Hotel Marketing Is More Complex Than Ever

Those days are long gone when, to sell its rooms, a hotel only needed to give rates to trusted inbound tour operators, a few travel agencies, and above all negotiate a good group rate with its long-standing clients. Later came GDSs and the Internet, bringing us new terms—mostly incomprehensible acronyms that nobody knows but which make you look very good when you recite them out loud in front of a crowd. To make matters worse, e-commerce and online marketing complicate our lives even further with PPC, PPA, ROI, CTR, CPM and all the rest of it. Then there is RevPAR, Yield Management, CRM, and other such jargon. It is all so complicated, and on top of that Barra and a few other madmen with blogs come up with things like RSS, podcasts, del.icio.us, blogs, and so on. The truth is that we belong to an earlier generation, but many of our clients and competitors are up to date, and many of them live fully adapted to the current generation. I do not think we need to master the terms and concepts, just as we do not master haute cuisine yet serve dinner every day. We understand the importance of good food so that guests dine well at our hotels, but we do not always set about cooking ourselves. However much we enjoy driving, we would never consider buying a car from IKEA and assembling it ourselves, although we would probably like to know the role played by each of its parts. I suppose hotel marketing is becoming something like that: either you are capable of building the car yourself, or you simply need to understand the concepts in order to know the advantages it offers you—but it is better to have a professional plan and execute it.