Hotel Marketing: How Understanding Planning Behavior Will Help You Get More Bookings

If your job depends on effective hotel marketing strategies, strategies that put heads in beds, you know you’ve got to understand your consumer. First, you’ve got to understand the marketing loop, but you’ve also got to understand who you’re talking to, when you should be talking to them, and where the conversation will happen.

To get at this (and many other hotel marketing questions) we conducted a survey of more than 2,000 leisure travelers who take at least 1.5 vacations every year. Here’s some of what we found:

· Women drive leisure travel. In our survey, 38 percent of respondents said the female in the relationship makes the travel plans, and 34 percent said decisions are made jointly. Add those numbers up, and you’ll see that your hotel marketing strategies must address women.

Are your current marketing efforts speaking to women?

· People are planning and booking further out than previously thought. 66 percent of our respondents begin their vacation planning process three months or more in advance.

Have you created findable content that answers these early planners’ questions?

· While travelers now visit an average of 22 travel related sites prior to booking, the single most influential tool for planning where to stay on vacation is Internet search. Search is huge when it comes to online hotel marketing.

Are you hitting SEO targets?

· 38% of travelers still book their hotel rooms by phone, not online. Do you make it easy for them to find the right number to call, even when they’re viewing your site from a mobile device?

We’ve got plenty of ideas and advice to help improve your hotel marketing strategies”and we’re giving away some of our best tips free in our Hotel Marketing Guide. Download it, read it, share it, and get ready to kill it.