Some marketing solutions to increase revenue of Level Hotel, a member of LV Hai Phong Investment and Tourism Joint Stock Company

Chapter 3 Proposes some marketing solutions to increase revenue of Level Hai Phong hotel.

This is a thesis that is extremely important to me because it is not only the result of my efforts and hard work during four years of study. Besides, it is the dedicated teaching of the teachers in the school, the enthusiastic help of the teacher - Master Do Thi Bich Ngoc.

I would like to sincerely thank my teacher - Master Do Thi Bich Ngoc for her dedicated guidance and instruction in completing this thesis. And I would also like to thank all the staff at Level Hai Phong Hotel for their enthusiastic help so that I could complete this thesis successfully.

Once again, my sincere thanks!

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CHAPTER 1. SOME THEORETICAL BASIS AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS TO INCREASE HOTEL REVENUE.

1.1. Basic concepts

1.1.1. Hotel Marketing

It is a continuous, sequential process through which hotels carry out planning, research, implementation, control, and evaluation of activities to satisfy the needs and desires of customers and the goals of that hotel. To achieve the highest efficiency, marketing activities require the efforts of every individual, department in the hotel as well as business partners.

1.1.2. Characteristics of hotel marketing

- Short time to approach customer service; Hotels have little time to impress customers, good impressions will stay with customers for a long time, bad impressions will immediately damage the hotel's image.

- Attracting buyers is more based on emotional aspects; emotional attachment often occurs in the hotel business. From initial feelings through the experiences of others to personal feelings arising during the process of consuming services, all affect customers' buying behavior.

- Focus on managing physical evidence; it is necessary to reaffirm that services are intangible, customers cannot see, sample, evaluate, or feel before buying. However, customers can decide to use them through physical verification. Basically, there are 4 types of physical evidence; physical environment, price, communication, customers. A hotel with good service quality will go hand in hand with an important, convenient, modern and polite physical environment. Price also affects customers' perception of service quality. High prices often demonstrate high quality and vice versa. Information about services includes commercial information sources provided by the hotel to word-of-mouth information sources reported by customers who have used the service. The attitude of the receptionist, the way of handling guests registering for rooms, requests for service, and customer satisfaction are the final physical evidence we can use. Marketing people must adjust

They must be able to control these four types of evidence to ensure that customers make decisions that are beneficial to their business. They must also ensure that the evidence presented does not mislead customers about the actual benefits they bring. That is, they must not make customers expect too much from the service. They must not promise more than they can actually provide.

- Use more distribution intermediaries; there is no physical distribution system for hotel products and services. Instead of a distribution system, the hotel industry has a typical system of intermediaries. These intermediaries help hotels introduce and sell their products, and advise customers to choose and make purchasing decisions. Therefore, it can be said that intermediaries play an extremely important role.

- Greater dependence on supporting organizations; the tight or loose connection of units in the hotel system will determine the final quality of the service. A weak link will weaken the entire system. The hotel industry must be a perfect whole. To have a perfect service product, everything must coordinate smoothly and fit together. Marketing makes customers come to the hotel. The reception department welcomes guests enthusiastically and thoughtfully. The housekeeping department directly serves customers. In the hotel, the food and beverage and entertainment departments also play a key role. All create a perfect closed system.

- Services are easier to copy; most hotel products are easy to copy. For normal businesses, they can keep the production process secret, but for the hotel industry, that is impossible. When selling products, we are forced to present all services, because the customer's consumption process is always linked to the production process. Services are not unique and cannot be copyrighted, so the optimal solution is to always move and develop continuously.

- Focus on promotions outside of peak periods; industrial products are invested more in promotions during peak periods. But hotel services are the opposite, and it can be called a rule. During low season, service capacity is very small. It is necessary to attract customers during this period to ensure continuous business operations. We cannot and should not launch a

Promotional services during peak periods due to not being able to serve customers or not being able to serve them attentively, that means losing customers and more seriously, damaging the hotel's reputation.

1.1.3. The role of marketing in hotels

- In the market mechanism, businesses compete freely to best meet customer needs. The more developed the market economy is, the higher the level of competition becomes. Competition is both a driving force and a tool for the market to eliminate and strictly select businesses. Therefore, to survive and develop, businesses must be oriented towards the market in a dynamic and flexible manner.

- When customers become the final judge of a business's survival, businesses must be aware of the role of customers. Business profits can only be achieved by satisfying and fulfilling customer needs, and then marketing becomes the key factor to business success.

- Business activities cannot be separated from the market, they also do not operate alone but take place in relation to the market, with the company's external environment.

- Therefore, in addition to functions such as finance, production, and human resource management, the important and indispensable function to ensure the survival and development of the enterprise is the Marketing management function - the function that connects the enterprise's activities with the market, with customers, with the external environment to ensure that the enterprise's business activities are market-oriented, taking the market - customer needs as the basis for all business decisions.

- Marketing activities in a business play a decisive role in the position of the business in the market. Starting from market research, cataloging goods to production, distribution and when the goods are sold, marketing activities continue, so the marketing management function is closely related to other management areas in the business and it has the role of guiding and combining other functions to not only attract customers but also find effective tools to satisfy customer needs, thereby bringing profits to the company.

1.1.4. Analyze marketing opportunities

- This is the first step that any business following the modern Marketing perspective must take before entering into business or improving its business results.

- The basic task of the Marketing opportunity analysis stage is to collect important information about the Marketing environment that affects the Company's business activities through the Marketing system.

