By Guillaume Thevenot
I am fortunate enough to meet and talk with a lot of hotel marketers in the past few years at conferences, one to one meetings or through this blog.
Based on several conversations, I strongly believe that hotel marketers need more empowerment and trust from their employers and/or owners.
What we have seen during and post recession in the UK is that several small hotel groups decided to cut down their overheads and started by their marketing departments. When owners decided to retain their people within their organisation, they aggresively reduced the marketing budget so that hotel marketers will work with almost nothing to increase brand awareness, social media activities and so on.
Now that 2011 looks a brighter year compared to the recent past, hotel marketers are back. Are you really?
#1 Most of small hotel groups combine sales and marketing so that you have a Sales & Marketing director leading the department.
=> Guess where the time and money is spent on?
#2 The majority of advertising spending (if you have any budget) is still spent offline. According to the recent Online Travel Report 2011 by BigMouth Media, hoteliers only spent 30% of their marketing budget online. In 2011, they aim to spend 38% online of their total budget (thank God for that).
=> why on Earth this industry doesn't get that the balance should be the other way around? OTAs and leading travel sites spend between 90 and 95% of their total marketing budget online. No wonder why hotel marketers are ranting about the fact OTAs get better position in search engines.
#3 Hotel marketers spend an awful lot of time and money on glossy brochures so they can impress their CEO or owners
=> if in 2011, one of your top goals is to create another printed brochure of your hotels and more importantly it is something requested by your CEO, think twice about the company you are working for. If your budget allocated to a new brochure is greater than a single digit percentage of your total marketing spend, just walk away.
#4 Hotel marketers don't think enough about product differenciation
=> when was the last time you sit down and put together ideas about how your hotels bring better value than others, what are the differentation points, why consumers would be more interested to stay in my hotels, what are the core values of my hotel group
#5 Visuals Visuals Visuals
=> most of hotel marketers don't update enough their visuals (photos, videos, virtual tours) to share stories about their hotels. Don't forget to use as many channels as possible to spread these visuals over the web (YouTube, Flickr, Picassa, Dailymotion is good start). And remember producing good quality pictures and videos is cheap today (5M pixels camera and a Flip video camera are enough)
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Source: hotel-blogs.com
