What can hotels do now the second phase of Cornavirus has arrived in Europe?
Back in April, we shared 11 actions hotels could take to help them survive the Coronavirus pandemic. We received emails from lots of hotels thanking us for that post and the recommendations we provided (please read that post first if you have only recently joined our mailing list). In this revisit we look at what hotels can still do as countries enter a second wave of the pandemic.
It is truly a horrendous prospect for our industry, particularly those based in Europe, that we seem to face yet again a period of closure while national governments attempt to curtail the problem of Coronavirus infection. As if the first wave was not damaging enough, our hopes of bookings for Christmas and the New Year period seem to have been swiped away from us, because of the virus returning.
Travel will come back, but it does seem realistic that the goalposts have been moved towards the first quarter of 2021. With this in mind, what activities should hotels focus on to come out of the second wave stronger than before?
1) KEEP PPC CAMPAIGNS RUNNING (STILL)
We saw during the first wave of the virus that OTAs had a very hard time keeping on PPC during the pandemic, in fact some even asked governments for money as they feared bankruptcy. What this meant is that hotels were able to enjoy superb exposure and ownership of their brand and capture every single piece of business that was searching for them during this time. If you’re considering switching off your PPC don’t do it because you’re essentially turning off people that are interested in your hotel so it’s like closing the door on business.
2) DESIGN A UNIQUE OFFER
The second wave of country level lockdowns is going to mean that lots of people are going to be at home on the Internet or in front of their email more than at any pre-Christmas time in the past. Black Friday, traditionally the 27th November will be massive this year. As a technology driven company, we are already seeing big industry companies offering deals for what is setting up to be a huge discount sale. We recommend that hotel’s design a unique offer that can fit into the Black Friday selling frenzy that will happen in the final days of November, and also consider an offer that can be launched between December and New Year that offers stays in second quarter of the year with a reputable refund policy. The OTAs will have already asked you to discount an already discounted rate, but there is nothing to stop putting an offer on your website where you include a luxury experience on top, or a hotel freebie, that the OTA cannot access – always make the plan that people will come to your hotel’s website before booking on via an OTA.
3)PROFILE YOUR MEMBERSHIP
In our first post we recommended setting up a loyalty club (loyalty club services) as these mechanisms provide a very cost-effective low-cost marketing tool that can be used by in-house marketing teams to target loyal guests. Especially at a time where all areas of the hotel business can be subject to factors outside of their direct control, hotels that can send more relevant communications to their memberships will see much larger revenue returns when they open again. If you were able to setup a loyalty club now is the time to implement a profiling process and align the database better with the business functions at the hotel and find out what interests your membership.
4)SWITCH TO FACEBOOK BUSINESS SUITE AND SAVE £££+
Silently Facebook rolls out updates during the year to its advertising network. Recently Facebook rolled out Facebook Business Suite [link] which makes it possible for hotels to manage and schedule posts for both Instagram and Facebook from a single control panel, while also accessing a few (but not all) of the more advanced targeting tools in Facebook Ads Manager. You may or may not see those changes already, but if you’ve not been into your Facebook Business Manager recently, go and check this because if you are a hotel paying for any tool that simply schedules posts, Facebook Business Suite might replace the need to invest in a separate tool, if you are only using that tool to schedule Facebook or Instagram.
5)REVIEW YOUR AUDIENCE SEGMENTS
Our Google Tag Manager event tracking solution (Guest Insight Services) provide our hotels with unique GDPR compliant view of how people are navigating the hotel website, and provide strategic insights based on their web activity. Now is a good time to review any dynamic audience segments that your agency or your own-in-house teams have created for campaigns during the year, to understand whether or not there are further improvements that can be made to their relevance. For example, asking questions about the length of time a person should belong to a specific audience group could lead to a saving in advertising costs and an increase in revenues coming out of the second phase of Coronavirus. It’s also a good time to explore the latest updates in Facebook Ads manager and how new audience segments and interest-based targeting options have been expanded since you were last there.
6)ACTION TECHNICAL SEO
We’ve always taken Google Search Console data with a large pinch of salt. It simply seems reasonable that any company with such a requirement to generate advertising revenue to survive would logically hold back data to business owners that might allow them to generate traffic without paying for that same advertising. It is still the only current source for data about how your hotel is appearing in Google Search (it’s search terms and popular pages).
