Because new media marketing channels differ so widely, it is nearly impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison on effectiveness. At best, we create a different set of performance metrics and success measurements for each platform.

That’s fine, but it makes high-level marketing strategy decisions difficult. What services and websites are worth your time?

To assist you with these decisions, evaluate Return On Objectives (ROO) instead of Return on Investment (ROI).

For example: if service is a top strategic focus for you, it is possible to quickly compare the diverse range of social networks – and see which ones are allowing you to serve guests the best.

What social media objectives are you measuring for?

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A list of suggested objectives, and tools to match these objectives to specific platforms, are now available in our Insider’s Circle membership site.

I was listening to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Randy Komisar today talk about innovation.

Executives often ask him how they can encourage innovation in their companies.

He comes back with this question:

“Are you prepared to let your employees fail 75% of the time?”

If not, you will never create an environment where people feel comfortable trying new things.

I love talking with the managers of hotels and resorts that thrive online: we get a much more complete picture of how they are succeeding. TripAdvisor is one tool I use to locate the places that guests seem to love, and today’s interview features a resort that is rated by guests as #1 in the area.

Here, I talk with Michael Vogt, General Manager of the Layana Resort and Spa in Thailand.

Josiah: Tell us a little bit about your resort.

Michael: Layana Resort and Spa is a boutique 50-room resort, situated on Lanta island off the west coast of southern Thailand. The low-rise resort was built to take advantage of the beach setting forested hills behind.

How have you achieved the success you have on TripAdvisor?

Our philosophy is rooted in small size, luxurious accommodation, unobtrusive personalized attention, tranquility and peace, gracious Thai hospitality, and value for money. We work hard to ensure guest satisfaction based on our philosophy, and pay a lot of attention to detail.

Most of the time, this works well and is reflected in favourable guest comments on Internet forums such as TripAdvisor and HolidayCheck. But from time to time we drop the ball and this too is religiously reported, which in turn gives us the opportunity to further refine our product.

How are you encouraging guests at your hotel to talk about their stay online – and share their positive experiences with others?

This has been as issue of much Management debate. On balance, we have taken a conscious decision not to adopt any techniques to encourage our guests to talk about their experiences with us online. We have done this because we perceive the types of guests we attract don’t respond positively to being coerced or manipulated into becoming marketing tools for us. And yet they are glad to share their positive experiences as long as it remains their preserve to do so.

The closest we get to encouraging guests to write an online review is by providing direct links from our website to TripAdvisor and, for example, World Luxury Travel Awards to enable guests to vote for us.

In the past, which marketing tactics have performed best for you? Which ones don’t quite live up to the hype?

• Direct print advertising campaigns have provided disappointing returns
• Tour Operator brochure placements seem to be essential to keep a wide net of travel agents informed
• Returning guest loyalty programs are good – though we find guests tend to book with us because they want to, not because of the freebies
• Short-term tactical offers have limited impact from our experience
• Genuine added value promotions are attracting more bookings and are better than simple price discounting
• 3rd party representation in other countries is expensive but has shown positive returns when used as a new market entry tool

What’s the most exciting trend you see in hotel marketing? Why?

The internet is changing the way we market ourselves. But so is technology, and the ability to track guest online complaints, competitors pricing and promotions, and detailed and accurate guest preferences, provides us with powerful tools to target specific offerings with pinpoint accuracy

In time, the current reliance on tour operators to sell to the market will shift and instead we will be able to provide personally packaged on-line offerings directly to an internet-savvy audience

Mobile handheld devices and the applications they access, plus the enormous power of comparative shopping, will change the way the world buys goods and services. The hotels that understand, embrace and utilize this technology to the fullest will enjoy a marketing advantage over their less visible competitors.

Thank you, Michael!

