Improve Website Performance by Alberghi Marketing

We stayed at The Devonshire Arms on the Bolton Abbey estate in the Yorkshire Dales near Harrogate recently. This has to be one of the finest luxury hotels in Yorkshire. What a wonderful hotel and what a fabulous location. Never having been to the Dales before, I was staggered by the raw beauty of the surrounding countryside, all part of the estate owned by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

The hotel itself sits in glorious splendour along the valley from the abbey. The walks from the hotel must be sensational. The abbey, although a victim of Henry VIII’s purge, still holds services and is well worth a visit.

There are two restaurants, The Burlington with 4 AA stars and the Devonshire Brasserie where we chose to dine. This is an excellent, lively and very colourful brasserie, with an exhilarating atmosphere. Great fun and the food was superb. It’s obviously and great favourite of Yorkshire folk, many choosing to travel quite a distance.

If you’re travelling to Yorkshire and you’re looking for somewhere stay that will enable you to appreciate ‘God’s own county’ to the full, I would recommend The Devonshire Arms without reservation.

We popped down the valley, along the winding wooded road, past the abbey to The Devonshire Fell Hotel. Sister to the Devonshire Arms, this is superb boutique hotel with a contemporary restaurant and twelve colourful bedrooms. The website is spot-on when it says, ‘…its richly colourful décor and bold contemporary art make it a great place to stay or to enjoy a relaxed lunch or dinner. The views from its position overlooking the valley and the picturesque village of Burnsall are simply stunning which, together with the informal atmosphere and delicious food, makes it the perfect bolthole.’

If you’re an owner of a small, independent, luxury hotel and you’re concerned about the possible adverse effects of the ‘credit crunch’, your top priority must be the performance of your website. In fact, you will never know how much revenue your hotel is capable of generating until your website is operating to the maximum.

Is your website properly search engine optimised? Are you monitoring the performance of your website? Do you know if traffic to it is going up or going down? Are you updating it regularly with special breaks rather than ‘offers’? (Breaks can be added value, offers mean discount) Do you have a Late Availability page that you can edit when you need? How much of your current traffic is coming via the search engines, how much is coming via referral sites and how much is coming direct? How much do you rely on hotel portal websites and at what cost?

Then, of course, if your website is producing loads of enquiries, who is in charge of converting them into bookings? Do they realise they are supposed to be selling when they answer the phone or responding to email enquiries?

You or someone in your hotel must know the answers so you can react swiftly to keep the site performing well. There is so much you can be doing to stimulate business via your own website enabling you, perhaps, to cut expenditure elsewhere. No other medium is so cost effective and no other medium is capable of generating anywhere near the revenue your website is capable of generating.

You need a high performance website in an economic downturn.

www.alberghimarketing.co.uk

This lovely country house hotel near Chippenham in Wiltshire is a delight. Privately owned and run, Beechfield House is only about two hours from London near the M4 (Junction 17) and is so convenient for Bath, Bradford on Avon, Devizes and the Cotswolds. The famous historic village of Lacock, well known for its use as a film location and for its opera, is close by.

It’s also great families visiting as one of the best family hotels near Longleat Safari Park and other local attractions in Wiltshire. The hotel is particularly appealing to some because there are rooms that can easily accommodate families of five.

The food is fabulous, the restaurant being particularly popular with local ‘foodies’. The hotel also has its own beauty treatment salon and outdoor heated swimming pool, and there’s an impressive arboretum of rare trees in the beautiful grounds complementing the lovely gardens.

Most importantly, the hotel is managed by the owners with great passion and dedication. It’s the finer details that make all the difference. Just take a look at some of the guest comments.

www.beechfieldhouse.co.uk

Hotel TerraVina, the luxury boutique hotel near Southampton and the New Forest in Hampshire has been voted one of 65 best new places to stay in the world by Conde Nast Traveller in their HOT LIST 2008.

