The Hotel Marketing Podcast

Stayful.com is a company that’s been making waves of late. They’ve been getting some excellent press coverage and the business model is extremely hotel-friendly. So I hopped across to check it out for myself. It didn’t take me very long to see why this is a great resource for hoteliers who want to sell off any unsold inventory for arrivals within the next 30 days. The best part – All reservations are final and the hotel gets paid within 48 hours.

I spoke with Roberta Seiler – VP of Sales and Partner Development, and she delves further into how hoteliers can maximize this resource to their benefit.

So if you are an independent boutique hotel, I highly recommend you consider Stayful.com.

This episode is about Business Intelligence. Whether you’re actively aware of it or not, your Property Management System is constantly generating a ton of data on a daily basis. And this data, if sliced and diced the right way, can present you with some excellent opportunities to boost revenue. But the challenge is to find a way to effectively tabulate and measure this data.

Recently, I was made aware of a tool called Hotel IQ and the company behind it is Intelligent Hospitality. I reached out to them and they were gracious enough to give me an in-depth demo of what their system could do. I’ll be honest – I was seriously impressed! The ease and speed at which this system could work its way through enormous amounts of data was staggering. And it was one of the easiest platforms to operate. The best part – It is surprisingly affordable.

In this podcast, I speak with Apo Demirtas – The CEO and Founder of Intelligent Hospitality and we discuss the Decision Support tool as well as speak about opportunities that hoteliers can take advantage of. As Apo points out in the podcast, they’re not a technology company – They are hoteliers and business strategists who understand business intelligence.

Great conversation – check it out!

Hoteliers, lets talk about the biggest weapon in your marketing arsenal – your Website! How do you get it right the first time?

We talk about the 3 key factors that make a website successful – Aesthetics, functionality and search engine visibility. Does your site use Flash? You’d be surprised by what you hear.

There’s also useful information on how to select the right designers/developers to work with... something that is always a bit of a gray area for hoteliers.

Resources: Links to add your website to local search results:
Google Local Business Listings
Yahoo Local (only US listings as of now)
Bing (only US listings as of now)

Click to listen to it or you can subscribe to it via iTunes or your podcast aggregator.

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-d9ee7bc7bcec1e7c49b1298397210a2d}

Are your property photographs assets or liabilities?

In this podcast, we discuss the impact that photography has on your bottom line. There’s a story of a hotel that’s lost over a million dollars over the past 3 years. Something they could have fixed by spending a couple of thousand dollars... But the problem is that they don’t know it.

We also talk about setting up budgets, deciding what to shoot, finding the right photographer, a bit of legal stuff to safeguard your rear-end and getting the most bang out of your images.

I have also provided a sample “Shot List” as a pdf for download.

Click to listen to it or you can subscribe to it via iTunes or your podcast aggregator.