Our Inns

One of the most useful things to do to attract people to a holiday property is to write about what’s in the local area in terms of places to go and things to do. In addition to the Internet version of this many people also place a pile of brochures on the local attractions in the property itself.

However, this falls down in three main areas. Firstly, on most websites you’ll get at best something to the effect that “there are many chateaux in the area” when they should be naming each one that’s there and saying a little about it. Why? Well, naming the chateaux means that people can find your site by searching for “accommodation near chateau versailles” if you’ve named it. Name everything that you can from beaches to zoos as you’ve no idea what future guests will be interested in.

Secondly, there’s the problem of updating the information. The majority of sites seem to operate on the basis that the local attractions never change. If it’s an historic chateau that may be largely true but it’s not completely true as there are often pageants associated with chateaux and they do change from year to year. More modern attractions change much more frequently with possibly the extreme case being the Disney parks where they seem to be constantly announcing new rides. Any photos you use should be updated on a regular basis and usually you shouldn’t be using a photo of something that’s more than 3 or 4 years old if you can avoid it.

Thirdly, there’s the business of organising the information which is often largely neglected. Guests do take apart guides left in a property and reshuffling things is a pain but it’s something that needs to be done because the idea behind producing a guide in the first place is both to make your guests’ stay an enjoyable one but also to give them ideas to either stay longer or come back to see things they missed. How you organise it depends to some extent on your place and what’s around in terms of attractions. Some places do themed guides so they’ll group all chateaux together, all beaches together and so on. However, that ignores the time required to travel from your place to the various attractions: clearly someone staying overnight isn’t going to be interested in travelling several hours to some chateau. Therefore, it’s probably more useful to organise the information by distance from your place so, for example, everything within 20 minutes (ie just around you), up to an hour (effectively a morning/afternoon excursion) and finally day-trip things (up to a couple of hours drive). What we do is follow the themed approach for the website and the distance approach for the guide in the property.

What’s important though is that your guide doesn’t gradually become more and more out of date. Whilst you could use Marco Polo’s book to explore China, it wouldn’t be an overlly practical guide.

How do you avoid the archaic guide syndrome? On the Internet site the ideal plan is to re-examine all the sources of information that you used to create the guide in the first place and apply updates as required. If you originally worked from actual guide books then you’ll need to purchase the new editions of these (usually they come out every 2 or 3 years).

The “pile of brochures” is a different matter. For a start, don’t make it a pile, organise it in a folder. Our own guide is organised into a section covering the surrounding area (basically everything within 20 minutes of our place), another covering the local region (within an hours drive) and finally one covering day-trips (up to around two hours drive from us). Thus if they’re only staying a day they will find something to do in the surrounding area, a couple of days lets them explore the region and longer lets them do day-trips. This works quite well and is fairly easy to get back into order after guests have pulled it apart. Although you may need to keep ones up to a year old to enable you to collect the latest version for regular festivals and the like, you should weed out anything more than a year old.

This is very much a winter season task although you’ll generally need to have taken the photos for your update during the summer. Incidently, forget about using camera phones for taking these photos: at the very least you need a good compact camera. See our camera guide for more on this.

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Let’s face it, the typical vacation rental or B&B just isn’t going to have the marketing budget of Renaissance Hotels and therefore you’re likely to have to tone down your proposal to the advertising executive looking after your account. Of course, chances are, you are the advertising executive and it’s your own place that you’re marketing.

Now, you might think that this means you’ll not be able to produce something quite so classy as the Renaissance campaign and, on the whole, that’s probably true. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t produce something similarly effective and memorable for your own place, albeit on a much smaller scale than the Renaissance campaign.

This image is one composed with a great deal of care with each element of it representing some aspect of Renaissance Hotels in general or of a specific Renaissance Hotel. Thus, we have the two hotel staff on the left representing the high level of service on offer in the hotels and carrying appropriately exotic looking dishes for the guest. Then there’s the individual attention from the pool guy offering the towel on the right. The pool is from their hotel at Seaworld and from the Hamburg hotel we have the arched building in the background. Right in the middle, of course, we have the most important aspect of the composition which is the representative hotel guest. The overall message is that you can expect elegant surroundings with personal service when you stay at a Renaissance hotel.

Obviously all that is specific to their hotel chain and clearly a lot of work went into creating the composition (this is only one of a number of images which they used in the campaign). Whilst you’re probably not going to produce something quite so sophisticated you can follow their principle of reflecting your message throughout your own marketing. They’ve emphasized elegance and service, what are you going to emphasize?

For example, say you have a luxurious chateau then make sure that in every image you use there’s a hint of that luxury. Perhaps by something as simple as a Louis XIV chair in the photo of the pool, or the Mercedes parked in front of the entrance. The idea is that you follow through on your core message of “a hint of luxury”. Or perhaps, your message is that yours is the place for outdoor persuits. In that case, each image should contain something hinting at one of those. The racing bike resting against the wall, the hikers heading off down the path, etc.

Doing this isn’t always as difficult as it might first appear. However, the key thing is to be clear on what message you want to get across. Once that’s clear in your mind you’ll be able to make the small changes in the images that you take which are required to get a consistent message across to potential guests.

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Surely not, it can’t be the new year already can it?

Ah, well, whilst many owners don’t begin their marketing for the new year until they’re actually into the new year, in fact it’s now that you should be starting to gear up with your marketing. Sure, you’ll not be able to go full pelt at it just yet as you’re still busy dealing with the summer guests but it’s time to make a start.

The first task is to assemble a list of all those sites that you’re currently advertising on. If you’ve not been keeping track of your listings, check things like your bank or paypal account for payments made for advertising and searching for yourself in google.com, live.com and yahoo.com.

Once the list is complete, go through it and add in the cost per year for each entry and, if you can, the number of bookings provided in the previous year and how long each one was for. When you’ve done that, you can examine it in more detail over a week or so and decide which subscriptions you’ll be renewing. For each listing, look at:

1. Is is free? If it is, you may as well keep it regardless of results.
2. If you’re paying for it, did it provide more bookings than it cost? If it’s a close call and the bookings are good quality, it’s probably best to renew anyway as you may be getting bookings from them which you’re unable to trace back to them.
3. If it’s providing a sensible number of bookings, are they good quality ones? Longer term bookings are better than shorter term ones and by dropping a site providing a stream of overnight bookings you’ll make space for more longer term bookings. For example, we dropped one site that was providing a lot of overnight bookings this year and ended up substantially increasing our occupancy in the form of more longer term bookings.
4. If it didn’t provide you with any bookings then consider not renewing it or downgrading to a cheaper entry if that’s an option. Remember that you may not be able to trace all bookings back to the original listing that people found you on.
5. Consider upgrading listings on sites that have brought you bookings eg we prioritise the search results on premium listings thus those with premium listings get more bookings from us and many sites operate similar prioritisation policies for listings (typically called bronze, silver and gold or something similar).

You might think that if a site hasn’t provided you with a booking and you’re paying for it then you shouldn’t renew the listing. However, remember that it’s quite common for people to look you up on a site and then e-mail or phone directly ie you wouldn’t know for sure where the booking is coming from (and asking them rarely produces the correct answer even if they think they know where they found you); similarly even direct click-throughs to your own site don’t always appear in the stats. What you don’t want to do is to cancel a listing only to find that it was really providing you with substantial numbers of bookings. Finally, remember that it’s the first place that they found you which is important but, usually, it’s the last place that they will quote to you.

Next you need to consider new advertising which is a whole different ballgame so we’ll look at that separately next.

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