Category: Tips and Ideas

One of the most important business lessons is that a stable market floats all boats. With strong consumer demand, it gets easier to overcome bad distribution decisions and poor revenue management strategies. The market takes the burden, and carries you to a successful run. However, as soon as the market gets uncertain, be it local factors like Brexit or a global financial crisis, bad marketing strategies are exposed.

When it comes to the hospitality market, hotels without a strong decision-making approach tend to suffer. These hotels start losing occupancy points, and even erode RevPAR (Revenue per Available Room). That’s when it becomes important to get in touch with a hotel consultant.

Principles of Competitive Strategy

Smart hoteliers make sincere efforts to maintain competitive advantage, not only through economic peaks, but even through times of distress. Several principles of competitive strategy come into play, and ascertain the path towards successful hotel marketing.

Observe Your Competition, Don’t Imitate

When the market changes rapidly, amateur revenue managers start panicking. Since it’s difficult to identify how long the situation will last, or how bad things will get, they choose occupancy over rate. However, most of the time, a lower rate isn’t justified. In fact, it’s unnecessarily self-imposed due to assumption of lower performance.

Without an experienced hotel consultant, such steps lead to a rate-cutting snowball effect, which can take months to recover. In order to avoid such hasty decisions, hoteliers should not only observe competition, but also listen to changing market trends. To guide strategy, it’s important to consider what customers might be needing ‘tomorrow’. Just because your competition has started cutting rates, doesn’t mean you should follow suit.

Base Decisions on Changing Markets

When the economic environment is changing, you need to act proactively. There’s a dire need to make decisions differently. Each day will be different, and you can’t use yesterday’s decisions for a profitable tomorrow. When it comes to hotel marketing, you need to consider consumer travel intent. It’s one of the best indicators of future demand and consumer confidence.

Whatever historic data you’ve acquired is out-of-date in a changing market. In the new-age marketing era, consumers are always connected, and want to make real-time choices about hotels and rates. Thus, your decisions need to be based on changing markets, among other factors.

Know Your Customers

In every market, this should be the business owner’s mantra. Knowing your audience allows you to convert more guests online. Apart from getting a hotel operations or revenue consultant on-board, hoteliers can use these effective ways to build closer relationships with customers, irrespective of market conditions:

• Collect data to understand your specific audience and its shopping behaviour.
• Understand why customers are booking on OTAs instead of your official website. There must be certain things you can improve or change.
• Target the right market with personalization techniques based on top personas suiting your brand.

Get a Hotel Consultant On-board

Last but not the least, getting a hotel consultant on-board changes the dynamic in your favour. With a team of seasoned hospitality consultants with significant experience in operations, marketing and financing, a hotel consulting agency can provide higher ROI and revenue. If you’re still not sure, keep reading to understand the benefits.

How a Hotel Consultant Helps Maximize Results?

As expected, an independent hotel consultant gives advice, designs strategy, and provides you with ways to increase sales. This helps you fill the gaps between desired and actual situations. Moreover, a consultant can also help with training, guiding and coaching the staff. Simply put, a hotel consultant not only defines your hotel’s goals and missions, but even implements strategies to achieve desired results.

Some other important responsibilities and roles of a hotel consultant include improving work performance, identifying operational needs, increasing employee motivation, improving organizational communications, enduring customer satisfaction and broadening the market segment. But why don’t we just discuss specific responsibilities in detail? Let’s go on!

Buying and Selling Assets

One of the key roles of a hospitality consultant is to help you buy and sell assets. With the expertise of a seasoned consultant, you’re in a much better position to make an informed decision about a planned purchase or a sale.

Evaluating Financial Impact

With this service, you can evaluate whether a certain aspect of your hotel will drain your resources or contribute to overall goals. While advanced techniques and analysis can work better with complex calculations, the expertise of a hotel marketing consultant allows for a few simple calculations to make financial sense of a project.

Planning, Market Analysis and Feasibility

With this service, you can easily identify, anticipate and satisfy consumer demand to earn higher profits. With adequate market research, planning and feasibility analysis, you get the right mix for your requirements. A hotel consultant gathers and records data about specific offerings, competition and market conditions to plan everything in an organized manner.

Improving Operations

A sound operational strategy is key to a higher ROI. This service allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of internal processes. With data gathered, a hotel consultant allows you to interface with guests, specifically catering to their needs on priority. With several technologies and loads of data, customers expect some level of personalization, especially when they’re spending time on your property to relax and unwind. With the right kind of indicators and insights, you can guide the staff to provide customers with a much better pre-booking, post-booking and on-stay experience.

Offering Technical Support

Whether it’s a Cloud PMS or a Channel Manager, every hotelier has some technical support requirements. When setting up operations for a hotel, technical platforms can truly define the process. Get in touch with a hotel consultant to understand what’s right for your business.

Restructuring and Repositioning

A hotel operations consulting firm can help you identify key issues that may be holding you back. It also helps you realign with new strategies and management solutions.

