I recently returned from delivering my "Mapping the Course" educational workshop at the Inn Development and Management Conference and one of the segments that I covered with the group was prospecting. Prospecting for new customers is a necessary function of the sales cycle but did you know that new customers generated as a result of prospecting can account for as much as 50 to 90 percent of your hotel's occupancy?
The conference center industry continues to benefit in many ways from the overall continued recovery in the hotel industry in general. According to the 2012 edition of Trends® in the Conference Center Industry, the average revenue for U.S. centers that participated in the survey increased by 5.5 percent in 2011 while net operating increase grew by 8.0 percent for the year.
I have two sons who are involved in college athletics and I spend a great deal of time traveling on the weekends to catch their home or road games.
Last week I wrote a post that took a look from 10,000 feet into the staggering costs to hotels in managing their e-RFP flow. At the end of the day, it doesn't take a meeting and event planner, an e-RFP distribution channel, sales manager or a senior executive from a major hotel brand to admit that the system is 'broke'.
When is your marketing campaign the most ineffective use of time, money, and resources for your hotel? When your message only contains your value proposition. Check the analytics of your last email campaign for instance. How many opens did you get? What percentage of your emails were unopened? What was your response rate? Did you see any click-throughs?
dark about how to harness this powerful tool's full potential that can turn a cold contact into a lead. Why? Because the key element, and one that will get the attention of your recipient, is that it must be about your prospect and what problems you and your hotel can solve for him. What I see, from the hundreds of emails that I receive each year from hotel sales managers, is quite the opposite. Here is just one example that includes all of the components of a typical email fail that hotel sales managers must avoid.
What’s the Issue? The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) is a civil rights law created to increase accessibility for millions of Americans with disabilities. The law was updated in 2010 and now calls for new ADA Standards for Accessible Design which included revised requirements, for everything from outdoor recreational areas to websites and online booking processes, to be implemented by March 15th, 2012. The crux of the law is to make sure that everyone, including those with disabilities, has access to the Internet.
Can't the Presidential Inauguration be treated like any other major event? Just ask seasoned hotelier Dan Jasinski, who is the General Manager of two DC area hotels in Silver Spring, MD, the Homewood Suites and Hampton Inn. I did, and he says, if left unrestricted, his 239 guestrooms will be fully booked for the inauguration within two weeks of the election in November, with many having already been reserved just after the system opens for booking in late January 2012.
According to Smith Travel Research, group demand (measured as a percent of total demand) began to grow year-over-year in March of 2010. Since then, the group occupancy rate has steadily increased, but has yet to reach the pre-recession levels observed in 2007 and 2008. While greater numbers of conventioneers may be seen roaming the lobbies, pre-function space, and banquet halls of U.S. hotels, operators and owners are telling us that negotiations with meeting planners are still contentious and concessions are being made to attract events to their hotels.
Thinking about Paid Search for the first time? If you've read any of our previous posts then you know that there is no better time to take advantage of PPC than the Holiday Season! Given the number of online channels that are now offering paid search (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook) and the different targeting options within each channel, (Basic Text Ads, Image Ads, Mobile and Local Ads are now all available) it's hard to know exactly where to start. To help bring some peace of mind to the end user, Milestone has been able to put together a bit of a cheat sheet for anyone considering PPC for the first time. Simply find your ideal budget and follow along:
As summer transitions into Autumn/Fall, most hotels are looking for a way to increase bookings during this historically slow period of the year. In most cases, trying to make any significant changes to an organic website to accommodate for this downtime may seem a bit overwhelming, and in many cases ineffective. PPC provides an excellent opportunity for hotels looking to take advantage of this slower period by running highly targeted short term campaigns for the holiday months. This article provides five steps to make sure you are getting the most out of your PPC during the Fall months.
Today Hotel Compete publishes new research into fascinating and important subject of hotel review scores. This research builds on an earlier study on the topic: Hotel Reviews – The Hotel Industry Must Learn from the Wisdom of Crowds. That article highlighted a fallacy in current industry commentary: that review scores are too biased or unreliable to be used for analytical purposes.
I got this inspiration after viewing one of Sandy Carter’s IBM Social Business Coffee Break videos the other day. Sandy is the VP, IBM Social Business Sales and Evangelism and she produces these short and insightful pieces about Social Business that I recommend you watch from time to time. Social media continues to grow in importance. It has not only become one of the critical tools to interact with customer but is also considered one of the key elements impacting organic search and ranking for the hotel. Hotels that take advantage of this trend are beginning to see significant benefits in terms of online placement and revenue.
By Chad Tsang, eStrategist, Milestone Internet Marketing. The traditional competitive analysis for SEO has always been focused on keywords and backlinks; however, as Search Engines, such as Google and Bing, evolve to focus on universal search, competitive analysis should evolve to a 360º approach on universal search as well. The 5 areas we recommend focus on are Keywords, Backlinks, PPC, NAP Citations, and Social.
This article provides several starter questions to help you study your competition and leverage your competitive advantage. Once you begin to understand your competitors' strategy, you can begin to make decisions and changes effectively. Make sure you always test and monitor your campaign results and compare it to your competition.
Since the release of universal search and Google's release of Google Goggles and Google Voice Search, images have become a strategic part of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Google indexes billions of images and sees hundreds of millions of image-related queries each day. Image search is projected to become even more widespread with the new release of Google Voice (where you can search for images by speaking your query) and Google Image Search, which not only lets you search for images, but lets you search using images.
Managing the reputation of an individual business is challenging enough in the age of social media-how does one manage the reputation of an entire country? To gain insight from a tourism perspective I checked in with Greg Klassen, senior vice president of marketing strategy and communications at the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), Canada's national tourism marketing organization. In partnership with the Canadian tourism industry and provincial, regional and municipal destination marketing organizations, the CTC leads marketing initiatives around the world to inspire visitors to explore Canada.
IN-DEPTH: There is definitely a lot of value in accurately predicting demand at every price level for hotels, rather than simply assuming that the past will repeat itself, says Frederic Deschamps, Vice President Global Revenue Optimization, Carlson Hotels Worldwide. A forecast of demand to come at every price level gives the RM area a "sand box" where different rate structures and distribution strategies can be tested.
One of the things I love about my solo consulting practice is that I'm rarely distracted during the course of a typical workday. Okay, I can hear you saying, "Brudney, that's because your phone never rings!" But seriously, while I'm busy making proactive sales calls - - yes, I'm still very much in a selling mode - - and creating time-sensitive documents, I typically will leave my cell phone in the off position and check incoming e-mails and texts only on the hour.
It is imperative for travel companies to make the most of website personalization solutions. Overall, ecommerce businesses are increasingly recognizing that conversion rate optimization and personalization are critical to online marketing success. These companies need to make individual user experiences more relevant and boost engagement, conversion rates and repeat visits.