This course will cover the following topics from a management perspective:

• The role of the revenue director has evolved. He/she can be a valuable ally when you’re looking to increase your ROI, lower costs and when you’re dealing with owners/ corporate head office
• Understanding the RM perspective
• Using data to gain insights, what questions should you ask the RM? What insights should they be delivering?
• How to communicate with your revenue staff
• Leveraging the RM function across the business
• Focus on Forecasting

More details coming soon! This is our starting list:

• Leisure Sales -the key operators and decision-drivers
• Corporate Sales – the Corporate RFP season – how to plan, prepare and navigate for success
• MICE Sales – the key operators and decision drivers
• Understanding how contracting works in the current (complex) environment- floating, dynamic and static pricing, Operators models of commission, markup and margin
• Meetings and functions – are your sales team an efficient, customer-friendly team? What should be happening be win more of the group and meetings business?

• The role of hotel salespeople has changed so much that it is barely recognisable, are you still using salespeople for the same tasks as you have been for years?
• Do you have the right skill sets in your sales team for the digital age?
• What type of salespeople do you need?  (Your business objectives determines this)
• Can your younger salespeople pick up the phone when they need to?
• Assessing optimal structure and sales team size
• How to motivate and retain your salespeople

Value-based pricing requires determining what your customers truly value ie the highest price they’re open to pay for your product/features.  Learn to:

• Understand the value proposition and rate strategy of your key competitors
• Develop a competitive advantage based on the analysis findings and repositioning the hotel by offering better value for money for consumers.
• A template spreadsheet is provided to aid in this strategy

• Embracing “Test and Learn Strategy”
• Website Analytics – what information can you get from website data, what can you do with that information i.e. Visitor Analytics, Source of visitors, keywords, conversion, usability, testing. What metrics should you be tracking?  Understand these reports and what information you can get from them to improve performance and how to start implementing a data performance model
• Email Analytics – best practices, what to measure, benchmarking
• Analytics & Attribution modelling – where is the ROI really coming from?
• What questions should you be asking your Digital team, whether they are insourced or outsourced
• Developing the perfect Marketing dashboard for your property/ properties
• In different scenarios, what tactics/strategies should we consider?

• Pricing and value/competitor analysis
• Developing your SWOT Analysis
• Defining your marketing strategy and tactical plan
• Components of the Marketing Plan (including digital components – only from a planning perspective)
• Tools – CRM, benchmarking, data
• Templates – marketing plan

Pre-requisite courses:

• Assessing your Product Value and Pricing
• Understanding the Accommodation Industry (includes SWOT/PEST)
• Introduction to Hotel Digital Marketing

• What is marketing and it’s role in a digital world
• From 4P’s to 7C’s to 4C’s to the modern marketing mix
• Importance of brand and branding
• Importance of spending on quality Photography and Video
• Print & Outdoor marketing
• Local Marketing
• Modern Email marketing
• CRM
• Loyalty
• Marketing integration across disciplines
• Content, content, content and importance of unified messages

GDPR, PSD2 & Privacy

• Should you outsource or insource Marketing services – benefits and drawbacks of both
• Case Studies
• How to evaluate vendors
• Negotiating the contract
• Onboard and manage the vendor relationship
• How to scale resources
• Combining in-house and outsourced services
• Getting the mix right
• Collaboration between revenue, sales, marketing, Public relations & digital marketing staff

Why single out the China and Muslim segments? Both are massive markets, growing fast and involve bigger differences that we don’t see across any other markets.

• Fast Facts on China outbound travellers
• Channels they use
• How to attract them in the purchase journey?
• Reviews and Ratings

Why single out the China and Muslim segments? Both are massive markets, growing fast and involve bigger differences that we don’t see across any other markets.

• Marketing and catering for Muslim Travellers
• Who are they?
• What are they looking for?
• Personas/ demographics
• Halal
• Travel needs

Website

• Your website from your customers perspective
• The Google 5 stages of travel explained (lesson from Course 8)
• Assess your hotel website – SEO and content, tools to assess speed, mobile friendliness etc
• Selecting a vendor to build your website
• Best practices – UX, Placement of Book button, layout basics
• Best Practices – Imagery and rich media and Domain structure
• Translated/localised content – when do you need it
• SEO strategy
• Content Marketing Plan – what is it
• Comparing your website to your Competitor set
• Analytics available, what the GM should track
• Emerging trends e.g. payment types

Booking path

• How to Assess the booking path – content, room types, images, descriptions, rates & offers
• Your competition – checking your Comp Set and competitive analysis
• Conversion rate

• Structure: on-property, centralised, clustered
• Staffing levels – how many do you need in sales, marketing, revenue & distribution?
• Digital marketing function – insourced or outsourced
• Revenue management: role, on-property or outsourced
• Training and education costs and more

The Roles of your sales, marketing and revenue staff need to change

• Managing and guiding your staff in the digital age
• Some strategies to help you start, and then continually improve
• Auditing and Rightsizing your hotels Sales and Marketing organization to be future (or even current ready)
• Involving your sales team and giving them confidence in their role to play
• Getting your team to work together. Do strategy sessions. Tips on how to approach this. (This is essentially about how to change the mix of roles in Sales, Mktg and Revenue)

Implementing best practice in commercial management, developing a team with collective goals

• Incentives and common goals
• Evolve your morning meeting – Is your morning team meeting something everyone dreads? Learn some great strategies for not only making the meeting interesting but making it productive too.  Who should be in the meeting?
• Increasing direct bookings involves everyone in your commercial team i.e. revenue, sales, reservations, events, distribution & marketing.

More specifically, the skills needed and how each person contributes to the running of a successful marketing campaign:

• The role of Sales, Marketing & Revenue in developing and executing a successful campaign

• The value of PR & reputation
• PR writing – writing a press release, writing for social media, visual storytelling
• Building media relationships
• Managing Reviews
• Igniting PR Champions
• Using Influencer marketing
• Engaging media during a crisis
• How to select and engage a PR Agency

Online reviews drive business because consumers trust each other more than they trust hotel marketing messages. Positive reviews, the response from management, up to date photos and descriptions on your website are the primary factors that contribute to improving your reviews and rating score.

• • Types of customer feedback -online and offline

  • What components drive review ratings and rankings

  • Best practice for responding to reviews & customer feedback

  • The benefits of reviews aggregators

  • Adding review feeds to your website

  • How and why consumers rate/review your property

  • Reviews and their impact on conversion & price

  • Managing complaints and bad reviews

  • Tools available to monitor social and reviews