20 Comments

  1. This post got me thinking about 2 examples of hotels attempting the “social media thing”, one the right way and one the wrong way.
    Four Seasons Bangkok actually has a staff member dedicated to monitoring mentions of them on Twitter and probably FB too. When I mentioned that I was heading there earlier this year I got a welcome shoutout and was invited to contact the manager when I arrived. I received a warm welcome, though to be fair, this being my first stay at a Four Seasons, this may just have been the warm way they treat all guests.

    I’ve also seen a disturbing trend of so-called travel bloggers recommending people to complain and gripe any grievances they may have about a hotel in twitter in the hope that the hotel will contact them and offer a conciliatory upgrade. Yikes, I don’t like the sound of where that could lead to, as many people who complain publicly often have the least brand loyalty and are price shoppers, the least rewarding kind of guest.
    I think hotels should put that effort into rewarding loyal guests and not trying to appease people trying to game the system.

    1. I do understand your point especially the use of social media to gain something out of the hotel and we have experienced this with Tripadviser, but would like to point out there are always exceptions to the rule Facebook being one of them as it allows direct interaction and editing options control by the hotel. I have created Facebook pages for several businesses, from different industries and have found that the hotel industries really are one of the best types of industries suited to a Facebook Page.

      For example, hotels can directly interact with new guests and old, keeping your location in the top of their minds, reminding them of what a great time they had with you, encouraging repeat guest and referrals of new guests. (Verble referrals being very important to hotels).

      Gaining a locale following, all hotels have high and low seasons, locals might mean anything from 100 yards to 1000Km, they do use local hotels for meetings, dinning and take short breaks, weekends away etc. and are often asked for advice by friends that visit their area on where to stay and eat. Local guests for example in our case are not affected by political problems, volcanos in Europe etc.
      Having a strong local following protects you in slow times and gains you good steady traffic from the referrals locals give you. This is not to be underestimated.
      We have learned over the years that financially this is a great tool and thank god has been over looked by the bigger hotel chains up until now.
      Direct referrals have another advantage, that is always forgotten by the industry, with its heavy reliance on agent sties to sell rooms for them, is that an agent takes in most case 20% of your room revenue, were direst bookings do not. Add that up over a year how much more could a hotels spend on direct marketing including Facebook and social media.
      it does not take much though, to realise that hotels are an integral part of peoples holiday, and big ticket item for most people, they want to share this with friends and family when they return home it does not take much to encourage them to share this with a wider forum and social sites like Facebook are great for this.
      Feel free to browse our facebook page and see how much interaction is going on and how much of it is from our guests and not just us pushing us.
      Our page for a 40 room resort in the middle of know where on a very small island 60km from the nearest land over 200km from the next big-ish town has now over 20,000 likes and very loyal following and I can’t state enough how it has assisted us in becoming as successful we are.
      http://www.facebook.com/castawayresort
      I can’t see how this would not be a useful tool to any Hotel of any size, and is truly easy to implement, it just takes a little bit of cash and a little bit of thought.

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