Planning and Implementing Entry/Exit Strategy

While operational strategy is the key to higher ROI, hoteliers also need to have a sound entry and an exit strategy in place. When you’re looking to acquire another business, strategy plays a pivotal role. With a hotel consultant by your side, it’s possible to get crucial tools and information to make the best decisions.

Make a Marketing & Distribution plan

It’s necessary to plan the road ahead and make a marketing plan to increase direct bookings. In simple terms, an independent consultant presents a well-defined roadmap of what’s important for the long term. With experience and expertise, a consultant uses foresight to keep you informed about changing market trends, distribution strategies, and several other indicators to help you build and market a brand.

Conclusion

Whether it’s about creating a hotel marketing plan, choosing a booking engine, or designing operational strategy, with an experienced hotel consultant, you have all the bases covered.

While strengthening your brand, the consultant ensures your hotel attracts more guests, which in turn leads to higher revenue. Isn’t that the end goal anyway? Why don’t you go ahead and give it a shot? There ere are many other ways to improve the guest experience and increase the direct bookings for hotels through apps like personal concierge app.

Hotel and resort visitors expect to find complimentary WiFi access during their stay, so hospitality businesses must incorporate this benefit into their offerings to give customers what they want and need.

But, offering free WiFi isn’t just a way to please and serve guests — it’s also a powerful way for hotels to improve their marketing, operations, and customer service.

WiFi marketing in the hospitality industry gives hotels many smart ways to improve their business. Here are a few ways that a hotel can benefit by giving free WiFi access to their guests.

Collect Demographic Data on Guests

When you use WiFi marketing, you have options for how you require guests to sign up to access the service. You can create your own login system, or you can sync with Facebook and enable guests to sign up using their Facebook accounts.

The benefit of using Facebook as a log-in source is that when guests sign in via this method, you get access to troves of customer data. You can learn about guest demographics, interests, and even spending habits. This data can provide valuable insights as you strive to learn about your customer base and craft messages that will be most likely to resonate with them.

Create Guest Profiles and Track Brand Engagements

When guests log in to WiFi marketing, you can also set up a system that creates a profile for them. This profile may include information pulled from the user’s Facebook page or connect with other supporting data systems that add details to their profile. It can include information about the user’s engagement with the hotel, tracking how long they stay, how often they visit, duration of time between stays, etc.

With WiFi marketing, you can also require an email address or phone number for users to sign up, which gives you a way to remarket to guests at a later time. You can then use details from the guest’s customer profile to determine what messages would best resonate with them based on their interests, habits, and engagement with the hotel property.

Share Marketing Messages on Login Splash Pages

A large portion of guests use free WiFi when it’s offered at a hotel. That means most guests will visit the designated WiFi splash landing page to enter their information and log in. Knowing that most of your guests will visit this specific landing page gives you the opportunity to market and connect with audiences on this page.

You can design this page to share important information about your property and highlight upcoming events and time-sensitive details. You can also use this page market to guests and promote offers, up-sells, and paid on-property amenities. It’s a prime place for sharing essential details and deals.

Promote Using Personalized Page Redirects

Once guests use your login landing page, you can use their data and guest profile information to set up page redirects so they are sent to a new landing page personalized just for them.

For example, if the guest has stayed at your property more than once, you can send them to a page about your customer loyalty program. Or, if the guest is staying with you for the first time, you can send them to a page that offers a virtual tour of the location. The personalized approach improves customer experience and gives you an opportunity to engage in more targeted marketing. The customer experience can also be improved by through guest check in app.

Track Foot Traffic on Your Property

A feature of WiFi marketing in the hospitality industry that many businesses don’t know about is the tool’s ability to track users as they move around a location. When guests log in to free WiFi via their mobile devices, the system can track where the user is on the property.

This information can be used to create heat maps that show you where guests spend the most time on your property. It can also offer insights into guest habits. You can see what parts of the property guests use most, what areas they ignore, how long they wait for amenities, and even if they take the wrong routes to rooms. All of this information can be used to improve your operations process, optimize your on-site digital way finding, and develop ideas for changes to on-site amenities.

Use Geofencing to Trigger Relevant Push Notifications

When you can track guests as they move throughout your property, you unlock another powerful communication opportunity. You can set up on-site geofences that trigger relevant push notifications to guests based on their position on your property. Geofences can also use guest location to trigger changes to areas around the guests, such as changing digital signage content or adjusting overhead music and messaging.

For example, you could set a geofence around the spa at your resort. When a guest walks into the spa, the geofence could trigger a push notification to their phone to alert them of spa specials. It could also use data from the customer profile to change content on the digital signage in the spa reception area. If the guest is a repeat customer, the signage could change to feature the guests most frequently purchased services. Geofencing is just another powerful way to use WiFi marketing in the hospitality industry to personalize and improve guest experiences.

Start Using WiFi Marketing In The Hospitality Industry

On the surface, it might seem like offering free WiFi to guests at hotels and resorts is just a way to please guests who expect to have this amenity. But when you dive deeper into what is possible with WiFi marketing in the hospitality industry, you find that this tool serves hotel management just as much, if not more, than guests. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

As a hotelier, there are a few metrics that you absolutely must be keeping track of each week. The most basic of which when it comes to the performance of your bedrooms is your average occupancy percentage and average room rate.

