Leave customers calling for more
Get out on to that hospitality stage and break a leg, says Stuart Harrison.
Hospitality is the real theatre of life. After all, we are on stage all of the time and, to adapt the old London Windmill Theatre slogan, "we never close."
We should want our customers, whether in restaurants, pubs or hotels, to relax, enjoy the experience and leave them wanting to come back for more.
And we, in turn, want a little of the spotlight, the recognition of a job well done. It's in our nature, it's part of the character, the very fibre of those who want to create an environment to exceed the expectations of our customers.
And industry awards, so brilliantly led year after year by the Cateys - our Oscars - offer such recognition.
One of the most enjoyable of these events is the Hotel Marketing Association's awards presented during their annual charity lunch held each year at the Savoy. And what I found particularly pleasing about the most recent awards was that provincial independent hotels won two of the six categories.
Allan Deeson of Nivingston Country House and Restaurant in Cleish, Kinross-shire, picked up the Best Leisure Marketing Activity award. The marketing plan involved co-ordinating an added-value, all-inclusive leisure break package for six independent hotels in Scotland and then targeting specific cities in Scotland and the North of England.
Deeson, who was director of sales for the Strand Group and then marketing manager for Thistle, has taken his marketing discipline into the provinces and come up trumps.
"The essence was to include everything for £99 per person," he says. "It was added-value, open-ended eating and drinking. No extras." Music to my ears. What is up with these people who keep taking the so-called easy route of discounting and then throwing the new-found knee-jerked rate into an expensive campaign? Any fool can do that.
The award for the Best Hotel Brochure went to the Ardeonaig Hotel and Restaurant in South Loch Tay Side by Killin in Perthshire, owned by Mandy Exley and her father Keith. I could have been talking to the director of marketing for a major group as opposed to a former vice-principal of a technical college who wanted a new challenge.
Mandy talks about defining the values of Ardeonaig, a 10-bedroom hotel which they closed and "opened in February in time for foot-and-mouth". She talks about expressing these values in the brochure as a "progression of words and pictures that catch the essence".
She can even give the percentage conversions of enquiries to confirmed business by quarter and by revenue. She adds: "Our marketing strategy was the most important thing we gave to the bank. It was fully integrated into everything we do."
How I would love to pin that statement to the ear of every finance director in our industry.
Stuart Harrison runs the Profitable Hotel Company and is a visiting fellow of Oxford Brookes University.
