Hotel marketing and commercialization, a necessary reflection

It is clear, and no one can deny it, that the way hotels are marketed has changed, and that the forms of marketing have changed. But, in the meantime, have the criteria of those who make the decisions that affect this new marketing also changed, and are they aware of what the radical transformation brought about by the digital era entails and requires? Everyone can analyze their own cases and reflect on the subject.

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LET'S MAKE SOME HISTORY: THE PAST

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Hotel marketing has been thriving by adapting to a parallel global prosperity. Adapting and expanding in response to corporate business needs, the growing social need to travel and the new ease of leisure consumption.

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Hotel occupancies and hotel business development initiatives were responding to the demands generated by a critical mass, always directed by the fortunate presence of intermediaries with the capacity to approach the end customer. Let's say that "things have always worked well up to now", so it has not been necessary to change or invent much.

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For hotels, until very recently, the option of going directly to the client was null, almost impossible, so they had to rely on those blessed collaborating agents, in their different formats, depending on the type of product or destination. Travel agencies in all their different modalities.

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Those of us who are older will remember that in hotels, direct clients were referred to by the peculiar term "interns". That said it all. It was impossible to consider a so-called "interns" recruitment campaign for which the return on investment (ROI) would always be inordinate. Unthinkable.

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In such circumstances, "marketing" meant collaborating with the aforementioned market agents or distribution players, which required great negotiating and contracting skills and, of course, the ability and willingness for public relations.

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A good Sales Director should have a broad portfolio of contacts, with whom he should maintain a very good relationship and with whom it was necessary to meet regularly. In person, of course. Being a good Sales Director meant being fully available to travel to meet the decision makers of client distributors in their cities of origin and at major events or annual trade shows.

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Given that hotel marketing always relied on "retail" partners or "wholesale" partners who, in turn, marketed with third party retailers, any brand generation, promotion or consolidation action, let's call it "Marketing", had to be negotiated with the latter, who were the ones who actually implemented the necessary actions with the means at the time to "hook" the end customers or future guests.

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Real marketing campaigns, some of them surprising and brilliant, that, by themselves, provoked inspirational moments or processes in the consumer. That was the task.

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In many cases, these marketing campaigns were presented with a shared dual personality that, at least on paper, was supposed to be carried out by "sharing" the investment they required. This was referred to as "comarketing".

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Such were those not-so-distant times.

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Let's go back to the figure of the Commercial Director of a hotel or hotel chain.

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As part of his commercial and contracting tasks, he also had to negotiate with these agents (tour operators, consortias, or travel agencies) the type of marketing initiatives that were deemed necessary and which were successfully achieved thanks to his excellent skills described above. Therefore, the control of the marketing budget was also implicit in the position. Thus, we already had a Sales and Marketing Director. A heroic managerial figure, a driving force in sales, with a very good disposition and commercial and negotiation skills. And what about marketing?

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NOW EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED: THE PRESENT

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The inspiration or the need to travel is no longer inspired by those brilliant campaigns. Nor the famous Curro who goes to the Caribbean; nor the fashionable actor on television; nor those ads in travel catalogs and Iberia magazines with white sandy beaches full of coconut trees. The customer now receives and feels inspiration in other areas. Today, these marketing or co-marketing initiatives are quite futile. Let's say they are of little, if any, use.

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It is clear that the concept of marketing has changed and that it is necessary to get right into it. The direct customer in his concept of "passerby", fortunately, has "passed". Now it is a close, curious and interested omnipresent Internet user with a very high degree of proactivity, which seems to have caught many hotel organizations and boards of directors off guard.

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Now the heroic "one-man band" is no longer valid. It is essential to know about marketing. Real marketing. Moreover, it is a different type of marketing in which it is no longer possible to harass the customer, nor bombard him with messages that we believe to be inspiring. Now it is necessary to undertake actions aimed at finding the curious and needy customer, who is looking on the network to be satisfied with the perfect option to the travel or vacation model that he himself has created with all the information received in the new areas in which he moves and breathes. These are new media that have involved all of us without exception: search engines, video streams, messaging, metasearch engines, social media, etc.

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Those collaborating agents on which any brand action used to rely are no longer useful for hotels. Perhaps they have already disappeared as such or are on their way to extinction. Some have become rusty, amortized figures whose only way out is to specialize in very specific market niches, while others have been slyly changing their role as agents to that of simple channels, and I stress the word channel, because it is not at all simple.

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The customer is now closer than ever to the hotel, at the simple distance of a click, if I may use the cliché. The hotel must get involved in this new Inbound Marketing model and implement all the tools and solutions within its reach to be able to show itself as a candidate option and in relation to what the customer is looking for. You must know your "buyer persona" perfectly and direct all your efforts and budgets towards them. Welcome to Digital Marketing.

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Definitely, and for some time now, the time has come to dissociate the role of Sales Director with people skills by incorporating a real Marketing team specialized in digital. And, with all due respect, it is much better if this responsibility lies with natives of the digital era instead of continuing to make use of previous generations, no matter how many medals from other battles they may have on their record.

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Many organizations should humbly take this courageous step and unlock a broad path of success and opportunity that would allow them to compete on an equal footing with the few pioneers that are already ahead of the curve, or with the very large international chains that understood this years ago.

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We see every day the tremendous respect that is illogically given to the different options or investment opportunities in digital marketing. Even when a high and evident return on investment is demonstrated and there are millimetric measurements of results and traceability that could never have been dreamed of. The only explanation is that such respect only responds to the fear of the unknown. To the unknown for those who inherited from other times the responsibility of the brand and who now must decide on modern concepts incomprehensible to them that directly affect the use of a meager budget from the account of that initial marketing that no longer exists as such.

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There is the sad dilemma of not taking advantage of this very clear opportunity for the sole reason of not understanding it. And it is also worrying that there is no intention to understand, because the person who must decide is sedated by the constant reservations that are arriving daily from the intermediaries between the hotel and the end customer, who is much more accessible than it seems.

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Of course, it used to be much more comfortable when the responsibility for brand management and promotion fell on that co-marketing partner; when the supposed success of those investments was only measured by the sales generated by the agencies or tour operators that were reviewed once a year through accumulated and mixed data at the time of renewing contracts in those pleasant and long business lunches.

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On the other hand, now that the "prodigal son" DIRECT CUSTOMER has appeared, let us consider whether the same traditional dynamics should be followed commercially. Definitely not.

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The distributor, the former agent, now called OTA, must comply with the new rules of the game since its role has changed significantly. It is no longer the one that generates business, it has lost that merit. Let's remember that it is a simple channel, the path that the customer takes to get to the hotel. In many cases it is the easiest access route, since these new intermediaries have excellent means and resources to present themselves first to the consumer who has started his "booking journey". Resources that, by the way, are paid by the hotel through commissions on the agreed sales. Commissions very well earned and well deserved as long as they are used for what they were really contracted for, which was nothing more than to gain access to those customers that the hotel cannot reach by its own means. Therefore, when the OTA stands in the way between the client and the hotel, it is in serious and flagrant breach of the rules of the game. Then that commission is no longer so deserved.

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It is curious that some salespeople are still reluctant to address the customer directly with the explicit aim of gaining their loyalty and, consequently, their next direct booking. It is also incomprehensible that an online agency should claim for itself this loyalty, which is the hotel's most sacred asset.

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That client is just as legitimate for the hotel as the commission for the agency for getting him the first time. That's the end of the deal.

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