“There’s no doubt that the trading environment has changed significantly over the year. Now more than ever our hotel owners want our scale, strength and expertise to help them stay competitive and get their fair share of the demand out there. Our guests want even better value for money. And we have to deliver.”
Tom Seddon
Chief Marketing Officer
Our marketing has two main aims. One is to get our guests to love our hotels. The other is to drive revenue to hotels for our owners. And both go hand in hand, says Tom Seddon.
Passion and performance
We want our guests to love our hotels and to come back time and time again. How do we do that? We have to ensure guests choose one of our seven brands in the first place, that they can make their booking quickly and easily and they have a great experience every time they stay.
Creating a great guest experience is something you have to work at – continually. The best example of this is Holiday Inn, which is undergoing the biggest relaunch the hospitality industry has ever seen. At the end of 2008 we had almost 300 relaunched hotels where people can really see and feel the difference for themselves. More hotels are relaunching every day and guests are telling us they love the change. Even in this more difficult economic climate we’ve been signing a raft of new hotels to the brand. We signed 419 Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express hotels in the past 12 months and owners have told us that the brand relaunch was a big reason why they chose us, which is evidence that we’re doing it right.
An owner signs up to develop a hotel under one of our brands because they’re convinced we’ll deliver them more guests than any other hotel company. It’s our powerful ‘system’ that helps us do that.
How to spend a billion
Our sales teams, reservations channels and loyalty programme are the three main elements of what’s often referred to as the IHG system. It’s this system that drives our guest bookings. The system fund, made up of contributions from all our owners, totals almost $1 billion, which we spend on behalf of our owners every year. It goes on our call centres, websites, sales teams, advertising and brand development. We now directly generate almost 60 per cent of room nights at our hotels through our system.
Customers can make bookings through:
- The Internet – 13 local language websites and www.ihg.com is now the most popular hotel website
- Our reservations centres – 12 call centres around the world that take reservations in 15 languages
- Travel agents and online travel companies. Guests can book to stay in one of our hotels through hundreds of travel websites around the globe
Priority Club Rewards (PCR) is an amazingly powerful tool and had a big year in 2008. It celebrated its 25th anniversary, welcomed its 40 millionth member and retained its position as the world’s largest hotel loyalty programme. It gives us a great database of customers who are more loyal than the average guest and spend more money with us when they stay.
We also have more than 300 sales people dedicated to developing relationships with corporate customers – big companies around the world, airlines that place their crews, travel agents, and people who organise large business events. Plus we have 8,000 hotel-based sales people to drive local business.
A large part of our marketing budget is spent in the online world, because guests have drastically changed how they go about finding themselves a hotel room. Over 70 per cent of bookings now have an online element, such as searching or booking. We have dedicated teams focusing on how we make the most of our web presence. We’re the largest advertiser with Google in the industry, the IHG website is the most visited hotel website and it’s the only hotel site among the top 30 travel-related websites in the world.
Our stories
How's this for climbing into bed?
It’s not so much the height of comfort as comfort at a great height. A woman in pyjamas abseiled down the Sony building in downtown Tokyo to rest on a Crowne Plaza bed perched half way up – watched by crowds of onlookers from the street.
The event last summer was amazingly successful, garnering press coverage all around the world. The aim was to publicise the way the ANA Crowne Plaza brand, a joint venture between IHG and Japanese airline ANA, helps guests get a good night’s sleep. According to a survey commissioned by ANA Crowne Plaza, sleep deprivation is becoming a national problem in Japan, with four out of five business people suffering from sleep problems.
Height of achievement
In Greater China we now have more than one million members of Priority Club Rewards. To mark the milestone we built a 10-metre-high mock hotel made out of photographs – and put it on show on one of the main streets of Shanghai. On the weekend of 15-16 November, the unique model was added to the skyscrapers along Huaihai Road. The ‘hotel’ was modelled on the InterContinental Nanjing, which is due to open in 2009.
The concierge has the key
Chief concierges at InterContinental hotels around the world have become the stars of 140 destination videos, in which they take viewers on a tour of their local area and share tips on what to see and do. The videos are now on YouTube and our website and have featured on in-flight televisions across the globe. The idea for the videos came out of our Concierge Programme, which launched in 2006 to highlight that the concierge is not only the face of InterContinental, they are also at the heart of the guest experience.
After a lifetime of loyalty our scheme gets its own reward
You might think that in order to be given a lifetime achievement award you must at least be human. But at a prestigious travel industry gathering that honour was instead bestowed on Priority Club Rewards. The Annual Freddie Awards, held in Arizona, USA, presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to mark our loyalty programme’s 25th anniversary. The awards are organised by InsideFlyer, an American magazine for frequent flyers.
Priority Club Rewards was not only the hotel industry’s first loyalty programme; it is also the largest and fastest-growing. Some 42 million members worldwide can now exchange points for a range of products and services.
Relaunched Holiday Inn hotels are strikingly different
As guests arrive at a new-style Holiday Inn they can’t help noticing the more modern signage, and since most of them arrive in the evening they will be struck by the way the outside of the building is awash with coloured light.
There are plants and benches by the entrance to make the hotel feel more welcoming, a front desk that is less cluttered and more professional, a special scent that’s dispersed through the lobby, and music playing in the background. When guests get to their bedroom they find upgraded bedding, clean, crisp white sheets, their choice of pillows, and better bathrooms with new showerheads and great-smelling soaps and lotions. We focused on upgrading the fundamental things that matter most to guests – and guests are noticing.
