|
|
|
By Thomas Lattin, contributing editor In Florida, a five-star hotel decides to stop providing fresh cookies in each guestroom, but keeps the one amenity that its competitors can't match: hot tubs in every room. In Mexico, a resort installs an Olympic-size pool instead of the individual villa pools it had originally planned. A U.S. hotel chain creates a new niche-market lodging product with minimum f&b facilities. These three examples have a common element: A management decision was made on the basis of "consumer conjoint research" -- that is, research in which a computer asks successive questions based on consumer responses. This kind of research tool is new to the hospitality industry, but eventually could replace lodging professionals' frequently misquided methods for determining what guests want.
Keeping Up With Changes Times change, markets change, needs change, and today's hotel owner or developer must keep up with what seems to be a monthly revolution in consumer tastes. Fortunately, help is here in the form of new, sophisticated consumer-research products that utilize the power of the computer. These software programs are designed to determine what hotel guests really want and are willing to pay for. A major element in the research involves "trade-off" testing: What will customers give up to gain something else? Will they pay $2 a night to have a hair dryer on the wall, or would they prefer a free breakfast or turndown service? The use of consumer research is relatively new to the hospitality industry. Two major chains pioneered the use of the conjoint research technique to create new brands and modernize existing products. With microcomputer technology, it is now sufficiently economical and flexible that even smaller operators and developers can use it. Consumer research is important because the lodging industry is so competitive. As retailers have always done, today's hotel operators are targeting their marketing efforts at specific customer segments. Traditionally, hotel marketing meant a salesperson calling on local accounts, with sales trips to exotic places for industry conventions and trade shows -- marketing, in effect, was a sales function. today, however, hotels are spending the time, money and resources to talk to their customers and learn who they are, where they are and, most important, what they really want in a hotel. In the past, many hoteliers made assumptions as to what their guests wanted. Now they are talking to the customer and finding that what he or she wants is really quite different from those assumptions. This kind of consumer research can be applied in various ways:
An advantage to this kind of research is that it eliminates bias on the part of the interviewer. The guest answers a few basic preference questions; the software then comes up with additional questions based on those answers. It's crucial to qualify the target consumers. If management wants to attract business travelers, interviewees can be qualified on the basis of trip frequency. Leisure travelers can be screened by age, gender, preferences and so forth. It's like having an electronic focus group. It's not magic, of course -- you can't just put 100 consumers in front of 100 computers and come up with 100 percent occupancy. but consumer research, properly applied, can provide a clear marketing edge. In shopping for this kind of tool, keep these points in mind:
There is a limit to what this kind of research can do. But if you're looking for a competitive edge, this maybe just the ticket. Hotel & Motel Management / Jan. 15, 1990
 Mark
E. Dixon
757 Upper Gulph Road
Wayne, PA 19087-2022
USA
610-971-0649
dixon_mark@verizon.net
|
