Families put announcements of their forthcoming weddings in newspapers. The announcements seldom include addresses.
How then do you reach the families? You have to start from the other end. Who are the families likely to contact when they’re arranging the wedding? Car hire companies, morning dress hire companies, bridal dress makers, etc. It is the second best solution, but if you can’t reach the families yourself, you need to be recommended by as many other companies as possible.
And, of course, so do they. So, the solution is to form a Bridal Association in your town or local area. Get agreement that all the members will recommend each other. Then to hold a Bridal Fair each year – maybe twice a year – at the hotel. There should be a piece of promotional material for all the companies
HOSPITALITY SALES AND PROMOTION
involved and these leaflets should be displayed and handed out in each member organization.
What is the process for forming a Bridal Association?
1 Select the best company in each segment of interest to a family with a wedding to arrange. The following list isn’t exhaustive, but you could include:
– Bridal dresses – Morning dress hire – Florist
– Calligrapher – Printer – Car hire – Photographer – Wedding cakes – Bands
– Entertainment – Travel agent
2 Approach the best company in each sector in your town to join you in forming the Association. Promise them exclusiv-ity if necessary.
3 The advantage to them is the greater exposure their products are going to have to the families. The more companies, the cheaper the cost of promotion to each of them.
4 Agree a date for a Bridal Fair. You will provide the room free, the tabling for stands, the reception staff, the designer for the promotional piece and the PR. The other members of the Association will pay for the advertising and the printing of the promotional pieces; posters, banners, tent cards, local paper advertising, etc.
5 Advertise the Bridal Fair as widely as you can. Use PR as well.
6 Admission to the Bridal Fair is free.
7 When the day arrives, you need to get the names of the vis-itors and their addresses and telephone numbers. Plus the probable date of the wedding, if decided. Set up a
Registration Desk for this purpose. Get the visitors to sign BUYERS AND CUSTOMERS
in and monitor that all the details have been written down.
8 Provide the list to all the members after the Fair. Then follow up on the phone to get the families to call at the hotel again and sell it to them accordingly.
Dealing with wedding enquiries
It is often a tremendously time consuming task. If the demand justifies a full time executive, the ideal candidate would be the sort of person to whom the bride and her mother would turn, as they would turn to the grandmother in the family.
Remember that the two key objectives of the family when organizing the wedding are to impress the guests (perhaps par-ticularly the ‘other side’) and not to exceed the budget. You need to reassure them on both points. The family may not have organized anything so large before. If that is the case, they may change their minds from time to time. Reassure them that this doesn’t present a problem to the hotel. The family will, obvi-ously, want to see the hotel, and entertaining them to lunch or dinner is a good way to win a better chance of getting the busi-ness. Be careful, though, that you don’t become a free meal out for every family for miles around!
Summary
Effective selling involves you in understanding the customer;
in being able to put yourself in their shoes and to understand how they think and what they want. It is simply inefficient to approach people at a time that suits you, and in order to get them to buy whatever you decide will be the product. So learn as much as you can about the markets and then tailor your products to fit in with their various needs. There is a great deal to understand and you never stop learning: I wish I knew more about the ground rules of Relationship Marketing in the Chinese communities!
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Case study
This case study illustrates:
● The sheer variety of opportunities there are for filling hotels.
● The varied kinds of approach there can be to getting business.
● The necessity of spotting opportunities faster than the competition.
If you were looking for some extra business in 2000, you might have considered the effects of the civil war in Sierra Leone. Transport aircraft were flown in to evacuate the expatriates from the war zones. They were taken to their countries of origin, but via the UK. When they landed in Britain, they would have to make onward arrangements to get to their homes. So would the Britons themselves. A lot of them would need hotels. Where would they stay?
