4 Tips for Independent Hotel and Lodge Owners
Lockdowns and travel bans have been particularly hard on independent hotel owners. The truth is you are competing with hotels and lodges that have big safety nets and ample resources. The offering is on par with the best in the business and goes a step further to provide guests with added personal value.
Your dream to own a piece of Africa is still alive. Your passion for sharing it with other people will keep you going.
It would help if you used this time to understand your business better and decide what you want it to become in the next three years, and how your business will achieve its goals.
Act Now to Have Later
For the first time in a long time; everyone is working on the same lead times, but this does not translate into equal success. The African Travel Industry is on the runway to recovery, and only the proactive will take off first.
The best thing anyone can do in a crisis is to act on the things that are within their control. Apply yourself and your team to your guests’ experience, safety and comfort. Ensure your operations are health & safety compliant as soon as possible.
There is no better time than the present to get back into the market. Implementing a strategy for sales, marketing, revenue, OTA, social media, and reservations will allow your business to get maximum exposure and convert it into bookings when travellers start shopping.
Get Leaner and more Effective
It would help if you made decisions for the survival of your hotel or lodge. Use this forced downsize to evaluate the efficiencies of your business, control costs, and assess your organisational flow.
Independent hotel owners are working with limited resources in a time when they need maximum exposure in the marketplace. It is a convenient time to work with third party hospitality services that may come at a more competitive rate, than hiring a full team of marketing experts to implement every aspect of your marketing strategy.
Don’t Say Yes To Everything
It is essential to understand every part of the value chain so that you can make the best decisions for your business. All hospitality establishments are rebooting and starting from zero occupancies, but that does not mean that blanket solutions in sales, marketing and revenue management will suit your business. Independent Hotels operate with limited resources but are more agile, and each one has unique circumstances.
Place All Your Eggs In One Basket
Just because you cannot afford to have a full staff sales & marketing staff complement sitting in your office, does not mean you cannot have a full sales & marketing team taking care of your business. There are many experts in various disciplines within sales and marketing that will give you valuable advice, but how do you choose in which to invest. Representation? Online Reputation Management? Social media? Revenue Management? The best answer is all the above.
As a business owner with years of experience in hospitality I know that everything is important, but you cannot spend your entire budget on a single aspect of exposure in the market. Independent hotel owners also need to keep in mind that all the tactics for gaining exposure in the marketplace cannot work in isolation. Your overall strategy must be implemented right through OTAs, Sales Representation, Digital Content Marketing, to Reservations and Revenue Management. Proactive Hospitality Solutions offers turnkey hospitality services that fit seamlessly into a hotel and look like in-house assets. We take care of the strategy and implementation of the strategy while hotel owners focus on their guests’ experience, safety and comfort
How we can help
Proactive Hospitality Solutions provides a turnkey service including strategic marketing, representation and reservations solutions to hotels and lodges across Africa.
With years of combined marketing and hospitality experience, the team of experts integrates with your operation and fulfils your business functions under a white-labelled service that represents your business. It’s like having a full sales, reservations & marketing team under your roof.
The Proactive team understands the complexities and challenges of this competitive industry and use strategic solutions that suit the specific needs of individual clients. The best thing is that this team does sit under one roof, and act in unison to maximise your hotel’s revenue, increase your turnover while minimising your expenditure and reducing staffing requirements.
Post lock travel increases the need for you to focus on the guest experience and safety of your operational teams. Proactive can take responsibility for the strategic solutions that will ensure your occupancy levels are increased and maintained on this road to recovery.
Contact Proactive Hospitality Solutions
Email: info@proactive-reservations.co.za
Phone: +27 21 879 0600