Quite simply Average room rate is your total weekly room revenue (excluding food and beverage) divided by the total number of room nights sold for the same week.  Let’s say your total room revenue is £20,000 for that week and number of room nights sold is 200 then your average room rate is: 20,000 / 200 = £100.

To work out your Average Occupancy Percentage you first need to know the total number of hotel rooms you have multiplied by 7 days.  For example, if your hotel has 50 bedrooms then in one week you have 350 available room nights available to sell.  To work out your average occupancy for the week take the number of room nights you actually sold in that week, multiply it by 100 and then divide by the total maximum number of available room nights.  For example, in a week if you sold 200 room nights your average occupancy percentage would be 200 * 100 / 350 = 57.14%

Now you understand the math what we want to try and achieve is to increase our occupancy percentage without adversely affecting our average room rate.

As every hotelier worth their salt will tell you… You can’t sell yesterday’s empty room! So, increasing our occupancy levels will certainly help the bottom line.

However, it’s not quite that simple as most hotels have peak seasons or days of the week when they are full and unfortunately you can’t be more than full.  So, what we need to do is fill our rooms during quieter periods.

1) Photographs.  Yes, you may have a 40 megapixel on your smartphone but photography is one area that I believe you shouldn’t try and cut corners on.  Old photographs can really date your hotel and cost you business.  If you’ve recently updated rooms or parts of the hotel make sure your photos are updated at the same time. Interior photographs need to be lit properly, they need to be staged properly with flowers and accessories and they certainly need post-processing to make sure they really pop.  The biggest jump I saw in bookings is when we redid the hotel’s website and replaced all of the OTA sites with professional photos.

2) Voucher and discount sites.  Get this right and it can dramatically increase your occupancy levels get it wrong and it will dramatically reduce your average room rate!  The aim here is to increase our occupancy levels during the offseason BUT NOT discounting rates at busy times.  In the case of my hotel, our quietest months were January to March but excluding Saturday nights as we were always full on a Saturday night with guests paying the full rate. The discount/voucher site will be looking for a 40% + discount so how do we pull this off without our average room rate taking a dive?  The answer is to add things to the deal with a perceived value and then apply the discount.  Lets say your room only rate is £100 if we add a late checkout which we charge £20 for (but costs us nothing) and a bottle of prosecco in their room on arrival that we charge £24 for (but costs us £7) and 2 x full English breakfasts which we charge £30 for (but only costs us £10) we now have a package with a perceived value of £174.  If we were to sell this package for £99 we have effectively given the guest a 54% discount which looks like an amazing deal.  In reality however, it’s only cost us the trade price of a bottle of Prosecco, and a few eggs, bacon and sausages!  Be careful what you throw in for free however as it would be nice to be able to leave a few things to upsell the guest when they arrive at the hotel.  The sales person at the discount site will probably suggest selling a dinner bed and breakfast package with a bottle of wine included.  The problem here is that you’ve lost the ability to sell them dinner in your restaurant when they arrive and you’ve even included the bottle of wine so you probably won’t make much in drink sales either.

3) Reputation Marketing. So, your website looks great, your photographs look stunning, you’ve got a strong offer that’s the deal of the century, your prospective guest is about to book but decides to check your reviews on TripAdvisor first…. Oh!

With 93% of people reading reviews before making a booking it doesn’t bare thinking about how many bookings you are losing if these are the first reviews a prospective guest sees!  So what can we do to improve our hotel’s reputation online?  The first thing we should do is make sure our reception staff are asking the guest before they pay their bill if they have enjoyed their stay.  Make sure they are trained to professionally handle a legitimate complaint and try to deal with the complaint, or at least escalate it and tell the guest a senior person will be getting back to them before they leave the premises.  By doing this we are trying to stop the disgruntled guest from leaving a negative review online before the manager gets a chance to look into the issue and attempt to make things right.  Obviously, if the guest had enjoyed their stay there is no harm in politely asking them if they would leave a review.  Most people will agree, but whether they remember to do it or not is another matter.  A much better solution is to automate the process and use reputation management software to get in front of a disgruntled guest and increase your positive review volume.  If a negative review does slip through the net and ends up on an OTA or review site you need to respond to the review and give your side of events as soon as possible.  Remember this is not for the disgruntled guests’ benefit but it’s for your prospective guests who are reading the review and may be about to make a booking. Some hotel reputation software will constantly scan OTA and Review sites for new reviews and alert you as soon as a new one is posted.  This can be extremely useful as it’s pretty much impossible to manually check every possible review website and OTA multiple times per day!