I first came across this market at Grand Metropolitan Hotels when the Syrians blew up the pipelines of the Iraq Petroleum Company in the 1950s. All the expat employ-ees of Iraq Petroleum were thrown out of the country and finished up at Heathrow Airport one freezing November night. It was one of the best pieces of off-peak business I got in those early days. Then when the Dutch were thrown out of Indonesia, the Indonesians wouldn’t let the Dutch airline land in the country. So British Airways were asked to fly them out to Amsterdam. They came via London and I got another first class booking.
Of course, you have to consider the moral implica-tions: you are benefiting from calamities. For example, we looked after some of the survivors of the sinking of the liner Andrea Doria. These people were lucky to be alive; a lot of the passengers they’d sailed with had perished.
Should you reject the opportunities for the same reasons we all hate vultures?
The fact is, however, that somebody has to look after
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survivors. Somebody has to care for them and help them with their immediate problems: heat the food for the babies, settle the nerves of the very old, help them find relatives and onward flights, and provide everything from toothbrushes to warm coats. When the Turks invaded Cyprus in the 1970s, the holidaymakers had to be flown home. We got 5,000 bednights in July and August by setting up a hotel booking service at the RAF station where they were flown in. Embassies all over London wrote letters of thanks to us for stepping into the breach in the emergency.
Somebody has to help – and, in helping, you benefit from increased turnover, first class public relations and the warm regard of the organizations you look after.
From these experiences came the concept of the Disaster Squad – nominated executives whose task it was to be on the lookout for opportunities of this kind 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Turks invaded on a Friday.
We got permission to set up the hotel booking service at lunchtime on Saturday. You have to be able to go into action any day and at any time. We were also allowed to run a booking service at Paddington Station and by 2 o’clock on Sunday morning we were getting tired. So I rang a couple of members of the Sales Department and they came down and relieved us – at 2 in the morning and without a word of complaint. (One of them eventually became Sales Director for Intercontinental.)
Some Disaster Squad opportunities are fairly easy to predict. If there’s a national rail strike, then a lot of people stay in hotels because they wouldn’t be at their office desks the next day otherwise. If there are floods, people may move into hotels until the floods subside. If there’s a fire at another hotel, somebody has to look after the guests who are arriving tomorrow when their bedrooms have gone up in smoke. It is a fact that you seldom find anybody else from competitor hotels on the scene.
I once read a report in the Sunday Times Business Section which told of the government’s concern at the
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decline of the village shop. The Minister had the problem in hand, we were assured. I rang a senior civil servant in the relevant government department. Did they really have the slightest idea what to do? No, the Minister had reacted to a question from the press and then left the problem in the civil servant’s hands. I eventually had the Department set up a series of training courses around the country for village shop owners to help them compete with the area supermarkets. Alas, it didn’t save a large number of the village shops, but it was the right solution and a hotel company made a great deal of additional profit.
Other opportunities are presented by, e.g. juries who can’t make up their minds and have to be locked away in a hotel overnight, so that they can continue their discus-sions the next day; or a headline which reads ‘US East Coast Airports closed because of blizzards’. Alright, you haven’t got a hotel in America. But if the airports are closed, how are the flights to America from your local airport going to land? They’re going to be delayed until the airports open again – maybe overnight. Then the pas-sengers will need hotels. If it’s a short delay, the airline may use local hotels. If it’s 24 hours they may well prefer to have the passengers in town centres where they can amuse themselves better. That’s where you might come in.
Delayed flights are a godsend in dead periods.
The opportunities are all around you. Some disaffected group is going to lobby the government or the local authority. Then they’re going to have to have a meeting beforehand to decide their approach. Where will that be held? Will they need overnight accommodation? What about the marches and the lobbying? Or government inquiries into major accident: who is putting up the expert witnesses, the lawyers, the claimants and the press?
The hotel industry exists to look after people who need overnight accommodation. Their reasons for needing it may stem from normal eventualities – holidays, commer-cial activity or socommer-cial arrangements – or they might come
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about from unexpected and exceptional circumstances.
Your job – as with any market – is to understand the com-plexities and to act before your competitors.