6 WAYS WE HELPED OUR HOTELS WEATHER COVID-19 AND COME OUT STRONGER THAN BEFORE
The COVID-19 health crisis of 2020 has rewritten the hospitality landscape for foreseeable future. For some hotels this has inevitably and painfully led to closure, while others have been able to survive with extreme fiscal belt-tightening.
Working with our hotel portfolio we’ve learnt that each hotel has its own unique segments for delivering large percentage shares of its business, and COVID-19 made it impossible for some of those guest segments to travel - even if they want to. We’ve also seen that some of the audience demographics, most notably the guests age, is playing a deciding factor in whether or not they are prepared to take the risk to travel vs risk of possible infection. For hotels that rely on a senior travel segment for their business, or rely heavily on FIT from countries on lockdown or with quarantine measures in place, these challenges still prevail, or need rethinking.
During COVID-19 our Client’s kept their marketing services active, at a time when many hotels and OTAs simply switched them off, and that meant we were able to think creatively, drill-down and identify areas where digital marketing activities could be carried out.
We reduced our fees by 50%, not because we could afford to do so, but simply because it was the right thing to do, and our clients are our livelihoods and we value their business.
We implemented and extended upon the “11 actions hotels can take to survive the coronavirus pandemic and come out of it stronger” which saw activities scheduled for the worst months of the health crisis pandemic.
Working with the hotel’s web-agencies, we were able to ensure that all our client portfolio had homepage load times of less than 3 seconds
We knew that keeping paid search campaign active during COVID-19 would be the right decision, but in front of a crisis of this scale and magnitude we had to be clear on communicating these benefits to our clients. Nearly 6-months on from the early days of COVID-19 we still see year-to-date (YTD) figures for our paid search campaigns delivering revenue at a cost of between 5% - 8% vs the 18% - 24% cost through an online travel agent (OTA).
We setup virtual collaboration boards using Trello that allowed all the hotel’s key stakeholders to access to digital marketing production schedules, hotel to-do checklists and access all their monthly reports in the cloud, whether they were working from home, or the office.
We setup twice-monthly virtual hang-outs on Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype and WhatsApp, which gave us the face-time needed during the health crisis during those harder months, while bringing together Director’s of Sales, Revenue Management, Head of Marketing and Marketing Associates together to coordinate how messaging about pricing policies and unique selling propositions (USP) would be communicated up through the digital marketing campaigns we were managing to drive bookings and enquiries.
Each hotel had their own unique digital marketing schedule modelled around where we thought they would see the most benefits - a tailored and bespoke marketing service designed around their needs.
COVID-19 and the variants thereof will remain a threat to the hospitality industry for the years ahead. This health crisis will not go away in the short or medium-term and adjustments will need to be made operationally and, in a large number of cases, at the core product marketing level of the hotel.
Despite this, COVID-19 lockdowns have seen internet usage and purchasing online increase many-fold. The necessity to survive and to communicate with friends and family have brought people much closer to technology and much faster than might have happened had COVID-19 never occurred. As a result, people are more web-savvy than before, which for hotels mean that if the right offer can be made and surfaced through the relevant online channels, more bookings and enquiries can be owned directly.
During the first cycle of COVID-19 we were able to identify activities and offer new creative approaches that made our hotel brands stronger online, while improving the internal marketing capacity and know-how of their hotel marketing teams, through knowledge sharing and advice.
As the potential for a second wave of COVID-19 increases so too does the need to have a fast and responsive team to back you combined with creative thinking to leverage the opportunities as they arise.
Get in touch to find out how our services are uniquely positioned to weather COVID-19, and to keep your hotel in business.
About the Author
Glyn Spencer Hopkins is the owner of Internet Affected and has been working exclusively with hotels for over a decade.
Internet Affected provides web marketing services tailored to the individual personalities of hotels; a complete range of digital services designed to help them take back ownership of their hotel brand from the OTAs. Specialized marketing solutions to increase guest loyalty, food & beverage bookings, events and wedding inquiries, clearly reported in straightforward language.
