Remember the last time you bought groceries or household items whilst in an unfamiliar place. Say buying some tin foil in your not-usual-supermarket? Or buying plasters whilst on holiday abroad. What about the last time you needed petrol when on route somewhere?
Did the name of the brand that made or sold that item to you matter? Can you remember it?
Now think about all the hotels you’ve stayed in over the course of your life. How many of them can you name? I bet it’s very few outside of major chains.
Independent Hotels have a problem. When most people are staying in an unfamiliar place and need a hotel, they have 2 options:
- Find a chain they know and trust and book with them
- Use an Online Travel Agency (OTA) such as Booking.com (I’ll include aggregator/comparison sites such as Hotels.com etc in this too)
If you are an independent hotel, the chances are you are completely reliant on guests from these OTAs. And they provide a good service to hotels, reducing the effort of the marketing teams to book out rooms (even if some of them really do feel like a necessary evil).
The problem is that when someone books this way, they are unlikely to have developed any kind of affinity with your specific hotel. The affinity they have is for the destination or event they need your hotel for—or worse—their affinity is with the OTA, even though the only thing they are providing is convenience (and taking 30% of the booking fee for their troubles).
Your hotel is the commodity role of tin foil. If it’s available, looks ok (reviews, pictures, etc), and is priced competitively guests may pick you without any further thought.
For small independent hotels, it is probably not sensible to remove yourself from the OTA pool. And it will certainly not make sense to compete with them in terms of search rankings. At least, not for that first stay. What about the next time that person needs a hotel in your location? How can you turn that chance buy into a repeat or even regular purchase? How do we maximise the 30% you’ve paid an OTA to obtain that guest, so that we can make sure we get 100% next time they visit. How can we get that person to want to not just choose you again, but seek you out?
Experience
The first and most important factor you have in your control is the experience you offer. I’m going to assume that as you run a hotel, the physical experience is packed with attention to detail. Your rooms, dining area, and reception are beautiful and spotless, with tasteful lighting, the beds are comfy with enough pillows, and that the whole place smells fantastic.
But the experience doesn’t start when customers enter the hotel and it definitely doesn’t end when they leave. Are you able to prepare them for their stay with just the right amount of email communication at just the right time with useful timely information? Can you follow up the stay with thanks when they check out? Are you able to encourage customers back by offering them reminders, discounts or exclusive offers or packages that intermediaries just can’t?
You can get to know your customers and give them an experience they can’t get with an intermediary. Personable, direct, and in a way that resonates with them. People don’t just follow any old hotel they visit on social media, but they will follow a hotel that they connect with on an emotional level. How many are following you?
With care the online and social experience you provide your guests can dovetail beautifully with the 5 star real world experience they have at your hotel.
Positioning
In order to become more than a commodity, you need to become a destination for people. How do you do that? The next thing you have control over is your positioning.
You need to make people want to stay with you specifically—not just with any half decent hotel in the area. Why would they do that? What is your thing? It could be the location, it could be the building or architecture, the interior design, it could be the history of the place, it could be the exceptional service.
Whatever it is you need to figure it out and tell and show the world. You need to do this in a way that is unique to you in a voice that no one else has but you. This includes how you write your emails, the copy on your website, the signs you have in the hotel, how your staff communicate with guests, how you shoot and frame your images and video on social media. Once you understand what your position is, you can use every aspect of your communication to reinforce that to potential guests.
If you do this authentically it will help you build an important connection with customers who get you. This connection will build a sense of loyalty and belonging in your guests, who will not only want to stay with you, but they’ll tell other people (like them) to stay with you too.
Brand
Your position and the experience that your guests have of your hotel (in real life or online) is your brand. Brand is not a logo—it’s what people think and feel about your hotel when they stay and, maybe more importantly, when they don’t.
You can do the obvious logical things, like letting guests know they can get the best prices by booking direct (if that’s possible for you to do), but people don’t (only) book for logical reasons. Travel is an emotional experience. A brand creates additional value to products and services above the tangible cost of that thing. Build that emotional connection with the right audience and they will come direct and even pay a premium for what you do.
Your brand is the reason guests will come back to you, directly, and cut out the intermediary.
It’s the reason they’ll tell their friends and followers to stay with you.
It’s the reason they’ll remember your name.
