Earlier in the year, an article titled Use SiteMinder To Save Money And Earn More Revenue was published here, projecting the savings that would happen after switching a property’s central reservation system (CRS). That article was mainly speculation on the fees associated with direct bookings and not having to pay for a service like GuestFolio for guest messaging. Around the same time the article was published, a boutique hotel was switched over to SiteMinder. Now, some more accurate numbers can be shared about the effect SiteMinder is having on that property.

Lower Fees – Big Time

In that article, the following table was shared to come up with an baseline to work with.

Followed by this table with an estimated cost for the same amount of bookings but using SiteMinder:

That projected difference works out to a savings of 44%. The actual savings in the last six months on the fees above is 61%!

But, the higher fees for the SiteMinder platform also includes Guest Experience for messaging and guidebook. This boutique hotel was using GuestFolio which was charging $400/month, plus the Sabre monthly fee on top. SiteMinder combined with Guest Experience is less than GuestFolio, creating another small savings.

Booking.com

The big surprise in savings came from Booking.com.

One of the main features of SiteMinder is Demand Plus, which creates a featured link on Google searches, TripAdvisor, and Trivago. It puts the link to the hotel at the top of the listings. If you use the free link from the Google Business profile, the link appears at the very bottom of all the options.

It was not entirely clear how much of an effect adding the link to the very top of the results would have. Turns out, it’s quite dramatic.

For this hotel, the Booking.com fees have dropped by 60% for the last six months. Those commission fees (18%) can really add up, so to have them essentially eliminated while maintaining the overall hotel revenues has been a real blessing.

The other side benefit to this is the hotel receives all the contact information for the guest and can keep encouraging them to book directly at the site, rather than through Google. The added savings should only grow. With Guest Experience on SiteMinder, every Booking.com reservation is sent a link to fill out their personal details. That helps pull more people away from Booking.com (or other OTAs) and gives the hotel the opportunity to have them book directly.

The other thing of note with Demand Plus occurred when reviewing their analytics page. It shows the impressions and conversion rate for each platform. Google was regularly in the 30% conversion range, while TripAdvisor was in the 10%’s, and Trivago had nearly nothing. This hotel is regularly one of the top 3 hotels in the city on TripAdvisor, so it was surprising to see the conversion rate be that much lower.

Combining the fees for reservations, commissions, and monthly fees, the overall costs over the last six months have been down nearly 40%, without having lost any revenues.

Switching to SiteMinder has made a lot of sense financially, and the user experience has been as expected. The only real headache was adjusting the confirmation/pre-arrival emails to look better. The email editor is in HTML, but not a WYSIWYG editor like some other platforms. Overall, I think the emails look good now, and not something that needs to be adjusted for a long time.

Fully Featured

The full set of features for SiteMinder can be found on the page devoted to it: Learn More about SiteMinder

There is currently a sale on SiteMinder, along with a free trial. To learn more about the sale, fill out the form below and more information will be sent to you. For the trial, click the button below to sign up.

Any signups through Four Sides Hospitality Consulting include assistance with the transfer from one CRS to SiteMinder, and consulting time to talk about best practices with SiteMinder.

The post Maximizing Efficiency: The SiteMinder Experience – 6 Months Later appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Apple announced yesterday Apple Business Connect, a way for business owners to control their information across Apple Maps, Wallet, Siri, Messages, and more. Business Connect allows the same amount of control as Google Business but offers more integration across all Apple devices. For hotels, it will also offer the opportunity for users to make reservations directly and see special offers for the hotel, restaurant, or other aspect of the hotel.

Get Started

It is easy to get started with Apple Business Connect. Enrolment is through the link and is connected to your Apple ID. If you do not have an Apple ID, you will be able to create one. You will be able to add additional users at a later step.

After signing in, you will be asked to locate your business on Apple Maps. Maps has been populating the business information over time. For hotels, it has been pulling the information from TripAdvisor and Yelp. If your hotel is listed on either of those sites, there should not be a problem locating the hotel.

After agreeing to the terms of service, you will be asked to verify the hotel listing. The easiest way to do this is by Apple calling the hotel and providing a code over the phone. The other option is sending Apple documents which will delay the listing being verified. The verification process is important because without it, you will not be able to upload pictures or change any other information.

The Hotel Listing

The listing for the hotel is going to be fairly basic. The logo and cover image are images that can be modified. The call and website buttons will link to the information you provide (i.e. the phone number could go to a reservations desk rather than the front desk). The Book button gives you two options, TripAdvisor or Booking.com.

