Extend the Spend

Your chance to learn from senior industry expert Stuart Harrison how to improve your hotel's earning capability.

Retaining customers, encouraging repeat business and establishing an atmosphere in which they stay longer and spend more have never been more important. After a challenging year, especially for the independent hotelier or small hotel group, we need a refreshing look at how we can increase our business.

To that end, marketing expert Stuart Harrison will tell you how in a special one-day seminar entitled Extend the Spend, to be held on Monday 17 June at Caterer & Hotelkeeper‘s offices in Sutton, Surrey.

Whether the client is small or large, independent or group-owned, Harrison has proved time and again - for such organisations as Select Country Hotels, Holiday Inn, Marriott and Arcadian International - that the way to greater revenues and profits is about process, techniques and attitude.

Extend the Spend will cover the following issues.

Customer loyalty
Build a comprehensive range of opportunities which you can take away and use in your own hotel. You will have a new awareness of how to build customer loyalty, taking your understanding from the customer as a prospect, to the customer as a promoter of your business. If you build the relationship correctly, the paying customer will become an unpaid part of your sales team.

Lifetime value In deepening the foundations from which we can sell more, this session will tell you how to place a lifetime value on clients and enumerate the key points in setting the atmosphere. This part of the programme will help to raise your awareness of how to see your hotel as the customer sees it. You will be challenged on whether your customers are ready to spend or ready to leave.

What business are you in? Hotels, of course, but have you examined what you are really good at - profitably good at - or are you everything to everybody? This day will discipline you to describe your own product better by identifying your benefits and then matching them to the customer for whom you can create the need.

Upselling and in-house selling Harrison is convinced that most of the information hotels need to increase their business is already in their own hands. Here, you will be challenged to increase rooms revenue through introducing better disciplines at reception and reservation, following up leads, identifying influential bookers, analysing unusual bookings and patterns of bookings, and capturing the return visit.

Harrison believes that it is amazing how much more the potential customer knows about what is happening in the area before the hotel does. "We need to tap this market intelligence and use it for our benefit," he says.

Opportunities to increase food and drink sales will also form part of the programme. It will examine how to write menus that sell and how and when to sell restaurants. "I call it the detail of retail," Harrison says. "We need to place a value on our points of sale."

Also in this part of the programme will be tips on how to sell to the weddings and meetings markets, the principles of building a programme to sell your off-peak nights, and where to place your point-of-sale material.

Pricing strategies Managing rooms yield is a key facet of becoming more profitable and this course will take you through the yield process. "This is not first about who has the best software system, it is about attitude," says Harrison. "Yield came first. We need to return to a better analytical understanding of our marketplace."

Stuart Harrison

Stuart Harrison is one of the leading brand and marketing strategists in the hospitality and leisure industry in the UK.

He has been responsible for, or influenced, the sales and marketing development of major brands including Holiday Inn, Marriott (which won his company, Scotts Hotels, "UK Hotel Brand of the Year" in 1993), Arcadian International and, most recently, Days Inn, Howard Johnson and Express by Holiday Inn.

He is a Fellow of both the Tourism Society and the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and a Visiting Fellow of Oxford Brookes University School of Hotel and Restaurant Management.

Harrison is also an adviser to upmarket hotels consortium Grand Heritage Hotels International, and a regular columnist for Caterer & Hotelkeeper. And he is principal of the Profitable Hotel Company, which undertakes strategic projects, audits and training in the hospitality and leisure industry.

Extend the Spend seminar

For information please contact: Lorraine Arnott, Projects co-ordinator, Caterer & Hotelkeeper, Quadrant House, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5AS. Tel: 020 8652 8349, by 30 May 2002