Our Inns

You might think you’re doing a pretty good job with your guests but then you start receiving unexpected comments either in the guest book or, more likely, on various websites that have been set up to collect complaints.

Almost always you’ll find that what’s written in the guestbook is broadly good. They liked the place, liked the area, and so on. However, whilst people seem very reluctant to go public with bad comments in the guestbook, they will do just that on a variety of websites which may take you by surprise.

What’s very common is that you’ll get a dreadful comment about a particular room and the next comment will say that the same room was excellent. The thing that has changed in this case is often outside the room and indeed outside your property: they had a duff holiday for some reason and they take it out on you. So, for example, we had a group staying recently for a wedding that didn’t go particularly well so we took the hit for that. Yet the very next night someone whose car had caught fire and who had a really awful day thought the room was fantastic. In a similar vein in the peak season you’ll often get people staying who really wanted to be staying somewhere else so obviously they’ll rate you pretty low on your location and indeed on any point where you fall down on in comparison to the place they’d wanted to be in.

Somewhat odd these days is the assumption on the part of a number of French guests is that everyone in the place will be French. Obviously the majority of French holiday accommodation is French owned but one would have thought that they’d come across non-French owned places before. However, even more peculiar were a couple of criticisms to the effect that in the breakfast room nobody else was speaking French. This was because everyone else that day was German, Spanish or Danish. But the gold star for the most bizarre comment in this area was from a German couple who complained that we didn’t speak French to them. What’s really odd about this one is that we didn’t speak French to them because they couldn’t speak French!

Then there’s the surreal eg “there was nobody at all in the hotel and nobody at reception when we arrived or checked out”. That was on a night when we were completely full. What’s even more puzzling is how they thought they received the room key and paid their bill without seeing anyone. Obviously I had been wearing my Cloak of Invisibility that I keep for special occasions!

Finally, what you may also get from time to time are comments which are out and out lies. The surreal one above clearly falls into that category and you’ll get many others that are seemingly politically motivated. For example, some incredibly negative comments we’ve had are from French guests who basically hate the English (although we’re not English they assume that we are). Essentially their underlying criticism is that you’re not French. Ironically, the worst of these recently was from a couple from Alsace who were of German descent and actually less French than we are as our family is originally from France!

That’s not to say that all guest comments are crazy because we have taken up a considerable number of suggestions from guests over the years. However, what you need to bear in mind that people will more often criticise than praise and that these days they tend to criticise in public.

What you will find though is that the majority of the websites that accept these critical comments won’t remove them even when you can prove that they are wrong or are from “guests” that you didn’t even have. Some will let you respond to the comments but many won’t. The only thing you can do to counteract these is to respond when the facility is available and perhaps to create an online version of your guest book to give people a more realistic view of what your place is like.

Popularity: 78% [?]

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.

Popularity: 53% [?]

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.

Popularity: 41% [?]