This is going to be one of the main differences with the Apple Business listing compared to Google Business listings. With Google, users have the option to check availability and make a reservation directly at the hotel. Maybe that will change for Apple Business in the future.

Modifying the Listing

The listing has a few areas that are able to be changed:

• cover image and logo
• basic description (only 100 characters)
• photos
• amenities
• and other basic information (hours, address, phone number, website)

The photos have to be above a certain minimum size and have a maximum size set. Businesses are only able to upload 100 photos. The full list of size restrictions is found here, Apple Business Connect photo standards.

With the photos, businesses will be able to add a short caption and alt-text for each image. Right now, there is no way to modify the order of the images, so that is something to consider when adding the photos.

Apple is verifying every photo to make sure it is up to their quality standards and does not break any of their rules (harmful language, spammy, discriminatory language, etc).

The one area I was not able to explore was Showcases. From the Apple News release:

Showcases, a new feature in the place card, helps businesses present customers with offers and incentives, like seasonal menu items, product discounts, and more. Businesses can easily update the Showcase section of their place card through Business Connect. Showcases are available to businesses in the US beginning today, and will be available to businesses globally in coming months.

Apple News Release

Overall, I think Apple Business Connect is a quality start to offering more control over the listings that were already available on Apple Maps and other products. I am looking forward to see how Showcases can be used, and what other enhancements Apple will be making with the product in the coming years.

The post How to Start Using Apple Business Connect for Your Hotel appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

After a few subdued years due to COVID, Canadian government travel is returning back to normal levels. The federal employees and contractors are authorized to spend at higher levels than previous years, as well. For 2023, their authorized amounts for travel will likely be even higher thanks to inflation.

The above seems is common knowledge for most Canadian hoteliers and other professionals. What is not common knowledge is that federal employees and (more importantly) the travel agents that work with the Canadian government have access to a directory of hotels for Canada and around the world. This directory consists of listings created for each hotel, along with pricing information.

For a lot of hotels outside of Canada, this is likely an opportunity for added exposure and more revenue, because a lot of major cities do not have many hotels listed for them. For example, Paris, France, has only seven hotels; Hong Kong, China, has 10; Berlin, Germany, has two. A lot of government workers rely on the directory to plan their business trips, but may also try to use it for personal travel as well.

Directory Information

To learn more about the directory, click through to the main page. Below will be some more links and information about getting added to the directory, how to price your hotel rates, and how the program is managed.

One important note about the program is it is renewed annually. There is a set fee to be included (it is fairly minimal in Canada) and the hotel rates have to be submitted each year within a set deadline. The deadline to be added for 2023 is September 21st, 2022.

Get Added to the Directory

In order to be added to the directory, the hotels have to be added to the Cvent Business Transient RFP platform by contacting the administrator of the Canadian directory. Hotels can do that by sending an email to: TPSGC.RHELVDGT-ACRDTMD.PWGSC@tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca

While waiting to be approved, it will be worth looking at your competition listed in the directory. Thankfully, the directory is open to the public. It is viewable at this link: Accommodation – 30 days or less. The directory will open up a listing on Lanyon, the Cvent portal. From there, you can do a search by city, filter by distance from the city centre, or pick a different outlying area (i.e. the airport or nearby city).

Clicking on a hotel will bring up its profile with a lot of details, including the rates, photo gallery, policies, and amenities of the property. The directory also allows you to compare multiple properties at once, which is a nice added feature. This will let you get an idea of how your competition is marketing themselves to these workers, and also their rates by season.

Setting Rates

Besides using the public directory to determine how your competition is pricing itself, another important area to look at is the per diem section of the directory. The City Rate Limits vary by each city, and will include a rate for hotels outside of the main cities. For Canadian cities, the directory has grouped surrounding areas into the heading for the main city (i.e. Cochrane, Okotoks, Airdrie, are included with Calgary).

The limits are only a suggestion of what will be reasonable for government travel. Any rates above the limits, may still get booked, but any rates significantly higher will likely not be booked.

Management

As mentioned previously, the directory is updated on an annual basis. If you miss the deadline date, the hotel will not be listed in the directory for the following year. After submitting the hotel information and rates through the Cvent system, the Government official will send an email to state if the hotel is approved or not, and the instructions to load the rates into the GDS for travel agents to book.

One other requirement of the program is hotels have to supply an update for the bookings they have generated through government travel. It will be important to have a separate rate code for the Government rates to track it. The reports are submitted online after each quarter and at the end of the year.

Otherwise, as long as the rates are loaded properly, and no government guests submit complaints to the program director, there will not be any ongoing management.

