Five Ways Hotel Staff Members Can Improve Their Hotel’s Online Presence
Carolyn Polinsky is Interactive Analyst at CDG Interactive
Hotel staff members are so busy attending to the needs of guests, fielding calls and preparing for special events that they spend less time in front of computers than those working traditional desk jobs. Yet, the industry is among those that could most benefit by having staff members utilize the Internet. In order to attract tourists, retain visitors and respond to the concerns of guests, invite your staff members to become online representatives for the property. Provide them with company email addresses, allow them time during the day to access the Internet and consider engaging in these tactics:
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Turn Your Concierge into a National Celebrity
Your concierge may be the most well-known face within the hotel and he can also become a national star. Hotel Concierges are recognized as experts on the area and provide guests with valuable tips and recommendations. Good ones develop a loyal following if they secure last minute tickets or hard-to-get reservations for guests. Have your hotel concierge write a weekly column or head a Flickr.com photo group so that and he can dispense advice and quirky insights and give fans have a way of keeping in touch with him.
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Let the Bartender Dispense His Wisdom on a Personal Page
Not only can personal pages be engaging forums that increase buzz about your hotel, they are another way to create in-bound links to your site, which helps increase rankings in search engines. Take advantage of sites such as myspace.com1 , gather.com and squidoo.com , which are user-friendly and free. The bartender at the hotel pub can create a myspace page in where he posts favorite recipes and writes about upcoming happy hours and customers comment on their experiences at the bar. He could author a tongue-in-cheek page on squidoo.com2 entitled “How to Get A Stranger to Buy you a Drink,” in which he shares what he has observed through first-hand viewing experience.
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The Events Coordinator Can Double as a Tourist Guide
In addition to providing the most accurate and up-to-date information on your hotel’s pricing and amenities, your hotel’s website can showcase all the attractions in the area. This way, it will attract tourists searching for general information about the area and may convince them to book at your hotel even if they did not set out to make a lodging reservation. Additionally, a calendar of events will bring those searching on the names of musicians, sports teams and galleries to your hotel’s website. The events coordinator at your hotel can keep the site updated with what is happening in the area and what local places best accommodate large groups.
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Send the Wedding Coordinator Out to Court Brides and Grooms
The wedding planner has the lively job of catering to stressed-out couples and their families. If she were to recount humorous stories, along with tips on what she has learned along the way, she would likely endear herself to couples looking for a place to hold their weddings. She may head a group online called Brides of Hotel…;, whereby hotels discuss their experiences and occasionally meet up at the hotel. Or, she could she could invite someone blogging about his wedding experience to come and tour the site so that he might write about it. Additionally, she could make a posting on a food site about the best appetizers to serve at weddings.
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The Guest Service Agent Needs to Look Outside the Hotel to Respond to all Problems
An unexplained downturn in reservations could mean that your hotel has been reviewed negatively on travel sites such as hotelchatter.com, tripadvisor.com or citysearch.com. Task a guest service agent with regularly reviewing these sites and responding to complaints by apologizing and explaining what is being done to fix problems. Additionally, he can use techonorati.com to look for mentions of the hotel in blogs and write comments on the blogs. Be sure that the employee is upfront about his connection the hotel in order to prevent fraud accusations.
These simple, low-cost methods will benefit both your staff and customers, as your staff will take more of an interest in the business and the website will appear as a more trustworthy source of information because staff involvement is evident. Clients of CDG Interactive such as Hotel Maison de Ville and the Hilton Washington Embassy Row have worked with our agency to use similar techniques and have had success in increasing the amount of visitors to their sites and making their employees popular. We recommend brainstorming with your hotel staff on unique ways that they can help make your site a hotspot on the Internet.
2 Squidoo.com is a site founded by Seth Godin, a guru of Internet marketing. It enables users to create entries on subjects on topics that they are experts on and its purpose is to drive traffic to the websites of creators.
