Hotel Blogs - When Hotel Marketing gets Social

The Friday Idea (13)

Text is important but pictures is 10 times more. So to make sure your hotel is rightly presented on all your indirect online distribution channels, make sure you check with your online travel partners that they have the latest pictures, videos and they get to upload them on their website as quick as possible.

Don't let an online travel agent lives with old pictures of your hotel. Even if you hotel doesn't sell well on a particular website, you may still have some visibility that needs to be upgraded with more recent pictures.

So are you waiting for? Zipp all your pictures into one file and send them to all of your distribution partners (including GDS).

The Friday Idea (12)

This is a dead simple idea this time and it all needs 7 words:

REGISTER YOUR HOTEL BRAND ON TWITTER NOW!

Forget whether it makes sense to use the social media for your hotel business, you will find out this later. The crucial point today is to protect your brand by avoiding squatters coming to get it before you do.

The Friday Idea (11)

Today, you can really measure what's going on your hotel website with free tools like Google Analytics.

Indeed, you can track:

- where they come from (referal site)
- how long do they stay on average on your site
- which page do they leave
- how many pages do they browse
- measure the conversion "Look to Book"
- analyze the traffic coming from different distribution partners (like meta search engines or OTAs)
- see which search engine drives the most traffic

All of these figures are very important but you also need to have several goals to achieve. At the end of the day, you want to convert more and more lookers into bookers.

So set yourself some targets and choose your partners carefully looking at which give you the most qualified traffic. Also don't hesitate to organize differently your landing page (homepage) and see if you can get more visitors to book your hotel.

The Friday Idea (10)

This may sound like a repeat of what is written on these pages, but I still find so many hoteliers websites with just the pictures of their best room (usually the one that is very expensive and gets hardly booked by the average traveler).

We need to be more transparent than ever.

You need to show a picture of each room type from standard, superior, suite, king suite and so on.

I have always struggled with pictures shown on paper guides/brochures from luxury hotel chains. They always show one of their most beautiful room but they have a problem of space (usually one page per hotel). Online, you don't have this problem anymore. Recently, I have looked at a new hotel website and was disappointed not to see any photo of their standard room. For me, it sounds like they are hiding something: they aren't proud of some of their rooms.

Regarding the hosting of your picture, quite a few options are available to you like VFM/Leonardo, IcePortal or ABC. They usually offer"Fremium" which gives you the possibility to load pictures up to 10 for free and then you pay the service if you want to load more multimedia content.

Don't forget to load your pictures on more general photos sharing websites like Flickr or Picassa. These websites are well optimized on search engines.

The Friday Idea (9)

When you are not in a big city or a busy resort area, it is sometimes difficult to meet with your peers and learn from each other.

So why don't you join social networking sites like LinkedIN or WIWIH. This time, this is not to engage with your customers but more to exchange ideas and share common practices about running a hotel or how to distribute your product online. This way you can only get stronger in your operations and be as competitive as possible. Usually this is something that Yield managers are doing quite well in crowded markets like Paris, London or New York. They share information about their RevPar, Occupancy so they can adjust their pricing accordingly and respond better to demand.

LinkedIN has some very active forums and so do WIWIH.

The Friday Idea (8)

Expose yourself!

With all audio and video tools available online like YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, podcasts and so on, maybe you should give it a try by presenting your hotel yourself and why not conducting interviews with your staff so they can take any potential customer to each corner of your hotel. This way, you add this personal touch with your audience before your customers come to checking in at your hotel.

Recently Adam Peterson, CEO of Vipe has launched a hospitality product allowing hotels to respond to requests with custom video responses. For example, a hotel using Vipe in the San Francisco Bay Area has rated first in their local STAR report for the last 9 weeks running. Vipe is proving incredibly powerful when, for example, wedding parties are able to really a get a feel for the hotel – potentially now without traveling there in advance (which helps in these times).

 See a sample video the Stanford Terrace Inn hotel based in San Francisco http://www.vipepower.com/Company/6G91RJJEYO38

 

The Friday Idea (7)

During these difficult times, it's important that you pay attention to what your competitors do in terms of their offers and pricing online. Are they discounting heavily or are they bringing more offers in?

The best way to see how competitive your hotel might be is to use from time to time hotel meta search engines like Kayak, VibAgent, HotelsComparison... so that you can discover on a specific day who is the cheapest with a similar product like yours.

Another way to have a reliable benchmark against your competitor is to adopt these comparison/report tools like the RateShopper from RateTiger or  RateView by RateGain. This will give you an automatic report about what your competition does and you could benefit from precious information in order to set up your dynamic pricing at your hotel property.

Of course before all that, you need to set up what's your competition set. For instance, if you are based in Paris, there is no point to compare with hundreds of hotels with the same star rating. You would have to be more precise than that. Have a look at the location/district level, facilities offered, number of rooms, hotel category (and not just the star rating) and why not their position on OTAs.

The Friday Idea (6)

I know that acquiring a proper CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool is probably not a top priority for the moment. But maybe you should track better how your customers feel about your hotel after their stay.

Ask them how was their stay when they check out. Because check out time in the morning is probably not the best moment to ask deeper questions, ask them their email address and let them know that you will send them an online questionnaire in the next coming days.

Tell the customer that you also value very much all review sites like TripAdvisor, Vinivi or VibeAgent and if he has a bit of time, you would appreciate his honest review on those sites.

The Friday Idea (5)

To gain visibility and loyalty from your customers, a good push marketing campaign and a loyalty program are not enough in 2009. You need to ENGAGE with your potential audience.

Have a look at review sites and see if people talk about your hotel. Make sure you respond to negative comments. Sites to look at are TripAdvisor, Vinivi, VibeAgent, Zoover, Uptake. On Google Maps, your hotel could be pinpointed with reviews aggregated from different sources (booking.com, hotels.com...).It's also worth to to check how your hotel is performing.

Last but no least, have a look at YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe and other video online portals and type your hotel name. Who knows, you might find that your hotel has been filmed by one of your past customer.

The Friday Idea (4)

Market your hotel online when you are independent is not an easy task. Even less so if you only display your regular "rack" rates on your own website and your online distribution channels.

So if you look at attracting new customers and increase your occupancy and RevPar, why don't you offer different rates options similar to packages like:

Room Only
Room + Breakfast
Room + Breakfast + Champagne in your room
Room + Breakfast + Dinner
Room + Breakfast + Theater ticket
...

Be imaginative in what you can offer to your customers and you will be surprised how they will talk about your hotel around themselves. And don't forget the "upgrade surprise" when your customer check in - if you can afford it.