A small tip that can be provided after several years of entering the rates, take the time to explore the Cvent RFP platform and update your hotel information. There will be a lot of saved time from having to enter in all the policies again, updating photos, etc. You will only need to update the hotel rates, and then the RFP will be complete.

To learn more about the directory and program, please visit the official website. Again, the deadline to be added for 2023 is September 21st, 2022. Act quickly.

Learn More About Four Sides Hospitality Consulting

The post How to Capitalize on Canadian Government Travel by Getting Listed on the Accommodation Directory of Canada appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

An article by Tambourine came across my feed today discussing the merits of live chat modules on hotel websites, titled Want More Bookings Get Chatty. They listed four very good reasons as to why a hotel should consider installing the live chat module, but failed to give any options. There are a lot of options available, it turns out. I will focus primarily on one, mainly because I enjoyed the default look of it without taking too much time to customize it.

Live chat modules, if unfamiliar with them, are a window that pops up on a website, allowing someone to chat through text with a support person on the other end. They are becoming more and more common, especially on websites that are looking to sell their services and businesses that have busy support systems (i.e. phone or cable companies.) They are unobtrusive and will disappear after a short time if they aren’t being used.

The best part about the chat modules is they are simple to use, both for the user and for the admin person. A user only needs to enter their name and start typing away. All of the chat modules I looked at can be installed on a website in a few minutes without too much effort. After installation, the admin person(s) can communicate with the guests through the website or through mobile apps on their phones. Some of the chat modules even offered desktop applications to make things even easier.

Pricing varied with the services: free to $200+ a month. The core features are always available on the lower-tiered plans. The limits placed on the tiers generally have to do with how many users the site has, and how many chat sessions can occur per month.

As mentioned previously, there are lots of options available online. Here are a few to get started with your exploration:

• Olark – 1 user with unlimited chats is $15/month.
• LiveChat – 1 user starts at $16/month.
• Tawk – Completely free. Unlimited chats, unlimited users.
• PureChat – Free for 15 chats, $15/month for 3 users and unlimited chats.

All of them offer the same basic functionality:
– web chat interface for users and admin
– customization for the look of the chat window
– chat history
– triggers for when the pop-up occurs, which pages it’s displayed on
– multipe users
– mobile apps to communicate while on the go

I will run through some of these features with PureChat.

Setup

Setup of PureChat is quite simple. You sign up for an account, get a snippet of code and then paste it into the header of your website or on individual pages. It was painless and installed within minutes.

Next was running through all the basics of the chat experience. This would include the words on top of the boxes, colours, location of it on the webpage (bottom right is the default), and what kind of animation to have the chat window first appear or disappear. When the window first opens, you have additional options, like whether you want people to enter a name or email address, or how you greet the people automatically. There are options for what happens when someone closes the window: download a transcript or have it emailed, rate the admin person, and have a button to direct them to a different part of your website. There are additional options for what happens when the admin person is unavailable. The default is to give the person the option to send a quick email.

Next you setup your users: name, email address, and their level of access. When the users first sign in, they will have to choose a password. They can also set a different profile picture.

The last step to get started is downloading their mobile app for your phone, and logging in with your credentials you used when first signing up.

Depending on how thorough you are in wanting to change all the default actions, setup can take from 5 to 20 minutes.

Chatting

The chatting experience is rather self-explanatory. There is nothing too fancy about it because it is designed for quick sessions to ask for help. There is no video conferencing, file attachments, audio communication, and so forth. Only text.

There are a few things of note for the admin users. Most of these services will allow for a canned response, a message prepared in advance that you find yourself sending out often. This will be rather handy for hotels that have to send out their cancellation policies or directions to the hotel frequently. You can setup as many canned responses as you like, and can set limits on who can use them if need be.

The other nice feature are the transcripts of the conversations. It will include the full converation for review if you want to see how your agents are responding, the agent involved, time stamps, and also an optional rating on what the customer thought of the conversation. Transcripts can be downloaded or emailed from the site, but can be automatically emailed to someone for review, which is useful at the start when usage may be the lowest.

If you happen to have a spammer messaging you, you can also ban their IP address and prevent them from messaging in the future.

Mobile Apps

Mobile apps are available for iOS and Android. They offer quite a bit of functionality for the user: access to chats, transcripts, canned responses, other team members, and scheduling.

Scheduling can happen on the site, but can be set for the users individually. That will be nice if you want a morning shift to respond during their hours, and then the evening shift takes over. Another nice touch is the ability to manually override your scheduling and turn off your availability.

For PureChat, the app is minimal and functional, exactly what you would expect to be using.

