Our hotel has an annual turnover of £2.5m excluding VAT and we spend about £110,000 on marketing. To spend at least 5% of your turnover on marketing is a good benchmark. My top marketing tips are:
We’ve been here before on a smaller scale when the Commonwealth Games came to Manchester in 2002. Increased general awareness of the UK has got to help; reminding people that Britain is still here. The BTA ( BritishTourism Authority) used to say that Americans visit London three or four times before they venture out to other parts of the UK. I can’t see that Cumbria will benefit per se from the Olympics
There’s a furore going on at the moment ( March 2011) regarding ticket availability. I’ve registered and it’s a joke. The minimum spend is £50 for a two-hour session. What are they doing to encourage kids who are involved or going to be involved in athletics to visit the Games? I’m disillusioned and I’m not sure it’s going to be great. Let’s manage it [the Olympics]right.
I think there are a few independent hotels that use revenue management software; the smaller the hotel, the less likely that they will use automated revenue management. Our hotel has 30 rooms and our revenue management system is our brains. We have 25 different room types that are differently priced. We use the SynXis Central Reservation System and we employ a revenue manager, who, with the general manager is constantly tweaking the rates advertised on our website. Through the use of Guestline PMS software and SynXis we can manually change our rates, which are then automatically changed across all our distribution channels.
To be honest it’s no different now than it was in the 1970s. It’s a real challenge to find local Brits to work here in the Lake District; locals cannot afford to stay here because of the property prices.
We’ve still got to work so hard to change the attitudes to the hotel and catering sector, especially how schools think about our sector. The message doesn’t seem to be reaching schools that a career in hotels is an exciting way for people to see the world. You can start at the bottom and go to the top if you’re got the attitude, drive and desire. I know of someone who worked on cruise ships and his tax-free earnings enabled him to set up his own business when he got back. Someone else started off as a barman and now runs three bars. A restaurant manager can earn as much as £60,000. We’ve still got to change attitudes and get these messages across to teachers and school-age children.
It started as a consortium in 1994 but it ended up with every hotel having its say and nothing was getting done. There were too many divided opinions, so about six year’s ago I arranged to legally change Fine Individual Hotels into purely a marketing company. We used to publish an annual brochure which was distributed amongst the member hotels but I soon realised there was so much more you could do with just one website, so last year we stopped producing the brochure and really focused on channeling all of the money into the sharp end. Now we are a web-only marketing company and the annual subscription has dropped from £1095.00 to £695.00. The majority of the 54 hotel members are in agreement about the approach we are taking.
Organisations such as Mr and Mrs Smith, Johansens, and Best Loved Hotels simply visit a hotel and say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and we’re in that mix. Fine Individual Hotels is not an alternative to other marketing organisations, we are an additional opportunity. My hotel [Linthwaite House Hotel] is a member of Best Loved, Johansens, Alistair Sawday, Pride of Britain and Signpost as well as Fine Individual Hotels. I do not have a problem with that; we are maximising our exposure.
Fine Individual Hotels is a selection of welcoming hotels that proudly believe in their independence. Each of these luxury hotels is privately owned and individually run, impartially assessed and rated, and specifically chosen for their dedication to those who believe in the finer things in life. Fine Individual Hotels is not a consortium, it is a chance to join a select group of like-minded ‘hotels’ in an exclusive advertising opportunity.
In the past sometimes a hotel in the same geographical area would block a similar neighbouring hotel from becoming a member of the same consortium. But I think it’s better if you can work together as a cluster of hotels in the same area. Fine Individual Hotels is not a club, it’s a business. The more hotels we have, the better.
We don’t just stop at listing hotels on the website, we use Facebook and Twitter to help promote you too. We make it our business to keep in touch with each hotel individually - if there is a special offer, event or news story, we have the services of a PR company that works on a proactive media relations campaign to get Fine Individual Hotels featured in the press. Members receive easy to view real-time graphical statistics on referrals. Every month they can see how much web traffic they are getting via the FIH site and see how it compares with traffic directly to their own websites. We employ a lady two days a week who encourages members to make sure their websites are kept up-to-date and in good shape. Last year, Fine Individual Hotels set a hard task of increasing business by 50% and we are proud to announce that we’ve done it. We have increased the number of referrals through to our hotels websites by 77%, referring on average 75 quality leads to each hotel, each month. On a yearly basis we feel the ROI far exceeds pay-per-click advertising.
