MARKETING PEOPLE
What are the key trends in the hotel sector?
The main trend we are seeing across hotels is re-investment: groups and individual hotels are either expanding the number of hotels within their portfolios or expanding the individual hotels with increased bed stock. Money is now also being spent on upgrading hotels that wasn’t being spent during the leaner recession years. There is a slow move back to individuality where before, the trend particularly with branded hotels, was a ‘one size fits all’ design approach. Now hotels are recognising the importance of providing customers with a unique hotel experience.
Recognising the importance of this, we have very much “embraced the cow” in our design-focus for the newly transformed Red Cow Moran Hotel. While ensuring the underlying brand essentials of quality and service at a price that is value for money are all still very much in evidence, these go hand in hand with ensuring our customers’ experience something new and unique.
From a market perspective, another trend we are seeing is the change in market mix of visitors into Ireland. Already we are recognising a noticeable decline in the UK traveller since the Brexit announcement and, interestingly, an increase in American and European visitors.
Operationally, the trends we would see in terms of food and beverage are that our customer is far more educated and has higher expectations for a quality dining experience. We have more diners eating across our various dining options and less drinkers. While guests are drinking less, they are tending to be more select, requesting more of the top-shelf items.
For example, we carry approximately 120 whiskey choices across the hotel complex and a range of upmarket gins, such is the demand.
What are your own marketing challenges?
I think the consistent challenge we all face as hotel marketers is trying to increase direct bookings and reduce dependence on OTAs. While these sites provide an essential service and a window to wider audiences, the difficulty with using them is the rising cost of sales and the lack of loyalty. We try to counteract this by ensuring we manage our online inventory carefully, that we always offer the best rates direct through our own website and that we have an attractive loyalty scheme to offer both our corporate bookers and staying guests.
How do you target your guests?
While we still use a range of traditional marketing channels such as cinema, print media and radio, we are investing more and more of our marketing budget digitally. Google AdWords and PPC would be effective mediums for us, as would social media and quality imagery above all, which is essential to the marketing tool box.