Integrations

All of these chatting modules integrate with other sites and services to offer more functionality. Depending on what else you use for your hotel, this may be useful. The information collected from the chatters can be sent to MailChimp to invite them to join your newsletter, or it can be sent to Google Analytics to track where people are visiting from, and more.

Most of these applications will also offer multilanguage support. Very useful for hotels located in major centres with international travellers.

Overall, these chat modules are easy enough to install and use that there is no reason for a hotel not to be using them. It will save guests from calling the hotel to ask questions and keep them in the booking process until the reservation is finalized. It will also offer one more amenity that your competition likely has not introduced yet. It is only a matter of time before they start including the chat interfaces on their sites, so get a jump start on them and start looking into one today.

The post Live Chat For Hotel Websites appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Starting this Friday, September 18th, I will be publishing a weekly newsletter, The Weekly Hospitality Notebook.

It will be a collection of links that I enjoyed reading over the past week, possibly some older content that is still incredibly valuable, with an emphasis on marketing and revenue management. Majority of the major hotel sites are full of news that doesn’t have much influence on daily operations, and the stuff that is of interest, is generally paid advertising articles. I will attempt to sift through all that to find the articles of worth.

In addition to the industry articles I find, you will also receive the articles I have posted on my website. Instead of receiving them daily, you will have the articles to easily review over the weekend.

You can subscribe through the link in the header, or click here. It will be free, but donations are welcome to help me unlock some additional features that will benefit readers- mainly having unlimited subscribers and removing the branding of the software.

If you have any articles you have written that you would like shared, or blogs I should consider, please email me.

The post The Weekly Hospitality Notebook appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Patrick Landman wrote a short list of ways to Improve your Hotel Review Score and Ranking on TripAdvisor which highlights a few points to consider when developing your marketing plan. He left out a few tools that can be used by hospitality professionals that will help drive your score and ranking up in significant ways.

Review Express

One of the easiest and most cost-effecient ways to improve the number of reviews you are receiving is to directly solicit the reviews from your guests. Patrick suggested WiFi landing pages and post-stay emails, which are both great ideas. TripAdvisor created Review Express to take it to the next level.

Review Express allows hotels to enter in a list of email addresses and have emails sent out to the guests with a short HTML form that allows them to review the hotel from within the email. The information gets pushed out to your TripAdvisor profile, publishing the review and increasing your numbers magically. There is very little effort for the guests since they don’t need to visit the website directly and worry about signing up for an account.

The policy I implemented at one hotel was sending out this email every week for the previous 7 day’s guests. TripAdvisor scans the email list (I exported the emails from roomMaster easily into a CSV file, then converted into Excel) to double check for duplicate entries, and then sends the email within 12 hours of you submitting the email list.

The results were rather staggering with how many reviews we actually received. The hotel nearly doubled the number of reviews being entered onto TripAdvisor and maintained its number one position for full service hotel (currently ranked number two overall to a small, remote lodge with only three cabins.) The results with TripAdvisor Review Express were great, but we wanted to take it further and switched to a different service.

Guestfolio

Guestfolio is a fully featured CRM (customer relationship management) system that is quite powerful. It acts as a mobile concierge, providing information to guests before their arrival (restaurant information, activities, room upgrades), but also handles emails to guests: confirmation emails, surveys, newsletters, and more. I will focus on the survey portion today.

Guestfolio works by integrating with your property management system to pull out the guest information directly without any exporting/importing being done by a manager or Front Desk member. It also pulls the information out immediately after a reservation is made, regardless of the source (online, phone direct, walk-in), which is how it can be incredibly useful for confirmation emails. With the survey emails, you have full control over the design of the survey. Everything from what is asked, to what kind of answers you would like back (ratings of 1-10 or check boxes), is all within your grasp.

Apart from designing the survey, you also get to specify the email being sent and when it is being sent (immediately after check-out, a few days later, etc.) After finishing the survey, guests have the option of sending their responses to TripAdvisor without much trouble. The hotels get the double benefit of having a more informed survey response, and a public boost for their TripAdvisor ranking.

The one hotel that has implemented this has been receiving the same number of TripAdvisor reviews as with the Review Express, but double the number of surveys overall with lots of feedback of the overall operation. The responses have been quite useful in giving positive feedback about our Front Desk staff members by name, and also noting minor problems directly to us without publishing a lower ranking on TripAdvisor.

Guestfolio is a paid service, so I would suggest hotels ask for a demo directly of the dashboard and the services provided before committing. It is a great investment and the hotel’s guests have been quite appreciative of the service, as well. It is one of the hidden amenities that guests love to discover that helps separate the hotel from its competition.

