As finances are stretched tighter and the market becomes increasingly competitive, hoteliers are challenged to stay on top of the hottest trends in order to bring something fresh to their guests and remain competitive.  A great way to stay current with the latest styles in fashion, travel, design, amenities, music and boutique brands from around the globe is to browse some of the fascinating trend watching websites that are filled with inspirational ideas a creative hotelier can adopt.

The Cool Hunter is one of the most recognized sites to track trends – and its founder Bill Tikos has also recently published “The World’s Coolest Hotel Rooms“, a fascinating peek into some of the most fantastic and creative spaces in hospitality.

Another on-the-money site is Trendwatching.com, which not only reports on the latest and greatest ideas but categorizes them into identifiable customer clusters and behavior patterns.  You’ll undoubtedly recognize some of your guests in these trends – and also gather ideas of how you can meet their needs.  In addition to free monthly emails, they publish an annual report of trends likely to develop in the next year. The InterContinental Hotel Group is one of many high-profile subscribers. Well if it’s good enough for them, it’s probably good enough for you too!

(Bonus site from Josiah: “I also like to watch Springwise, which delivers new business innovations from around the world.  You may be especially interested in their Tourism & Travel channel.”)

Everyone loves a good list.  To help you plan for the upcoming year, I’ve put together some of the best new marketing ideas for 2009.  Enjoy!

Note: This list has been updated as 130 Hotel Marketing Ideas for 2010

Website

Organic Search Marketing (SEO)

Paid Search Marketing (PPC)

Social Media

Measurement & Analytics

Customer Service

Technology

Miscellaneous

TripAdvisor shares the results of its annual survey of over 3,000 US travellers.

Some key takeaways for hotel marketers:

• Increased awareness in green travel
• Increased popularity in cultural events (good for destination marketing)
• Connectivity is important
• Hotel brand loyalty is increasing

How do you plan to adjust your marketing message because of these trends?

Image via Wikipedia

What do your customers want from you?  Specifically, what do they want from you when they’re mobile?

That’s the question you need to answer when building a mobile marketing campaign.

If they’re interacting with you on their phones, they need something – now. Think what this could be and how you can solve it from their perspective.

It’s probably basic information like:

• Your phone number
• Your email
• Your address
• Directions from where they are (perhaps from Google maps)
• Important hours (check in, check out)
• Special promotions

They don’t need to access your whole website, just the basics.  Consider making a separate, very basic website with just this information.

Or, start off by making your existing site mobile-friendly.  (This is easy with blogs.)  Mofuse.com offers a quick & easy converter.

An accessible website is one aspect of your mobile marketing campaign, but what about personalized communication?

Begin with people you already have relationships with: your best guests.  Ask what they want most from you (special rate alerts, etc). Only send what they ask for, and only as often as they ask.  You must be extremely sensitive to privacy issues, since nothing will hurt your relationship than sending unwanted messages.

However, if guests have specifically requested mobile communication from you, SMS is a good place to start.  Most people are familiar with text messaging, and nearly every phone supports it.  Some companies that specialize in SMS communications include MobileStorm and i2SMS.

The future of mobile marketing for hotels will undoubtedly involve proximity awareness, giving you the ability to serve relevant information based on the user’s location.   But for now, it’s important to make sure your basic hotel information is fully accessable to mobile users.

Today I’m joined by Kevin Sturm, a hospitality technology consultant, to discuss some trends taking place in the hotel industry.

1) Kevin, thank you for joining us. First of all, can you tell me a little about yourself and how you help hotels use technology?

Sure.  To put it about as briefly as I can I help hospitality venues with the evaluation, purchase, implementation, and optimization of hospitality technology systems.  I focus mainly in hotels and resorts, but also work with stadium/arenas, restaurants, and food service operations.  My goal for any client is to simplify their technology decisions.

I spent a large portion of my career on the vendor side of technology.  Those years of experience taught me a lot about how a hotel can benefit from technology solution, as well as how they can get stung.  If a hotel is purchasing a new system, I make sure all their needs are clearly defined and implement a decision process that quantitatively and qualitatively evaluates each system.  I’ve found this works very well, and generally much better than the historical RFP process.  For customers that are generally happy with their systems but want more out them or still have highly manual processes, I provide assistance in optimizing their systems.  Often this ends up being complex system integration projects.

2)  A little while ago I wrote on how Sheraton is using interactive tables in their lobbies.  Do you see information entertainment like this gaining popularity in the years ahead?

I do.  I’m not sure Microsoft Surface technology is were it is though.  It’s cool and fun, but I want to see for a hotel how it is either decreasing costs or increasing profits to justify the still high cost.

I think we will see apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch (and other personal devices) make headway in information entertainment with hotels.  It’s more personal (the device is mine and/or I can take it with me) and it’s already at a high adoption rate because of a palatable price point.  For high end resorts it may be more cost effective and memorable to provide guests with an iPod Touch that has the same interactive solutions as the interactive table, and provides a way for the hotel to send personalized marketing and messaging to a guest.  Information entertainment is and will continue to gain in popularity.  I’m excited to see what we have not seen yet that can immediately provide value to hotels.

