Can five star hotels afford to be superior? Some brands just seem to consider themselves above adopting a human and personalised form of communications. I never got anywhere with Orient Express, beyond providing a seminar on social media. I was pompously rebuffed by a marketing exec. from Pride of Britain. And Leading Hotels of the World are currently showing themselves to be utterly clueless in the art of contemporary corporate communications. The company’s immediate problem lies with a promotion launched to celebrate the group’s 80th birthday. It hit the rocks for all sorts of reasons and online commentators have been quick to criticise the way LHW have handled the subsequent mess.
One of these is Alex Bainbridge who has republished the CEO’s apology and skewered the thing like a frog on the dissection table. Along the way, he points out that a video apology would have been a good deal more effective than this rather wooden missive and rightly cites the now famous JetBlue effort as a classic apology of its kind.
We are big fans of using video to get your message across but it doesn’t suit everyone and even if Leading Hotels were reluctant to run VT, this situation shows that if you want to play in the new media landscape, you should adapt your communications approach to avoid the new and very public potholes.
Lesson number one is surely that it is smart to get into some sort of continuous and authentic conversation with the market right now and on as many different fronts as possible. That way you build up relationship collateral in case things go belly-up later.
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clueless in the art of contemporary
corporate communications
for travel guide
For me big hotels doesn't mean Five Star Hotels but big hotels means that serve their guests as if they are their bosses.
Big Hotels are the ones that charge value for money irrispective of that star rating.
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