Four Edge Hotel School undergraduates attended the ninth National Hotel Marketing Conference at St. George’s Park, Burton-on-Trent. The event bought together a wealth of experience from marketing and hotel professionals across the UK, resulting in some extremely inspiring and insightful discussions.
Following the success of last year’s event, students from the Edge Hotel School were given the opportunity to attend again to take on different roles, including marshalling and registering guests but ultimately, to ensure the smooth running of the day. Charlotte Jakubecz, Vivien Schaper, Charlie Johnston and Michael Maffey were the undergraduates lucky enough to be selected from the large number of students who applied to attend the day.
Pamela Carvell, Conference Chairman and President of the Hotel Marketing Association, set the scene for the conference by welcoming the delegates and giving a taste of what would be to come. This was followed by the keynote speech by Phillip Hesketh, who gripped the audience by discussing the significance of making guests feel important, loved and giving them a sense of belonging. Vivien Schaper found this speech particularly insightful and hopes to share this with fellow students back at the Edge Hotel School and Wivenhoe House Hotel. Peter Hancock followed next and reinforced the importance of offline marketing and stressed that over ‘seven million newspapers are still bought on a daily basis’.
The morning session concluded with a talk by Ian Miller, CEO of Crafted, about the various technological advances which will affect the hospitality industry, which included a relevant section on the future of Google. With three trillion searches made every year, Ian highlighted how critical it is for hotel marketers to work with Google by reinforcing that ‘Google knows more about consumers than we do’.
Vivien, Michael and Charlie attended the How to improve Brand Loyalty by using customer insight and “going mobile” seminar, with Justin Bowser, COO of HTK, and Marijke Morris, Commercial Manager of Stoke-by- Nayland Hotel. They learned about the do’s and don’ts of loyalty programmes in which real industry examples were used to show that these could influence consumers to increase purchasing by 57%.
Charlotte Jakubecz found that Simon Bullingham, MD of Journey Marketing and Simon Rhattigan, MD of Devonshire Hotels and Restaurants captivated the audience with their seminar on the Brand Journey for Hotels. The seminar highlighted not only the importance of creating a consistent message but also gave ideas on how to integrate this into the business, such as through a brand story and co-creation. Her favourite section was on ‘hotel packaging’ which reinforced why it is important to tell guests why they should purchase certain packages, rather than expecting them to figure it out for themselves.
The day ended with everyone coming back together and learn about the future of PR and how to identify and create stories that the press will want to cover, followed by the Dark Arts of Digital marketing, which showed that nowadays ‘it is no longer about losing a sale to another hotel, but anyone selling rooms in your hotel is also a competitor to your hotel’.
The undergraduates went away from the experience with a much greater understanding of the challenges hotel marketers are facing today and how they should be responding. It was lovely to receive such a positive reaction from the industry professionals, who were all very willing to share their experiences.
