Hoteliers believe in power of marketing to get through tough times

MEDIA & MARKETING: As hotel owners turn to the internet to fill rooms, guests are insisting on better prices

THE RECESSION is making it that bit harder for hotel operators to fill bedrooms, but small family-owned hotels still believe in the power of marketing to carry them through these dark days.

As Marie Chawke, general manager of the five-star Aghadoe Heights in Killarney, puts it: “We can’t just sit on our hands and wait for it to get better. We have to make it better.”

The Aghadoe Heights has joined with five other hotels to market their spa facilities to domestic and overseas visitors. The hotels have invested in a dedicated website, “Ireland’s Inspiring Spas” and are spending €17,000 dispatching a brochure to 100,000 British readers of Condé Nast Traveller magazine in the UK. Later this year, the hotels will partake in another joint initiative when they take stands at the Taste food events in London, Birmingham and Edinburgh.

According to Chawke, it is taking hotels a lot longer to secure firm bookings. “Last year, guests would take just one phone call to make a booking. Now it takes three calls to get the reservation confirmed as guests keep looking for better and better prices.”

The Kilkenny Ormonde, which underwent a major upgrade last year, has 118 rooms to fill every night. Marketing manager Áine Comerford says she is spending significantly more money on web marketing than last year. Much of Comerford’s spend is directed at buying key words on Google and optimising the hotel’s listing on the search website.

Every month, Comerford also e-mails an e-zine to 20,000 individuals on her database, promoting special offers. She has bought an advertorial slideshow for her hotel on YouTube and is in the throes of creating a Bebo page. All her marketing efforts are paying dividends, with the Ormonde boosting occupancy in January by 12 per cent year-on-year.

The Ardilaun Hotel in Galway, currently in the process of adding more suites, has been in business for 47 years and its marketing efforts won plaudits at the recent HSMAI Sales and Marketing Awards.

Marketing manager Maria Kelly is also a firm believer in the value of e-zines, and what works best for her is a call to a location for a price driven offer.

She said: “It’s all about price but also value. When we are reducing our prices, upselling in the hotel becomes much more important. All the staff have to be engaged in sales, whether it’s the person on reception or the porter carrying bags to the room.”

Kelly does peer comparisons by using www.cityoccupancy.com, a website which collates hotel pricing and occupancy data. Kelly learned from the site recently that the Ardilaun was ahead on occupancy but behind some of the hotels in Galway city on price. “But that’s because we include breakfast and dinner in our room rate while other hotels just charge for the room,” she said.

Apart from her online activity, Kelly also runs classified ads in national newspapers each week to drive bookings and has a weekly presence in her local newspaper, The Galway Advertiser.

But while the web brings big benefits to hotels, it also has its downside, and there is one website the hotels can’t control – www.tripadvisor.com. Even if the hotels anonymously post up favourable reviews of their hotel, they can’t delete the negative ones.

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Good news for television stations at last with the unveiling of the new name for Bounty kitchen paper. Bounty is being renamed Plenty and the marketing spend to make Irish and UK consumers aware of the change will amount to €10 million. But why ditch the number one brand in its category? Bounty is a global Procter Gamble brand and in 2007 PG sold its paper operations in Europe to Swedish company SCA, along with the licence in Europe for the Bounty trademark. SCA’s long established paper towel brand on the continent is Plenty and now the Swedes have decided that savings involved in having one brand throughout Europe outweigh the brand disruption in Ireland the UK.

siobhan@businessplus.ie