SurveyMonkey

If you are looking to gain the same kind of information that the Guestfolio surveys would provide you, at a more affordable price, you can create surveys using SurveyMonkey at low prices. Their basic service is free, with the caveat being you are limited to 100 total responses. Not exactly great for a guest satisfaction survey. The monthly plans that allow for full customization and unlimited responses start at under $30/month CAD. The full customization includes adding your logo to the survey, exporting the data, full support, and more.

I have created a demo survey on SurveyMonkey to give you an idea of how it looks and functions: Demo Hotel Survey.

If you have other ideas on how to improve your TripAdvisor ranking, feel free to leave a comment below.

The post Improving Your Hotel Rank on TripAdvisor appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Technology has changed the way we interact with our customers. It used to be that reviews were written by professionals and those reviews came out infrequently. Today, they come out in seconds and are written by the people who actually have the experiences. You have to be proactive in order to avoid negative situations.

Technology gives people the opportunity to vent and they will if they have a bad experience. You can be reviewed by the time someone gets up to their room; they could already put something on TripAdvisor about their experience.

One of the things that a lot of people in the hospitality industry and service industries in particular miss is that you need to think about the interactions you have with a guest because everything can change in a matter of minutes if someone puts a negative review online.

– Joel Rosen, Horwath HTL, hotel consultant

An interview done by Joel Rosen with Buuteq, which is a hotel website/marketing design company. The interview is partly about why he chose Buuteq for his latest client, Pacific Gateway Hotel at Vancouver Airport, but I think there are plenty of informative tidbits found within that will be helpful for every hotelier.

You can read the full review at Buuteq

The post Interview with Joel Rosen at Buuteq appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

[First post of a series: New Year, New Hotel]
Towards the end of the year, I sent out a thank you letter to all the guests who have stayed at the hotel and wishing them happy holidays. It sounds like a daunting challenge:

1. How do I collect all those email addresses from the property management system?
2. Where do I import the addresses to?
3. Do I send a plain email or something fancier?

Thankfully, this is not a difficult task and takes maybe an hour of your time to complete from start to finish. Below are instructions with roomMaster 2000. The process will likely be similar with other PMS software. Once you have the data file with email addresses, the steps will be the same.

Exporting Email Addresses from roomMaster

The first step is to collect the email addresses. roomMaster makes this very simple using a query service.

BACK OFFICE Menu –> Guest Profile Email Export

You have five options now.
1. File name (I keep it the default)
2. Export Type (CSV)
3. Only Certain Records (to collect email addresses from people who stayed in 2013, or other time period)
4. EasyMail (collects first and last names, company name, etc)
5. Open File (a quick view to make sure there is data in there)

Hit Extract and we go into the query window. If we had left “Only Certain Records” unchecked, we would receive all the email addresses from the very first night audit.

In the next window, we want to Insert a new query.

Scroll down until you see the Last Checkin Date and Last Checkout Date. We are going to tell it to pull all the email addresses from 01/01/2013 to 12/31/2013. We could leave it open so it collects only the stays from 01/01/2013 forward, but you are likely to have a few guests who stayed this past week mixed in. Might seem weird to receive an email stating, “Thank you for staying in 2013,” when you checked in during 2014.

Next, we use the query wizard to get the email addresses we would like to pull out. There are a lot of options here, but I am keeping it simple. Some other queries that could be useful: anyone with a company name or used a direct bill account, anyone who had used a certain rate code, everyone who lives within your state/province, and so forth. The information pulled out is only useful if the Front Desk agents have been entering it often. Something to keep in mind for this year’s and future years of operation.

Once you have your query entered, you hit Finish, save the query for future reference (Stays in 2013), and then hit Extract. Depending on how large of a database you have, this process could take only a few seconds. You should receive a pop-up window with a string of email addresses, commas and other items entered between “ ” marks. If you did, great, if not, you will have to double check the query to see what went wrong.

In the pop-up window, go under FILE and Save As to save the file to your desktop (or other location). If you choose not to have the file open up right away, the file is downloaded to the roomMaster folder (in this case, it’s E:/DATA/roomMaster). From here, you will want to email/transfer the data file to a computer for you to work on so you don’t tie up a workstation at the front desk.

MailChimp

MailChimp is a mass email service that operates online. It’s quite powerful to use and many companies with huge client bases use it on a regular basis (i.e. all those promotional emails about sales at Amazon The service is also free, up to 2,000 subscribers or 12,000 emails send per month. If you are a large hotel, you will have to choose from either a paid option or segment your guests and only send emails to a select bunch. One option, send the emails monthly, but delete the mailing list before you send out the next batch. Keeps you in the free program, while reaching out to your guests.