4) Snail mail. Before email marketing was a thing we use to send postcards with a special offer to guests that had stayed before.  With GDPR rules in Europe it’s becoming increasingly difficult to market to your repeat customers using email.  OTA’s are also shielding the guests’ real email from you which ads a further barrier.  GDPR does not apply to postal mail so I believe this is a marketing channel that is due for a renaissance. If you do a quick search on the internet you will find companies that will allow you to design the postal campaign online and they will take care of the postage.  With rates as low as 32p per letter and no stuffing envelopes or queuing at the post office, I think this is a great method to increase your occupancy levels in the quieter periods.

5) Dynamic pricing.  If your prices are set in stone you are probably leaving money on the table AND missing out on bookings.  The idea is simple – your rates change based on demand.  If the hotel is busy and you only have a few rooms left the price goes up.  If the hotel is empty the price goes down.  Things to keep in mind:  Don’t put on a mask! If you charge too much on a very busy day you may well let the room but if the guest feels like they have been robbed you could possibly get a bad review and that will cost you more in the long run. Don’t go too cheap – it’s very difficult to raise prices once people have experienced your product at a lower price.  Be mindful of guests that have already booked at a higher price. Get this wrong and you will be discounting existing bookings!  There are tools like hotel mobile app out there to help you do this and some of the OTA’s like booking.com even have their own products that will compare your rates to the competition.

It’s a competitive market out there and with the recent booms in the economy, people are always on the lookout for new travel, entertainment, and leisure experiences. While this is great news for hotels, restaurants, and casinos, it sure can be a challenge trying to keep up with the demand. So how do you ensure your customers have great experiences to keep them coming back? It’s all about providing an enjoyable customer experience.

How often have you been to a restaurant or hotel and something goes wrong? The restroom isn’t functioning or the WiFi is so slow it’s not even worth using. Most people are willing to forgive an issue or two, but it could come at the cost of a prized customer. The right staff, equipped with exceptional customer service, can turn that negative experience around to result in a lifelong customer. So how do you find talented employees that know how to skillfully interact with guests? How do you identify a good hire? We’ve got 5 quick tips that you can put into practice today!

1)    Look for Service Intuition

Some employees seem to know just what’s needed before it’s even considered. Like the waitress that always keeps the coffee cup full or the hostess who’s checking in coats while processing a payment. It’s the dedicated and well-trained staff that keep your operation running clean and smooth.

By including qualifying questions as part of your application or interview process you can better recognize candidates who have the intuition to provide the exceptional service you’re looking for. Adding a few hypothetical examples of day to day operation challenges and asking how they would handle the situation can give incredible insight into how well the candidate might perform on the job. You may even get some unique ideas and creative replies that you can put into practice.

2)    Seek Performance and Personality

It takes a combination of hustle and the right attitude to work in the hospitality industry. Having a weak link in the service chain can throw the whole operation out of whack and end up costing you precious time and energy in the long run. Finding the right talent takes a little work on the front end, but it ultimately pays off.

Hiring managers often make the mistake of being too nice and avoid asking difficult questions. Don’t rush through and miss the opportunity to get a good glimpse into how the potential employee will react in a real-world scenario. Interviews typically last only 20-30 minutes so it’s crucial to quickly recognize tactful traits and problem-solving skills. An effective way to determine what an interviewee is capable of is to have them describe an instance where a guest was not pleased with the service. Does the candidate take responsibility or lay blame elsewhere? Are comments negative or derogatory towards guests? Their answers are your first clues into the type of worker you will have on your hands.

3)    Demand a Professional Demeanor

Most people put their best foot forward when interviewing and the hiring manager has the task to envision the candidate performing on the job. It’s easy to hire out of desperation, compromising ability over quality, but for some roles and positions it is just not negotiable.

Customer facing roles demand that you have personable and approachable staff. Every employee should meet your requirements and should be prepared and trained to deal with any customer situation. By surprising candidates with questions that go beyond their role, such as asking a dishwasher what they would do if a customer needed seating while the hostess was away, you can convey that customer service is a high expectation no matter the role they play in the company. Don’t be afraid to challenging your staff.

4)    Identify Integrity and Responsibility

Trust is a key factor to consider in a candidate when hiring. Whether they handle cash or the have the duties of locking up each night, having employees you can rely on is priceless. Is it possible to screen candidates for trustworthiness?

Background checks can help to screen out risky applicants, but how do you identify excellent work ethics? Situational interview questions, such as, “Can you describe an instance where you thought a co-worker was doing something wrong, what happened?” If a candidate doesn’t have an answer, it could be a good indication that they may be hesitant in sharing reports, problems or issues with their manager in the future.

5)    Improve the Quality of Candidates

If you’re still struggling to find the right hires, it just might be the source. Placing ads on job boards can bring in applicants but you’re looking for a dream team! StaffedUp is a hiring platform designed by restauranteurs created to tackle the challenges that hiring managers face in high turnover industries.

If you are in search of best concierge app then please contact us and know more details about it.

The world is becoming more and more automated in all aspects, and this trend will continue. Automation has two main functions. The first is that it makes life easier for everyone. And secondly, and the most important for businesses, is that it helps increase revenue. With this in mind it raises the question: Why are hotels so awfully slow at adapting new technologies?