- To find business opportunities or risks that will threaten the Company's operations, they must consider macro environments such as the economic, political, legal, socio-cultural environment, its intermediaries or suppliers... But to approach and turn those opportunities into profitable opportunities, businesses must know the strengths and weaknesses of their business and those of competing businesses. At the same time, the important information to research is information about the market such as who the business's customers will be, why they buy, what characteristics of the products they require and how much they can buy those products at?

1.1.5. Characteristics of hotel services

- Service products are the result of the service process, it gathers many values to satisfy customers. Different from other common goods, service products have both tangible and intangible values, the process of creating products requires direct participation of customers.

- Therefore, in the hotel business, in addition to common characteristics, hotel products and services have their own unique characteristics compared to other common goods and these characteristics are factors that affect service quality.

- Therefore, hotel business owners need to grasp firmly to develop business activities and increase revenue for their hotels.

* Relative invisibility

- Because hotel products do not exist in physical form, cannot be seen or touched, neither suppliers nor consumers can check its quality before selling and before buying.

- With common commodity products, this job is relatively easy. People can use their natural senses to evaluate, they can touch,

look, measure by highly conventional measurements because they themselves have specific physical and chemical properties such as length, width, color...

- Hotel services are intangible so they depend largely on consumer perception, which means customers can only feel it and can hardly perceive it with their natural senses.

- The invisibility of hotel services creates difficulties for both suppliers and consumers. For suppliers, this characteristic causes significant difficulties in hotel marketing, and at the same time shows the need to take measures to attract customers to the hotel, requiring great efforts in researching customer psychology. At the same time, the process of providing services at the hotel requires constant innovation.

- All of these jobs can ensure the hotel's development and survival, affirming its position in the market.

- For customers, the intangibility of services increases the difficulty in their decision to buy products and services because they cannot know exactly what kind of service they will enjoy when they have not consumed it. It can be said that customers are the ones who bear the greatest risk when using the service.

- However, service products have both tangible and intangible characteristics. Therefore, in the hotel business, to overcome the difficulties caused by the intangible nature of service products, service providers, in this case hotels, need to rely on tangible factors to increase the persuasiveness of their service products.

For example, for food products, attention must be paid to the presentation and decoration of the products to make them look nice and stimulate the customers' appetite... for room service, attention must be paid to the amenities and cleanliness of the rooms...

* Simultaneity between production and consumption of services

- For physical products, the manufacturer can specifically define the product and production quantity.

- As for service products, the production of a product depends entirely on the customer. Therefore, although services are intangible,

But customers can still feel it deeply because they are the ones who directly participate in the process of creating it.

- In the tourism service industry in general, customers play a very important role. Because customers are both the input factor of the production force and the consumers of service products.

- It can be said that, with most services, when they are produced, customers consume them. When the production process ends, it means that customers enjoy the full service they have purchased. This characteristic creates a challenge for service quality managers.

- Requires the service to be done correctly step by step, from the first step to the last step and without any errors. To do this, in the process of creating hotel products, managers must always stand from the perspective of the service user.

- From the design, construction, arrangement as well as purchase of interior and exterior decoration equipment of the hotel to create an impression on guests when using the services at the hotel. Combined with the service process, style and service attitude of the staff, the active coordination of departments in the hotel will certainly make guests feel like they are enjoying a perfect service.

* Hotel products are perishable services and cannot be stored or stocked .

- Service products are perishable, because they will be considered lost if not used within a certain period of time.

- Neither the seller nor the buyer can store services to satisfy future needs. Defects and failures of normal products can be repaired because consumers only come into contact with the goods when they are complete. However, services are different. If a small error occurs during the service process, even if it is repaired immediately, the customer will still have a bad impression of an imperfect product.

- The process of production and consumption of services in hotels is almost identical in both space and time. In other words, hotel services are highly “fresh”. Therefore, services

cannot be stored or preserved in warehouses like goods to be able to coordinate to match supply and demand.

- In the hotel business, room service is the source of the highest profit. Room rates and accompanying services are calculated based on material wear and tear, employee labor costs and the cost of goods and services to create the product or service.

- Therefore, when a room is not used on a day, the hotel still has to pay for that day. A day that passes and the room is empty means that the revenue from the room has been lost because people cannot "sell it back" or provide room service for another day.

- The intangible nature of hotel services is also a factor that makes it very difficult to create services and even more difficult to maintain services. In addition, the inability to store services in warehouses like other common goods requires hotels to always find ways to maximize the number of rooms sold each day if they want to promote business efficiency.

- In fact, to ensure revenue, hotels often use overbooking to avoid customers automatically canceling their registrations, wasting rooms and reducing revenue.

- However, the most proactive and effective way is for hotels to pay attention to managing their service capabilities, arranging appropriate time to mobilize the maximum workforce during peak times, hiring additional seasonal workers or using employees under labor contracts. At the same time, cross-training employees so that when work requires, they can support and replace each other, reducing stress in departments that are lacking staff.

- In the hotel business, the service objects are diverse and rich, from all classes and components, so the product must be highly comprehensive to satisfy all requirements of all customers.

- The heterogeneity of services is due to the personalization of services. Services are performed as a result of interaction between two parties: the service provider - representing the supplier, and the service recipient - representing the customer.

- Both customers and service staff are influenced by personal factors. Customers' needs are diverse, their behavior is inconsistent and