My Twitter account was compromised - could yours be next?

I try to use my Twitter account for communicating to friends and business associates so imagine my horror when I woke up yesterday morning to find my account had been compromised and a direct message, the content being distinctly adult in nature, had been sent to a number of people following me. Why do some idiots have nothing better to do with their time than cause problems and create mayhem?

My apologies to everyone who received the message and my thanks to those people who replied saying they new it was not from me and advising me that my account was compromised. I immediately changed my account settings and scanned my computer and hopefully there will be no repeat.

So how did my account become compromised?

I believe it was as a result of a direct message I received from someone I was following which stated "LOL is that you?" and without thinking I opened it up to see who it was from as I did not immediately recognise the sender. A foolish thing to do, especially for someone who takes great care when it comes to virus and identity protection. So a kind word of warning to everyone out there - be careful it can happen to anyone!

Now, I can go back to concentrating on the Plough and Harrow Hotel - http://www.ploughandharrowhotel.co.uk/ which we succesfully completed the purchase of last Monday. So far it is proving to be an exciting time and we look forward to developing the hotel over the coming months and years.

Best Wishes

Robert Smith


 

Completing on the Plough and Harrow Hotel - Birmingham

Its been a hectic few days since last Tuesday when we exchanged contracts on the Plough and Harrow Hotel  in Birmingham. The deal is set to complete tommorrow morning Monday 22nd February and it has been a real challenge to try to get supplier deals in place within 5 days!
Thank goodness for some old supplier contacts from my days at Paten Hotels who have managed to fast track account applications and with one or two exceptions, Fruit and Veg and diary, I am confident we are almost there and ready to go.

Now as to the choice of GDS and PMS supplier for the Plough and Harrow I have finally settled on a combination  of Clarity Hotel Systems for the PMS and Synxis for the GDS and WBE services.

The choice was extremely difficult and I was surprised by how competitive the proposals were, not to mention the excellent products put forward by Clarity, Guestline and Protel for the PMS and Travelclick, Evolution, Synxis and XN Hotels for the GDS.

I am sure that Clarity and Synxis will develop and excellent working relationship with us over the coming years and together we will develop and effective and rewarding distribution and operational framework for the hotel.

With this important decision now made I will be focussing my attention on turning the Plough and Harrow Hotel back into a first class individual hotel like it used to be before it went through 15 to 20 years of being owned by corporate groups who failed to invest in the product.

Exciting times and you can follow what we do on our website which will be http://www.ploughandharrowhotel.co.uk/ ( a temporary page will go up in the next few days) and if you are ever in Birmingham then come and see us.

Best Wishes

Robert Smith    



 

Just exchanged contracts to buy the Plough and Harrow Hotel in Birmingham

I am delighted to announce that myself and two partners (ex directors of Paten Hotels)  have finally managed to exchange contracts to purchase the Plough and Harrow Hotel in Birmingham. The sale is expected to complete on the 22nd February 2010.

It has been a long road to get to this point since I first viewed the hotel in May 2009 but we have stuck with the process as we believe that with investment and independent management this unique hotel will soon return to being one of the most sought after hotels in central Birmingham.

I look forward to telling everyone more about it as we get to work.

Cheers

Robert

The government think the recession is over but is it really? Here's my list of what Hoteliers should be doing in 2010 to really beat the recession.

The governments official figures showed that in the last quarter of 2009 the economy grew by all of 0.01% and hence "officially" the recession has finished. Or has it?

Hotels which I am speaking to certainly do not feel as if the recession has ended, and as many hotels continue to go into administration, it will most likely be many months or even years before the hotel industry consider the recession has ended.

So what can hoteliers do to beat the recession?

Here are a list of things which I will be encouraging my clients to do over the coming months:

1) Review your distribution channels (GDS, WEB and Voice)  and learn about where your accommodation business is actually coming from and then plan marketing activity to target similar business. If you are not using GDS as a channel you are most likely not even being considered as a possible venue by corporate agents and travel management companies.

2) Arrange a meeting with your GDS representation company to review the statistics including your ARR, length of stay and lead times. Review your rate plans to make sure these are right for your market.

3) Invest in a revenue management system such as IDEAS - http://www.ideas.com/. This is highly effective software which can help you to maximise your revenue and is effective in independent hotels of most sizes. Revenue management is not just something the corporate hotel groups do - its something all hoteliers should be doing.

4)Make sure that every client that comes to your website knows they can book online and make sure that all your rates and packages are available and in line or better than your competitors. Simple research will highlight dferences with your competitors.

