Smart Hotel Marketing: How Hotels Can Fill Reservations Now
Smart hotel marketing involves focusing on existing demand, offering value, and targeting demand during and after Coronavirus. If you work for a hotel or hotel marketing company, nobody needs to tell you that the COVID-19 outbreak has seriously impacted your business. During the best of times, hotel marketers operate in an extremely competitive environment. For many locations, customers will simply cross the street to save a few dollars or enjoy an extra perk with their loyalty program. At the same time, some hotels have managed to find some unique opportunities to maximize their bookings with savvy, budget-friendly coronavirus marketing. Seven Tips for marketing my hotel during and after the coronavirus crisis It might help to review some of the challenges hotels face right now before considering suggestions for coronavirus marketing. For example, USA Today reported that occupancy rates across the country have dropped to about 20 percent. Compared to the same period last year, the hotel industry has suffered over a 70-percent decline. On the other hand, some kinds of hotel properties have held on better than others. For instance, budget and suburban hotels have typically not suffered the same drop in bookings. People still need to travel for essential work or urgent personal reasons. In some cases, healthcare professionals have decided to self-quarantine in a hotel to protect their families. With the current drop in travellers in mind, consider these hotel marketing tips that can help you weather and emerge from the current situation. 1. Pick your marketing battles Most marketing analysts caution struggling hotels to keep marketing, even if they have to trim budgets. You may even find that it’s easier to compete on paid search and other platforms because other venues have also had to redirect some marketing dollars. Instead of casting a wide net, try to hedge your bets. As an example, Hospitality Net encouraged hotel marketers to direct ads mostly to domestic and not international audiences. Because of travel bans and discouragement, you may do better by appealing to a domestic and even fairly local audience than you could if you tried to advertise your New York City hotel in Spain. 2. Consider local marketing efforts As an obvious example, some hotels have restaurants. Even if the dining rooms have closed, curbside pickup and delivery still attract customers. Some upscale restaurants have enjoyed success by packaging up multi-course or family meals for anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays. More modest restaurants have attracted local residents who are tired of their own cooking or businesses that may need lunches picked up for essential workers. As for coronavirus marketing, some healthcare workers or impacted people may need a room to isolate themselves. This may be the best time to attract these customers by offering generous deals for long-term stays. You might also offer your meeting rooms for people or organizations who need in-person places to gather during the crisis. 3. Beware of too much price competition Certain, the section above suggested considering offering lower rates for certain kinds of guests. Before that, current statistics appear to suggest that budget hotels have faired the best during this crisis. Still,you can’t lower your rates below a certain point and still expect to profit, so engaging in too much price competition just to fill rooms can lead to an even worse disaster. Typical industry advice is to offer deals that you would normally offer during a promotion but not better. You may decide to offer long-term rates for certain situations because you can enjoy certain economies by having the same guest stay for several days to several months. You might also consider some packaging bundles and services that add value but don’t reduce your revenues so much. Some of these ideas make particular sense during the outbreak. For instance: Instead of the typical breakfast buffet, consider offering a free breakfast delivered to the room. Rather than having a late-afternoon happy hour in the lobby, switch it to a room-service cocktail. Offer free coupons or discounts for various closed services that begin on the date when they open again. 4. Consider promoting more flexible cancellation policies Right now, most of the large hotel chains have updated their cancellation policies to better accomodate guests during the coronavirus crisis. Until June 30, Marriot will let guests make changes or cancellations without charges so long as they do it with 24-hours notice.Hyatt, Hilton, and other large chains have similar new policies in place. After all, with hotel occupancy rates down, most hotels don’t have concerns about turning away guests because of overbooking, so they probably don’t have so much to lose. These more flexible cancellation policies can help reduce the concerns of customers who may worry about having travel plans disrupted. It can also help encourage people to stay home if they suddenly find themselves sick with the coronavirus, so you can also consider it a safety measure. Even if you plan to resume your typical cancellation policy later, you can also earn some good will by remaining more flexible now. 5. Promote your health and safety measures These days, it’s common to find travelers searching with terms like “coronavirus safety tips for travelers” or even “coronavirus-safe hotels” on major search engines and social networks. As the outbreak progresses, you have probably already striven to protect your employees and guests through such measures as: Asking guests about possible exposure to COVID-19 Providing protective equipment, disenfectant, and additional guidance to cleaning staff, food handlers, desk clerks, and even valet drivers Offer touch-free checkins and checkouts If you allow them, keeping any quarantined guests and even their laundry and belongings away from others Right now, you might have somewhat more limited ways to broadcast your coronavirus-safety messaging. Google only appears to display organic, authoritative sources for most searches related to coronavirus. Still, you can reassure potential guests by including messages about your safety efforts with your website, emails, social site postings, press releases, and advertisements on all sorts of digital media. Because of the global pandemic, everybody
