A Web Site Makeover

By Allan Richter -- Hotel Interactive 11/30/2004

The 760-room Sheraton Atlanta Hotel resides on Atlanta´s Courtland Street, considered a main thoroughfare when the hotel was built as a Marriott in 1965. The area´s Civic Center, an entertainment venue, was a popular draw and made for a solid anchor. But while the property was in a strong location in its early years, the city´s hotel commerce shifted when the Georgia World Congress Center was built seven blocks away.

Seven blocks might not seem like much in a city like New York. In Atlanta, where pedestrian traffic pales by comparison, it is as good as miles. The hotel´s location eroded its market position, bringing convention traffic to the property only when the largest conventions were in town.

"If a convention brings at least 5,000 rooms to the area on the peak night, we can expect to fill roughly 350 to 400 rooms," says Robert Dow, the Sheraton Atlanta´s revenue management director. "It´s solid business. It gets us to about 50 percent occupancy, and with the transient business we have it makes for a decent mix."

The problem, Dow says, is that the convention center hosts only 14 or so confabs annually that are large enough to drive that kind of traffic to the hotel. The Sheraton Atlanta needed a solution. Moving a 760-room hotel closer to the convention center wasn´t very feasible, but getting the convention center´s clients to come to the hotel was.

The Sheraton Atlanta began the process with a major renovation and upgrade. Then, to get the word out on the revitalized property, the hotel went to work on its Web site. It hired TIG Global, a Washington, D.C.-based Internet marketing firm.

Central to the hotel´s physical renovation was adding desperately needed meeting space. The Sheraton Atlanta featured 35,000 square feet of meeting space, far too little to fill its 760 rooms. After the renovation and upgrade, completed last year, the hotel touted 88,000 square feet.

"It´s a better ratio and it allows us to fill our rooms a lot more effectively with in-house group business," Dow says. "Before, with the amount of space we had, the largest group we could accommodate would be a group for 350, maybe 400 rooms tops. So that would mean 360 empty rooms on any given night. Now we can either take one large group for 700 rooms, which doesn´t exist too much anymore, or we can take several groups and you´ve almost filled your house. We´re at a point now where we can have two programs running at the same time, two large groups."

TIG Global consulted on the renovation of the hotel´s Web site–www.sheratonatlantahotel.com– and online strategy. The three-pronged approach that started with building a highly functional site that helped the hotel gather customer information and process bookings more efficiently. The online overhaul also aimed to shift volume from higher-cost third-party Web sites.

Finally, TIG Global helped the Sheraton roll out Web marketing techniques to generate volume directly from corporate and leisure travelers and boost referrals to the central reservations toll-free number. It also generated more proposals for group and wedding business. The idea was to create an electronic magnet of sorts for inquiries and bookings.

Instead of bemoaning the seven blocks between it and the convention center, the Sheraton Atlanta capitalized on less hectic pace at the property–and it used its revamped Web site for the job.

"The environment is quieter, and we offer more of a personal feel," Dow says. "When you walk into our lobby you don´t have that huge convention hotel type of feel. We call ourselves the largest boutique hotel in the world. You feel like you´re in a hotel that has maybe 200 rooms plus."

Among highlights of the redesign, the Web site used vivid images, provided more detailed content and made navigation more efficient. No longer passive, it issued strong "calls to action," such as the addition of special promotions on the home page with links to promotional pages.

The site was designed for flexibility, letting the hotel quickly add promotions to fill holes. The hotel could proactively market by adding utilities, for example, to collect email addresses for targeted campaigns. Web pages showcased group capabilities and the hotel´s new expanded function space. Wedding pages were refined with the bridal audience in mind and RFP links were added so inquiries could be made online for groups and weddings.

With its enhanced Web marketing efforts, the hotel identified local marketing opportunities like convention and event calendars, attraction sites, and city and destination guides that could feature the Sheraton Atlanta. It saturated online media in selected hand-picked hot spots with free, paid and reciprocal links. It enriched its site content so the hotel would turn up when people used search engines for common keywords.

Further, it employed pay-per-click advertising by deliberately segmenting keywords for primary market segments–business traveler, leisure traveler, citywide attendee, and wedding planner, for example. It also focused on so-called pull-through marketing through banner ads and other techniques on sites catering to weddings, groups, and corporate and leisure travelers likely to choose an Atlanta hotel.

Although Dow would not disclose the amount of revenue the Web site generated before its reconstruction, he said the hotel drew annualized direct revenue of $400,000 from the site afterwards, representing a "significant" increase.

Internet bookings through the site are double what they were last year, he said, signaling a shift from third-party online distributors. Dow added that occupancy improved by 6.1 occupancy points over 2003, and he attributed more than 20 percent to the Web marketing efforts. The hotel saw a 12 percent RevPAR improvement this year over last, with a 4.3 percent market share improvement, he said. And the site generated more than 200 qualified inquiries for group and social events.

"Things are definitely turning around," Dow said. "We´re definitely in positive territory."