ROUNDTABLE: Sit up and take notice of hotel PRs

The pressure is on for hotel PRs to achieve more than brand exposure, with campaigns now expected to drive footfall and increase revenue. At this month’s roundtable, luxury hotel PRs debate the challenges they face and the potential opportunities for creativity.

There was someone missing from this month’s Hotelier roundtable; a man. Six glamorous women, responsible for the public relations at some of Dubai’s most luxurious hotels, gathered at Raffles Dubai for the event, and there was not a gentleman in sight.

Clearly, the world of hotel PR is still dominated by women, but in many other ways, it has evolved greatly in recent years. No longer are guest relations executives promoted into PR with the expectation of merely hosting media, drinking tea and sending out shiny press releases.

Hoteliers are looking for qualified PR experts who will be involved in strategic planning and even sit on the executive committee.

The shift is down to several factors, from developing technology to the demand for tougher returns.

The internet made a huge impact, first driving PR online and now pushing it into social mediums, and the recession has also played a role, as PRs are under pressure to develop campaigns that will not only get people talking about their hotel, but bring them through the doors, wallets at the ready.

So what approach are those at the top of their game taking and where is the PR evolution heading? This savvy six met at the Fire Presidential Suite at Raffles Dubai to discuss these questions and more.

In all honesty, I doubt a male guest would have got a word in edgeways…

How has hotel PR evolved from the process of gaining exposure for your property, to gaining guests?
Sarah Omolewu: Previously it was about how much exposure we received; now it’s about the footfall coming through the doors as a result of the PR campaigns.

Some of the marketing budgets have been cut, but with PR they’re looking for more of that ROI in terms of actual money. We’re doing things now with promotional codes and initiatives with social media.

We’re trying to find ways to track how much money is coming in, as opposed to how many people hear about what we’re doing.

Derryn French: Gone are the days when you could do a ‘nice to have it’ advert and a bit of PR around it; I think now everything has to be around a call to action.

There really has to be a ROI and people are looking at how many people come into your hotel rooms, what the occupancy is and how that particular call to action is manifesting in terms of revenue to your hotel.

You now have to be able to justify what you’re doing to contribute to the success of the business.”

Sarah Walker-Kerr: Looking at the structure of PR globally, there was an article in The Economist about how PR has more of a presence in the boardroom. The role of PR is considered to be at a higher level nowadays.

People take more notice as well, and you have to be part of the strategy and decision-making processes in the hotel. You’re the one that has got one foot in and one foot out of the company, you’re that bridge, and the role is becoming more measured in terms of the property’s performance as well.

DF: I think you can also see it in that previously the PR or marketing manager used to be very much underneath the banner of the sales and marketing function.

But now I think that there’s been a huge shift in terms of where your position is in the company. I’m part of the executive team and part of every single strategy.

From that perspective I think there’s a generic change in how you contribute to the business.

Shona Mac Sweeney: I agree with that as well. There is a clearer understanding and appreciation of PR.

Katerina Dixon: We have a weekly with pretty much all our departments in the hotel. We used to internally promote guest relations managers into PR executives because there was an understanding that a PR entertains journalists.

That story is not there anymore. It’s not something where you just meet and greet and people, it’s about strategic thinking, how you are building a reputation of the brand and developing the positioning of the hotel.

Where should the PR function sit within the hotel? Is it part of marketing or sales, or neither?
Vivienne Gan: A lot of the changes mean PR is merging more towards marketing, which I’m not certain is a good thing. I guess it depends where the boundaries are defined. To some of the directors of sales and marketing and GMs out there it’s one and the same — PR and marketing.

That’s a shift that I’m not too keen on but I also attribute it to the fact that I’ve been in this business for quite a number of years and because of that I see that people in sales start as sales executives, sales managers, director of sales and then suddenly, they become DOSM, so where does that come in? They look at the PR person and say ‘you’re the catch all-marketing person’. That is a little bit worrying.