The email templates can also be incredibly fancy or simple. For this example, I am going to stick to simple. The next steps are going to assume you have signed up for the service and are on the main page.

Create the List

Left-hand side of the screen is the menu bar. Below Campaign is Lists. Select it, and then in the top-right of the screen, select Create List. Choose a New List for now.

Go through and fill in the fields: List Name (i.e. hotel name), From Name, From Email (where any responses will go), and so forth. At the bottom, I would suggest a Daily Summary to show how many opened the email, unsubscribed, or subscribed.

Once you have created the list, now it’s time to import the email addresses.

In the list view, at the far right of your list name is a dropdown menu (Stats then the arrow). Click the arrow, and then go to Import.

Click Upload from CSV
Find your file and start the process to import the records.

In the next screen, we get to tell MailChimp what the data is. Email address is going to be the first column, first name likely the next, and last name. The last columns will be the stay information. Click skip on the columns that aren’t going to be mentioned again (blank ones, stay information mainly.) For the others, click Edit and select the appropriate field.

Click Import and now you have a list of subscribers to communicate with.

Campaigns

Select Campaigns in the menu on the left, and then Create Campaign at the top right.

In the next screen, I select A/B split campaign. This allows you to setup two different subject lines to see which is more effective. MailChimp will send out emails with each subject line to 15–20% of the list. Whichever subject line is more effective will be the subject line for the remaining members of the list. Gives you are higher chance of success with the campaign.

Next screen, you will select the list you are going to use, name the campaign, create your subject lines,

With the Templates, you can either design your own or use one they have already designed for you. I selected the Basic design in the Predesigned section to keep it simple.

The editor is quite nifty. Whenever you hover over a section, you get a little pop-up to change it. Change will bring up an editor (or different window if you are changing an image). The editor is pretty self-explanatory, but there is one thing I would like to point out.

With merge tags, you can bring in some information about your subscribers and make it more personal. For example, I could enter:
Hello, *|FNAME|**|LNAME|*

and get

Hello, James McCullough

There are other options in there, like links to share on Facebook, the date, and even ask a quick poll.

The image editor is also quite powerful. You can crop images, resize them, add effects, and so forth. Too much for me to cover in one post. Do keep images to a minimum though.

Once you have the design done, and text entered, the next part is to send it. If you click through the Plain-Text section (for people who aren’t viewing it as HTML with the graphics and formatting), you get the last screen to confirm all the details again.

At the very bottom, there is a Send button and also a Schedule button.

Select Schedule, and you get to enter the time and date for when that email is going to be sent. Pay special attention to the time zone for sending the email. The email won’t be as effective if it’s sent in the middle of the night for your time zone.

Once the email has been sent, you can log into MailChimp and see the activity, and even a full report. The report will tell you whether people are clicking on the links found in your email (to your hotel booking page, for example), what the links were, and even the time people opened the emails. Don’t be alarmed when you only see a small percentage of people opening up the emails, either. Open percentages are generally quite small, not even 50%.

In the campaign I sent the week before Christmas, it was sent to 1,100 people. 400 of them opened the email (39%). 16 of them clicked on a link (1.5%). The best time the email was read was 1 PM. The crazy thing is that nearly 100 people were still opening the email two weeks after I sent it. An indicator of how infrequent people look at their email during the holiday season.

I hope this mini-tutorial on how to export the email addresses and create a mailing list has been of interest to you. I would love to help you out in creating your mail campaigns (MailChimp has multi-user support), brainstorming ideas on how to use your list and segment it to send emails to specific groups, or assisting in exporting the data from your PMS.

If you would like assistance with setting up your campaign, contact me.

The post New Year, New Hotel: MailChimp Campaign from roomMaster data appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

I recommend all owners at least explore the possibility of having a vacation rental video in their marketing portfolio. Please, whatever you do, don’t invest in one of those slideshows that has photos whizzing in from outer space or messages disintegrating into mist. A slideshow displaying different photos of your property does not constitute a video: even if it has music or voiceovers. A video is an actual video. One that communicates space and personality and ambiance. Ask to see your videographers portfolio before signing up. And don’t think of videos as your first two-piece suit. Rather, a compliment to that.

Matt Landau, Videos are for Winners

Matt is a smart guy. I have mentioned him previously in a post about The Value of Professional Photographs for Hotel Websites in which he tested how the quality of photographs effected overall bookings. In his latest post, he talks about the value of videos for promoting the vacation rental, but it also works for properties of all sizes.