Bob Regnerus is a smart man. I’ve watched him increase the profitability of many websites, so I know his recommendations come from real world testing. His recent blog post, Don’t Celebrate The Launch, included a very important message:

We all love to celebrate a job being finished, but in online marketing, and in ALL marketing for that matter, the launch is NOT the time to celebrate.  Sure, go ahead, high-five each other for nailing the deadline, putting out good-looking work, or figuring out that complex issue, but do not get drunk in this celebration because you’ve only completed about 7% of the task.

If you really want to celebrate, save that for when the sales roll in.  I could care less about how a web site looks, reads, or acts until I start to see what it does in terms of sales.

Bob works primarily outside the hospitality industry, but the concepts apply just as well to us working with hotels.

I’ve watched organizations spend hundreds of thousands on a website…and then think their job is done.

It’s not.

The launch of a new website or campaign is just the beginning.

The real value will come from the testing you need to do in the weeks and months that follow.

It’s essential for:

1. Succeeding in marketing
2. Building fans (the power of predictability)
3. Laying the foundation for a profitable business

This is easy to see when you analyze the habits of the super-successful.

• Joe Girard consistently hand-wrote personal letters to each of his customers. He became the world’s greatest salesperson (according to Guinness).
• Richard Branson consistently carries a notebook everywhere, and writes down every new idea he comes across. “Always have a notebook in your pocket. People at parties and events can have great ideas, and you won’t remember them the next day.” (This is one of the best practices I adopted for myself, with Jott as my tool of choice)
• Scott Ginsberg consistently writes a thought-provoking article every day, and now has a large following in the niche he created: approachability.
• The Tailor Made Hotel consistently creates a new, customized activities itinerary for every single one of their guests.
• Ritz Carlton consistently uses the “daily lineup” on every employee shift change to review objectives and deliver superior service.

What are the top 3 things you do – day-in and day-out – without fail?

Why did you choose to consistently perform these activities?

What benefits do you get?

I’d like to hear from you: let me know in the comments, and I’ll share my top 3 activities there shortly.

[Photo credit: fdecomite]

The Power of We by Jonathan Tisch explains the story of how the CEO of Loews Hotels uses partnerships to build his business. Although this may be more of a management strategy book, there are some very good ideas I took away from reading it that we can use marketing setting:

• No one can be all things to all people — so you must work with and through other organizations.
• Continually look for appropriate publicity opportunities. If you don’t have an advertising budget to match large competitors, publicity efforts can get you print and electronic coverage out of proportion for your size.
• Push authority and responsibility as far as possible down the food chain. Instead of treating managers and employees as cogs in a machine, consider them partners in leadership.
• Travel and tourism are built on partnerships. Every satisfying consumer experience in travel and tourism depends on the successful combination of efforts by many organizations: travel agents, airlines, car rental firms, hotels, restaurants, theaters, taxi companies, and so on.
• The employee comes first. If you make treating your people right your highest priority, customers will be happier too. When you invest in your people, they are also less likely to walk away and join your competitors.
• When hiring, start with the kind of person who fits your company culture, and then train for skills.
• Having specific operational guidelines might seem restrictive — but most employees find these systems helpful, and even liberating. Competencies can become second nature, which frees up the mind of the employee to focus on more challenging tasks, such as solving guest problems.
• If two people always think exactly alike, then one of them is redundant.
• In hospitality, you get instant customer feedback. Guests are not hesitant to tell you what they like and don’t like about the service you provide.
• Your first interaction with a customer is a priceless opportunity.
• The crucial challenge is making that first stay — the first guest experience — really memorable and pleasant. the goal is to win him over to become a loyal customer. That will give you revenue and referrals for years to come.
• The customer base for hotels is complex. There are almost as many different reasons for staying at a hotel as there are guests. Your hotel has to offer a mix of services, styles, and amenities that will satisfy all of them.
• Treat your customers as partners by:
  • Communicating from the bottom up: understand that today’s customer isn’t merely a passive target of advertising, but actively participates in shaping popular perception through buzz and word-of-mouth.
  • Focusing on the customer experience: your services aren’t as important as the quality of the experience you can help them enjoy.
  • Linking with customer communities: identify groups of customers who have shared interests and feelings, and use this to shape your business interaction with them.
• Be a little more creative, a little more dramatic, a little more surprising, and a little more colorful in every message you create.
• Impressing a guest can happen with seemingly small things – for example reducing the average wait time on a phone call from 45 seconds to under 20 seconds.
• Understand your brand identity and the nature of the customer experience it stands for.
• Find the niche you want to occupy.
• On branding: all Loews hotels offer a similar level of service and common set of graphics standards… but unlike other hotel chains, the properties are not built to fit a common architectural design.
• Do a “design audit” of your organization. Aesthetics play a big role in ensuring the message you send is consistent with your brand identity.
• Truly partnering with your customers requires you know a lot about them and what they need and want.
• Use guest databases to develop and maintain detailed histories of your guests interactions with you, so you understand their spending patterns and the kind of services and amenities they value.
• How does your organization partner with its most important customer communities?
• If you treat your customers as partners, they will return.

