Hotel customers: who is your target audience?

Who is the consumer of hotel services, what categories exist, what is the difference between them? How to determine your target audience in order to more clearly implement the positioning of the hotel and, as a result, formulate advertising campaigns correctly? These questions need to be clarified primarily for effective marketing.

Consumers of hotel services: who are they?

The services of the hotel industry are used by very different people and for different purposes: single and family, young and old, rich and poor, representatives of different nationalities, different professions, workers and top managers, vacationers and business travelers, etc. Every hotel customer can have their own needs and preferences, which must be taken into account for quality service.

Depending on the goals, we can distinguish the following categories of hotel services consumers:

1. Tourists: eat in restaurants and cafes, buy souvenirs, visit entertainment and cultural institutions, mainly make reservations for rooms and services, but are prone to impulsive purchases.
2. Vacationers: despite some similarities with tourists, they are less interested in cultural and educational events, often more calm, and they have a higher need for silence.
3. Business people making trips for work (including business trips): higher requirements for accuracy and timeliness, the need for additional communication and transport services, often prefer payment by bank transfer, often are a hotel guests on a regular basis.
4. Workers, temporarily living for contract job: stay for a relatively long time (from several months to a year or even several years), prefer economical options.
5. Event organizers: such customers in a hotel are more likely intermediaries, reserve places for groups of people, often use additional hotel services such as conference rooms, meeting rooms, and the risk of canceling reservations is increased.
6. Overnight: just passing by, or come to a given location for some private purpose, stop only for one night (less often for a few) for sleep and rest, in most cases not booking anything in advance.
7. Arrived at the event: it can be a sporting, cultural or scientific event, applicants for the period of university entrance campaign, and other options for one-time peak gathering for a relatively homogeneous large group of people who are practically not familiar with each other, also get here.
8. Just married: the need for privacy, increased demands on the level of comfort and service.

Potential hotel customers are also divided into the following categories:

1. Individuals and corporate clients.
2. Citizens of the country and foreign guests.
3. Traveling alone, as a couple, as a family or as a mixed group.
4. Gender (men, women), age (young, middle-aged, elderly and also a special category – children).
5. Solvency and exactingness to the level of quality (as a rule, these two signs correlate with each other, but not necessarily).
6. Regular guests and occasional (one-time) guests.

Each of these categories is not completely defined: they can be detailed even more, isolating narrower segments with more precise needs and characteristics.

The target audience of the hotel: how to determine your own?

Each category has its own expectations and preferences for the list and the level of quality of services, convenience, security, methods of booking and payment, the interior of the premises, staff and price level. But it is impossible to create a hotel “for everyone”, therefore, for a successful business, you have to correctly position your property on the hotel services market.

Defining your target audience helps to choose the most perspective and competitive option in terms of sales and market conquest, as well as the most effective marketing tools.

To determine the target audience of the hotel correctly, you should consider:

1. Hotel location. This is the most important factor, which is also impossible to change. The location in the resort area, near the sea or famous sights, directly indicates that the most likely potential customers of the hotel are tourists and vacationers. If the hotel is located in a large city, industrial zone or close to major transportation nodes, you should pay attention to business travelers. For country houses and cottages it makes sense to offer services to families with children and just to those who like quiet relaxing outdoor recreation. For the point near the large tracks, the most popular option is modest motels, for overnight and breakfast.
   However, such an obvious approach is not always reasonable, if consider the factor described in the next paragraph of the list.
2. Nearest competitors. Analyze what types of hotels are already around. Perhaps, near this sanatorium the ordinary hostel with low prices for the working people is required? And in this noisy city on every corner there are many ordinary business hotels, but there is no cozy place to relax on the weekend? Become special, and you will immediately receive a lot of grateful customers at your hotel.
3. Material capabilities and restrictions. Yes, a lot of services can be added later, but some things will not be possible to implements for this place at all. For example, if you don’t plan to open a restaurant or a cafe at the hotel independently, and there are no suitable partners around with whom you could cooperate, then opening a high-level hotel for corporate clients or a holiday house will obviously be reckless. It’s better to limit yourself only to accommodation services: hostel, mini-hotel. Or if for some reason you don’t want to mess with cashless payments, noisy guests, or you only have single rooms, then you should not focus on corporate clients, tourists or families. It’s better to focus on the segment of the target audience who are more suited to your conditions.
4. Plans for the future. The most difficult moment, because you need to consider both your real opportunities now and perspectives for the future. For example, if the hotel already has an inexpensive and affordable image, it will be practically impossible for it to change it into the prestigious one without a large-scale rebranding campaign. Therefore, it’s better to immediately understand what it’s worth to “swing at”, and to think out the sequence of gradual development without changing the target audience of the hotel.

The more accurately you define your segment, the more successful will be the advertising campaigns and “hit the mark” in servicing. On the other hand, way too much narrowing of the target audience can lead to the fact that these type of customers will simply not be enough to fill the existing hotel room stock, even if all of them will use exclusively your services. The balance in this matter between accuracy and quantity is the key to success. It may also be worthwhile to differentiate hotel services depending on the season or other parameters, or to make several different room types with different conditions and offer various options for different segments of the target audience.

Hotel room types will be discussed more detailed later in a separate article, expect for announcements.

And not the last question is profitability. Your hotel may be completely full, but the income will be very small if the selected target audience is willing to pay at prices much lower than that would suit you.

In more detail the the profitability of the hotel, calculation and evaluation will be discussed later in a separate article, expect for announcements.

Well, the potential hotel customers are identified, classified and fully understood. Where do you find them eventually, and how to attract them effectively?

Read more about this in our article How to attract more clients to a hotel

Expect for more useful information next week – now about the promotion of the hotel on social networks.