As a Technical Company it has to be said that we AccuBook often stood in awe of the online trail blazed by the airlines at the turn of the century. However in presentations whenever we mentioned the Ryanairs of the world we were quickly shot down with a '...We are hotels, not airlines...'.

However by now even the most hardened online sceptic would have to admit that nearly every online techniqiue used by the airlines eventually becomes standard practise for the hotels.

This being the case, there is probably one technique that would be very useful for hotels in the current economic climate........Using empty hotel rooms for Marketing. We were prompted to return to this subject by a hotel customer who explained to us how they managed their Sales and Marketing Manager (our ears picked up at this as we are often party to debates between Hotel Owner/Managers who consider that their Sales and Marketing Staff are not doing what they want them to do).

This particular Manager told us that their Sales Manager had no Marketing Budget at all, and had just one target...to utilise for Sales Promotions 2% of their distressed inventory. This particular hotel had 62 rooms, and at the (pre recession) time were operating at 71% occupancy. A quick calculation shows that this hotel has 1860 room nights per month available (30 x 62), of which 29% were unsold rooms, dead money, never to be seen again, ie 540 Room Nights.

Remember hotel rooms are considered as perishable goods in the sense that if they are not sold that day, the income is lost forever, supermarkets have the luxury of being able to sell most unsold goods the next day, but not hotels.

So this Marketing Manager had to use 2% of the hotels unsold rooms ie 10 rooms per month, for promotions. Not as easy as it sounds, we benefitted because very often we were asked to help out by using these rooms for online promotions. Apart from the usual hotel website competitions, we found one of the best ways was to offer these rooms as prizes to websites that promoted similar products. For example the hotel in question wated to promote Surfing Breaks in the month of September, so we found 4 very popular surfing Websites and offered them each a free surfing break if they would use it as a competition on their website (providing a link of course to the hotel website).

The problem with this type of marketing is that it is very difficult to see a direct link between the marketing and an increase in room sales, but it does seem to be a good way to get people talking and spreading the hotel name around, 'Brand Awareness' being the technical term. Airlines such as Ryanair virtually built their business on selling distressed inventory for eye-catching 99c prices, much to the chagrin of their competitors who complain that their average prices are often cheaper than Ryanair.

The largest benefit of using distressed inventory is of course that the marketing is virtually free (You rarely see Ryanair advertising on TV). No doubt Marketing experts will be able to tell us that its not quite so straight forward, but it does seem to be a technique that suits the current economic climate, and if we had to place a bet..... we would follow the airlines.