We love doing technical SEO and so now is a good time to carry out these SEO audits to verify that each and every page of your hotel’s website is appearing against the right type of terms and that search terms are not being shared across pages without good reason. It may also provide you with some opportunities for removing keywords to focus the page on those keywords that are ranking already. It might also be that some pages can be consolidated or updated so as to capture a better range of keywords. As some of our clients have been with us for over a decade it means that we have access to search and traffic data from before the time that Google Search Console was the only available source. However, this exercise is still one that we carry out periodically as part of our core SEO service to make sure that the hotel is getting the most relevant traffic for each of their pages. Click here to get one of our free SEO audit reports, it will tell you how good your SEO is, and how to make more revenue, it’s free!
7)LET GUESTS CONNECT WITH YOU FROM ANYWHERE
There are lots of tools available to facilitate real-time communication. During the first phase of lockdown Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Skype all saw massive upswings in their subscriptions. While we have all become much more savvy with using tools to coordinate meetings, so to have the people we traditionally call our guests or our clients. Depending on the kind of availability you have at the hotel, whether you are open or closed or whether you still have staff attending to enquiries during your normal office hours, two ways to make this easier are:
CHAPORT – This is a chat-app that allows visitors to specific pages of your website (you might just pick certain hotel functions) to contact the hotel and enter into a dialogue in real-time. What’s good about this app, is that it is approximately 50% cheaper than competitors but has a good deal of the same functionality. You can setup specific types of message triggers based on where in the website the person is, and also join your hotel’s Facebook Messenger account to have all messages arriving in a single place. When no-one is at the hotel you can also trigger messages to appear to a visitor. For example, you could show them a link to your Christmas calendar or direct them to a page with your offer. (see the product here), or suggest they download an events catalogue if they are in your meetings section. See the product here.
ONCEHUB – How about giving businesses visiting your hotel the ability to schedule a call with your events team - even outside of office hours- in their own local time zone. Oncehub connects to both Gmail or Outlook calendars and let you set rules to block out certain times of the day. It’s an effective and active tool that you can also include in your corporate signature files to make it as easy as possible for clients to contact you. See the product here.
8)BUILD RELEVANT LINKS (EXTERNAL & INTERNAL)
Search engines used to advertise to webmasters telling them to add their website to their search indexes. They even encouraged webmasters to create links to their websites saying it would help give prominence in their indexes. Reading between the guidelines of most search engines today it seems the goal is NOT to include websites and save themselves the costs of bandwidth and what they might call unnecessary indexing.
In 2016 we conducted an online experiment to see the state of organic listings results for hotels in Google. We took 314 popular London destination-based keywords (such as 4-star hotels in London) from Google AdWords and then looked at the first page of results of Google and categorized the results.
85% of results were OTAs owned
9% of results were magazines, newspapers
2% of results were Hotel Chains
2.3% of results were Representation companies
0.44% of results were Independent hotels.
What we can be sure of is that in four years that situation has not got better and we know today getting position on the front page of the search engines is about paying for that traffic. However, with a solid internal and external linking approach in place for your hotel you should still be seeing anywhere between 25% and 45% of all your online revenue coming from organic traffic. It therefore makes sense to invest time in technical SEO to improve the internal and external linking of the website. At Internet Affected we are less interested in traffic volume and more interested in traffic quality, this is what we are able to achieve for our clients with this ongoing service, while their competitors have to increase their budget for paid advertising services as they miss out on free traffic opportunities.
THE TAKE-AWAY
It hardly seems fair that our industry, devastated by the first wave of Coronavirus, is now looking down the barrel of a second wave across the European countries, not that citizens in those countries were able to travel much, but the medium-term concern among hoteliers will be on the impact of confidence in the travel market.
A return to normality will come and with it will be people with a desire to travel and travel luxuriously. Nobody took a summer holiday this year, and it looks as though Christmas might be cancelled too. For people that have been lucky enough to make it through with their jobs, there is going to be a large amount of disposable income available to spend on jaw-dropping experiences and luxury travel retreats and escapes. These will be one of a number of opportunities that come out of this health crisis, even if it is difficult to see the light at the moment.
Our clients are already in a position to lead recovery after the second phase of COVID-19 has passed as we have already implemented all of the above as part of our core services to prepare them for this reality.
We are now looking at the activities for first quarter of 2021 to ensure they can be ahead of their competitors and capture more business in a less costly way, more strategically.
If you would like to get in touch with us to discuss how we can help your hotel, please use the call scheduling options below, or use our contact form to send us a more traditional email!
About the Author
Glyn Spencer Hopkins is the owner of Internet Affected and has been working exclusively with hotels for over a decade.
Internet Affected provides web marketing services tailored to the individual personalities of hotels; a complete range of digital services designed to help them take back ownership of their hotel brand from the OTAs. Specialized marketing solutions to increase guest loyalty, food & beverage bookings, events and wedding inquiries, clearly reported in straightforward language.