“…..Hotel TerraVina is on the edge of the picturesque New Forest, a 15 minute drive from Southampton airport, but it would attract attention even were it poised on the outskirts of an industrial conurbation…. …………. As you would expect there is a sizeable cellar, but more than that, Gerard, a Master Sommelier and Master of Wine, has put two Enomatic machines behind the granite-topped bar to keep opened wines fresh and will happily provide tutored wine tastings on request. The restaurant – a fusion of pale-toffee leather and chrome, exposed brick and oak—is airy, and modern and designed to evoke relaxed Californian style…”

The Hotel TerraVina is owned and managed by co-founders of Hotel du Vin, Gerard and Nina Basset.

www.hotelterravina.co.uk

This has to be one of the best country house hotels in Dorset. It’s certainly a little treasure of a Jacobean manor house that’s apparently been in the same family, the Prideaux-Brunes, for over four hundred years and has been run as a country house hotel by the family for over thirty years.

The chef is a member of the family and anyone who dines at Plumber Manor is regarded as a friend of the family. As a result, the food is superb and the service second to none. I think it’s one of the best restaurants in Dorset but it’s actually one of Dorset’s best kept secrets and I get the feeling the locals like to keep it that way! You still have to book well in advance, especially at the weekends.

Richard Prideaux Brune is a very genial host and makes everyone feel extremely welcome. If you’re looking for a hotel in the heart of Dorset in beautiful countryside, in the middle of Hardy country and an easy drive to Lulworth, and the Jurassic Coast, then look no further than Plumber Manor country house hotel

Creating a calendar of good in-house events is one of the best ways of raising the profile of your hotel locally and of building a rewarding local database. If you’ve never done this before, it might take a while but you’ll get there in the end.

One of the most popular of such events is ‘Cooking with Chef’. I know of hotels who admit guests into their kitchens to allow chef to create a two course lunch. They teach both how to prepare the ingredients and then how to cook dishes. After a thoroughly enjoyable morning, they all sit down to lunch and a glass of wine. If you are a little embarrassed by your kitchen, then a demonstration elsewhere can be equally successful.

I once arrived at a hotel mid-morning to hear a commotion in the kitchen with lots of raised voices and hoots of laughter. The GM then told me it was a typical ‘Cooking with Chef’ event.

I know of small luxury hotels that now have thriving events calendars and an ever increasing band of followers. One such has a dining club with strictly limited membership that members pay to join. There’s now a long waiting list.

One of my favourite events was a 16 course taster menu with a specially selected ‘taster’ glass of wine to complement each course. It was even part sponsored by a wine merchant! As you might imagine, a fair proportion of the diners stayed overnight.

These are my tips for organizing a successful events calendar:

1. Ensure there is someone competent to organize your events. If things go wrong, word will quickly spread and you’ll never get the programme off the ground. It will also adversely affect your hotel’s reputation locally
2. Once you’ve decided on an event, post the details on your website. Devote a whole page to it and put a link to this page on every other page. Write the event details with great care so it sounds wonderful and of real benefit/enjoyment to participants
3. Create an overnight package around each event, i.e. offer a special rate for those attending the event, thereby creating a special break to feature in your Special Breaks list.
4. Try promoting your event(s) with a simple lineage advert in the ‘What’s On’ page of your local newspaper, featuring prominently your website address and your phone number. It’s very cheap and one interested person is likely to bring a friend or two.
5. Invite feedback and add all the favourable comment to your website Guest Book and add a link to your Guest Book from every Event page
6. Always consider sponsorship. Your wine merchant might be interested in sponsoring your wine events and they probably have someone who can talk passionately and amusingly about the wines being tasted.
7. Treat your event guests as special. They are often instrumental in increasing food and beverage revenue and conference revenue at other times. For instance, they could return for dinner with friends, they could suggest you as a conference or meetings venue to their work colleagues, they could recommend you as a wedding venue to relatives or friends.
8. Remember your event guests by name if they bring friends to dinner, for instance. Guests love to be flattered by recognition, especially in front of those they’ve invited along.
9. Communicate with your growing events database as often as you like. Send them a regular Events Calendar update. If you’re doing it properly, they’ll keep coming back for other events
10. Plan well ahead. Successful events can make a useful difference to revenue in times of need. 

