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THE 6 INFINITY STEPS TO HOTEL BUSINESS RECOVERY !

Writer's picture: yusofhamzahyusofhamzah

Updated: Aug 27, 2020



It has been almost one year since we heard about “high season” for hotels around the world. Seasonal events and festivals eg; city wide events, holy week, golden week, summer holidays have passed with no positive effect on hotel business.


The Airshow in Singapore, Food Hotel Asia, ATM in Dubai, ITB Berlin, The Olympics, have been either reduced tremendously, postponed or in many cases cancelled. Upcoming events F1 in Singapore, ITB Asia later this year and other events are also not seeing any promising signs. Wedding Events, Company Annual Celebrations, Incentive Travels and product launches have been not been spared. One thing for sure, nothing is permanent but change.


We at Infinity Hospitality Asia strongly believe that the end of bad times is near.

In contrary to some headlines news on a slow recovery, we are confident that the travel industry is so “frustrated” that it will make a strong come back soon within 3 to 6 months ahead. To emerge as a Game Changing Hospitality Winner, here are 6 Infinity Steps to a Great Business Recovery and it has to start now!


01) Listen & Broadcast

Create a culture of “putting your ears on the ground” and listen to everything about the Industry globally, regionally and locally.

The mainstream news is not sufficient.

  • Identify and authenticate credible and reliable sources online and offline.

  • Get the latest developments on airlines, hotels, travel providers and government agencies.

Assign a team for each sector of development.

This way each team will be very focused on any indication and/or signs of slightest business opportunities.

  • Answers to WHEN, WHERE, WHAT and WHY will trigger your team to work out the HOW if such opportunities present itself.

  • Share all these findings in regular daily meetings and cascade them down to all team members.

  • Discuss and chart down steps to action by all different stakeholders in your organization and business partners. These action plans must be made dynamic and live as they may change very quickly.


Remember to keep these action plan simple and measurable. You will be surprised that some of these action plans turn out to be unique and will stimulate new businesses.



02) Micro Managing Your Database

It is time to micromanage your database if you have not started doing so.

Your database is your “gold mine” !

Most hotels have good size of database however not many optimize the business potential it can produce. The first step is to ensure not only you have a good size database but a top-quality database. Be sure you have cleaned your database. This is not a single one-time process but a system to ensure your database is clean, complete and valid at all time. Some of the things to look out for and eliminate are duplicate records, incomplete crucial information eg; e-contact and names, etc..


There are a number of good systems that can automate most of these processes. We strongly suggest you subscribe to one that you and your team are most comfortable with.

These systems will also enable you to slice and dice your database to work your marketing plan in the most appropriate manner.


For example

  • Segregate your F&B contacts from the rooms, your banquet contacts from your restaurants, your press from everything else, etc..

  • Rooms database needs to be broken down further by business segments and channel source. Birthdays, gender, travel pattern, travel purpose, etc.. are some of the strategic information you need to effectively launch a successful marketing campaign.


Once you have a clean and well segregated data warehouse, it is very important to have a system in place to grow your database.

Some of the areas where you can grow your database from are: Sales & Marketing, Reservations, Front Desk, Restaurants, Banquet & Events, Purchasing, Corporate Office, Human Resources, Marketing Communications, and Management Offices.


It is recommended to have weekly targets for each of these database reservoirs. Your database quality and quantity will multiply if you have a string of hotels in your organization.

The principle of the system remains the same with one or multiple hotels.


A strong database management will significantly improve all your marketing campaigns. If you have not started to measure the effectiveness of your previous marketing campaign, you must start now.


Depending on the purpose of your marketing campaign ie; brand awareness, monetizing and conversion etc.., create different yardstick eg; brand website visits, online business conversion, engagement, etc.. We suggest that the key driver for this project will be between MarCom and Revenue Management.



03) Turn Loyalty To Advocates


How often have you been engaging your guests in the past six months especially when you don’t see them in your hotel?

While managing database, you will find interesting information about your loyal customers or at least guests who came back at least once after their first. The keyword to enhance your repeat business is engagement. One size does not fit all in this case. The manner in which we engage a customer who came twice is very different from one who returned every month.


We suggest that repeat guests are segregated by the number of visits within 12 months.

Your engagement contents and marketing campaigns need to be crafted differently with each cluster. Bottom-line we need to engage all of them in a timely manner. Some are already your advocates and promoting your hotel to their friends and business contacts.


It is important for hotels to acknowledge these efforts from them. A simple gesture of goodwill and recognize their preference is a good start.