Most hotel marketing professionals know what they should be doing. But very few are doing everything they know. I’m not exempt from this.

KNOWING is important, but unless you take action and DO…nothing is achieved.

There are many reasons we fail to implement. Constraints on time and resources. Lack of excitement about executing the plan.

As I said last week, I believe the first step is to automate repetitive tasks and put your marketing on autopilot as much as possible. Then, you may consider outsourcing everything except the areas you excel in. Taking these two steps gives more freedom to focus on the important.

Tell me: how do you balance the need to continually educate yourself with the need to get stuff done?

How do you plan to turn more ‘thoughts’ into ‘actions’ in 2010?

[Photo credit: totalAldo]

I received a number of emails recently from readers who enjoyed my interview with Hans Pfister, and so I wanted to explore these concepts in the context of larger hotels. To do this, we’re joined today by Christoph Schmidt, who manages operations for 5 hotels and 25 restaurants at LAAX resorts in Switzerland.

Christoph grew up in a small family hotel in the Swiss Alps, and was exposed to hospitality at a very young age. “I remember talking with guests since I was eight years old.” He entered hotel management school in Lausanne, before starting his career in the industry at Hilton.  He did two hotel openings, one in Zurich and one in Sofia – before heading to Berlin to work at the Four Seasons. He took a little time off to earn his MBA from the Berlin School of Economics, and used his skills to manage the Ritz-Carlton in Berlin for two years. Since returning to his home, Christoph has been managing operations for LAAX resorts.

What role do systems play in ensuring a consistently good guest experience?

Regardless of the size of the hotel, it is crucial to have some systems in place. Certainly, the type of system will differ depending on if it’s a small independent hotel or if it’s a large international company. I’ve seen both.

I think a system is certainly essential to assist the employees in fulfilling the guest experience. With a system, you can cover many things but ultimately the service happens in front of the guest. The employee can use the system, but at the end, they need to use their judgment in serving the guest.

For the small hotel, it may not be worth the effort to build a big computerized guest information system. For large hotel companies, it is important to share guest information between properties. You want your guests’ experience to be the same if they are staying in Madrid or Milan. Ideally, you want to have a detailed profile of your guest, knowing what he likes, what his preferences are, what his hobbies are. Sort of like a CRM system for hotels.

How do you develop this profile information? How would you discover a guest’s hobbies?

The system needs to work with guest communication. So the employee who knows that a gentleman likes a lot of strawberry marmalade at his breakfast needs to have a procedure where this information is saved. At one of the hotels I managed, we had small notepads where we could write this information down, and then it would be given to the guest relationship manager.

This process needs to exist in a small hotel as well. The software that you use to save this information is secondary, it’s more important to develop a good procedure for saving and recording information. You must have a workflow system like this before the software system. Employees must clearly know what to do with the information they receive.

Read more…

This is post from our friend Rajul at London Hotels Insight. He gives us some case studies how a couple hotels are doing this well, and I think you’ll get some good ideas here.

