Hospitality Marketing

Being a part and parcel of the advertising industry, I’ve come across my fair share of marketing programs. There is for instance something called relationship marketing. And there is of course the ever popular search engine marketing. But the first time I heard about a hospitality marketing program, I was a little stunned. After all, what could there be to hospitality marketing/ It seemed to me like some clever hotelier had coined a term and was using it to pitch the same old services that they offer anyways. But I was wrong. Hospitality marketing is a distinct (and one might add, difficult) aspect of marketing. And I was about to discover the details for myself. As the name suggests, hospitality marketing is all about marketing the hospitality services provided by industries like the hotels, motels, resorts and spas. But isn’t it what they are supposed to do anyways? Not really. You see the concept of hospitality marketing is relatively new.

For long now hotels, motels, resorts and spas were content if they had high occupancy rates. For them, every customer who was a paying customer was good enough. And this is how they have been surviving for aeons now. But the rise of the modern day economy brought with it a rise in the number of conventions, seminars and meetings. Which is when hospitality marketing kicked in to define the kind of audiences hotels, motels, resorts and spas wanted to attract. Some of these places went the whole hog and declared themselves to be business venues and began tapping into distinct kinds of customer profiles. In fact, by adopting a kind of hospitality marketing, they managed to re-invent themselves into becoming the preferred choice for the growing breed of business travelers. But some of the others, more notably the bigger hotel and resort chains, made better, more intuitive use of hospitality marketing. The best example could be the kind of services some of these groups offered by capitalizing on the downtimes that affect any industry. Just like any other industry, the hotel and resort industry too faces its lean periods. By effectively utilizing hospitality marketing, they were able to convert these lean periods into periods of high occupancy, thanks to the way in which they reinvented themselves. A noticeable shift of the events that occur at these places will reveal the subtle yet effective influence of hospitality marketing. And this is a branch of marketing that most hoteliers have grown to trust and adopt. So you'll view your next convention in a different light...

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