With many Loyalty Management System (LMS) you and your team can automate the process and develop a simple reward and recognition program. The LMS system must interface or integrate with your Property Management System (PMS) so that the process of identifying each repeat guest segment can be done seamlessly. The obvious objectives of reward and recognition program is to enhance loyalty, increase business referrals and improve guest’s satisfaction.


The regular engagement with repeat guests along with the program will elevate loyalty and turn them to become your advocates.

Many hotels aim to achieve high percentage of repeat business. We need to go beyond that i.e. turn your repeat guests into loyal advocates. This way your repeat business growth speed will significantly improve. It is more likely for us to stay in a hotel recommended by our friend who is already a regular guest there. This fact is more powerful than reviews on social media and third-party websites. People trust reviews than what the hotels brag about themselves BUT it is also true that people trust their friends more than strangers writing reviews.


The toughest stage of growing repeat business is to create every reason why a first-time guest should come back again during their next visit to stay with you.

Once a guest stays twice with a hotel, it is more likely that they will come back for you. Besides turning Loyal Guests to Advocates, the LMS system can also facilitate to grow your repeat business by coming back after their first visit. Again, engagement is key in this process. Anticipating and putting in place a system right from the booking experience, pre-arrival activities and creating excitement, a wow welcoming and a comfortable stay is crucial for these guests to have a wonderful and lasting experience.


We all have our favourite hotels in different cities we visited and may be for different reasons. How often would you change to stay in another hotel if you have been staying at a particular hotel at least twice or more? So, the important thing to do here is to create a living campaign attracting guests to come back the second time.


Once again, for every implementation it is very important that you measure results.

How are they comparing to your objectives? Usually you may need to tweak some of the processes and creative campaigns in most cases to improve further.



04) Business Intelligence

Most Hotels focus their business intelligence on comparing business results. This is important as it is the ultimate responsibility and goal for the management and owners.


In order to achieve success in the business results comparison, hotels need to focus on intelligence that influence future business results.

Now is the time to work on a clean sheet of business intelligence before we continue collecting data from sources we used to and about players we used to. Begin with checking the following,

  • What have changed in your hotel in terms of size, service offerings, mission and vision?

  • How many new hotels or new room inventory are there in your vicinity, and/or market this year? Or,

  • How much have this been reduced?

Using some or all of the above answers, reassess your primary and secondary comp sets. Comp sets and benchmarking are very important decisions as they will influence your marketing and business strategies. Rate positioning and market mix will also be affected by your comp set choice. In some case your hotel may emerge top in RGI and yet not necessarily your potential.


The reverse can be true as well. Some of the key considerations when choosing comp sets are vicinity, size, class, rates, management and global network, physical attributes.

Once you and your team agreed on the comp sets, do the traditional SWOT analysis in the modern way. You can do this by subscribing to Guests Reviews aggregators system.


There are a couple of popular ones and they are very good affordable. The reviews aggregator system will be able to have your primary and secondary comp sets under your radar at all times. You can fish out information using keywords most commented by guests.


For example, one of the most essential guests need is a high speed uninterrupted wi-fi connection. Through the review aggregator system, you can tell how you fair comparing with your competitors for this important service and take appropriate action/s.


You can do the same for other most commented keywords eg; cleanliness, friendliness, location, etc.. For each of these keywords, you can drill down further to see what exactly guests like or dislike them about. Many hotels including yours may have subscribe to the system however very few are making full use of the functionality and develop a roadmap towards business intelligence and marketing plan. Although the stakeholders may seem to be mostly operational team members, we strongly suggest the Sales & Marketing team to drive this function.


Researchers have found consistently that the top decisions for choosing a hotel are Location, Price and Guest Reviews among others.

Therefore, set goals for each of top crucial keywords you think most influence guest decision to book a particular hotel. There is no limit on the number of keywords you like to focus on.

A weekly review with key stakeholders will determine if your action implementation is indeed working. You may want to make the measure of these objectives KPIs for your Department Heads.


Business Intelligence must focus on Revenue Management functions that drives strategic decisions in the future

Statistics like business trends comparison, business curves of various segments, year on year, month on month, week on week are some of the basic information you can churn out to determine how good your business outlook is.


Good & Bad situations must be justified by deep diving into other data so that your team are all aware of the situation. As a guide some of the areas where consistent statistical reporting and reviews need to be provided are:


a) Rolling 12 months business on books with in depth analysis of first 3 months

b) Business Segments performance

c) Business Sources and Distribution Channels

d) MICE Contents and Risk analysis

e) BAR rate positioning and rate parity analysis

f) Product rate positioning and performance

g) Primary & Secondary Comp sets Comparison


In today’s context, Revenue Management is not only looking at top line goals but also bottom-line profitability. Therefore, it is crucial for hotels to analyse cost of sales for each strategy to be deployed.