5) Content (images, descriptions, facilities etc) are really important both on the web and in the database systems of the many hotel booking agents and travel management companies. If your property's data is out of date or the images and descriptions are poor an agent is less likely to place a booking with you. A simple way to keep the data up to date is to use the ABC Connections system http://www.abcconnection.com/ which specialises in distributing data to the major UK agents and TMC's including the Hotel Booking Agents Association.

6) Make time to review your customer databases and how these are segmented for marketing purposes. How many customers stay at your hotel but are allowed to leave without you learning about their buying habits and are never contacted by you again? Set up systems to stops this happening.

7) Invest in an effective email marketing system to benefit from cost effective, targetted niche marketing using your revised database.

8) Review your marketing costs and make sure you are getting a good return on investment. Don't simply renew advertising because "we always advertise there", look for new marketing opportunities, particularly online, which can be tracked and the return on investment measured.

10) Highlight the areas of your business where you have fixed operating costs but no revenue. In a lot of hotels, and with conference business really depressed, lunchtimes are are a prime example of this. In this case consider how you can generate revenue which at least pays the fixed costs and bring you in some new customers which may stay with you when good times return.

These are just a few of the areas you can look at which could help your business to beat the recession once and for all.

Good luck

Robert Smith
Complete Hotels Services

A new blog entry in an new year - worn out by GDS and PMS discussions!

It's almost halfway through January and finally I'm finding time to update this blog. Firstly, Happy New Year to everyone and I hope that you all had a good festive period and are optimistic towards the outlook for 2010.

The reason I've been so delayed in writing this is because of exciting times at Complete Hotels Services. We are now very close to concluding a management contract on a 45 bedroom hotel in Birmingham and at the same time acquire a lease on a beautiful 9 bedroom country inn in Northamptonshire. I hope to be able to give more details in the next 3 to 4 weeks so watch this space. The last few weeks have been spent working on these deals and a lot of time has been dedicated to speaking to PMS suppliers and GDS representation companies. It amazing that whilst the suppliers ultimately all sell the same thing, albeit with different features and service levels, it was some years since I had done research into these two areas and the costs and the way that they are presented have surprised me.
In general the PMS costs seem to have reduced, probably because of web based solutions making savings on hardware, but the GDS representation services seem to still be as expensive as ever with many bookings likely to cost in excess of £10 per booking without including the origintaing agents commission!
When I decide who we select I'll let you know and if anyone out there is researching GDS and PMS systems then feel free to drop me a line at robert@completehotelsservices.co.uk

In addition to this we have been speaking with a number of potential clients about the services CHS offer and how we can work with them to acheive increased profits in 2010. In particular sales and marketing, and especially in the areas of web marketing and SEO.
I was delighted to see that according to Google analytics a clients website traffic had incrased by 90.5% year on year from 2008 to 2009. They haev certainly seen increased sales as a result.

Finally, tomorrow I'm attending one of my favourite annual events, the Hotel Booking Agents Association annual dinner and I'm looking forward to catching up with many old friends and colleagues and discussing many industry related issues. If you have any which you would like my opinion on then let me know by leaving a comment.

All the best
Robert Smith

Tips on How to Start a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Campaign

Nowadays hotels understand the importance of the internet and the difference it can make to their business. They also know that being at the top of the search engine results pages is important for driving traffic to a website and subsequently making sales. The big question is how can they achieve this & at a reasonable cost?

Now, it’s not difficult to get to the top of Google if you are willing to pay to appear as a sponsored link, where you bid for the position and every time someone clicks on your advert you pay. However, as competition for the keyword phrases increases so do the costs and hotels will not be able to afford to continue with PPC forever.

The more cost effective way to appear at the top of the organic rankings, on Google that’s just below the sponsored links (normally 3) which appear on most search engine results pages, is to conduct an SEO campaign to get Google and the other search engines to index your website content and return it in search results. The other fact is that once you get towards the top of the rankings it becomes a lot easier to stay there because one of the key factors Google looks at is the popularity (traffic) of a website and by being high on the results you will get more traffic.

So how do you start an SEO Campaign?

Assuming that you already have a good, relevant domain name and have access to a Content Management System (CMS) to update your website, here are some of the most important steps that your marketing team can do before you employ a SEO specialist.

