How to prepare your hotel for the new year

Q: I cannot believe it is nearly the end of another year. I need to start planning for next year and just have no idea where to start. Help!

A: I do a lot of planning sessions with businesses at this time of year, and use them to plan ahead for a successful 12-18 months. The very first thing I ask for is EPOS/or your system stats and a copy of your plan for the current year; I then review this with the following things in mind:

• When are you quiet? Check out when your quiet periods were; mark these on a calendar or wall planner so you can think about how to fill the hotel in the same weeks next year.

• What worked? There really is no point in running something that didn’t work, so review what did and didn’t. Hopefully, if you’ve been clever, each marketing campaign or incentive will have a code and your staff will have marked these off. If you’re not, you’ve made the job a little bit harder and will have to work them out! Hopefully, good campaigns will have corresponded with good booking rates and you’ll have a full house. Any which haven’t, ditch them.

• Was it worth it? Assess whether the marketing campaign was actually worth it; whilst a full house is great on paper, it isn’t if you heavily discounted the room and then didn’t benefit from associated spend. Badly conceived promotions can cost and not make you money, so make sure you don’t run them again, or if you do, run them better.

• What is going on around you? I’m based in Cheltenham and there are several major events in the town including horse racing and the literature festival. If you aren’t full during these weeks, then you’re doing something wrong. Next year is the Rugby World Cup – are you close enough to a stadium to take advantage?

If you can, map this information onto a calendar or wall planner or into a diary, preferably in different colours; you’ll see your highs and lows through the year. Try to make it visual as it is easier to stay focused and timely.

You shouldn’t try to run a campaign that fills every day – just ones that fill some. Preferably you’ll run campaigns that have a slightly longer ‘shelf-life’ so you can put in the effort once and reap the rewards for weeks rather than focusing on filling a few days. Whatever you do, make sure 2015 is your year of data capture. I know so many hotels and businesses that run campaigns supported by third party platforms, only to fail to collect the customer data properly or encourage them to come back.

Once you have the plan in place, it’s time to focus your resources. If possible, try to build in time to write and prepare your promotions in one go, so you don’t have to keep finding the time each week.

What’s more, make sure you review your plan every 2-3 months through the year. It sounds stupid but on meeting one hotelier earlier this year, he was in a flap about marketing and wanted to ‘simplify’; when going through his plan, he’d done so well at the beginning of the year, offering incentives to come back, he was actually fully-booked for several weeks straight. The panic happened when he ran the campaigns anyway, only to have to turn away customers for already full weeks – wasted effort. If this does happen, either look to cancel promotions or adapt them for future use instead.

Finally, think about how you can use 2015 trends. People are bored of blanket offers and straightforward advertising and are hoping for something more personal or real. A great campaign that landed in my inbox was one which said “Hi Angie. Last year you visited us for XX event and we think you’ll probably be coming back; to save you some hassle, we’ve reserved you a room (same as last year) and will keep it reserved for the next 48 hours. To confirm the booking, simply reply XX and we’ll get it sorted.” No money off, nothing extra, but super simple and really intuitive.

By Angie Petkovic