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Hotel/Motel Directory Advertisement

Dman

New member
Has anybody done Hotel/Motel directory advertising? I have 15 of them just outside my delivery area…Round trip to get to them maybe 20-25 min. I am in a medium size coastal town sit back about 8 miles from the beach. The hotels are not really beach going hotels, just business and town tourist. My shop (DELCO) has been a little slower lately.

I had a salesman come to me to see if I wanted to advertise in 9 of the Hotel/Motel directories having 8-10 pages total, about 900 rooms for one year and option to renew. There are probably 6 shops within that area that he passed up because he wanted to see us in there. He says he picks up something from our shop each time he comes into town and he thinks our food is great and wanted us in them. I wouldn’t be an exclusive but the I am the only pizza shop in the directory. He wanted to sell me a 1/4 page but after finding out no other shops are in the directory and nobody is doing the keycards. I decided to do full page that he didn’t even try to sell to me and put menu in the ad. Is directory advertising worth it…what are some pros and cons…what can I expect?

Thanks for any imput,
Dman
 
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Dman:
I had a salesman come to me to see if I wanted to advertise in 9 of the Hotel/Motel directories … There are probably 6 shops within that area that he passed up because he wanted to see us in there. He says he picks up something from our shop each time he comes into town and he thinks our food is great and wanted us in them.
Call my a cynic but I think the words “I had a salesman come to me to see if I wanted to advertise” says it all! These brochures are notoriously hard to fill from a sales perspective and I would be really surprised if it wasn’t more a case of he’s been knocked back 7 or 8 times on nearby shops.

One of the big problems with putting your menu in one of these is that your stuck with those menu prices for a whole year. Better to have a generic menu with no prices and ‘call us for a great deal’.

The other issue is that being in a 8-10 brochure isn’t that good at getting your name noticed. Perhaps some other guys will comment on the effectiveness of these. I think a better bet is to go into each of the hotels with some menu’s offer a staff discount/free food and try and start a relationship with that place and see if they will recommend your shop. I think you would get more business from getting one good motel relationship that simply having an advert in a brochure which may or may not even make it into the hotel room.

There have been quite a few posts about getting business from hotels/motels and certainly brochures has never figured that high in the suggestions that I can recall.
 
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Being in a resort, I do a lot of these. I take a half page and use it to print an abbreviated menu. I also work the front desks with free pizza and discounts for the staff.

The issues to me are:
  1. How many other pizza delivery places are there?
  2. How far away are they. (I would not do it in a place that was more than 10 minutes away and would hesitate to do it over 5 minutes away)
  3. Pricing. NONE of these outfits have fixed prices. The first quoted rates are often more than double what you can get in for. For the size ad that I do, I think that basically a $1 per room is about right to be in one of these… so a guide that is placed in 500 rooms is worth about $500 per year.
 
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I’ve never done the directories, but if you are anywhere on the east coast dealing with anyone selling hotel advertising, make sure he’s not named Mark Walters or representing a company called National Hotel Guides. He’s a scumbag theif who has ripped off MANY pizza shops from Ohio to Florida, to Virginia and everywhere in between. Mostly he sells TV channel stands and key cards but as he is generating publicity for ripping people off selling these, maybe he’ll try selling something else. For what its worth, the key cards and the TV channel stands I got from other companies work great.
 
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my 2 cents

I was able to increase my sales by 25 percent in one year…
I went around to each and everyone and pushed for my menu to be placed in the room.
out of 16, One told me that they can not do anything because they have a full service restuarant on premise.
Eight had told me that they would keep my menu behind the desk,
I had 3 that let me put menus out on the desk or out on a stand. and 4 let me put menus in the rooms
If you can service them its WORTH IT, but if I was you I would investigate it yourself before you pay someone to do something SOOO simple
 
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We have had amazing results from hotel advertising. We do both TV Channel guide (toppers on the TVs) and full page ads in the in-room guides. They are very reasonable cost and the benefit is tremendous. I can send you excel stats if you’d like and refer companies. Just PM and I’ll pass along the info.
 
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