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1. Identify When Low Season Periods Occur With Forecasting

A critical foundational step is to forecast low hotel occupancy periods with precision. This gives your hotel a clearer picture of accounts receivable and payable during this period.

It enables you to better prepare management with regard to performance control across different hotel divisions, business objective execution, and overall planning. Preparation through accurate forecasting provides the understanding that is key to subsequently enact initiatives to arrest and reverse low occupancy rate trends.

2. Target New Customer Segments With a Dynamic Marketing Drive

You may have one or two specific buyer personas that you traditionally target, but low-season is the perfect time to diversify.

First of all, you can mine your own customer data and communicate with clients (via email, phone or social media) to identify customer trends, needs and wants.

SERVING GROUPS, BOTH GUESTS AND NON-GUESTS

There are so many initiatives to generate more revenue in low season. These include team-building retreats, corporate meetings and events, offering a coworking space for self-employed people and small businesses, corporate events and meetings, and, of course, weddings. These can all be outstanding sources of ancillary revenue. As a potential quick-win, you can analyze your current customer data to see if there are previous customers who may be interested in these kinds of services.

GEO-SPECIFIC TARGETING

A relatively new possibility thanks to technology advances, you can target specific groups with marketing. For instance, if you’re a European hotel in winter, you could target potential customers from Middle Eastern countries to escape the summer heat.

KEEPING DIFFERENT AGE GROUPS FRONT OF MIND

It is possible to keep your product attractive across different age groups without being too broad. After all, if you appeal to everyone, you’re not appealing to any group in particular. It’s important to strike the right balance to remain attractive and not close yourself off from any specific cohort.

Different age groups typically require specific services. For instance, a retiree with an abundance of free time, is much different to a millennial bleisure traveller who wants to work and enjoy some down-time too.

With such diversity, and indeed, differences within specific groups too, you can create offers accordingly. For instance, a long-stay package can target retirees, including activities like a museum visit, walking tours, and food tasting events. You can also look at the specific needs of particular groups. As an example, 35% of people over 65 years of age have a disability. Therefore, improved access points and staff training can differentiate your hotels from others as one that is mindful and caring of retirees’ needs.

You can also source social media and communication campaign data from your guests themselves. What do they want to see and do? What does their perfect hotel break look and feel like? This data can be the source for social media and blog topics to attract future guests.

CREATE A COMPREHENSIVE TARGETING PLAN

This involves identifying the groups that you want to target. You can then use the internet and social media, from Facebook to Instagram, and from Google search to Pinterest, to advertise and post organic content. You can also combine this approach with blog posts on your website and email campaigns to drive business, including promotions and a periodic newsletter.

3. Maximize the Reach of Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

It’s one thing to enact digital marketing campaigns. It’s another step entirely though to implement a periodic process to optimize them for return on investment.

Your hotel can increase hotel revenue in low season by maximizing its slice of the traffic pie with a number of tactics. These include the following:

·         Take requisite action to achieve a higher position on Google Ads and Metasearch Engines.

·         Increase investment in search engine marketing by buying brand-neutral keywords.

·         Enlarge reach of online retargeting campaigns and launch targeted display campaigns.

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