In the hospitality industry, tools are needed for supplies and other necessities. Even in smaller enterprises, tools are made available for staff to use in performing their work duties. In large hotels, there are a much wider range of tools specifically designed for addressing the requirements of hotel workers.
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Social Listening Tools
On social media in today’s world, everyone has a voice. So what are people saying about your brand on social media? Wouldn’t it be great to know when your audience mentions your hotel brand? Good news is, you can listen to those conversations with the help of social media listening tools. These tools allow you to monitor conversations through flagging certain keywords, hashtags, or brand mentions online.
What you do with these mentions are totally up to you. Ideally, if someone mentions your brand in a positive way (for example, through an Instagram post, commending your property on a fun stay), you could express your gratitude through a reply. Similarly, if someone had a negative experience and wrote a less than stellar review on their blog and tweeted the post to their followers, you can reach out via the comments or on social to offer to fix the issue. Social media listening tools will help you identify these conversations happening in the sea of content online. Some of our favorites tools are Mention, Hootsuite, and Tweetreach.
Analytical Tools
One tool in your marketing toolbox is your hotel website. To figure out how well this marketing tool is performing for you and your property, you can use Google Analytics. This free tool from our friends at Google empowers you with the digital analytics tools you need in order to figure out all the touchpoints your customers receives during their customer journey. Knowing how customers interact with your website can tell a qualitative story of how customers come and go into your ecosystem. If you’re creating content on your hotel website (for example, with a blog), Google Analytics also tells you how much traffic your posts are generating.
Google Analytics is an especially powerful tool when it comes to direct bookings. It tells you from which sites your visitors found your site, how long they stayed on your website, and even where they are located geographically. This is especially useful information to know if you’re using paid advertising. By knowing where your biggest audience is, you’ll know which geographic location you want to target your ads.
And since we’re on the topic of Google, a bonus tool to use (that is also free!) is Google Alerts. Set an alert for the frequency you’d like to be notified and on a keyword that you want (your hotel’s name is a great first step) and start getting notifications of when you’re mentioned on the web.
Survey Tools
Surveys are a great way to get honest and quick customer feedback and conduct market research. While you may not think of a survey tool as a hotel marketing tool, it can inform you as to what people want to see more of from your brand. What kind of hotel promotions do your customers want to see more of? What do they love about staying at your property? Figuring out these nuggets of information can inform what you show off more often in your hotel marketing.
Now that we’ve convinced you to give survey tools a test drive (hopefully!), we have some suggestions on tools to try. Companies such as Typeform, Google Forms, or Survey Monkey are great tools to test out and see which ones you like the best.
Task Management Tools
Managing your upcoming marketing campaigns and work load is an important aspect of running any business. Good thing there are task management tools can make this a whole easier. Being able to organize, track, and prioritize your day to day, for yourself and your team, can be made easier with a few these tools. It’s especially handy when you’re planning out a new marketing campaign (for example, a seasonal hotel email marketing campaign or a user-generated content campaign).You can track each project milestone, add comments, attach important files, and see what other work is still left to be done in the project.
There’s a whole host of hotel marketing tools out there to help you stay on task and focused when it comes to marketing your property. And with so little time and so many marketing projects to take on, these tools are here to help you be smarter about how you market your hotel and best of all, save time in the process. Trello, Asana, and Flow are just a few of the options out there to help organize your working day.
Channel Management Tools
It is relatively easy to manage your hotel’s own website, but it becomes increasingly difficult as the number of distribution channels start to grow. When hoteliers decide to use online booking platforms or metasearch engines to gain more visibility, bookings are then made and modified simultaneously on multiple websites – making it nearly impossible to track them all. This is when channel managers come in handy.
Channel managers oversee all distribution channels, continuously updating the number of available rooms on across all of them. That means you do not risk overbooking your property or misinforming your guests about the availability of certain rooms. Not only is it significantly safer, as you do not have to fear misleading your customers, but most importantly, it is much more efficient, as you can focus on other tasks, instead of keeping an eye on every website you cooperate with.
Some of the best channel management tools include Cloudbeds, Hostaway, and Cubilis, but there are many more solutions you can choose from.
Online Travel Aggregators
Love them or hate them, today it is nearly impossible to run a successful hotel business without OTAs. Websites dedicated purely to bookings have taken over a large chunk of the industry. There are various types of OTAs dealing with different aspects of hotel and lodging, however, most of them are focused on hotels and flights, with car rentals and activity packages taking the next spots.
We spoke about distribution channels and how to manage them and OTAs are one of the main reasons why the channel managers were created in the first place! The idea is brilliant – showing all of the offers from each city in one, easily accessible place. It is much easier for customers, as they do not have to search the entire Internet for the right offer. It is also great for hoteliers, as before, only hoteliers with budgets for good online advertising were easily found online. Now, with a more level playing field, each hotel gets a chance.
Of course, the existence of such powerful companies that monopolize the market comes with some issues. The first of them is the commission charged by OTAs. Fees are tearing down many smaller hoteliers, who have to hand on up to 30% of what could have been their revenue to the booking platforms. Then there are also rate parity clauses which don’t allow hotels to show different pricing on any of their channels. This means that they can’t give discounts on their own websites.
There are a few ways hotels can fight back. One is making sure that the local governments make the mandate of rate parity illegal. Secondly, hotels can use online travel agents that do not charge a commission, such as Bidroom.com. Bidroom has found a way to work successfully without the need of imposing any fees on hoteliers and it also fights against the unfair practices of other OTAs.
Email Tracking Tools
While on the subject of increased productivity, it is impossible to dismiss email tracking tools. As a hotelier, you send hundreds of emails each week. Some of them are more urgent, some can wait, but they are all important in their own way. That’s why email tracking tools are so useful. On many occasions, you want to be sure your message was delivered and not sent to spam. You want to know whether it has been opened or left untouched. Tracking tools let you better control your conversations and be more aware of what is happening in your relations with recipients.
They are also useful for marketing purposes, as you can see how many clicks you got and how many of your messages were even taken into consideration. Gmail has its own dedicated tracking tool called the MailTracker and Chrome also offers its own tracking engine. Yesware is another great option that works with both Gmail and Outlook.
Cloudbeds
Cloudbeds is a hotel management software designed to simplify hotel operations management via its integrated management suite. That suite includes reservation management, room assignment, accounting, and housekeeping tools. As an added bonus, the software works seamlessly with top travel sites such as TripAdvisor and Expedia. And it’s been rated among the top choices in its class.
Consider these tools and see how you can automate your operations and increase your hotel’s efficiency. Your guests (and your employees!) will thank you.
Smart Hotel Software
Smart Hotel Software contains a set of tools suitable for central reservations, guest relationship management, housekeeping, and more. It includes features like guest folios, check-in and check-out confirmations, advance deposit alerts, integrated POS, and information sharing capabilities across multiple platforms.
Tracktik
Tracktik is an intuitive piece of software that allows hoteliers to manage perhaps the single most important resource in any business: the workforce. It lets your management keep track of your teams and makes sure the business stays efficient. Not to mention that it streamlines operations via cloud management services, mobile-based solutions (both Android and iOS) and desktop platforms. It even offers powerful finance-management modules.
Conclusion
If you are in the business of hospitality industry, today’s customers are looking for greater service. They want access to all the tools they need in order to make their stay in your place comfortable. And the hotel industry is in a way inclined in providing these amenities in order to stand out among other competitors in the market. One of the tools in hospitality that are gaining prominence today has got to be iPad POS systems. Their introduction has created so much impact among businesses because of its convenience, usefulness, and efficiency.