3)  How else are cutting edge hotels using technology as a drawing card for tech-savvy guests? Free WiFi no longer is enough, right?

I think this really depends on the hotel segment and the type of travel.  I fit the tech-savvy guest profile pretty well, and decently fast free WiFi is still a major plus for me on business travel.  My other requirements have little to do with technology, rather just good guest service.  But if I’m traveling on leisure and staying at a high end resort I have different requirements.

There is some cool “newer” technology out there.  One I personally like is a device that allows me to connect my laptop or iPod to the television and play the movies I have for free.  Allowing guests to easily access the entertainment content available on the Internet, things like streaming TV and iTunes, is going to be a big move for hotels.  Historically it has been that hotels have tried to stay ahead of the guest with technology: Pay-per-View movies, WiFi, flat screen TV’s.  But the expectation is changing.  Tech-savy guests want a hotel to have the same conveniences I have at home.

There is another technology that hotels can use to draw the tech-savvy guest, and that is green technology.  The demographic of tech-savvy is also often green-savvy.  I think Smart Room technology is going to be an interesting draw in the future.

4) If I don’t have a lot of money to spend on technology upgrades, what are the most cost-effective additions I can make to my hotel?

This is a good question, especially given the current economic situation.  But my answer applies even when a hotel can afford a new system.

The best advice I can give to a hotel is to invest as much time as necessary into making sure the current technology systems are setup correctly for the business goals.  Much too often I find hotels recently replaced a technology system only to have the same or similar struggles with the new system.  When money is tight the best thing to do is make sure you current solutions are configured to meet your business goals, your staff is WELL trained on how to use them (buy training if you need to), and that actual problems with the system don’t get resolved by the “we’ll work around it” approach.  A hotel should be contacting customer support when any problem arises, as work-around processes are often expensive and inefficient.

If all of the systems are working well and there is budget for a single purchase I would recommend looking into an analytics or business intelligence system.  But that is a difficult recommendation as each venues requirements are a little different.  As mentioned above, smart room technology may be the right choice for a hotel to decrease operating costs.

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To learn more about how Kevin Sturm can help your hotel, visit his website or contact him directly:

Phone: 805.425.0594
Email: kevin[at]kevinsturm[.]com

BreadCrumbz, a navigation tool for mobile phones, uses the built-in camera and GPS location tracking to build a picture-based map.  Watch the demo on YouTube:

I believe this is just the beginning of a trend.  Pictures will become the future of directions. Put your website ahead of the competition by offering directions to your hotel in pictures. Small, hard-to-find urban establishments have the most to benefit from this technology.

You could take this a step further and offer custom walking tours of local attractions.  The possibilities are limitless.

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

That’s the opening paragraph in a recent article by Wired that suggests blogging is dead.  Obsolete. More suited to 2004 than 2008.

I disagree.

Now, the author does raise a few valid points:

Writing a blog today isn’t the same as four years ago. This is true.  The blogosphere has become far more crowded than it used to be. Publishing a blog isn’t as unique as it once was, and you may not receive the same attention.

When blogging was young…posts quickly skyrocketed to the top of Google’s search results. Again, true.  I remember blogging during that time, and it was far more common for posts to achieve top rankings (along with the traffic and links that come with that).

Text-based websites aren’t where the buzz is anymore. Maybe, but buzz doesn’t always equal effectiveness. Besides, blogs should only be one part of your social media strategy and overall web presence.

These arguments against blogging fail to recognize how blogs can still be foundational to an effective hotel marketing plan.

The more useful information you publish, the larger your web presence will be. A blog is one of the most search-friendly publishing methods, and you can increase the number of visitors to your site by writing prolifically on useful topics.

Blogs provide the opportunity to be an authority of the subject you cover, whether it’s a destination or a niche in the hospitality industry.  Your writing is compiled into a library of knowledge that visitors can browse through, and you can re-use in future marketing material.

The popularity of social multimedia websites like Flickr and YouTube do not mean an end of blogging.  In fact, I recommend embedding photos and video content into your hotel blog, making it a destination resource.

So while blogging’s buzz factor may have worn off, its usefulness to a hotel marketer has not. (Just look at Bill Marriot, whose blog has brought in $5 million in additional revenue.)  This is just another reminder not to jump on the blogging bandwagon without carefully considering the advantages and disadvantages of hotel blogging.

HotelMarketing.com points out a piece in Travel Weekly with Crystal Cruises’ Mimi Weisband.  According to her, the current credit crunch is causing consumers to shift their priorities from material acquisitions to experiences.

This is great news for hotel marketers.   Potential guests will be more open to hearing how staying at your hotel will be a meaningful experience.

Let me ask you this: How will you take advantage of this shift in priorities?