BEST PRACTICE: Marketing for mid-market hotels

Just about every major hotel operator in the world is expanding its mid-range market footprint in the Middle East. According to Christopher Hewett, associate director, TRI Consulting, core regional markets such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will see room rates come under pressure as a slew of mid-market hotel openings put pressure on five-star property performance.

With GCC governments making travel and tourism a major component of their economic diversification strategies, the hospitality sector is set for long term growth. But in a crowded market hotel brands will have to amplify their marketing efforts if they are to win the hearts, minds and money of budget travellers.

According to David Henry, vice president sales, marketing & distribution hotel services Middle East, Accor Hotels, success will come down to visibility and engagement. “The core of the battle is on the web, where visibility can be achieved [through] search engine optimisation (SEO),” he says.

“Engagement is key in terms of marketing — hospitality is all about engagement, emotions, and the experience, and this is what we have to deliver,” he comments.

Accor currently has 33 mid-scale hotels in the Middle East market with its Novotel and Mercure brands, and a further 14 on the way. It also has 15 Ibis and Ibis Style properties, with a further 19 in development. Regardless of the category, however, the goal for the company is to engage with every customer, at each stage of their journey.

“We engage around, for example, the destination guides that are featured in our app. Our aim is to maintain that engagement right through booking, on to when the customer reviews their stay on TripAdvisor,” says Henry.

Local firm, Hospitality Management Holdings (HMH), achieves engagement by deploying a cross-platform marketing strategy to promote its ‘halal-friendly’ USP. The company’s portfolio across the MENA region includes Coral Hotels and Resorts, Corp Hotels, targeting value-conscious business and leisure travellers, and the ‘no-frills, economical and ecological’ B&B concept ECOS Hotels.

“Digital and social media is our key focus,” says Laurent A. Voivenel, chief executive officer, HMH. “We don’t have thousands of hotels all around the world, but when it comes to communications and social media, we are as sharp as – or maybe even sharper than – many of the [bigger chains]. We have to work harder, faster, and smarter to be visible and present, and it takes a lot of work.”

Premier Inn Hotels concentrates its efforts on social media, according to Tania Mitchell, the company’s yield and digital marketing manager. The business, which in the UAE is a joint venture between Premier Inn’s parent company, Whitbread PLC, and Emirates Airlines, has six hotels in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah.

“As Facebook has got quite strong capabilities for businesses to use, we focus heavily on that, and we use it for three key things,” says Mitchell.

“Firstly, it’s about engaging with our customers and giving them a platform where they can talk directly to us. Secondly, it’s about raising brand awareness – trying to push the brand out to a certain demographic around the GCC. And thirdly, we use Facebook to drive traffic to our website.”

Premier Inn strives for a targeted approach to its social media advertising. It specifically targets a 25-to-45-year-old demographic within the GCC, who have expressed an interest in travelling or hotels.

However, tracking the success of its social media strategy can be a challenge. “We report on the engagement of our fan base. If we do certain promotions that link to our website, we’ll add some tracking to understand how many visits are delivered. But it’s quite difficult to measure the true value,” says Mitchell.

“The fact that social media is important is absolutely non-negotiable, but measuring its value in monetary terms, or in terms of a KPI, is difficult.”

Despite the challenges, social media is the only viable option when it comes to targeting the millennial generation, says HMH’s Voivenel, whose own personal/ professional Facebook page has approximately 24,000 followers.

“About 50% of the millennial generation book their hotels using a tablet or mobile device. Obviously we want these consumers as our customers – the millennial generation is almost as big as the ‘baby-boomers’ – so we have to give them content they want in the format they want to read it,” he says.

“Not so long ago, corporate executives controlled the conversation when it came to their products and services. But today, thanks in large part to social media technologies, customers play an equally vital role,” says Voivenel.

Accor’s Henry agrees that the way social media has put control into the hands of the consumer is revolutionising the way hoteliers have to think about their marketing strategies.

