Hotels are incredibly versatile in terms of applying various marketing tools; customers pay attention to every detail while staying at the hotel. That is why, they are often looking for rich marketing experiences and sort of tell the hotel: ‘sell me something', ‘make me want that experience' etc.

Despite the popularity of the social media marketing and online marketing tools, hotel premises still remain the most important marketing tool for selling hotel facilities to the existing customers and to new arrivals. Therefore, hoteliers should look at what they have currently at hand and explore the possibilities of using their premises for selling their hotel experience, increase sales of extra services, and improve their brand image.

Using their hotel premises as marketing tools is easy and highly efficient due to low costs and high flexibility of this instrument of hotel marketing. Flexibility allows changing content as often as you want and making the advertising appearance capable of enhancing the assessment of the target markets.

What can hotels sell in their elevators? Spa, restaurants, sports facilities. Hotels can also upsell rooms by describing luxury bedrooms with sweet sleepers and a great jacuzzi. Elevators are a great instrument of personality marketing where you can introduce your great chef de cuisine or a sommelier who has just received a wine award from some reputed organization.

Finally, the effectiveness of the elevator as marketing tool is rather high as people normally have nothing to do during their lifts, so they either look in the mirror or read the information. Marketers should always remember that the amount of information should be short enough and precise.

The advertisement has to be full of high-quality imaging to attract attention and have the visual ‘promise' of a great experience. Also, contact information about ‘where?' and ‘how?' should always be present at the bottom of the ad.

Generally, elevator is a great selling point for the hotel. By updating information seasonally and ensuring the quality of the ads, the sales increase always follows such well-thought marketing strategy.

Mila Petruk is a hospitality consultant and a founder of Milina Outsourcing Management (MOM) which provides consulting to hotels and restaurants including mystery guest audit, temporary staffing and training support. Being a hospitality industry enthusiast, Mila has a global insight into the developing trends of hotel and restaurant business all over the world. Having a rich international hotel work experience and an MBA from one of the reputed Swiss hotel schools, she has applied it in almost every hotel department she had worked. Contact Mila at mila.petruk@gmail.com.