Let’s look towards airlines as an example, they are very good at embracing new technology. There are very few airlines that don’t have either online check in or self service kiosks, everything that can make travel as smooth and efficient as possible. Today it is unthinkable in most places to go to a check in counter and waste 45 minutes to get your boarding pass, when you can get it directly on your phone. So why are hotels so slow to adapt? You could argue that there are fewer airlines, so you have to stick to their ways. Fair point, but all airlines still have the option to choose check in via their counter. Check in via counter at airlines is expected to drop from 49% in 2017 to 26% in 2020. This is illustrative of how people would choose to check in given the options in a hotel environment as well. It’s difficult for consumers to use a technology when it’s not readily available to them to use.

Another aspect is the feeling of difference and superiority among hotel managers. If you ask 1,000 random hotel managers if they feel their hotel is unique and different from other hotels, chances are you will get 1,000 positive answers. But the hard fact is that almost none of them are. Truth of the matter is, most hotels are just another tool for guests to get a night’s sleep, and the cheaper they can get this the better. Of course, you have hotels that offer 5 star services, where they even make your bed ready at night, but that’s not what the average guest is looking for, and these guests don’t care about price at all. Time and time again studies find that price is the decisive factor for why guests choose price over any other factor. Except for location though, because location is actually the determinant factor for guests when deciding hotel. But let’s not bring that into the equation because you wouldn’t book a hotel in Paris when you are going to London. Let’s get back to reality.

When elevators first came they needed an operator, but automation made this redundant. Of course this person had to be paid, and in the end who ended up with the bill? Yes, the guest! Today if you ask guests if they would like to pay more money for their stay if you have an elevator operator, what do you think the answer would be? The same applies to a receptionist. What do you actually need the receptionist for? To give information to the guests you say. Sorry, but a receptionist will never be able to obtain Google’s up to date knowledge or have the varied opinions of TripAdvisor. Most are insistent on having a receptionist though. Maybe to tell the guests about the facilities in the hotel? This is something that the guest can read about on the website or even in a leaflet in the room. The receptionist has outplayed his/her role in the hotel world. Almost everybody has a smartphone these days, and they can use them to find any information they want, as long as the information is readily available.

Hotels can also be excused for being hesitant to take on technology because they have seen the drawbacks of automation. A lot of hotels jumped on the hotel automation train when it first came. But unfortunately for them they were on the wrong platform, the Bluetooth platform. It has become evident that Bluetooth as a technology for hotel automation systems has been a failure. It’s a great technology, but not for this specific use. This requires guests to actually use Bluetooth, and how do you solve the fact that people run out of batteries? No battery = no Bluetooth. Then usually with the Bluetooth technology comes an application you have to download. Automation is supposed to make life easier for everybody involved, not harder. So maybe it’s not so much lack of willingness among hotels to try automation as it is scepticism to the tested and failed technologies.

Then there is the argument that having a reception free hotel will make it feel cold and empty when checking in and there is nobody there. That is a fair point, but as long as price is the determinant factor for why a guest is choosing a hotel over another one, then automation is the only way to go. There is a reason why airlines such as Ryanair EasyJet and Norwegian have become so popular. Price!

Personal concierge app provide facilities to the guests and also it is best app to know about the reviews of guests. Our experience tells us that guests want automation more than the hotels themselves. This is an interesting observation, but not a surprising one. At the end of the day people want to be able to check in as conveniently as possible and at the lowest price, and that is done easiest with no human interaction, no downloads and no Bluetooth.

Some hotel brands are phenomenal with Social Media Marketing. They use every trick in the book brilliantly and see significant traffic and new reservations as a result. Many, however, make mistakes with their Social Media that not only hinder sales but conveys their brand in a poor light.

Here are 3 common mistakes Hotels make that you need to avoid:

1. Poor content

Content is very important, and it’s all too common we see hotels posting poor content on their feeds, discrediting their brand. Your content needs to be high quality, of genuine value to those you’re targeting, posted in the correct frequency, timings and with perfect typology (all of which are subjective to your brand).

Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience, and ask yourself if you’d gain value from following your social feeds and if they’re genuinely interesting to you.

2. Not using social to its full potential

Social Media not only consists of several very different platforms, but each platform has a wide variety of unique features; from bios to Instagram Stories and Facebook Groups. The list of ways you can use these platforms is endless.

Hotels should have their Social feeds branded brilliantly, with enticing bios, profile pictures, cover photos, groups and, of course, content. Hotels need to be using Instagram Stories, giveaways or contests, paid campaigns, and (if budgets allow) social media influencers. It’s a lot to take in, but your competition may already be doing all of these, and the rewards are massive.

3. Not responding or engaging

Try communicating with 10 different Hotels on Instagram, and I guarantee not all will respond. Some Hotels post, but then do nothing else. The high importance of customer satisfaction and personal interactions in the Hotel industry mean all Hotels should be speaking to and, more importantly, listening to users on Social Media. Ask questions, run polls, respond to all tweets, and like others’ content – it all makes social a bit more human.

