These days you read a lot about Millennials. Millennials are born between the early 1980’s and the mid-1990’s and make a very interesting target group for you as a hotelier. Why? Because Millennials are young professionals, adventurous and both willing and able to travel. They are very into social media and sharing the fun things they get up to in their free time. And that’s where your opportunities as a hotelier come in: you can make sure your hotel, apartment or B&B gets featured on their feeds so it will be shared by many and liked by even more. With this, you can build a strong online community for your hotel, apartment or B&B. As Millennials – and every other customer for that matter – value these word-of-digital-mouth recommendations and see this as their number one source of reliable information your online reputation matters.
So the question is: how can YOU attract these Millennials to your hotel, apartment or B&B?
Make booking easy
Perhaps the most important recommendation for attracting Millennials to your hotel, apartment or B&B: make sure booking your rooms is easy. It might sound like an open door but you’ll be surprised at what a quick-win this will actually proof to be. Make sure your hotel is listed on the big, famous online travel agency sites such as Booking.com and make direct bookings on your own website available. This needs to be possible instantly. No contact forms, no telephone numbers or e-mail addresses with the promise to get back to them. They will not fill out your form. They will skip your hotel, apartment or B&B and go to the next one.
How to do all this when there’s already so much on your plate? Or how to do all this when you’re not technical at all? Get a reliable property management system, booking engine and channel manager. These systems will help you to take control over your bookings and manage everything that’s happening in your hotel, apartment or B&B. Need a suggestion? RoomRaccoon’s all-in-one hotel software solution provides you with all these systems in one, is easy-to-use and very affordable.
Visuals are key
A key feature of Millennials – as touched on before – is that they are highly active online. If possible, 24/7 and without a pause. So being visible online with your hotel, apartment or B&B is absolute key. Make sure your website is attractive as Millennials are extremely viable for “instagrammable” content. With this, I mean not only to focus on the functionalities of your room but on the atmosphere. Everybody knows a hotel room has a bed but Millennials want to know how that bed looks like. Focus on the pictures. Millennials are extremely visual so if your pictures are dull or do not represent your facility in the best way possible you already lost their interest before they even had a proper look at your room(s).
It’s the little things
Focus on the complementary bottle of champagne, fresh roses in the room and chocolates on the cushions. As clichéd as it may sound, these are the things Millennials look for – as they make for nice pictures they can post on their Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook -and might be the very good reason they choose your hotel, apartment or B&B instead of your competitor’s. There’s also another site to this: as stated before Millennials are very visual and online. This results in them more inclined to post a review or photo report online. As we all know people are quicker to post a review about a negative experience than about a positive one, Millennials will not hold back to show everybody the curtains in their room had a hole in them, the bathtub was dirty or if the doorknob was falling off. These are also the little things that count. Make sure your rooms are in perfect shape for every visitor, as you – and the whole Internet with you – will definitely know about it when it was not!
Please feel free to share your experiences, tips and ideas on how to attract Millennials to your hotel, apartment or B&B below. What works for you? Let’s share knowledge!
