62 – Capturing Leisure Travel This Winter

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this episode of the Suite Spot, host Ryan Embree helps hoteliers prepare for the upcoming 2020 winter season and shares his thoughts on what to expect. Ryan takes a look at two major factors impacting travelers' booking decisions this winter: the weather and area-specific COVID-19 restrictions. He walks through multiple examples of social posts and marketing strategies that properties can implement to give them the best opportunity to attract and capture leisure travelers. This episode is an excellent blueprint for hoteliers looking for a place to start when creating a winter marketing strategy for their property. If you are looking to learn more information about how Travel Media Group can help your hotel increase winter occupancy or want to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Suite Spot Podcast · 62 - Capturing Leisure Travel This Winter Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot, this is your host Ryan Embree. Welcome to episode number 62. We are getting to that time of year, the winter season, typically a slower season. We've done many episodes in the past talking about how occupancy slows this time of year. We have the holidays, which gives us a nice little bump, but what can we expect this year? You know, it's a bunch of question marks that we've seen since the resurgence of COVID-19. There's a bunch of question marks. So what's this winter season going to bring for our industry? And is it something that we're going to be looking forward to? And are there things that we can do on our end, on the operations and the sales and marketing side, to help maybe put some more heads and beds and help that occupancy grow during this, again typical, slower time of year. Ryan Embree: So that is what this episode is all about. Very excited to share this with you, actually goes hand in hand with our educational webinars, which we do every month at Travel Media Group. If you haven't checked those out, I encourage you to do so on our YouTube page. This webinar was titled, "There's No Place Like Hotels for the Holidays: Targeting Leisure Travelers this Winter." So that's what we're going to be talking about in today's episode is attracting and capturing those leisure travelers during the winter season. And I want to start by really kind of having you envision a grid, a grid split into four distinct quadrants and where your property is really located on this grid is really going to be based off of two key factors. The first is weather, now for most of the country, when I say winter, that means cold weather. It drives people indoors and typically again, slows our occupancy numbers, but there's also places in the country that stay relatively warm where cold travelers travel to and flock to this time of year. So that's where our headquarters are in Orlando, Florida. Now the next major factor is new and it's 2020 driven, but it has an enormous impact on guests as they're considering whether to book and go on vacation this winter, and that's going to be the level of COVID restrictions in your area. So again, in some parts of the country, there are still some highly restrictive requirements put in by local cities and regions. But in other locations, restrictions have really begun to ease and loosen as time has passed. Ryan Embree: So what we're going to do today is we're going to travel from quadrant for quadrant, whether you're warm weather, cold weather, you have high restrictions or low restrictions, and we're going to come up and create a custom marketing and advertising plan specifically geared a...