 Alberghi Marketing

Make the Most of Your Website Opportunity

If your website is working properly, it will be generating email enquiries. Your site should be capturing the email addresses of all enquirers, assuming they’ve ticked the ‘opt-in’ box, so they can receive details of special offers, events, news, etc from you. The result is an emailing list that is like gold dust! After all, these are the addresses of people who have asked you to keep in touch! In my experience, a good, well written email promotion to your database will always generate sales / bookings.

However, the content needs to be worth reading and of benefit to the reader.

Don’t be put off because you don’t have a smart email template with beautiful photographs and colourful headlines. There’s nothing wrong with a promotion in plain text. Those experienced in direct marketing will often use plain text in a serif font, e.g. Times Roman (more legible which is why newspapers use it).

Email promotion content published as text can work better than HTML because often readers print out the email to be read and stored as hard copy, or because text is regarded as more personal. You can certainly write in a more personal vein. I recently read of an email promotion test where the text version of a newsletter achieved over 320% higher response rate than the identical promotion delivered as HTML.

Talking of testing, email promotions provide a wonderful opportunity to test what appeals to your database and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid of sending out an email promotion perhaps twice a month, testing something different each time. You need to monitor the response, of course, and note what sort of promotion generates the greatest response or amount of business. You will then be in a better position to create more successful emailings. Keep testing!

Your website has the potential to be your most powerful sales medium and email marketing is a well-proven method of generating extra sales.

Alberghi Marketing 

How to Mix a Bloody Mary – Plumber Style

Many would say that Richard Prideaux-Brune, whose family has owned Plumber Manor Country House in Dorset since it was built in the early 1600s, is the antithesis of the typical cocktails maestro but he’s in a master class of his own. Watch him mix a Bloody Mary and you’ll quickly realise you’re in the presence of a master mixer! Richard knows his cocktails and mixes them to perfection.

Here are the ingredients of his popular Bloody Mary. Needless to say, nothing is ever measured; it’s all done from experience.

• Masses of Worcester sauce
• Fresh lemon juice
• Sea salt
• Celery salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Dash or two of Tabasco sauce
• Ice
• A generous slug of Vodka
• Schweppes tomato juice
• A slice of lemon
• Another twist of black pepper
• A good slug of dry Sherry to top it off
• Shake

ENJOY!

Well Written Websites Perform Better

It always amazes me the number of hotel websites that are created by website developers who have no sales experience, do not optimize for the search engines the sites they create or who are not briefed in detail by experienced direct marketers. The consequence is often that the sites are merely representative rather than being potent selling tools.

If someone is searching in Google, for instance, for ‘country house hotels in the Cotswolds’, your hotel’s website needs to be near the top. The copy plays an important role in achieving this. (Remember, most people search for hotels by destination, not by hotel name).

However, the written content of your website also needs to persuade people to respond in some way, either to make an enquiry or to make a booking. It’s not enough to generate loads of traffic to the site if the content is not sufficiently appealing. The content needs to outperform that of your competitors, especially if their websites are also near the top of Google.

Whatever you do, don’t let anyone try to convince you that you need a specialist website expert to write the content of your site. If your developers have never written direct response copy, either for advertisements or direct mail, which is written specifically to generate responses or orders, then they’re not qualified to write the copy for your website. It can be rather like asking a shipbuilder to write the promotional material for a new cruise liner he just helped build!

The internet is direct marketing writ large and your website has the potential to be the most potent sales medium imaginable, converting browsers into enquirers at a higher rate than any other medium.

