hotel/B&B/guest inns and so on.

More than 2 years ago, I was invited to speak at a hotel conference held in Dublin called Hotel Website Marketing conference. I have to admit I didn't know about this conference until I was asked to attend and speak (at that time I was representing Amadeus). Back then I was really seduced by the conference organiser Ciaran as he did a great job to pull this event in record time with about 100 attendees at the time.

This year is about taking the conference to a new level with 6 events in 6 key European cities (Milan, Berlin, Madrid, London, Paris, Amsterdam) with great companies talking to the hotel trade crowd on different subjects: booking engine, group bookings, social media, reputation management, email marketing and more...

So here's one advice, ask your boss or yourself if you can take a half day of the office (or a full day if you want to network with your peers after the conference) and go to this conference as you will learn a lot and I am sure you will be able to pick 2 or 3 things to apply to your respective business.

To register, visit their website and pick the location.

I also forgot the conference fee is ridiculously cheap: €99 per person.