Tasting the Big Apple
It's a question that every family-run hotel has asked: How do you get customers to notice your hotel when you haven't got the big brand name or the big marketing budget of a Hilton or a Hyatt? For one of New York's newest family-run hotels, the answer was to use the old favourites: sex and food.
The Benjamin - situated in the heart of Manhattan and with 209 plush suites each taking in more than $300 (£187) a night - has been packed out at weekends ever since it ran a newspaper advert showing two sets of naked feet, and inviting parents to return to a time "before children". In the UK, you'd be hard pushed to call it saucy, but in the more puritanical parts of the USA, the ad was positively racy, and it got the hotel noticed.
Different tack
"We're a family-run business, and if we were to do the same sort of advertising as everyone else, we would not be able to get beyond the white-noise clutter," says John Moser, general manager of the Benjamin. Without the big marketing bucks of world-famous rivals such as the nearby Waldorf, and working in one of the most cut-throat markets in the world, Moser and the hotel's family owners decided to try a different tack.
"We hired an advertising agency that had never done any hospitality advertising before, because we wanted to have a new slant on it," he says. "We tried to make our ads totally different from a normal hospitality ad. With a lot of ads, all you see is a lot of couples having a glass of Champagne in a hotel suite. We ran a bunch of ads just showing the feet at the end of the bed, and it's been so successful we've actually had to close the offer down."
It was something the hotel had to get right first time. The Benjamin opened its doors last year on the site of an older hotel, the Beverly. Changing the 1927 building, designed by celebrated architect Emery Roth, into a modern, four-star, hi-tech hotel was a $30m (£18.7m) project. For a big chain, that's a major investment; for a family-owned chain that started in dry cleaning for the stars and now has nine suite-only properties in the city, it was, as the Americans say, betting the ranch.
Eye-catching
The hotel was cautious with its limited advertising cash and didn't splash it around. The "before children" ad appeared in one newspaper only - the New York Times. But that was a careful choice. The paper sells in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and New York, the four big cities on the eastern seaboard, and the eye-catching image, combined with the 40% discount, transformed Saturday nights in mid-Manhattan. "It was like turning a switch when we ran that ad," says Moser. "Suddenly, Saturday night became our busiest night."
The reaction to the campaign is an example of how advertising can be made to work for family hotels with few resources. The ads were carefully thought out, and clearly targeted at the customers the hotel wanted to attract. They were confined to specific publications, keeping the ad bill down.
And they were never anything more than a tool. The policy was that they shouldn't become a substitute for good service, or a surrogate strategy, or a veneer covering poor management.
Best of all for the hotel, the ad allowed it to drum up new business without going down the route followed by other completely new hotels - discounting. Moser claims that the Benjamin didn't offer any discounts from the weekday rack rates during its first few months of existence last year. A huge occupancy gap opened between itself and its rivals at the beginning but, as the effect of the ad kicked in, the gap closed, and the hotel avoided the tricky customers' complaints that come when hotels eventually raise their discount rates as they become more popular.
Moser now claims to be at full occupancy most nights of the week - attracting a number of guests now that the original projections said would not be achieved within the first three years. And they're all paying close to top dollar.
The advertising agency turned out a second unusual campaign to attract customers during the week. The ad didn't sell plush surroundings or good-value room rates - it sold food. New Yorkers leafing through their local papers would have come across an advert showing award-winning US chef and restaurateur Larry Forgione lying on a bed with two of the hotel's senior managers (all fully clothed). The ad was drawing attention to Forgione's decision to move his renowned An American Place restaurant into the Benjamin's ground floor. Forgione's new establishment also provides all the room service for the hotel's guests. Again, it was a quirky ad that got noticed, and Moser insists that the restaurant is drawing the crowds.
But advertising isn't everything, and the hotel knows it needs to work hard to keep the customers coming back. Moser has a few more tricks up his sleeve.
The Benjamin provides business-centre facilities in every suite - each room has high-speed Internet connections, a desk with printer, fax machine, scanner and copier, and three direct-dial in-and-out telephones in each suite. Every detail about every guest is written down and squirreled away in the hotel's computer to make sure that each guest gets personally targeted service if they should return.
And then there's the pillow menu - a range of 11 different types of pillow, from "jelly neckroll" to the "five-foot body cushion", all to help guests get a good night's rest in the city that never sleeps.
"Advertising gets the people to come in the door. It gets them to pick up the phone," says Moser. "The trick is what to do with the people when they're here. There are some things that we can do with 209 rooms that 1,000-room hotels can't do. It's really the service and the attention to personal details that brings them back."
The hotel already claims to have a cadre of regular guests after little more than a year in business. Some guests have clocked up more than 10 stays so far. But each time a guest returns, the task of getting them to call again gets harder.
"You are constantly trying to create a bigger ‘wow' factor each time they stay," says Moser. "We need to know things about our customers that will give them a little bit more each time, so they say, ‘It's like my home here - they know me when I come to this hotel.'"
FACTS
The Benjamin
125 East 50th Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA
Tel: 00 1 212 715 2500
Fax: 00 1 212 715 2525
Web site: www.thebenjamin.com
General manager: John Moser
Suites: 209
Turnover, accommodation: $17m (£10.6m)
Percentage occupancy: 1999, "mid 50s" (hotel opened April 1999); 2000, "high 70s"
Rack rate: $320 to $550 (£200 to £343)
Achieved rate: $290 (£181)
Turnover, food & beverage: $740,000 (£462,000)
Food and beverage gross profit: 43% of F&B gross revenues
Turnover, other: $1m (£600,000) including phone, rent, movies, etc
Investment and shareholder structure: the Benjamin is owned by Manhattan East Suite Hotels, a privately owned and operated company with 10 hotels in New York City. The six directors are direct descendants of the founder, Benjamin J Denihan
Projected method of growth: "Our primary objective is reinvestment in our current product. Short-term goals include 200-400 new keys in Manhattan. We are looking at possible repositioning."
An American Place
125 East 50th Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA
Tel: 00 1 212 888 5650
Covers: 100
Cover turn per session: 11/2-2
Average spend, breakfast: $25 (£15.60)
Average spend, lunch: $32 to $35 (£20 to £21.87)
Average spend, evenings: $65 to $70 (£40.60 to £43.75)
Total turnover, food and beverage: $12.8m (£8m)
Split: 72% food, 28% beverage
Net operating profit: 16%
Marketing spend: $10,000 to $15,000 (£6,250 to £9,375)
Marketing methods: "If an opportunity comes along… "
Investment and shareholder structure: wholly owned by Larry Forgione
Expansion plans: "Considering new restaurants within three hours of Manhattan"
An American Place
Early European seafarers who explored North America's shores in the 16th century wrote of a land of plenty - fruitful soil, abundant harvests, rivers teeming with fish too large for the explorers' nets. That's the type of picture that award-winning chef Larry Forgione likes to whip up when he talks about re-creating American cuisine.
Forgione is regarded in the USA as one of the country's leading chefs. Having learnt his craft in London and elsewhere in Europe, he returned home in 1979 determined to put new American cuisine on the culinary map.
His passion is for the regional, seasonal, farm-fresh food that the European explorers marvelled at - a far cry from the widespread, popular view of US food as nothing more than beefburgers and fries. His signature dishes include wood-grilled breast of free-range chicken, fillet of Atlantic salmon, and Chesapeake Bay soft-shell crabs - all created from home-grown or native US foods.
He first opened An American Place in 1984 - the Benjamin is its third location since then. The restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It also provides room service for the hotel's guests, and acts as caterer for functions and banquets.
Source: Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, 6-12 July 2000