The Revenue Manager is to recommend strategies and rate positioning but the Team need to be convinced by the decision and support them. Daily briefing and monthly meeting is required to communicate this as it involves business decisions ie; rate positioning, distribution, promotional activities, tactical demand generators, etc..


05) Budgeting & Forecasting

We can safely and sadly say that the original budget for 2020 is far from achievable for hotels globally. A new budget is inevitable only this time it is a budget based on the new normal, at least for now.

There are new operating costs, new savings, new initiatives, etc.. Therefore, the method may not be traditional ie; referring to last year’s information and insert multiplier to derive numbers. This budget needs to be done with zero based and work into every detail. You may need to add new lines to your Expenses and/or Revenue. It will be taking slightly more time but its all worthwhile.


One way to continue making important investment yet ensuring it does not have a negative impact to the bottom-line is to negotiate various safe deals eg; barter, and/or profit sharing with no upfront costs. This way, you will only pay if the item you invested produce results. This way also ensures that your investments pay by itself. It is important to invest in systems mentioned above and providers are more willing to negotiate deals and business model now than ever before.


Churning out the Revenue budget will be the forefront of the total budget and Sales & Marketing activities and Revenue Management Strategies are the forefront of the Revenue Budget.

This sequence is important so that to ensure expenses are kept to the appropriate ratio to revenue forecast.


The crucial equation is to get the Revenue Forecast as accurate as possible. Based on points 1 to 4 processes and strategies, your revenue budget will be a reasonable one barring unprecedented events. We suggest a 2-day intensive “management team retreat” at your competitor hotel to accomplish Budget 2021.




06) The Future Sales

Traditionally Hotel Sales person visits offices, entertaining clients in hotel or even elsewhere, attending tradeshows, conduct tele-sales, etc.. to build rapport and generate sales.


Covid 19 & lock-downs around the world changes everything.

The situation forced us to engage clients differently through online zoom or google meet, etc.. We believe that, the future of sales will change forever and will have very little traditional transactions. We call this "contactless sales". Not only the environment forced us to change but the fact is, more and more business transactions have changed way before COVID-19. People have less or no time for sales person visits. Buildings imposed visitor restrictions for security reasons. They spend more time on online gadgets than ever before. So what is the future sales?


Engagement must continue only this time is different. The Sales Team can develop an internal and external network using social media and messaging system. This is where all the current traditional engagement is migrating to. Platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram are some of the platforms you may like to start implementing your client’s engagement strategies on.


The good thing is- they are free at least for now!

Create groupings for each salesperson for the cluster of accounts they are responsible for. The Director of Sales will oversee all clusters and have the flexibility to swap around accounts and replace a new salesperson when one leaves.


Most people are very busy the whole day from 9am to 6pm or even longer. They do not want to be “disturbed” by any salesperson - conversely they expect you to be reachable 24/7!

Don't get me wrong - we still need to engage them.

We know that most people look at their favourite social media at least twice a day ie; once before they reach office on the way to work and the other on the way home. And many others engage using social media multiple times everyday especially on weekends. So, if you want to catch them socially that’s where and when to can get their attention.


Another thing that will change is sales entertainment. The objective of entertainment is to keep your clients happy and loyal. In today’s context, they have no time to come to your hotel and see you for lunch or seeing you to bring lunch at their premises (although the latter is a better option for them). So, how do you entertain them?


We say that to achieve our objectives to keep clients happy and loyal is to provide them with some memorable experience. Include their family and loved ones. Let them stay over the weekend when you can afford some rooms and include at least a meal in your restaurant with compliments from the hotel. They do not need you to be around! A courtesy social media message to tell them you are always there to assist with anything will suffice. This is a perfect way for them to experience first hand your product and services and better still you might just earn a fantastic review on Tripadvisor!


There will be some situations especially where events are concerned, that the salesperson need to meet clients at the hotel and conduct site inspections and discuss details of requirements as well as price negotiation. The groundwork will have to be done on social media.

Infinity Hospitality Asia is keeping a realistic approach on the hotel business and we are all hands-on deck to weather this and help businesses to an Infinity Business Growth!


Would you add anything to 6 CRITICAL STEPS TO INFINITY BUSINESS RECOVERY?

Please add your comments below …

 

BY YUSOF HAMZAH | SENIOR COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR


Need some professional advice for your hotel?

Contact us at : (+65) 65674295



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Infinity Hospitality Asia Pte Ltd

100G Pasir Panjang Road

#01-01 Interlocal Centre

SIngapore 118523

Telephone

(+65) 6567 4295

Email

UEN202006933H

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