Using Place Branding to Restart Marketing in Travel and Tourism
Place branding ideas that will strategically enhance your hotel marketing efforts and assist in post-coronavirus recovery. Place branding refers to creating an identity for a location, such as a city, town, or state. The idea started to gain traction a few years ago as a way to attract visitors, businesses, investors, and residents to various destinations. As has happened after some other disasters, place branding might provide an effective way to help enhance marketing in travel and tourism. Consider some hotel marketing ideas to use to help restart tourism by using place marketing concepts after the outbreak of coronavirus. Enhancing marketing in travel and tourism with place branding after coronavirus Right now, news of the COVID-19 outbreak has consumed attention all over the world. Governments have imposed various travel bans, stay-at-home orders, and social distancing directives. Naturally, tourism marketing companies have found themselves in the tight spot of attempting to produce revenues while still acting responsibly. City Nation Place provides an entire publication dedicated to place branding. According to that publication, even more than the current lost revenues and profits, the damage to the reputation of some states and cities could take a long time to repair. At the same time, they have observed some localities responding to disasters better than others. Anybody who is involved with marketing in travel and tourism can benefit from examining some case studies about the way certain destinations have responded to disasters in a way that could enhance or detract from their brand. California wildfires and the California Wine Country During 2019, wildfires made the news all too frequently. Locations hit by these fires include California, the Amazon, and Australia. In a reference to earlier fires that affected California’s Wine Country, the CEO of Visit California said that the destruction impacted less than one percent of the entire state. At the same time, that’s not the picture that people from elsewhere got from media coverage. Instead, it appeared as if the entire state was burning. Obviously, news stories about blazing infernos can attract attention. Factual stories that mention that the fires only affected five wineries and less than two percent of California grapes rarely get much notice by the public. Still, Visit California responded by organizing a feast to help raise funds for assistance and promote the resilience of the residents. They held the celebration, called The Grateful Table, in a field that bridged both Napa and Sonoma Counties. The successful event raised about $150,000 and perhaps best of all, attracted very positive media attention to California Wine Country. Puerto Rico and Hurricanes Irma and Maria Most people have probably seen images of devastated landscapes and cityscapes after Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico. Images of desperate pleas for water, food, and supplies also made the top of the news cycle. While this narrative did help ignite relief efforts, it also had some negative long-term ramifications. Even a year later, people sympathized with the island territory, but they no longer wanted to make travel plans to visit. According to the CEO of Discover Puerto Rico, Brad Dean, news on the anniversary of the disasters did more to remind people of unfinished repair work than to inform them of all of the projects that had been successfully completed. They worked hard to change the news narrative to one that highlighted the progress they had made and how welcoming and pleasant a destination visitors would find Puerto Rico. Though they faced a tough battle, they succeeded by ensuring that the majority of news stories about the disaster’s anniversary contained a positive message. How can I incorporate place branding into marketing for my hotel or other destination? The case studies above illustrated good efforts to rehabilitate the image of an area impacted by such natural disasters as fires and floods. In many ways, people should compare a pandemic more to a natural disaster than any other kind. Except for a few conspiracy theorists, nobody thinks that anybody intentionally spread the virus or certainly, meant to get themselves or their own family infected. As with other disasters, people mostly can’t judge a location for experiencing the calamity. On the other hand, they might judge the destination’s reaction to that disaster. For instance, neither California nor Puerto Rico wasted any energy trying to present a false narrative that minimized the destruction they experienced. Most of all, they simply wanted to show the world the true narrative of the ways that their people reacted, that they welcomed visitors, and that guests could still have a great experience when they came. Why you should brand your location when you brand your hotel As noted in Creative Supply, few people visit Paris because they want to stay in a particular hotel. Instead, tourists stay in a Parisian hotel because they want to visit Paris. Just as in other kinds of real estate, location matters a lot. You should consider this if you’re looking for hotel marketing ideas for a big city, tropical beach, or even a convenient suburban location beside a major freeway, airport, or business district. Naturally, you want to sell the value and attractiveness of your hotel; however, you will miss opportunities if you don’t also promote the attractiveness of your address. In order to develop this asset, you should think about ways to invest in it. Your investment might consist simply of helping to promote it as you promote your own property. During this time of a worrisome disease outbreak, you can also consider investing by figuring out ways that your hotel can help your community. For instance, if you the chefs and staff of your closed dining room don’t have enough to do, perhaps you could see if local hospital employees could use your catering services or even a wing of your underutilized rooms to house traveling nurses. You don’t even necessarily have to give all this away for free, but you might try to offer the kinds of promotions and flexibility that will make