Videos are becoming more common on hotel websites, but it is extremely important that they are done as a professioanl. It will help you control the viewing experience that potential guests have when watching the video. What I mean by this is that if a promotional video is a minute long, but starts off a bit choppy or uninteresting, people are more likely to click forward on the video, perhaps missing parts you wanted them to see.

The other reason why hotels should consider including a video on their website and cross-posting on YouTube, is because people are seeking out these videos more and more. For example, yvr2002rtw is a user on YouTube who posts only videos of hotel rooms and luxury airline services. He has over 60 videos posted, and over 600,000 views. That’s an absolutely staggering amount for videos that aren’t popular music videos or comedic events gone viral.

The problem with his videos, which becomes quickly evident after watching several in a row, is that they are a bit disjointed. There is no real story with them, more “show and tell.” This style of video is difficult to watch all the way through and leads to people skipping forward or not bothering to watch it at all.

Something else that Matt touches on his post is the value of capturing both the neighbourhood and the owners’ personality. The rooms at your property are only part of the story there. As I said in my post on Aligning with Your Guest’s Needs:

If people can recognize the indentity of the property immediately, they will buy into the services that are offered, and the ones that are not.

What better way to help people identify what your property is about than by watching a video? A quick two minute video will give a person much more information than two or three pages of text. Plus, it will be more enjoyable to watch than to read something on their computer screens.

Matt paid for two videos, one of the property, and one of the neighbourhood around his property. They are both very well done, and I encourage you to click through to watch them. The one of the neighbourhood is posted below to show you the effect a promotional video can have.¹

If I were to do a video of a property, here are the elements I would be sure to include:

• Share the experience of the property (the lobby, the restaurant, staff, pool area, lounge)
• Share some of the experiences from local activities (a neighbourhood pub, a winery, a market, coffee shop or other destination activities like a golf course, ski hill, beaches)
• Share the experiences of your more popular rooms (the sitting area, the bathtub/shower, and finally the sleeping area)

I would probably design multiple videos depending on the amenities your property offers. Perhaps a video to showcase your amenities that would draw in the corporate people (meeting rooms, a focus on the work space in the hotel rooms, business services) or a meeting planner (catering, meeting rooms, accessibility to/from hotel rooms).

To find a media company to work with, do a quick Google search, and be sure to look at several of their portfolio videos before making a final decision. It would also be useful to have a sit down meeting with them to discuss your needs and what they can provide to you. If you need assistance in tracking down a company, get in touch and I will gladly assist you.

The post The Power of Video Marketing for Hotels: Why You Need It appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

I have been doing a lot of reading and researching into web design for hotels lately, preparing for a new site design for a client. There is certainly a lot of information out there, with many companies specializing in hotel web design. These companies include customized content management systems (CMS) to allow the designer/hotel owner to easily modify the site easily to keep the information up-to-date. The only problem is they generally cost well over $4,000.
That price is reasonable if you have a large operation with steady occupancy, but what are the options for a smaller property who are looking to setup from scratch a website?

I thought I would write a short series of posts about the process, including some things that people should consider along the way. There are four different steps in order to produce a website:

1. Domain name and hosting
2. Website design (static or CMS-based)
3. Content
4. Promotion of site

The last three steps are the most involved, so I will start with the first step.

Domain Name

The domain name is the item most people are going to know without knowing the proper term for it. It is what you see in the address bar of your browser: Google.com, Apple.com, USA.gov, etc. If you have a website currently and only need to redesign it, you don’t need to be concerned about the domain name. If you are starting a new property, purchasing/registering a domain name is going to be something you want to do as soon as you decide on a name for your property.

If your property is going to operate under a flag (Best Western, Quality Inn, Ramada, etc), the brand management team will help you get a site up through the brand’s website. It is still important to setup your own website in addition to this branded page for a couple reasons. For one, you will be able to fully control the content on the site and modify it without having to wait on someone. Another reason, it will be much easier to tell people CoastCapriHotel.com instead of http://www.coasthotels.com/hotels/canada/bc/kelowna/coast_capri/overview.

A domain name is priced depending on the TLD, top level domain. That is the .com, .org, .biz part of the domain name. The cheapest ones (.com, .biz, .net, .us) will cost around $15.00 per year. Specialized ones (.ca, .nu, .bz, usually the country codes) are going to cost more, from $20.00 per year to $50.00 per year. You can register multiple domain names to protect your brand, and then have the extra ones redirect to your main website. I would suggest doing this if your hotel name is very general.

