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offline marketting

Offline Marketing

thlodge started this discussion 17 years 10 months ago

WOW .. I have tried just about everything. Seems the best is to have a good rack card. does not have to be professional, you want to get your name out there at a resonable cost and a wide distribution. You can send the cards to other hostels. You can drop them off at the chamber of commerce and visitor welcome centers. Bus and train terminals. anywhere a traveller might have aminute to check them out. In this resort area I have even placed them or cars parked in the ski areas parking lot .. I was specifically targeting groups from out of state so did not post on every car, just the out of state vans with mega ski racks. You can put them in display racks at the local restaurants and businesses sometimes. Anywhere your potential guests would see them.
I advertise in the Hostel Handbook. Seems to get some good distribution, and has a web site to boot. And I get a number of handbooks as part of the deal. Then I found a couple web sites that list places to get free information. So I offer these catalogues just for the postage as a promo and stick one of my rack cards inside. never know where your customers will come from. But I am still getting requests from people that hit these web sites and are requesting the book .. from an ad I posted about 15 years ago ...

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thlodge

17 years

Onme year I was on a road trip for another purpose and thought I would do a little promoting on my way. Good thoughts, lousy outcome. I made up discount coupons and attached to my rack cards. I went through one of my target areas and visited every bicycle shop I could find. This was a promo to increase my summer guest potential. There was no expiration on these discounts. Well, I dropped off 10 card packages at about 20 cycle shops and thought I might get the usual 10%. Boy was I suprised, I got zero response. So as I said before I have tried everything I could think of over the years.
We had a time when the Appalacian Mountain Club came here once a year for cross country skiing. Every time they changed organizers for their annual ski trip I had to re-introduce my lodge to the new leader. Eventually they stopped their trip. I have had other groups like this one. Same thing, when the leaders changed, the direction of the group changed, and I would lose them.
The best advertisement is word of mouth. We have had Boy Scout Groups comming here for a few years for their ski trips. I have offered each of these troops a free weekend for the entire group if they would write an article and get it published in the Boy Scout magazine. I have had no takers in 10 years, about 10 different troops. I can not figure why they would not try for about a $650.00 offer . Beats the hell out of me, maybe I will try it again.

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redmoon

17 years

an important way to market your hostel is to form a relationship with other hostels in nearby cities. I know when i was travelling through eastern europe, most of the people i met didn't have any clue where they were going to stay at there next stop - and so they let the current hostel book a bed for them at a hostel they recommended.

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Josh Hostels

17 years

That's a good idea...

I wonder if creating information regional "networks" of hostels would be beneficial to hostelling. Just informal arrangements of the best regional hostels to send their guests to each other...

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talkeetnahostel

17 years

I am part of an Alaskan Hostel Association that we formed to help promote all the hostels in our little end of the world, as none of the big hostelling assocations seem to give us much thought.
One thing that we did this year was to create a booklet of sorts where each member hostel created two pages about their place and what they (and the area around them) have to offer. We put it together in a 3 ring binder (inexpensive and easy), and the binders are sitting on the coffee table or whereever of all the partisipating hostels. This way guest can see which hostel they want to go to next. A bit more personal than rackcards, and it helps promote hostelling in general. For most people, once they:ve tried 2 or 3 hostels and have good experiences, they usually stick with the hostelling scene.

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