The Top Questions About Place Branding
Place branding has become a critical tool for municipalities seeking to draw tourist dollars. Here’s what you need to know about how it works and how to implement it. Do you live in a city — or a destination? If the answer is the latter, then there is an excellent change that your environment has been “place branded.” Sometimes also called “destination marketing,” place branding follows many of the same rules seen with product marketing and can help nations, states and cities develop a public identity and connect with travelers (or even prospective residents) seeking fresh experiences. How Place Branding Works Travel is a critically important industry for municipalities, who must strive to earn their share of a market that’s worth nearly $8 trillion — or 10% of global GDP. Given the enormity of those numbers, it’s no small wonder that cities are hiring marketing agencies that specialize in place branding to help capture their piece of the market. The truth facing these places is simple: Just as businesses must compete for consumers, locations must compete for people, businesses and the resources they bring. The core of place branding is the creation of an identity that articulates the unique characteristics and sense of place connecting to a nation, state or city. This identity encapsulates the way a place looks and feels, its attributes and features and the people who live and work within its borders. These elements are then rendered using the usual marketing and advertising toolbox: Slogans, logos, campaigns etc. Let’s distill that down to a famous example: “Keep Austin Weird,” a slogan adopted by the Austin Independent Business Alliance. The slogan, which arose organically based on a comment made on a community radio show, is the perfect distillation of the ethos of Austin — a city known for its love of the off-kilter and original within a state that exhibits more traditional values. “Keep Austin Weird” became enormously popular because it articulated the essence of the place; somewhere you can find independent film and music festivals, outsider artists and mavericks of every stripe. That place branding has helped Austin become the fastest-growing city in the United States. Tips for Smart Place Branding Place branding, when executed well, is a self-reinforcing process that provides sustainable benefits. When a place develops a favorable identity, tourists are drawn to visit, and their economic activity helps boost that city’s bottom line, allowing it to pay for infrastructure improvements, amenities, schools etc. In turn, better living conditions create a draw for not only more new residents, but also new businesses. When cities become larger, healthier and more vibrant, they become even more attractive to tourists, and the cycle of positive results continues. Creating a campaign that can kickstart that cycle, however, is no small task. When developing a new place branding campaign, it’s important to consider the following: Create a tagline and logo that can distill the essence of your location into a few short words and images. In most cases, your tagline should gesture toward a fundamental truth about the location you’re describing. If it doesn’t, then your tagline is going to be superficial and won’t resonate. Once you’ve settled on a tagline, it must be formulated in a pithy and memorable fashion. While taglines and logos are important and perhaps the most high-profile elements of a place branding campaign, you also need to think deeply about the fundamental nature of the place you’re branding. Think about the location’s existing public identity. How does people current view the area? Do they think about it at all? How would you like them to think about the area? Place branding should be more than an inventory of the features and attributes of your location. If you’re surrounding by green space and mountains, think about how this environment makes people feel, rather than dwelling on superficial physical characteristics. Once you’ve settled on some branding ideas, interrogate them rigorously. Are your ideas going to resonate with a large and diverse group of people? Is your branding concept original and compelling enough to truly create a fixed identity within the public’s consciousness? Once you’ve settled on a place branding concept, you’ll need to market and advertise through various channels and create a tailored plan to reach the audiences you’re targeting. Yet it’s imperative to view place branding within a larger strategic context. This shouldn’t be a task solely for marketing people. Place branding should be top of mind for urban planners, city managers, architects, officials — everyone who plays a significant role in the operation and promotion of a jurisdiction. Finding the Right Place Branding Partner At Bigeye, we’re domain experts in place branding –– and we have the full stack of advertising and marketing tools you need to reach the largest audience possible. Contact us today for more information about how we can help turn your location into a destination.