Hotel content comes in many forms. They could be visual or text-heavy depending on how and where they are getting published. They may not necessarily be focused on a hotel’s unique selling point and could be just about anything - from city guides to food recommendations. It is not surprising, however, to see hotels build their marketing content around their Unique Selling Point. After all, a hotel’s unique selling point helps a hotel business identify its position among its competitors and plan for a fitting marketing strategy.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
While hotel marketing teams usually focus on marketing strategies that get more “Heads into Beds”, Portier believes that that should not be the ultimate goal. Hotel content targeting guests bring in ancillary revenue too! The question is how do we maximise content and give our marketing team the viewership they deserve?
It is important to point out that hotels generally already have great content. The Langham Hotel group, for example, creates these visually appealing videos and uploads them on their Youtube page.
Photo retrieved from The Langham Hotels and Resorts Youtube Page
These high-quality videos have been beautifully created and truly deserve better viewership than the meagre view counts they are currently seeing. No doubt, Food and Beverages content fare better through mediums like pictures or videos but, as mentioned above, hotel content is not limited to multimedia formats. Text-based content can be very useful too! Resort World Sentosa publishes these exciting How-To guides on their website for their guests to read.
Photo retrieved from Resort World Sentosa's website
Educational Content = Good Content
These articles are comprehensive and give really good tips to guests who are looking to make the most out of their time at Resort World Sentosa. In addition, they also serve as educational articles to remind guests of safety distancing guidelines in that specific country. Through this, hotels can cultivate a sense of security in their guests. While there are no metrics to gauge how many people have actually read these articles, the quality of these educational articles is enough to warrant the fact that they ought to be given more emphasis on their outreach.
How Can Portier Phones Deliver Content-Driven Viewership Rates?
The general platform created and supported by Portier Technologies was built on the basis of delivering engaging content to guests, in order to empower hoteliers to establish a heightened guest experience. Arguably, a hotel is more than just a bed in a location - it is a reflection of service, a temporary home for travellers, a property packed with experiences, services and otherwise. Nevertheless, discovering what’s beyond the physical property can be a challenge for most guests.
While some hotels offer a large variety of ancillary services, others focus on the bare essentials, but still have more to be discovered than just the bed. From a guest’s perspective, both can be confusing and thus, limited in promoting an experiential stay. At a hotel that has an array of on and off-site experiences, for example, guests can get lost in the sheer amount of offerings and miss out on those services that would have been most suitable. In this particular context, we have received several positive TripAdvisor reviews that highlighted the fact that without our service at hand, guests would have missed some of the most memorable parts of their hotels stay.
The above is made possible because the way in which the Portier Platform delivers content to Portier Phones is optimised and focuses on the relevancy of hotel services first. The hypothesis is that an already captive audience - guests that made the decision to stay at a specific hotel - need to be engaged in a significantly different way from those that are still deciding as to where to stay. That’s where our greatest strength lies.
Today, on average, we see something in the region of 50 minutes per day spent on our devices by each guest. This reinforces our belief that delivering content via Portier Phones is more effective and impactful than printed materials, tablet-based content, web-based content and app-based content. Simply put, we get around 80 times more content consumption than any other technology platform in the market.
While it’s fairly simple to describe the mechanism of delivering content to devices, the optimisation of such might be a bit more complex. In other words, how can we measure whether this content delivers revenue increase?
Call-to-Action Buttons
Good content marketing engages guests but great content marketing drives bookings. One crucial component which is often missing from hotel content is the Call-to-Action button (CTAB). Using the RWS example from above, at the end of the article, there is no specific instruction or button to guide a reader to make a booking. A simple "Book Now" can make a world of difference when it comes to landing a sales conversion.
A CTAB guides readers using persuasive copywriting and facilitates a frictionless booking process. CTABs are powerful tools because they capitalise on the instant gratification that guests crave when they feel engaged with a really good piece of content. The way in which the Portier Platform drives readership of hotel services inevitably leads to increased guest interest, and the provision of frictionless calling options at the article level leads to a boost in guest satisfaction and a truly frictionless experience.
How Can Content Impact Revenue?
This is where call-to-action buttons and data insights come into play. In its most traditional form, hotels deliver content via printed materials. There is a comprehensive guest compendium by the bedside cabinet, promotional flyers on the desk and maybe even a personal welcome note highlighting selected services. While that might be a good look, its impact cannot be measured, nor can any calls-to-action be placed with urgency.
Digital platforms have a significant advantage over the above, in that any touch can be accounted for and any piece of content can deliver usage data. That’s what happens on Portier Phones - content is created, measured and optimised. For instance, if hoteliers want to talk about their spa services, a lead piece of content will be a guest’s entry point to those services. On the Portier Platform, readership data is sent back to hoteliers and items such as the call-to-action buttons can be optimised for better conversion.
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Currently, and focused on Portier Technologies’ global average performance, 32% of guests that read such a piece of content click at least one of the call-to-action buttons within 5 minutes of entering that specific article. In other words, if 100 hotel guests read a spa article and the call-to-action button at the bottom of the article says “BOOK NOW”, 32 guests will hit that button within 5 minutes of starting to read, giving hoteliers 32 opportunities to sell that particular ancillary service.
As is visible from the above, our content platform delivers deep data insights which support the development of better converting algorithms over time. We look at readership and action flows and then help each of our hotel partners optimise content in terms of positioning, placement and actioning. As a result, content has become a powerful TRevPAR booster that can guide a captive audience of guests to the most fitting ancillary services and ultimately deliver TRevPAR increases to the hotels we work with. Today, these increases stand at around 25% as a global average, and we continue to push the boundaries of digital content.
The Push for TRevPAR Strategies
Given the amount of time spent to create content, the fact that there seems to be a lack of effort in boosting viewership is unfathomable. Eventually, hotel marketing teams tend to stop producing these entirely and shift their focus on meta-search and getting heads into beds. As the travel industry is preparing for a cautious return, Portier strongly believes that hotel revenue recovery strategies can be a two-pronged approach - RevPAR and TRevPAR.
As per STR’s definition, TRevPAR is the total revenue a hotel generates from a combination of its rooms as well as from all of its ancillary services and miscellaneous income streams, divided by the number of total available room nights. Whilst RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) is arguably the KPI most industry professionals pay attention to, TRevPAR is likely to see its moment in the sun during the hotel sector’s rebuilding period post-pandemic.
The reason for this theory simply is a continued expectation of seeing fewer travellers (than pre-pandemic) make journeys over the next 6-12 months in particular. In other words, hotels can assume that their occupancy rates will remain below 2019 levels, as highlighted by the latest global occupancy rate of 46% (courtesy of Hotel Management), representing two-thirds of pre-pandemic global occupancy performance.
Content & TRevPAR Booster
With that being said, some of the revenue focus of hotels will shift towards ancillary services, ultimately increasing the income per guest, rather than only putting all resources in a brutal online fight for more heads in beds. One of the rather unconventional ways in which hoteliers will be able to deliver increased guest spending is through content, and undoubtedly, the Portier Platform is a content distribution like no other.
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