1. Research your targeted keywords / phrases

The first and most important step is to determine what are the most important keywords or phrases, usually 2 or 3 words, for which you want your website to appear on search engines? You know your hotel better than anyone else. You know your target audience. So find the key phrases, probably between 10 and 20, which you think that customers will use to type into the search engine and relate to your hotel. (E.g. “hotel in Town Name”) See more information here.

2. Choose the right page titles for your website pages

After you have decided on your keyword/ phrases, the next step is to place them in certain areas of your website pages. The title of your web page is the very first thing that any search engine crawler will read and take as a factor to rank your website – you can see the page title at the very top left of the internet browser. Your homepage title should contain your main 2 or 3 targeted keyword phrases. All the other pages of your website should have title related to the content of that respective page. (E.g.) the Keyword phrase “hotel in Town Name” would appear in the page title.

3. Set up meta keywords and description

Alhough Google has said they do not read meta tags content I you advise to put your targeted keywords in the meta keyword and a one line description about that webpage in the meta description. Many other search engines will still read them and if you are not stuffing keywords that are irrelevant to the page content then Google is unlikely to penalise you.

4. Create unique content for every webpage

Your website pages should have unique content describing the hotels featured services and facilities The content should include the keyword phrases that are in the title of the page. Experts say that you should use your targeted keyword phrase 2-3 times per every 200 words.

5. Create a business blog

Google gets excited by new and original content and a blog fits the bill. Use a business blog to communicate with your customers about anything happening in the hotel and very importantly update at regular intervals. Once or twice a week is good. Articles don’t have to be long and as long as they relate to your hotel then that’s good. Perhaps consider asking management to provide comments for the blog on a rotation basis. For example the chef can talk about what food is seasonal, the restaurant manager about the revised wine list etc. Wordpress or blogspot are easy to use and set up.

6. Use Web Analytics

Once your website is up and running you want to know more about where the traffic is coming from, the volume of traffic & the search terms being used amongst other things. Analytics software can do this and Google provide theirs free of charge so use it.

7. Review your website positions for the keyword phrases

Having put in the work to get the keywords phrases right and in the correct places on the web pages you are going to want to know that it has worked. Conduct some simple searches yourself for your key phrases and record the position each keyword phrase achieves and the page it is pointing to. I suggest you do this every 10-14 days and keep a record to see the movement. If you are improving then great, if however you start to drop down then you should consider making some changes to the keywords or content on that page. You can buy software to automate this or if and when you appoint an SEO company they can run theses reports for you as well.

8. Use social media websites to promote the hotel

Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious are some of the buzz words today in social media industry an your hotel should be represented on them. Setting up your hotel profile on these & similar websites are must and then use them to have some fun. For more ideas on this take a look at this article I wrote a while back.

9. Register on the Open Directory (DMOZ)

The open directory is used as a base database by many search engines and is free so get your hotel listed on it. Go to

10. Register your Hotel with Google Local Business Centre.

The local business centre is free and supplies the results for Google Maps. Create your own entry and load as much information as you can including images, video etc.

11. Start a link exchange policy

Allowing other websites which are of a good quality ( look at Google Page rank) and are relevant to your own business to link to your site in return for a link form you to them is good practice. I recommend using http://www.linkmarket.net/ to manage the process. It’s only about $50 a year and easy to use.

I hope you find these tips useful and would welcome any thoughts or comments.

Kind regards

Robert Smith

Will the banks support hotels through the winter or call in the receivers?

For the last 12 to 15 months I've been searching for a small (up to 60 bedrooms) hotel to purchase ideally in the south east or midlands. During this time I viewed numerous properties which for the most part have been over valued, in a poor state of repair & under traded. Some of these properties have been on the open market for the entire time I've been looking and despite prices dropping do not seem to be getting any real interest from purchasers or if they are there is a lack of available finance.

In a conversation I had the other day with a respected  property agent he mentioned that he believed this winter was going to be a really difficult time for a lot of these businesses as well as many more which have seen sales revenue continuing to decline in 2009 and is showing very little sign of improving in 2010.

The question is what will the bankers do about supporting viable businesses  who are going through a tough winter?

Will they support them at a time when the media is focusing more on bankers bonuses rather than on what they are doing to help small and medium businesses?

Only time will provide the answers but don't be suprised to see a lot more hotels and other hospitality businesses going into administration in the coming months especially as so many are now suffering from inflated rentals due to the high valuations and the number of sale and leaseback deals during the last few years.

I see in the last couple of weeks Merchant Inns and Elizabeth Hotels have both gone into administration. More will surely follow unless the banks show some support!