In this episode of Suite Spot, we prepare hoteliers for the upcoming holiday season, which is historically slower for hotels. Ryan counts down the top 5 ways to market your hotel during this year’s winter months. We tackle everything from traditional advertising avenues to best practices on setting your hotel up for future success. This list will help you build a strategy to make sure that you are getting the most revenue out of your business in a time of low occupancy and ADR. We would love to hear your feedback to our list. What are you doing to optimize your hotel’s revenue during the “off-season”? You can reach us by either calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at info@travelmediagroup.com. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending and hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone and thank you for listening. Happy holidays. This is your host, Ryan Ryan Embree, and you are listening to the Suite Spot. This is episode 15. We've got a great episode for you today, very excited about it. We felt that, uh, during this holiday season, unless you are in a winter destination, we know that this is typically considered in the industry a off season or slower period. You're starting to see occupancy maybe dipped down a little bit, causing her to come down as well. And hoteliers are constantly looking for ways to put heads in beds and fill their rooms during this slower winter season. And the spirit of that, we are going to have a top five list today of the ways that you can market your hotel during the slow off season. So let's go ahead and jump right in. Ryan Embree: We're going to start with number five and number five is for hoteliers to start thinking about traditional advertising avenues, some more out of the box, ways to market your hotel. For example, coupons or billboards, you know, 60 percent of travelers during the holiday seasons are searching for hotels and making booking decisions during the holiday season. These could be a travelers that are going on road trips across the country so they might not have a particular plan or do the research that they would for maybe a summer vacation they're making on the spot decisions and for those travelers we know best that places like coupon guides or billboards could really sway a last minute traveler to make that booking decision at your particular property. In saying that, if this is your first time implementing some of these traditional avenues of advertising, I would caution you to really have a system in place to be able to track your ROI. So if you're a have coupons out there, you know, track the number of calls that you're getting from the coupon. Collect those coupons at the front desk. Put in a rate code in your pms to make sure that you're getting a solid ROI. So you can know moving forward, whether that is a channel to market your hotel moving forward. Ryan Embree: So number four on our list of top ways to market your hotel in the slow season is to grow your guest database and the point of this would be to grow the information about your guests through email marketing so that you can really connect with those guests in the future. So if you haven't already, start collecting emails from your guests when they first arrive at your property. You can. You can use this information for feedback for their stay, but also in the future, in the slower times, like the winter months. You can reach out to them for holiday events or stay again and save packages. We know that a majority of of bookings are now coming from Ota or third party sites. Ryan Embree: Now that you've had the opportunity to host these guests,