KD: It’s still happening. All of us are doing PR, sponsorship, events, and marketing altogether, whereas in various blue chip companies you have much more defined roles. Here we pretty much do it all.

DF: At the same time I do think there’s a strong argument for having them combined. I would never do a marketing campaign without a PR campaign; I would never do a PR campaign without a marketing campaign.

Everything I find in my business works hand-in-hand. I guess it depends on your business, there are some corporates that like communication to be completely separate from marketing, but I think that the way forward is very much a combination of the two.

KD: I think it depends on the complex of the property. The more properties you have obviously the more people you have to manage, you have to have very defined roles for online, social media these days — digital marketing overall.

DF: Absolutely, within there you need to have your e-commerce manager, potentially your PR manager, marketing manager, but I think the roles need to work hand-in-hand.

SO: I think it depends on what you’re promoting as well. For our F&B outlets it’s definitely hand-in-hand and the PR budget almost has more money or the equivalent as the actual marketing budget behind a particular campaign.

For the hotel, the focus is mainly on marketing with the support coming from the PR. They are becoming something that is one and the same.

KD: Do you think it is more focused on sponsorships as well? We have a lot of big projects with third parties involved. It’s about going out and not only talking to media but talking to corporate companies as well.

Almost you are overlooking a sales person because we are trying to speak to some of the same contact people as our sales team. We are trying to obviously leverage that partnership positioning and see what we can do together with our corporate branding opportunities.

You are brand ambassadors and must work within brand guidelines. Is this restrictive, and how do you find ways to be creative?
SWK: At Armani, everything we do is so brand-orientated. To some extent it does restrict but at the same time it’s very important. Brand guidelines are followed by the centimetre, but saying that it doesn’t limit the creativity.

We can propose new ideas, new promotions, but you have to think of who we’ve got to talk to at the end of the day; it’s the upper echelons of society. It’s an aspirational brand.

SMS: At The Palace, being managed by The Address Hotels + Resorts, we find a similar approval process. Initially The Palace didn’t have anywhere near as extensive brand guidelines that we developed with The Address, so I think to a certain extent we’re quite lucky that we have a little bit more flexibility. Innovation has to be there but for a young brand it is vital that there is a large amount of control.

VG: One of our biggest roles is to be the brand ambassador, going around to every single department and telling them all the time [about the brand standards] because there’s always new people, new GMs, F&B directors who have their own ideas, god bless them, but they just have to conform.

I have a ‘bad file’ basically of really bad collateral and occasionally I come and say this is what your colleagues around the world have come up with.

I say you may laugh but sooner or later I’m going to collect something from you that’s going to end up in my bad file. It always happens, they always come up with some dinky little flyer made of tissue paper and I say it’s going to the bad file.

In all seriousness, I love brand guidelines. At Ritz-Carlton we don’t have a lot of advertising budget, we’ve always traditionally relied on public relations.

I’ve worked with companies before when you didn’t have any guidelines and you think that’s great, I’ll do what I want, fly by the seat of your pants and guerrilla PR — but it’s not, because when you don’t know what your boundaries are, you can kind of get smacked with things that you didn’t even know you did wrong.

And then when you get smacked one too many times, you don’t want to do it anymore. When I first joined Ritz-Carlton I’d never seen so many rules in my life, but once you know the boundaries you can push them.

SWK: It goes back to what I said earlier about the PR being one step in, one step out of your company. It’s building up the trust of your corporate office, who ultimately is the big brand guardian, and I think by working closely with them and building up your reputation and trust, you can move on.

KD: We are quite lucky at IHG, we have very defined corporate guidelines — we have a tools provider online and you can just download them and it’s very simple.

We have dedicated websites for that and we can just pass it on to our agency, so they know exactly where to place the logo, design the collateral, etc so that makes the job a bit easier.

DF: Starwood’s very strong in terms of their brands and brand initiatives and I think that you can’t underestimate the power of the brand, we all walk the brand, we talk the brand as far as the hotels are concerned, and we are all conscious of the brand message and I think that’s a really strong part of what Starwood provides us.

