In the hotel business it is well known that reserved rooms are preferred rooms and while the walk up business definitely helps the bottom line it is the pre determined revenue of the reserved rooms that hotels use to make their living. That means that getting as many rooms reserved as possible and tied down with credit card confirmations and that means marketing the hotel to get that extra business.
People are always traveling for various reasons and the only reason they do not choose your hotel over another hotel is because they have seen something on the other hotel and they have seen nothing in regards to yours. The key is to not just get the marketing machine cranked up and working in your favor but to identify the key areas where your marketing efforts, and dollars, will see the most return.
It used to be that one of the secret weapons of the more successful hotels was the use of travel agents. The hotels would invite travel agents to stay for free in their hotel to see what the hotel has to offer and in return the agents would use the hotels as part of package deals for vacationing travelers.
The hotels would give discounted rates to the travel agents and the agents would fill the rooms for the hotels months in advance. Today there are still traditional travel agents that are experts at filling hotels and keeping those relationships with hotels all over the world alive but the average traveler has moved away from using traditional travel agents and has moved to booking their vacations on the internet.
A smart hotel is going to hunt down the more successful internet travel agencies and work out package deals and discounts with those internet travel agencies to help book rooms in advance. Your exposure with one large internet travel agency is going to exceed the exposure you would get from any local traditional travel agent.
The internet has become the medium of choice for people looking to book vacations and even more popular than the internet travel agents are the internet discount travel sites that allow people to piece together their own vacations with discounts from various hotels, airlines, and car rental companies.
In order to find success with internet marketing you will need to make sure the information being offered travelers via these discount travel sites is accurate and that all of the processes these sites have in place to book rooms in your hotel are also correctly set up. Keep the channel of communication open with these websites and offer them excellent discounts as well.
Some of these sites try and get discounts out of your hotel by helping you fill rooms you cannot fill at full price and offering them at a negotiated discount with the traveler. Any prebooked room you can get is revenue you can count on and a prebooked room at a discount is always better than hoping that someone walks up and pays full price.
Reaching out to travelers through the internet is a full time job and working beyond the traditional travel sites will help get you more exposure. The larger search engine websites offer advertising spaces that are seen by millions of people a day and the rates are not so expensive for exposure like that. Get your hotel’s name and link on those major search engines to make sure you are maximizing your exposure.
The final piece to the internet marketing puzzle is making sure your website is clean, easy to use, updated, and helpful to any potential customer that tries to use it. People want as much luxury as possible out of a hotel for as little money as possible so make sure you create a website with a luxurious appearance that gives the impression that you have a hotel worth spending the money on.
Make your website easy to get information from and easy to book a room with and make certain that all room booking information is updated in real time from all of your room booking sources. You will have angry customers and bad referrals if you constantly have double bookings due to a lag in updating the website booking information. Create a desirable and functional website and people will use it to book rooms in your hotel and make you revenue.
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