As hotel marketers are ready to welcome 2021 with a reset attitude, now is the time for each hotel to finalize its yearly marketing plan. There are 5 major hotel marketing trends and new tools that should be taken into consideration.

Google Travel Insights

Google launched its Travel Insights platform, featuring a series of tools which will facilitate hoteliers to measure travel demand. These tools have initially been enrolled for the APAC market, where travel recovery is already showing promise. The new tools are divided in Destination Insights and Hotel Insights. They will be available to any Google business user, including non-advertisers, through the Travel Insights platform.

Guest segmentation according to vaccination roll-out

Hotels to spot and target potential travelers who will get the vaccine first. These would be, for example, senior citizens and front-line workers, and could be addressed with “You deserve it” campaigns which prompt them to travel again. The campaigns could further be coupled with insights on what to explore in the destination or resort credits and exclusive offers.

Instagram Travel Guides

In 2020 Instagram launched its new Guides feature. This allowed creators to share tips, resources, and other content on their user profiles. This feature was initially available only to specific creator groups who focused on well-being and mental health content. However, the Guides feature is now accessible to all users and embraces new content types. A major content focus for the new feature is Travel Guides, which can include longer form content like images and videos and resemble a blog post. Guides can be added to any user’s stories or direct messages.  Hence the presence of a hotel or destination in a popular guide can have vast impact.

Brand Lift

Brand lift studies can be run in conjunction with hotel in-stream and bumper ads on YouTube. They are a very useful tool for hotel marketers to measure the impact that YouTube ads have on brand awareness, as well as on travellers’ perceptions throughout their consumer journey.

Retro design

Old is modern again; the funky aesthetics of the 60’s and 70’s are back. They can be applied, for instance, to brand fonts. Hotel marketers can consider using such fonts in email and marketing campaigns to instil freshness and vivacity.

Each of the above tools can be used individually, but it is even more advisable to consider them all together, as integral parts of a consolidated marketing plan which will aim at revenue maximisation.