NEW YORK — Engagement with customers is a foundation of meaningful hotel industry recovery, particularly necessary as business travel and international travel is forecast to pick up in 2022.
For Dorothy Dowling, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for BWH Hotel Group, communicating the message of care and safety that hotels cultivated in 2021 will play a big role in customer engagement in 2022.
“Loyalty is for sure the most important marketing asset for Best Western,” she said in a video interview with Hotel News Now during the 2021 NYU International Hotel Industry Investment Conference. “We’re all in the business of re-earning that customer loyalty, and helping them understand our product offerings and how we’re going to take care of them.”
She said that for the brands under the BWH Hotel Group umbrella, it’s about heading into 2022 ready to communicate the company’s commitment to its guests.
“It’s about us demonstrating our capabilities in terms of all the caring capabilities we have to deliver to the customer through our cleaning protocols, sharing wellness of the employees … and taking care of our own employees,” she said.
Trends Driving Hotel Loyalty
Beyond communicating care and cleanliness, Dowling said other current trends are informing the future of hotel loyalty.
“One is that everyone is doubling down on [loyalty] because a lot of it is in the change in the digital marketplace … and having the [customer relationship management] capability to be able to speak to our audiences in terms of first-party data,” she said.
“And it’s really [about] engaging with those customers in a more personalized way to understand their needs and be able to deliver on those needs in a more personalized offering.”
Loyalty members drove approximately 80% of the company’s direct online bookings during the pandemic, Dowling said, and that volume didn’t drop off during the last year. For that reason, she said the company must “make sure we’re bringing the value to them in 2022 and beyond.”
Shifting Sales and Marketing Roles
Dowling said that as the hotel industry reinvents itself throughout the pandemic and aftermath, leadership roles may shift, and sales and marketing professionals may need to adapt.
She said when she thinks about the future of those in commercial roles in the industry, “it’s understanding a lot of the traditional ways that we went to market, but layering in a lot of the digital competencies, the revenue management competencies and really being a good student of the game.”
Dowling received the 2021 Stephen W. Brener Silver Plate Award at the conference, and she commented on the leadership qualities she has cultivated over the years that have served her in her field.
She cited her view of “relationships as the currency of life” as one tenet that has defined her leadership, particularly over the last year and a half. She also pointed to the value of bringing humanity to leadership.
“When I think about relationships and what COVID has taught us in terms of empathy, I look at a lot of those feminine qualities that are going to power our future differently,” she said. “When I think about the change coming out of COVID, it really is this leadership of empathy and bringing our whole selves to work.”
Company Future
BWH Hotel Group in December brought Larry Cuculic into the role of CEO and president, following longtime President and CEO David Kong’s retirement.
“We are extremely excited about 2022, because we see it as a year of growth,” she said. “Having a new CEO at the top, reformulating our team, really realigning in terms of how to power our hotels and really optimize the performance in 2022 is especially exciting.”
For HNN’s full interview with BWH Hotel Group’s Dorothy Dowling, watch the video above.