And we have an amazing archive which is really up to date in terms of what you can and can’t do, all your social media etc. We’re very much governed by those guidelines but I think it’s a very positive thing to do that.

How do you utilise social media in your PR campaigns?
VG: It’s very controlled. We have 75 hotels around the world and they’re not allowed to set up their own Facebook page. We go through an agency that we’ve contracted so they go through all our guidelines. They set up the SOPs for us and then we go through them to set up a Facebook page [Ritz-Carlton DIFC has just become the first hotel to launch this].

And then after that the content is just carefully monitored. But at the same time it is quite a liberating thing to do.

KD: One thing that is evolving in the market is online social media, where we don’t have any templates [from the global office].

We were quite proud to be the first hotel in Dubai to open Twitter and Facebook accounts and we had a dedicated person, Rob Singleton, who said I can justify my role and we trusted his word and said ‘make it happen, make it work and make it ROI friendly’.

We now have 12,000 followers to date on Twitter, we have 7000 followers on Facebook, and we have different Facebook pages for each outlet.

We are actually now setting IHG-wide guidelines for what works and what doesn’t work. It’s something we were quite creative with because we are so used to a uniform design of everything and then with social media, suddenly we had this freedom to do different things and try things that we were not used to before.

How does your approach to F&B PR differ from that of the hotel generally?
KD: InterContinental allows us to do a lot of creative work with regards to F&B — because we have so many different standalone outlets, we do not use the hotel brand on any of the F&B advertising.

So we design our own templates of how we feel the brand should be positioned in the local market and that’s something that your corporate company can never dictate to you.

PR for Belgian Beer Cafe at Crowne Plaza cannot follow the same template as our Reflets par Pierre Gagnaire at the InterContinental. We put the address and contact details of our hotel at the bottom.

SMC: We’ve followed exactly the same thing. Having been here for 10 months I really didn’t have suitable signature adverts for any of the outlets and it was the first project to agree to change the template, because we had a different management company when we opened the hotel.

It’s taken a good six months to get the necessary approvals, and we’re now on our third signature and again, omitting the property logo. We have very, very fierce competition [as a result of our location] and we were expected to deliver in terms of value offering and this can be very difficult for our hotel. Brand positioning is vital.

DF: We’ve got very strong food and beverage outlets, particularly Barasti which is a completely different product to Le Méridian Mina Seyahi for example, so you have to have that flexibility.

We provide the image and then an identity for that brand like Barasti or Bubbalicious but I always link it back to its location, for example our Bubbalicious brunch which is at the Westin is called Bubbalicious by Westin.

It’s definitely got it’s own brand image and there you don’t have to conform to your hotel branding, but it’s important to link it back to the hotel and to give it a location and an identity so that people can identify where the product is.

SWK: For us it’s the complete opposite — it is Armani/Hashi for example, the brand philosophy has to go out with every single thing that is done. The branding [is vital] even right down to a lot of internal things — HR development is called Armani Learning so everything is touched by the Armani brand.

SO: I would say for Raffles we’re almost in the middle. Our F&B brands do stand alone but we always have to link it and have the Raffles logo.

I come from an entertainment background where I worked with a lot of celebrities and cool brands where innovation is just part of what makes everything so successful.

So being with a brand that’s so classic like Raffles where there are guidelines, we just had to push the envelope and I live by the idea that it’s better to beg for forgiveness, then ask for permission! So we try something really neat and if it works, you kind of develop that trust with corporate office.

Dubai is an extremely competitive place, especially for classic brands, so even working at Raffles when it comes to how I dress, I just push the envelope with the shoes, I’m not going to match my shoes! It’s always something small that you do and people see it and if they think that it works, then they let you move on and just go for it.

How has regional unrest affected your hotels?
KD: We are just looking at relocating guests in Dubai hotels. If you’re an FIT traveller wanting to travel to Egypt you may change and come to Dubai. We’ve seen some bookings from Bahrain coming through.