Founders Media manage your Social Media with an eye for perfection and algorithm beating, innovative ideas, all while conveying style and sophistication. We also provide Audits and Consulting for brands seeking an external perspective.

Hotel mobile app for hotel is a best app for hoteliers to know about the reviews of guests about their hotels and they can improve their services according to the customers.

These days you read a lot about Millennials. Millennials are born between the early 1980’s and the mid-1990’s and make a very interesting target group for you as a hotelier. Why? Because Millennials are young professionals, adventurous and both willing and able to travel. They are very into social media and sharing the fun things they get up to in their free time. And that’s where your opportunities as a hotelier come in: you can make sure your hotel, apartment or B&B gets featured on their feeds so it will be shared by many and liked by even more. With this, you can build a strong online community for your hotel, apartment or B&B. As Millennials – and every other customer for that matter – value these word-of-digital-mouth recommendations and see this as their number one source of reliable information your online reputation matters.

So the question is: how can YOU attract these Millennials to your hotel, apartment or B&B?

Make booking easy

Perhaps the most important recommendation for attracting Millennials to your hotel, apartment or B&B: make sure booking your rooms is easy. It might sound like an open door but you’ll be surprised at what a quick-win this will actually proof to be. Make sure your hotel is listed on the big, famous online travel agency sites such as Booking.com and make direct bookings on your own website available. This needs to be possible instantly. No contact forms, no telephone numbers or e-mail addresses with the promise to get back to them. They will not fill out your form. They will skip your hotel, apartment or B&B and go to the next one.

How to do all this when there’s already so much on your plate? Or how to do all this when you’re not technical at all? Get a reliable property management system, booking engine and channel manager. These systems will help you to take control over your bookings and manage everything that’s happening in your hotel, apartment or B&B. Need a suggestion? RoomRaccoon’s all-in-one hotel software solution provides you with all these systems in one, is easy-to-use and very affordable.

Visuals are key

A key feature of Millennials – as touched on before – is that they are highly active online. If possible, 24/7 and without a pause. So being visible online with your hotel, apartment or B&B is absolute key. Make sure your website is attractive as Millennials are extremely viable for “instagrammable” content. With this, I mean not only to focus on the functionalities of your room but on the atmosphere. Everybody knows a hotel room has a bed but Millennials want to know how that bed looks like. Focus on the pictures. Millennials are extremely visual so if your pictures are dull or do not represent your facility in the best way possible you already lost their interest before they even had a proper look at your room(s).

It’s the little things

Focus on the complementary bottle of champagne, fresh roses in the room and chocolates on the cushions. As clichéd as it may sound, these are the things Millennials look for – as they make for nice pictures they can post on their Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook -and might be the very good reason they choose your hotel, apartment or B&B instead of your competitor’s. There’s also another site to this: as stated before Millennials are very visual and online. This results in them more inclined to post a review or photo report online. As we all know people are quicker to post a review about a negative experience than about a positive one, Millennials will not hold back to show everybody the curtains in their room had a hole in them, the bathtub was dirty or if the doorknob was falling off. These are also the little things that count. Make sure your rooms are in perfect shape for every visitor, as you  – and the whole Internet with you – will definitely know about it when it was not!

Concierge apps can also help you get last-minute deals, keep track of your rewards programs and increasing direct bookings. Please feel free to share your experiences, tips and ideas on how to attract Millennials to your hotel.

The payment methods you offer your customers has a massive impact on your online conversion rates. Offer the wrong payment methods in the wrong way and your visitors will leave your site and book a room through a comparison site or (worse) with one of your competitors.

In this blog, I’ll look at three areas of your online checkout system that you can tweak right now to improve your conversion rate.

Tweak 1: Payment Options

Once upon a time, the travel and tourism sector was dominated by cash. But that time is long gone and things are very different now. In today’s world, credit cards rule supreme and every hotel is (or really should be) set up to accept plastic payment at its reception, online and over the phone.

However, the payment landscape is changing. Alongside card payments, there’s a new rapidly growing group of payment options called ‘alternative payment methods’. This is basically anything that doesn’t involve a credit or debit card.

Right now, Worldpay estimates that there are over 200 alternative payment methods, ranging from prepaid cards and digital wallets to digital currencies and mobile payments.

With so many payment options out there, it’s essential that you offer the payment methods your target demographic wants to use. If someone finds that they can’t use their preferred payment option, they will go elsewhere.

Before deciding on a range of payment options, I recommend you talk to your customers and asking how they wish to pay. Then make sure you support those payment options during your checkout process.

Tweak 2: Site Security

With data breaches in the news almost every week, consumers are getting more concerned with their online security, especially if they’re handing over personal or financial details. In the past year, Coca-Cola, Macy’s, Delta, Whole Foods and Arby’s have all experienced some level of security breach.

When I’m talking about SME site security in relation to conversion rates, I’m really talking about two different things: security and the communication of security.

First, you’ve got to make sure that your site is actually secure. This is quite a technical point and is too complicated to go into here. As a starting point, I recommend you read through the PCI Security Standards Council’s website. The PCI SSC was founded by American Express, Discover, JCB International, MasterCard and Visa, and works to make payment security stronger and better understood.

