Are Multi-Location Hotels Worth the Investment?

Budgets, marketing and operational juggling, and brand consistency are among the important strategies for multi-location hotels trying to stay ahead of the competition.

FREMONT, CA: The travel business is one of the fastest-growing sectors as a result of the rising demand for foreign travel brought on by emerging economies. The expanding wealth of the population is expected to keep the market strong. However, as markets grow, so does competition.

significant tips for multi-location hotels looking to stay ahead of the competition are listed below:

Increasing impact of Online Travel Companies (OTAs): Hotels and OTAs coexisted together for many years. However, the cost to hotels of using OTAs to book stays has increased dramatically in recent years, severely hurting their profits.

In addition to their effect on profit margins, OTAs restrict hotels' influence on a visitor's choice. Over 280 hotel reviews are posted on websites every minute, which receives 460 million monthly visits. Hotels may find it difficult to manage their OTA profiles. Simply monitoring these networks won't be sufficient. Increasing direct bookings has to be the primary priority for any hotel marketing.

Brand uniformity: Maintaining brand consistency can be challenging, particularly in a setting with multiple locations. However, a successful hotel marketing plan must prioritize brand consistency. Ensuring all the offline and online channels provide a consistent local and global brand experience is necessary for maximum brand impact. If hoteliers have the correct tools, they can efficiently and consistently display the brand abroad. By giving branches access to specialized marketing tools, they can also quickly generate, manage, and order (local) marketing materials within their hotel's corporate brand.

Budgets: When establishing hotel marketing campaigns in a multi-location situation, one of the most difficult questions to answer is who will foot the bill. It is the duty of a brand manager or marketing manager to persuade their divisions of the value of marketing to the whole company.

Shared investments produce shared outcomes. Research shows that hotels that implement shared-spend co-op programs, which divide marketing costs based on a percentage of sales, see a 20 percent higher rate of growth compared to those that do not share the costs. These cooperative marketing initiatives necessitate long-term planning for promotional campaigns and encourage participation from local affiliates.

The juggling act of marketing and operations: Besides overseeing daily hotel operations, one, as a brand manager, anticipate that their local affiliates will handle daily marketing initiatives. This seems like a nightmare, especially for those local affiliates who aren't experts in marketing.