The written content of your website, therefore, needs to be very convincing, highlighting all the selling points of your hotel, and needs to persuade browsers to make an enquiry at every opportunity.

www.alberghimarketing.co.uk

I wrote this article for the December issue of Hotel Business magazine:

Hotel Receptionists Hold the Key to a Successful Website – Ten Tips

The websites of small, luxury hotels, if successful, should be generating by far the largest percentage of enquiries. Imagine the difference to the bottom line of your hotel if the reception team treated every enquiry like a hot opportunity and did their utmost to convert it. 10% increase in revenue, 20%, 30%, who knows?

No matter how successful your website is or, for that matter, how much effort and money you are putting into other forms of marketing, if the resulting enquiries are lost by inexperienced or untrained reception staff or staff that do not realize they are supposed to sell the benefits of the hotel in order to secure a booking, then all that effort and money is wasted.

I’m amazed that hotels are still recruiting people simply to occupy the reception desk and to answer the telephone. Receptionists should be capable of converting telephone enquiries into bookings; they should not be there simply to answer callers’ questions, quote a rate and then leave it to them to think about it. Also, these are frequently the people who are expected to respond to email enquiries when their command of written English is lamentably poor. What’s worse about email responses is that all too frequently, nobody in authority checks them.

I dread to think how many times I have sat in Reception and heard the girls say, ‘No we’re full on that date. Thank you. Goodbye’.

I have even witnessed receptionists welcoming walk-in prospects and, when asked what the price of a room would be for the night, quote without hesitation the lowest rate possible, a ‘distress’ rate. When asked why, the answer was ‘because I’m allowed to and it’s more likely they’ll book.’ I’m sure that’s why the hotel’s average room rate was so low!

I frequently ask reception staff if they think their hotel is expensive and well over 50% respond, without hesitation, ‘Yes’. In their worlds, of course, the price of a night in a luxury hotel might well seem expensive but in the luxury hotel market, the rates relate directly to the experience at that level. How are these receptionists supposed to be convincing to callers who ask for a cheaper rate?’

This might sound a bit of a rant and I suppose it is. So, for what it’s worth, these are my top ten tips for improving the performance of receptionists in small, luxury hotels where a specialist Reservations dept. or specialist training are not options:

1. When recruiting receptionists, look for those with a vivacious personality. You need enthusiasm and conviction at the end of the phone.
2. Ensure they understand they are there to convert enquiries, especially phone enquiries (more people still prefer to enquire/book by phone), as well as to be ‘on Reception’.
3. Ensure all receptionists are always familiar with the hotel’s primary selling points, especially those that give you an edge over your primary competitors. They need to be quoting these to all enquirers.
4. Make mystery phone calls and send mystery email enquiries to your hotel. Then log what was said on the phone and file the email responses for review later.
5. Ensure all receptionists understand why your hotel is not expensive.
6. Every so often, treat them to dinner and a night in the hotel so they understand what makes your hotel special. They will then be able to convey the character of the hotel far more effectively over the phone or in an email.
7. Prepare for them an email response template that features the primary selling points of the hotel. The mystery email exercise will ensure they’re doing it properly.
8. Hold monthly receptionist meetings (more frequently, if necessary) to:
   1. Review the mystery phone calls and the emails and discuss how they could be improved.
   2. Review the average room rate being achieved and discuss how it might be improved.
   3. Ask them to list the primary selling points of the hotel at every meeting
   4. Review the guest welcome process. A guest arriving at your hotel for the first time might well be impressed by the building and the grounds but his first impression of the ‘guest experience’ is the receptionist. You know what they say, ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression.’
   5. Make receptionists feel really involved and take pride in what they’re achieving. They can make a huge difference to the bottom line.
   6. Review how they can clinch the booking without reducing the rate
9. Create performance incentives. I suggest these are based on average room rates achieved by the team and an individual incentive for the most revenue generated by ‘upselling’, e.g. bottles of Champagne, flowers, beauty treatments, etc
10. Finally, and perhaps controversially, pay them more! Good receptionists can do more for you than mediocre sales people (I’ll be talking about them another time!) who can be paid twice as much.

You need to convert those website enquiries before your competitors get the chance!

www.alberghimarketing.co.uk