15 steps to successfully launch a hotel
12 October 2011
A quick search on Trip Advisor brings up 1060 hotels in London, 1844 in Paris, 432 in New York City and 434 in Milan. That’s a lot of hotels to be heard and seen over. How do you even begin to make a mark when you launch a hotel in what is an increasingly crowded market?
Let’s assume you aren’t relaunching an iconic and world-renowned hotel after a £220m restoration, such as the Savoy. Let’s also assume you don’t have a celebrity budget to die for and Kate Moss, Jade Jagger and Alexa Cheung attending your launch party, like the W Hotel in Leicester Square, London.
Instead let’s assume you are a ‘normal’ hotelier – someone with a vision for a hotel offering, a sense of style, a USP or niche market. Someone who has seen an opportunity and has gone for it, and is determined to make it work. Let’s assume you know your audience you know the business and you know how to run hotels.
That’s a pretty good starting point, so let’s assume you have a good team, a good product and the right price point – essentially, let’s assume that once you get guests and business in, it’ll come back because you’re good.
In this near perfect situation, you now turn your attention to launching; to being seen and heard about, to bringing in business. At this stage I would suggest you do seek the advice of a PR and/or marketing professional, who will help you devise the right strategy for your business and budget (and don’t think your budget needs to be six figures, or even, for that matter, five figures – there are ways to make your budget work harder for you and a good PR/Marketing professional will help you do this). In the mean time, here’s a quick top 15 tips to consider when opening a new hotel.
1. You MUST engage: Whether this is through traditional or social media, incentive sites, partnerships, business outreach etc whatever the route, you need to establish a message and start to engage with your audience. Start the conversation as early as possible. Relationships get stronger the longer you’ve known someone.
2. You MUST understand your audience: As I discussed in my last post, audience is key to PR & Marketing – understand who your audience is and you will understand what the product needs to be and how to communicate it.
3. Get the product right: Do not open the doors until the product is right. A bad experience early on will domino and have a potentially catastrophic affect on business. PR and Marketing professionals are good barometers for whether you are ready – invite them and a small selection of voices you trust to experience the hotel pre or during a soft launch period. Get the product right early.
4. Customer Satisfaction: I won’t preach to the converted but customer satisfaction is key to new openings. 1 in 4 consumers use Trip Advisors before they book their holiday. If the customer experience is not right it will be evident. Give one member of your team the responsibility of managing customer feedback and sites such as Trip Advisor and ensure that criticism is fed back into Operations and that all customer reviews, good and bad, are responded to quickly and efficiently. Montague on the Gardens, London, is a great example of success in this way. They do not proactively PR their hotel however they have made sure that the product, experience and customer satisfaction is the best it can be. As such they are ranked 6th out of 1060 London hotels and have a 94% approval rating. This is PR enough for them.
very nice thank you