For example, Hotel Colorado can be reached at hotelcolorado.com or thehotelcolorado.com. But if you type in hotelcolorado.net, you get a property in Italy. Even worse, when you type in hotelcolorado.it (.it being the top level domain for Italy), you get a different property in Italy. Very confusing. Some of these issues are unavoidable if your property has been around a long time, or you are located in an area that shares a name with different areas in other parts of the world (Rome, NY vs Rome, Italy).

For the actual name, I would encourage you to register the main property name domain, and one that include your type of property, even if it isn’t part of your official name. The reason for this is to help search engines drive traffic to your site. People will search for “hotel colorado,” and sites with either of those terms in the domain are generally going to show up higher in the search rankings.

To register a domain, there are many services out there to use. The one service that I would not suggest is Go Daddy, as they tend to send non-stop emails about product enhancements. If you plan on registering a country-specific domain, you may have to investigate locally to find a solution as the registry companies I will suggest may not be able to handle them.

The one company I suggest over the rest is Hover. Hover is reasonably priced, does not sent out hassling emails, and it is straight-forward to register a domain. Support is also available whenever you need it, in case you need to change where your domain is going to be directed to (more on that in a bit) or need to add another top level domain. Hover handles a large number of domains, so you can easily grab a .com, .biz, .net or .ca, .uk, .co, etc.

Another option is HostGator, which is also a hosting site, so you can have your domain and website there. Hover is only a registry, so you will have to find a different hosting site. HostGator, like Hover, does not send out a lot of emails trying to have you upgrade the services there. It is straight forward with great support. Either option will be a good solution for grabbing a domain name.

Web-site Hosting

Having a domain name is a crucial step, but you won’t be able to see a website if you enter it into your web browser. You are most likely to receive a page from the registry company saying the website has not been constructed yet. In order to build a site, you are going to need to host it somewhere.

Like registry companies, there are countless hosting services available. Their prices and products are all going to vary, as are the support and the realiability of the services. For every hosting site that exists, there are probably 5 denouncing their reliability, so do be careful in which company you choose.

There are three different options to choose from:
1. Local company (an internet service provider, web design firm, your own computer)
2. International company (a large company with multiple servers in remote locations)
3. Free hosting (WordPress.com being the main one)

With the free hosting, it may suit your needs, but they are generally restrictive. Some of the free services place ads on your website (a banner at the top and/or bottom) that may annoy your visitors. A professional designer will most likely be unable to work in that environment, as well, because it will be restrictive in what actions may be done.

The local companies and the international companies will generally offer the same services. There are some differences between the two. The local companies are likely to be a little pricier than the big companies, and the customer support may be a bit delayed depending on the size of the company. If you send a request in for help on a Friday, you may have to wait until Monday for a response. At the larger companies, this is not the case. They have dedicated support teams, plus huge knowledge bases on their sites or available elsewhere on the web to help you solve your issues.

Another potential drawback is where the local servers are located. When I worked in Whitehorse, Yukon, there was only one internet and phone connection serving the territory. If something happened to that line between Whitehorse and Edmonton (2,000 kilometers), all internet services would go down in Whitehorse – cable and cellular connections. This meant that any website that hosted on a local server would be unavailable to someone outside the territory. The downtimes also ranged from 3 hours to 2 days, which could mean lost business since the competitors’ websites were hosted outside of the city and could still be reached.

If the local company is helping you with some other services (designing the website, brochures, marketing campaigns), then I would suggest using them. But do be careful, and do some research if you are in a remote area about where the websites are being stored.

For the international companies, there are many to choose from.

My preferred hosting company (and the one I use currently) is HostGatorHostGator. Apart from the low prices offered on the site ($3.95 a month), I have received nothing but great support from them. They have a large knowledge base available for me to browse through, forums for support from users, or I can contact the support and get an answer quickly. Unlike Go Daddy (which I used previously), I never receive an email from HostGator apart from a renewal notice one month prior to the end date of the term.

The main draw for me is how much control I have with the site. I have full access to the file server, have one-click install for the popular CMS options (including WordPress), can setup as many email accounts as I like, and includes some free Google Adword coupons. There is a free site builder available, as well, but if you choose to have a web designer assist you, giving them access to the site is simple without giving them the master account information.

Need Assistance?

If you would like a hands-off approach to registering a domain, getting setup with a hosting service, and getting your first hotel website launched, Four Sides Hospitality Consulting can assist you with all steps by:

• helping you pick and register a domain name
• helping you find a web host or host the website for you
• help create a basic hotel website and have it linked to a CRS
• help you create a Google Business Profile
• and more

The post Here Are The First Steps In Creating A Hotel Website appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.