Don’t worry, though, it’s not all jargon and has some really good advice for tightening up security on your website.

Second, now that your website is actually secure, you’ve got to communicate that to your site visitors.

One of the most effective ways to do this is by using trust badges. A trust badge is a little virtual badge issued by security companies and payment companies to indicate that your site meets a minimum level of security.

Some of the most popular ones include:

• PayPal Verified
• McAfee Secure
• TRUSTe Certified Privacy
• Norton Secured

Work these badges into your site — for example, in the footer — and highlight them during your checkout process. The idea is that a potential customer will see the badge next to the payment section and feel confident enough to enter their payment data thereby increasing conversions.

Tweak 3: Payment Gateways

A payment gateway is the bit of tech that allows your website to actually process credit and debit card payments.

Technically, there are two types of payment gateway.

• Shared/Direct gateway: A shared or direct gateway is one that you can integrate into the checkout process on your site.
• Hosted gateway: Hosted gateways are hosted by the company that provides the payment gateway. In order to process a payment, your website has to redirect a user away from your website to the provider’s site, have them enter their payment information and then redirect them back to your site for confirmation.

Hosted gateways are generally considered more secure as you send your customer to the actual provider’s website to enter their payment information and the provider tends to have crazy advanced security.

Unfortunately, sending customers to a separate website isn’t great for conversions.

Imagine you did the same thing in real life. A customer came up to your reception and asked to check in. However, in order to pay, you asked them to walk down the street to the bank and pay there. They’d probably walk out, wouldn’t they?

While shared gateways mean you shoulder a bunch of security concerns, they are great for conversions as your customer can complete the full transaction on one site.

Before deciding on a service, it’s important to compare payment gateway options to see what the market has on offer.

A hotel concierge app is a software product which serves as a personal assistant app in hospitality industries. To know more details please contact us in comment section.

Today, Google is one of the leading hotel search providers. It seems like they’re bringing out new tools to help searchers find their perfect hotel all the time. The challenge for hotel marketers is understanding the tools available and knowing how to use them more effectively than the competition.

Google Ads has three PPC features that are particularly powerful for hotel marketing. If you aren’t using these already, reconsider. If you are already, here are a few tips to level up your PPC game and get better return on your paid ads.

1. Native Gmail Ads

Native Gmail Ads are ads that appear in your Gmail inbox. This is a powerful tool because, according to research, 66% of consumers check their email multiple times per day. This gives you plenty of opportunity to put your ads in front of your audience.

There are 900 million Gmail addresses out there, so native Gmail ads have the potential to give you huge reach. They are also expandable, giving you much more space to show off your hotel than other forms of PPC advertising. The expanded ad comes with a variety of template options, as well as custom HTML formats, which allow you to create a variety of unique ads.

Most of your usual display targeting options are available to Gmail ads, such as keywords, demographics and affinity audiences, so you’ll be at home when it comes to building your campaigns. Plus, as Gmail ads have become more refined, the targeting is getting much more sophisticated, allowing you to maximize your click through rate.

The best thing about Native Gmail Ads is that you already have lots of data to draw on to create successful ads: your emails. You can use everything you’ve learned from your email marketing campaigns to achieve a good open rate and apply that thinking to your Gmail ads. This gives your ads a much faster and higher return on investment.

Top Tip: Use Emojis!
They boost email open rates by around 30% and can do the same for Gmail ad CTR!

2. Ad Variations

Which call to action is better: “Book Now” or “Book Today?” Ad variations can help you find out. Using this Google Ads tool, you’re able to review the performance of different versions of your ads and apply the successes across your account. Ad variations save you time and boost efficiency by allowing you to make changes quickly.

Your CTA is one of the most important aspects of your ad creative. Ad variations allows you to experiment with the position and the copy of your CTA. You’ll soon be able to discover whether your call to action is better positioned in Headline 1 or your Description.

You can also make variations to your hotel features to see which gets the best results. For example, you may find that “5 Star Service” works better than “Inclusive Mini Bar” in your ads.

Ad variations are best used when you want to test one change across multiple campaigns or your entire account, while campaign drafts and experiments are best to test multiple simultaneous changes on a smaller scale.

Top Tip: Use Filters!
Ad Variations gives you lots of ways to filter your changes, giving you total control.

3. Campaign Experiments

If you want to make lots of changes across your campaigns, you should be using Campaign Experiments. This Google Ads tool allows you to test new ideas without overhauling, and potentially ruining, your active campaigns.

Campaign Experiments essentially allow you to split test your ads. This tool allows you to get real life data points that you can use to adjust your hotel advertising. No need to speculate, simply test!

When your experiment is live, potential customers have a chance of seeing your experimental ad, rather than your normal one. The chances of this occurring will depend on how you split the traffic share. Once you have statistically significant data to draw on, Google will send you an alert, so you know that the data you use to assess your experiment is valuable.

You can adjust the impression split and the end date of the experiment, so you have complete control over your experimental campaigns.

