Hospitality Marketing

Introduction

By identifying, predicting and satisfying the needs and wants of guests, hotel enterprises seek to design an attractive hotel product, broaden sales channels, and make promotion programs more extensive, while setting a competitive price for their product.

Hotel enterprises also need to make use of modern marketing concepts, which are founded also on employee satisfaction as a primary precondition to achieving guest satisfaction. When successfully applied, internal marketing, which focuses on employees and employee satisfaction, is reflected in the quality of the employee-guest relationship. The quality of services rendered is enhanced by the effective interaction of employees and guests. This ensures both the satisfaction of current guests and an increase in the number of new guests.

Discussion and Analysis

Marketing play a role n the hospitality industry

In selling a hotel product, a marketing strategy is put into action by selecting and analyzing a hotel facility's target market and by formulating a marketing mix for the product which will satisfy the needs and wants of target groups.

The selection of a target market is crucial to successful marketing in the hotel industry. Namely, the tourist market has the nature of a diverse market because potential tourists have different wants, needs, demands and possibilities. This makes it necessary for hotel enterprises to choose the market segmentation technique, which helps them to meet the demands of selected market segments as fully as possible. After hotel marketers have identified segments on the tourism market by using a variety of activities, methods and techniques, a decision is made as to which segments will be targeted. A detailed program of the hotel product's marketing mix, adjusted to the selected segments of the target tourist market, is then elaborated. Hence, identifying and analyzing the target market is a fundamental precondition to developing a well formulated marketed mix.

In the hotel industry, the marketing mix - "a combination of different methods a hotel facility uses to achieve, through marketing, the best possible sales of its product on the market"2 - consists of four basic elements:

A hotel product

The price of the hotel product

The promotion of the hotel product, and

The distribution of the hotel product.

Hotel product. This is the primary element of the marketing mix, with the other elements adjusting to it depending on the given situation. The hotel product represents a set of tangible and intangible elements used to satisfy the needs and wants of guests.

Costs

Costs clearly influence the price of a hotel product, and they determine the bottom price below which a hotel enterprise will begin to lose money. Prices in the hotel industry should not, however, be overly cost-oriented, and they should not be increased to cover costs. Instead, they should be based on demand and adjusted to changes on the market.

Rivals also play an important role in pricing. A hotel enterprise will often be compelled to change its pricing policy as a result of changes in the prices of rivals. Considering how fierce competition is today, it must be analyzed and monitored. This means that prices, once fixed, cannot be allowed ...