96 – Spring Workshop Takeaways

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Host Ryan Embree discusses insights and takeaways from Travel Media Group's recent Spring Workshops where he talked one-on-one with hoteliers about their hotel's digital presence. Discover trends in hospitality and learn how you can position your property for success through review response, social media, and reputation management. Suite Spot Podcast · 96 - Spring Workshop Takeaways 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. Ryan Embree: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree, Director of Marketing at Travel Media Group. And we've got a great episode for you today. We do these episodes four times a year because we actually conduct four occupancy workshops for hoteliers. And this season's workshop is titled "Business is Blooming: How to Grow Occupancy this Spring." So this is our spring occupancy workshop. It's one of my favorites because we are coming out of the winter, which is typically a slower time for the industry. And we're finally starting to see that growth and occupancy. Now the springs the past couple years have obviously been a little bit different with the pandemic and coming out of that. But with these workshops, we are talking about positioning your hotel digitally for success when travelers are searching and they're doing quite a bit of searching, which we'll talk about here in second. Ryan Embree: So again, these are occupancy workshops where we meet one-on-one with hoteliers in about a 15 to 20 minute session talking about the hotel's digital presence. How are they positioning themselves coming into the season of spring break, holidays, May, Memorial day, a lot of great things in the spring and really setting ourselves up also for the summer where occupancy really heats up. So with these episodes, what we like to do is, typically when I conduct these workshops, we get some really good takeaways and insights from the hoteliers that we talk about some common themes and threads. So in the past, obviously we've talked about the staffing shortage right now, which has been hurting a lot of people. This is our third time doing a spring occupancy workshop. Again in 2020 and 2021, there were very different conversations, which leads me to our first trend that we noticed this workshop versus others, which was the positivity of the hoteliers that we were talking to. The optimism that was out there, that travel is returning. Ryan Embree: And as I talk about these travelers doing searches, you know, I've got a really amazing stat that we came across, where it says U.S. organic Google search visit growth by industry in Q4 of 2021 versus Q4 in 2020. And the percentage change for travel was at 41%. So that is a lot of eyes looking and planning and being inspired to travel once again. But as I caution the hoteliers that I spoke to on this workshop, they're gonna be looking at your hotel's digital presence a lot differently than they did pre-COVID-19 and pre-pandemic. But trend number one, occupancy is growing. It's here. Whether we like it or not, transient leisure has always been there the past couple years and has been leading the pack in recovery, but we're also seeing business, weddings come back. So we'll talk a little bit about that later, but the second trend that I noticed on these conversations that I was having is, you know, we have been as an industry running around, it feels like, trying to figure out what to do to adjust to this pandemic, this new normal that COVID has kind of ushered into our industry. Ryan Embree: And then on top of that, you have this staffing shortage, right?