The biggest benefit of using Campaign Experiments is that it allows you to test with less risk. This is especially important if you’re experimenting with successful campaigns. But with Campaign Experiments, you can share a portion of your already-established budget to test the new direction and potentially make your campaigns even more successful.

Once you’ve finished your experiments, don’t forget to keep a record of what you tested. Keep records in your AdWords account or collect them in a spreadsheet to refer back to when creating and testing future ad campaigns.

Top Tip: Test Your Bids!
Experiments allow you to play with how aggressively you’re bidding. So don’t forget to test this too.

These three Google Ads features are a vital part of the complex paid search mix. The hospitality and tourism industries are competitive, yet varied spaces, challenging for even seasoned marketers. But Google has tools to help you get the results you need. Just remember: practice makes perfect and keep on testing!

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Sure, I’ve been purposely provocative with the headline of this piece – but through many years of designing and developing people-centered, digitally-led experiences – I believe there is a fundamental need that hoteliers are overlooking when designing and implementing customer experiences that they should start to consider, investigate and improve.

To provide some context maybe I should call the article – stop trying to improve your customer experiences and focus on improving your human experiences.

You may well be thinking – human experiences? That sounds like another catchphrase created by the digital and specifically the digital marketing sector. Well although I am sure that will eventually be the case – where you will receive email or LinkedIn invitations for Human Experience Consultants and experts – the need for experiences to be designed, developed and delivered with the human (rather than a customer) at the core is not only gaining traction, but is the only route for service facing businesses.

• Let’s start by thinking about the number of touchpoints that may make up a customer’s engagement journey with you online and offline – OTA’s, social, your website, brochure, telephone, face to face.
• Then let’s look at the types of technology that they are using or exposed to smartphones, browsers, desktops, tablets, AR, VR, AI, Automated marketing, bots, blockchain, smart speakers……make it stop…. !!!
• No stopping now…. let’s think about the marketing angles, the adverts, pop-ups, social media ‘content’, PPC, SEO, radio, Sky TV, terrestrial…..
• Let’s target them, set up some attribution, track them, segment, force them to sign-up – it makes it sound like we are going to war with customers rather than trying to get them to enjoy a stay with us…

What a complete, desperate, unintelligible mess

And all focused on the customer, their engagement, their journey (well the journey we want them to take)… not at any stage focused on the human at the centre…

I take a different view.

One of the great unsaid truths of understanding customer behaviour is that you can’t really know what people are going to do – certainly not over the lifetime of any relationship you may have with them.

Humans are inherently contradictory, confusing, emotional and disinterested. Sure, we know that making a call to action orange may get more clicks, that by writing FREE results in increased ROI and that providing seven day trials to a SaaS (Software as a Service) product will increase sign-ups.

But over a number of years, when their life changes, when they get fed up with certain services, ask you to delete their data or when they turn off more and more of the wonderful cookies and tracking tools that you put on your site and into their browser – how are you going to build a valuable relationship with them?

You can begin to form a strategy by starting with the people at the centre of the relationship. Not your user. Not your customer. The human.

And by focusing on three iterative needs in any relationship that involves a human.

Attention. Respect. Trust.

Not hard really.

We hear a lot of people discuss that the most valuable commodity today – greater than gold, saffron and yes even Bitcoin…) is a customer’s attention. Their attention is being fought over by advertisers, newspapers, start-ups, corporates, content providers (i.e. everyone) all for the magic click, like, share and purchase.

The problem is very, very few businesses actually truly focus their own attention to their customers and their needs from a relationship. They rely on Google Analytics and surveys, TripAdvisor reviews and complaints rather than listening, conversing and observing.

It’s a completely disrespectful way of treating anyone – treating those that pay your wages, that keep you in business and will tell the truth about you and your business in that way? Are you nuts? You don’t need a multi-channel approach, an influencer plan, a UX team, a marketing strategy if at your business core – you have no respect for customers – you need to respect them, understand their individuality and their human behaviour – and yes, their contradictions.

Once, you have paid attention to your customers and treated them with respect in their interactions with you – you build true memorable and fulfilling experiences. From fulfilling experiences, trust is built. The golden goal, the holy grail – a customer that trusts you, a customer that comes to you, one that will pay more attention to you than your competition and one that respects your services, products and opinion (your content marketing strategy may then even work).

It comes from the heart, from your empathetic centre as a human – not as a hotelier or a digital marketer. It comes from truly paying attention to people, to their needs, giving them your respect and ultimately gaining their trust. It makes technology irrelevant and enables you to free yourself up from monitoring and focus on delivering a service.

Sure, there is more to developing people centred human experiences than I can outline in a brief article – and we’ve a Medium Journal where you can find out more about our thinking and our successes.

Businesses that deliver the best experiences are truly human centred, they pay attention, they respect their customers and they gain their trust. Ultimately, the future of business growth, customer loyalty and success within the hospitality sector may be digitally enabled, but its human-led.

A online concierge app is a software that plays important role in the hospitality industries. To know more details contact us in comment section and get your answers.