Research Hotel Wedding Enquiries

If the website of a small independent luxury hotel is performing as it should, the number of wedding enquiries being received will be very significant. If there is a download facility on the website that enables people to download an information pack, there is the opportunity to request a minimum amount of information before the download is available. Name, email address and phone number should be mandatory and other detail such as wedding date, numbers, etc., should be optional. The hotel is then in a position to follow up the enquiries.

As the owner of a small luxury hotel, you should be receiving copies of all the wedding enquiries as they come in. You will have also perhaps appointed a wedding planner whose job it is to follow up each enquiry and report back to you. Once an enquiry has been converted to a show-round, the enquirer must be considered a ‘hot’ prospect. If a quotation is then submitted and your hotel is not successful, you need to know why, and I’m afraid the wedding planner might not be the person to find out. She will have followed up by phone and email, often without response.

We receive, at Alberghi Marketing, copies of the wedding planners’ reports and, if a sufficient percentage of enquiries have been converted to show-rounds, we call all the ‘hot’ prospects. It’s astonishing how readily they’re prepared to speak to us when hotel wedding planners might not have succeeded in even making contact. Most importantly, we are often provided with a wealth of information, including the name of the chosen wedding venue, why it was preferred to the client hotel, what specifically were the negative points of the client hotel, e.g. rooms too small, overnight rates too high, menus too complicated, etc.

The results are always very revealing and hugely useful, often leading to updates in the wedding information pack, the pricing policy (not necessarily a reduction!), enquiry handling, and so on. As with all things marketing, you need to be able to monitor performance and in the case of wedding enquiries, that means telephone research.

Tags: Improve wedding bookings, Luxury hotel weddings