DF: I think it will impact both ways. Certainly we will have an impact in terms of people that were travelling to those regions, but we are very wary, depending on how it escalates, on the impact it will have on people that term the Middle East [as one]. People aren’t geographically educated.

As soon as anything happens in the Middle East you do tend to be packaged within the bracket so people are a bit nervous about travelling here.

We haven’t had a huge impact but I think you’re definitely seeing your forward bookings are not as strong as we were looking at and there have been a number of cancellations as well. If anyone’s not watching it, they should be.

SO: It should definitely be taken into consideration. We’re mainly GCC; 75% of our guests are from this region. People that were planning on going to Egypt are coming to Dubai instead and they are staying at Raffles because it’s a brand they’re familiar with.

We’re not as much affected by the unrest, if anything it will be a little bit more beneficial for us because we don’t get a lot of travellers from the west and Europe and US.

SMS: We’re pretty much the same, if anything we’ve seen the GCC travellers coming in sooner. It’s spiked a bit which is great for business.

SWK: I think that our GCC market business will carry us through the next few months.

Getting to know you: Hotelier's Expert Panel

Derryn French
Director of market communications
The Westin and Le Méridien Mina
Seyahi Complex
Derryn French has been working in the hotel business since she was 17, first studying hotel management and then working in F&B, rooms and sales and marketing for various chains. When Derryn moved to Dubai she made the transition into PR, joining Habtoor Grand six years ago. She has been in her current role for more than three years.

Sarah Omolewu
Public relations manager
Raffles Dubai
Sarah Omolewu has more than eight years experience in developing successful strategic marketing and communications campaigns, first in the US and now in the UAE. Prior to moving to Dubai, Omolewu owned Imani CMG, a boutique marketing communications firm where she worked with brands including Delta Airlines and Coca Cola. Specialising in entertainment marketing, she has successfully utilised celebrities to support the marketing communications and CSR campaigns in her role as PR manager at Raffles Dubai.

Katerina Dixon
Director of marketing communications
InterContinental Hotels Group, Dubai Festival City
Having started her career with above the line and below the line agencies, Katerina Dixon came to Dubai 11 years ago, and started with Jumeirah just after the opening of Emirates Towers. She worked in sales for two years and the joined InterContinental eight and a half years ago, first at the Deira property (now Radisson Blu) and then in her complex role at IHG DFC.

Vivienne Gan
Regional Director of Public Relations, Middle East
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company L.L.C.
In her regional role, Vivienne Gan looks after six hotels in the Middle East but her primary role is to get Middle East media coverage for Ritz-Carlton’s hotels around the world. She joined Ritz-Carlton in 2000 in Singapore and then moved to Ritz-Carlton Bahrain, following an earlier career as a broadcast journalist in Singapore. Gan looked after the food and travel beat on a breakfast TV show, during which time she dealt a lot with hotel PR, ultimately realising:“I could do what they’re doing and then I went over to the other side and I’ve been there ever since”.

Shona Mac Sweeney
Marketing and communications manager
The Palace – The Old Town
Shona Mac Sweeney started her career in hospitality management with Sun International Hotels in Cape Town and then followed her Irish roots to join Jury’s Doyle in Dublin where she trained in F&B. Mac Sweeney progressed into rooms and guest relations and made her entry into PR six years ago at Le Méridien Dubai. She worked for Starwood for five and a half years and then for an agency for two and half years before taking up her current role at The Palace — The Old Town 10 months ago.

Sarah Walker-Kerr
Director of Public Relations
Armani Hotel Dubai
Sarah Walker-Kerr began her career in aviation, working with British Airways for eight years. She then joined Sun International and helped set up the international marketing office in the UK. After eight years, she moved to the Fleishman Hillard agency, working on accounts such as Kempinski and Etihad Airways, and for the last three years she has been in Abu Dhabi working for one of the private jet operators. Walker-Kerr has now been working at Armani Dubai for two months, having been inspired to get back into the hotel business by coverage of Hotelier Middle East’s Great GM Debate.