‘We used the lockdown months to keep Brand Fern alive in the minds of our travel trade partners’
During the national lockdown and thereafter under Unlock 1.0, 2.0 and now 3.0, our traditional sales connect with our corporate clients and travel trade partners are all no longer available. Our sales associates remained working from home right through this period. We used the lockdown months to keep Brand Fern alive in the minds of our travel trade partners by holding zoom webinars with our Consolidator agents for their B2B partners and also with trade associations like IATO, ADTOI, etc, the theme being ‘Dekho Apna Desh with The Fern Hotels & Resorts’. This actually gave us great visibility because agents who traditionally used us in a few select locations suddenly became aware of our reach of 75+ hotels in over 60 locations in India.
For our corporate clients, we kept in regular touch through weekly emailers, email updates on our hotels, regular telecalling, WhatsApp posts, etc.
As our hotels started reopening under Unlock 1.0, we have started an aggressive social media campaign of posts and videos, which continue on WhatsApp and through weekly e-mailers to our database. As corporate business is still to kick off, we have launched our Fern Self-Drive Holidays - 2-night packages at 24 of our Fern and Beacon hotels in select leisure destinations, covering beach holidays, hill resorts, temple towns, jungle safaris and forest resorts. And with more of our business city hotels reopened, we are now launching our Weekend Staycation Packages at these hotels as well.
These are all daily promoted both on social media and through our pan-India sales teams, those working from our offices and hotels and those working from home. All these have been well received by our clients and trade partners, with regular enquires daily and some package bookings starting to come in. Staying connected like this all through the summer has helped keep us in touch with our clients, and this will translate into a faster pick up once their travel restarts.