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Hoteliers in London often ask me how to deal with TripAdvisor comments.  A recent survey by TripAdvisor/Market Metrix found that 85% of hotels have no guidelines on how to handle negative guest reviews published online.

To address this issue, I would like to look at London hotels that appear to do this well.  I hope this will encourage others to follow suit, knowing that complaint recovery is one of the best ways to build customer loyalty.

We all love to use TripAdvisor, but it does have faults. Occasionally, people use the site malevolently.

I know one very solid London hotel where someone posted a lot of negative comments when they returned home and asked friends and family (who had of course never stayed at the hotel) to do the same. These negative comments went against the grain of most other reviews in a hotel where I personally know the management to be very diligent.

If the hotel can prove foul play in such cases, management should contact TripAdvisor directly to see if invalid comments can be removed.  TripAdvisor is usually understanding and even-handed in these situations. It’s not about whether a hotel gets complaints but how well – and how personally – it responds to them.

But back to the original question: assuming a negative comment is genuine, how should hotel management respond to it, if at all?

Some hotels put in standard responses – the worst possible solution.

By entering some “blah blah” about how you value their feedback, etc. (without addressing the specific underlying issue) a hotel’s management is simply being arrogant.  It’s better not to bother responding at all.

Other hotels respond to negative comments by thanking the guest (which is a good start) and then mentioning some specific steps they have taken.

Better still, they may actually give ownership of the issue to the hotel department head responsible for that area, who responds in person.

That for me underlines that complaints are a genuine improvement opportunity – if the hotel in question is fundamentally well-run of course.

Read more…

For the past 11 years, Christiane von Ulmenstein, owner of the Whale Cottage Guest Houses in South Africa, has been doing a very interesting experiment. Instead of trying to beat her competitors in Cape Town, she decided to work with them. The following is the story of why she did it, how she did it, and what the results have been.

There are many ideas here you can use, so I hope you enjoy her story…

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“I came from a big corporate environment where there are competitors, you do competitive intelligence, and you try to defeat your competitors. One does not usually consider working with them.

When we started out with the guesthouse we began doing print advertising, because that was the best way get the word out when you are new then. I decided to call a meeting with other guest house owners — we were about 20 at the time. I said let’s get together and have an informal association, which is now called Camps Bay Accommodation Association. (Camps Bay is a suburb of Cape Town.) And everyone was happy with that. We were all kind of new to the guesthouse industry.

We made a few firm rules for it. One of them was to realize the importance of referrals. We were all receiving inquiries, and if you can’t use it, it would be so wasteful to say “We’re sorry, we are fully booked.” So one of the first rules of our association was that if you were full, you had to refer the inquiry to other guesthouses. Our goal was that Camps Bay – as a whole – should get the business, and the business should be retained there. It did not matter if you had friends with other guesthouses and suburbs close by, you need to keep the business in Camps Bay. And it has worked fantastically.

Our guests are amazed, because they feel we offer incredible service as a suburb. Instead of inquiring through one or two websites, they now can have options at 24 different guesthouses. So they can choose in terms of quality of accommodation, and also a range of prices. So our guests have a far wider choice. They think we’re extremely organized!

Organizing the system

The association began as just a referral network, but as we grew we encountered two situations. The first was long-term bookings, where you could see in advance which rooms you have available. And then there was the very real scenario of someone arriving at your guesthouse when you’re full, and you need to send them somewhere else. The process of contacting 24 other guest houses was very time-consuming.

I drew up a template, where each of the members had to e-mail me their availability for the next five days, and I would put everything together and e-mail it to all the members. That was a lot of work, but I didn’t mind doing it because it helped us all know what was available, and helped the members become more efficient.

And then we decided to set up a website: CampsBayInfo.com. it’s just a general marketing platform for Camps Bay.  The hotels are obviously members, and we have an availability schedule that is now updated automatically. Each member has to update the information on the website using a system we set up.

We have learned how valuable this website is. People are finding out about the area from the website, and it is driving reservations to our member hotels.

How we developed the website

Read more…