VANCOUVER, British Columbia—The iconic Fairmont Hotel Vancouver may have turned 75 years old last week, but the grand railway property is on the cutting edge of social media.
“We’re doing some interesting things that you wouldn’t expect at an historical property,” said Sine Scott, who for four years has overseen social media for Fairmont’s Western Canada hotels.
A sizeable portion of the hotel’s guests are using social media on their mobile devices and sharing their stories while on property. The hotel now monitors Facebook, Twitter and other channels around the clock. “We had some fun success when we started 24/7 monitoring,” she said.
The efforts allow the hotel to surprise customers in a positive way, improve their experience and boost satisfaction, Scott said. One example: A guest mentioned on Twitter that she was going to the Hotel Vancouver for her 50th birthday and that she adored the hotel’s pet Labrador dogs, Scott said.
“She wanted to see the dogs, and we were able to pick up on that,” she said. “We had one of our dogs go up to her room for a visit. We would not have known that had we not been monitoring social media.”
What role does social media play in running this and other Fairmont hotels?
“It fits into a few categories,” Scott said. “First and foremost, it helps with operations and interacting with our guest. That’s what we do day to day. That’s our business.”
A year of #HotelVancouver75
The hotel’s team also uses social media to create a narrative that people can watch and participate in over the course of months.
In honor of the hotel’s birthday, for instance, Scott and her team created the special hashtag #HotelVancouver75 to use for all of 2014 to promote awareness of the birthday and track use.
“We wanted to try something special so we could measure all the interaction,” she said. The Fairmont brand was left out of the name to keep it from being too long.
The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver used the hashtag to ask followers and fans to share memories and photographs over time, for instance. Photographs of the historic hotel are usually quite popular, especially on Facebook, Scott said.
And last week, the hotel kicked off another campaign, “75 surprises,” to coincide with its actual birthday. The initiative was designed to build a database of local customers and prospective customers.
As the name implies, property staff will give away 75 surprises for the entire year. The gifts range in value, with the highest-end surprises being a one-night stay with a restaurant gift certificate.
To support the social media campaign element, the team also has planned other surprising tactics to boost satisfaction or promote something.
“We are also going to do surprises for guests in the hotel,” Scott said. “They’re not social related, but we hope guests will take photos and share them on social networks.”
A guest with social media savvy who appreciates the unexpected—for instance, a free upgrade to one of the Hotel Vancouver’s suites—might want to trumpet his or her victory on Facebook or Twitter.
“That will be very organic,” Scott said.
A key lesson learned
One of the most important lessons Scott and her team have learned over the past few months is that raising awareness of posts on Facebook requires advertising.
Facebook is the hotel’s largest account, with nearly 8,000 fans.
“We have noticed over the last few months—probably five or six months—that we have to put advertising dollars behind our campaigns to get exposure,” she said. “When other properties were doing similar posts, they were not getting as many entries or pickups because they didn’t have as many ads to support that.”
The team reaches approximately 2% of their fans without a Facebook ad, while Facebook had determined that figure to be 6%, Scott said.
They have a budget in the “hundreds” of dollars per month to spend on Facebook. They use it to promote contests but also destination- or hotel-related information or offers.
Instead of spending money to try to elevate less-popular posts, they spend it on promoting posts that have clearly struck a chord, she said.
“The reason we do that is we want to provide quality content to our fans. There is so much content out there right now,” she said. “You can tell pretty quickly whether it's resonating.”
What about the sales function?
Hoteliers who don’t understand the importance of social media often ask, “How does social media help my sales?”
Scott said sales is not the primary function, but rather something that will naturally follow in time as the hotel engages customers in the online conversation. Driving sales is not the primary business objective.
At this historic hotel, Fairmont uses social media as a tool to amplify promotions and new services or offers on the premises that ultimately could drive sales.
“It’s very much a conversation and not as much a purchasing and buying tool,” Scott said. “But we do track revenue from offers we put out there.”
Asked whether revenue derived from social media has evolved over the past four years, Scott said, “It has been changing. We are starting to see some revenue come from social—but not a good portion. It’s about 1% of Fairmont.com’s bookings.”
It could be more, however, because at this point Fairmont primarily tracks room revenue as opposed to food and beverage.
“We have not done a great job of tracking food and beverage,” she said. “We have a good local following on social media, so maybe it is more but we haven’t set up great tracking on that.”