82 – 1 on 1 Hotel Workshop Takeaways & Insights

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this special edition of the Suite Spot, host Ryan Embree discusses the recent Hotel Digital Marketing Workshop Event hosted by Travel Media Group. This season’s theme was titled “How to Keep Occupancy Hot this Fall” and focused on capturing occupancy as children return to school, beginning a slow drop in leisure travel. Ryan talks about the key takeaways and common themes that he uncovered in these 1-on-1 meetings with hoteliers. This episode keeps its finger on the pulse of the hotel industry and listeners will gain insights into the upcoming fall season. If you are looking for more information on TMG’s Hotel Digital Marketing Workshops or want to submit a topic for a future episode, reach out to us at 407-984-7455. Suite Spot Podcast · 82 - 1 on 1 Hotel Workshop Takeaways & Insights 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. And welcome to the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you for listening, no matter where you are coming from today, we've got a special episode and special edition of the Suite Spot. Really excited to share this episode with you all. Will be a little bit of a quicker episode, but super insightful. Now at Travel Media Group, to give you some background, obviously COVID-19 and the pandemic in 2020 impacted our business, just like the hotel industry as a whole. Travel Media Group, we've been in business for over 30 years and we only work with hotels. So seeing the impact that COVID-19 and this pandemic had on the industry as a whole was absolutely devastating. And, you know, we were having conversations with hoteliers throughout the entirety of the pandemic and were really feeling what they were feeling. Hotels made a lot of adaptions during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to meet the needs and expectations of guests during this health crisis. At Travel Media Group, we did the same to meet the needs and serve our customers. Ryan Embree: One of those really cool initiatives that we started here at Travel Media Group actually began as a virtual trade show, and we didn't have the opportunity to meet face to face to our hoteliers like we'd done for so many years, really decades of going to these events and trade shows: AAHOA, Choice Hotels, Wyndham, Best Western, all of these that we typically will see. So one of the things that the pandemic forced us to do was adapt to this new normal setting. And with that, we did a virtual trade show where we would meet virtually with our hoteliers and get to talk to them about their properties, what they were experiencing and try to come up with creative ways and ideas to get more business to a property. So that kind of evolved in 2020 into now, 2021, where we do one-on-one workshops with hotels virtually to talk specifically about their property. Ryan Embree: Our educational webinars are awesome because they cover a specific subject, but for hoteliers that are looking for a tailored, specific approach for their location and their property, these workshops seem to be a really great channel and way to do that for hotels. So in saying that we have just completed our fall 2021 marketing workshop. And the episode today is actually going to be five distinct takeaways and insights that we were able to uncover in these workshop meetings and sessions with hoteliers. So let's go ahead and jump right in the first takeaway from our hotel marketing workshops was that people are traveling now. It doesn't sound like a very resounding takeaway, but when we did this back in the spring of 2021, people were just starting to begin to travel again, we weren't seeing those occupancy bursts like we're seeing right now. And like we did over the summer. Now, obviously with the Delta variant, we know that there could be some impacts on that for occupancy. Ryan Embree: We know during the fall time that historically even pre-pandemic have bee...