“We are going from one-size-fits-all mass marketing to one-to-one marketing. The customers don’t want to be told what’s good for them. They want to find out for themselves from trusted sources, like Facebook or – particularly for the Saudi Arabian market – YouTube. The level of engagement in Saudi with YouTube is unbelievable,” he states.

As well as corporate promotional videos, YouTube users can view spontaneous, improvised videos uploaded by satisfied guests. These can actually be an incredibly effective forms of free marketing, says Henry.

“There was a particularly hilarious movie that a German family made during their holiday at the Novotel Sharm El Sheikh. They were actually promoting the hotel tremendously, and to the European and German market, which is essential for us.”

“Customers are relying on more peer-to-peer exchanges of information. The challenge is actually to accept that, and to give the responsibility for the promotion of your brand to the customers.”

As perhaps the most influential manifestation of this trend, it is no surprise that TripAdvisor features highly on all the companies’ agendas. Managing online reputation can be a mammoth task, but ensuring that every customer review or comment is responded to is a top priority, as Premier Inn’s Mitchell explains.

“Online reputation is the face that you have out there, and it’s accessible by anybody, so we focus heavily on responding to customers, following up, and taking whatever we’ve received from that customer, whether it’s positive or negative, back to the business. It’s about using that information to train your team, develop your product, or change a process.”

Head of marketing for home-grown operator Citymax Hotels, Rohit K. Challapalli, concurs. For the brand’s three-star hotels in Al Barsha, Bur Dubai and Sharjah, “TripAdvisor is a great source for us to understand what our customers really think,” he says.

“The reviews are monitored by our general managers and any comment is replied to within 24-48 hours.”

Last year, guest comments on TripAdvisor led Citymax to improve Wi-Fi services at its hotels. “Guests used to say that they weren’t very happy with the Wi-Fi so we invested in a seamless Wi-Fi system throughout the whole hotel, offering uninterrupted streaming from the basement parking, into the lobby, restaurants [and] rooms,” he explains.

As well as listening to guests, it’s vital to return their loyalty. As Citymax is part of the Landmark Group, UAE guests who hold one of the group’s Shukran cards can collect points at the hotels. “We also have a members’ club for our Huddle Sports Bar and Grill, and for the Maxx Music Bar and Grill, that gives regular guests 20% off F&B,” says Challapalli. “It really connects the guests with the brand – they feel more valued and have a sense of belonging.”

Accor also believes in incentivising loyalty – classic, silver, gold and platinum members of the company’s Le Club Accor Hotels programme can collect points and receive benefits at its hotels worldwide.

“In the Middle East we’ve long since passed the 500,000 cardholder mark,” Henry says.

“Our studies in the Middle East show that most people in the region have about six hospitality loyalty cards, so the consumers are well educated about loyalty programmes.”

This is a fact that HMH is hoping to turn to its advantage when it launches its own loyalty scheme at the end of this year.

“Loyalty programmes are a critical aspect of today’s consumer behaviour and our guests have been asking for one,” says Voivenel. “We have entered into partnerships with frequent flyer programmes such as Emirates’ Skywards, and Ethiopian Airlines’ ShebaMiles.”

If your brand does not enjoy a global reach and millions of loyal customers, you just need to ensure you’re getting “maximum bang for your buck”, adds Citymax’s Challapalli.

“We might not have the same name recognition as the global mid-market brands, or as deep pockets. Our marketing is very ROI driven. We have to work harder because we’re a smaller, younger brand.”

Although, the trend towards one-on-one marketing presents challenges to smaller hotel operators, it also serves to level the playing field. If the product is right, and the social media messages are supportive then smaller operators can create a powerful, cost effective, marketing buzz. “The marketing function is increasingly important at the hotel level. A company the size of Accor has to imagine globally, but still rollout locally,” says Accor’s Henry.

“We are all just trying to adapt to the evolution of customers’ needs, and we have to do that in the new battlefield of the 21st century – the digital environment.”