It’s already so difficult to stand out from the competition in the Hotel Industry, so why do we spend so much time trying to be like all other hotels?
NB: This is an article from Direct Your Bookings
First, because the competition is certainly high across most countries and regions, making in it difficult for the final customers to really tell what makes a hotel different from all others. Second, because of how hotels are marketed and distributed in the world: think of the OTAs, who are the masters at flattening any value proposition by leveraging the only factor that matters to them: price, better rates, greeter discounts.
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But it’s not just that: to make things even worse, there’s another important reason why so many hotels and hotel managers struggle so much at standing out: they communicate the exact same things, deliver the exact same messages, and use the exact same words and expressions.
And so, when it comes to picking the hotel to stay at, facing an array of hotels to choose from, each of which using the same wording and message, what other factor can travelers use to decide, if not price and little else?
In today’s video I’m going to show you 13 of some of the most abused words by hotel marketers, words that make any marketing effort ineffective, to say the least, or totally useless, and that will turn any hotel into a commodity par excellence.
This and more coming up, so let’s dig in.
Why These Terms
The words and the terms that I am about to show you can be found on many hotel websites or hotel adverts.
When used on a hotel website, they’ll simply become irrelevant, because they don’t communicate anything.
When used in advertising, these terms trigger what is called “ad blindness”, a phenomenon that makes hotel ads essentially invisible, in the eyes of potential customers.
And I’m 100% sure most if not all of them will sound familiar to you.
Let’s start with the first term:
Welcome to [Hotel Name]
So so so many hotel websites open up in front of travelers with this message. Welcome to [Hotel Name].
For years we’ve heard the importance of the 1st impact, during the very first few seconds, between 3 and 5, to make an impression… what kind of impression can we make by saying “Welcome to [Hotel Name]?”
I’ve come to the conclusion that those who have this opening statement in the home page are those who either: don’t know what to write instead (and so they end up writing Welcome to Hotel Name because it’s the most aseptic statement they can come up with) or they have seen it some many other times, in so many other hotel websites that they must have thought to do the same, just to conform to the mass.
Welcome to Hotel Name is a nice thing to say upon check in: when trying to get a booking and generate revenue, that’s the most useless and irrelevant thing to say.
Enjoy
I think half hotel adverts include a sentence that starts with “Enjoy”.
Enjoy this, enjoy that.
Enjoy is also a very easy term to use because it can be followed by anything and you can append whichever service or benefit that you want to offer.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a negative word, this is not a video about terms that you shouldn’t be using because they are bad; you shouldn’t be using them because everyone else is.
