Question

Movement restriction imposed by various governments to mitigate the spread of covid 19 in the form of social distancing and closure of national and international borders and airports has brought a number business organizations to a standstill, leading to the decline in growth and market share, especially the hard hit tourism and hospitality industries. Assume that you are the manger of IDISAM Hotel LTD,which holds the largest share in the hospitality industry, but now on the verge of collapsing due to Covid 19 pandamic.

Required: Supporting your answers with specific examples and justifications, propose corporate or grant strategies that the company can use to deal with the situation at hand.

Answer 1

As a manager of the IDISAM group going through this current situation of crisis, my first plan of action would include the following :

• Optimizing the current marketing spending of the Hotel and increasing the spend in Digital Marketing: Most hotels would try to cut their marketing spending during this time of crisis and this unprecedented time, however, research has shown that there exists a strong correlation between the marketing spend and the overall performance in the times of crisis. My role as a manager would be to not cut the marketing spend but rather to optimize it to suit the target audience i.e the people who are willing to make the bookings in the present or the future. Optimized marketing spend which incorporates digital marketing will not only help bring in cash flows in the present but also set a stage for a potential revenue source in the coming future when things start going back to normal. The idea is simple, even though nobody is making bookings still occupy a space in the minds of the customer and since most of the people will be at home spending their majority time on their smartphones and PC's, Laptops, spending on digital marketing campaigns will make sense. As a manager, I will also be responsible to devise clever marketing campaigns which resonate with the minds fo the customers during this current time.
• Communication: As a manager, I need to persuade the customer to refrain from making the cancellations. And in addition to that, I need to drive them to book further plans in order to keep the cash flow coming in. The key to this seemingly impossible task is communication. We need to communicate with the customer to ensure that proper safety and precautionary measures are being taken by our hotel. We need to communicate to them how important the customer is to us. The team can use many ways like email, SMS, calls, website notifications ensuring the same. Engagement with the customer is really crucial for any business and especially for the hospitality industry.  Many hotels such as the Pacific group have been able to retain a major chunk of their customers by this continually engaging with their customer's on a regular basis via various social media platforms, even if a customer is not willing to stay as of now, they do oblige by postponing their bookings to the future and not making a cancellation. For us, the prime focus should be to somehow maintain the cash flow equilibrium.
• Growth Strategy: The hotel needs to devise an appropriate pricing and cancellation strategy in order to ensure its revenues and cash flows. The hotel can have a cancellation policy according to the price setting. With the right price and offering flexible cancellations on the booking, we are providing an assurance to the customer to make their bookings as they will ben more confident to make the booking by looking at the cancellation policy and thus driving our revenue in the meantime. Customer Confidence can help drive bookings. The hotel can also offer flexible re-booking policies to reduce the overall number fo cancellations and further increase customer confidence by providng them with a rebooking policy while they make their booking.   
• Data and Web analytics : The hotel industry has access to the data of their customers who have visited or have been visiting their websites or who have stayed at their hotels in the past , using this data and many web analytics tools the hotel can observe the behavior of the customer during this time and help themselves strategize accordingly. Using the web analytics tools the hotel can generate leads and paln to convert them or even transform the cold leads into hot leads. On such web technique is the Retargeting technique. Retargeting is an effective way of ensuring customer conversion, retargeting is a remarketing kind of campaign wherein the hotel website can help the customer keep attracted to the website even though they have bounced from the page. It can be an efficient technique in order to capture more customers and increasing the total number of conversions. Hotels like Discovery Hotels have been using the technique of retargeting in order to aggressively remarket themselves.