While it is definitely too late to discuss marketing opportunities for the holiday season of 2020, what’s critical is that hoteliers find ways to bolster revenues for the first quarter of 2021 – a period that, statistically speaking, may end up going down as one of the worst in the modern history of hospitality. One method to mitigate this dire possibility is to think in terms of extending the holiday cheer into the new year.

One shift in traveler behavior stemming from COVID-19 that’s essential to grasp has been the shortened look-to-book ratio for most leisure guests. Instead of reserving a room months ahead of time, many are taking a ‘wait and see’ approach; they’re researching destinations and hotels but aren’t confirming their credit card details until within seven days out from the intended arrival date.

Besides making this a nightmare to manage from a staffing perspective, it also means that hotel marketers must remain on standby then react almost instantly to changing market conditions. For this present holiday season, undoubtedly innumerous consumers want to travel for a quick getaway or find a hotel to host their extended families that’s equidistant from all invited relatives. But with rolling lockdowns and a general malaise over the fear of enabling a super-spreader event, many of those who intend to travel are watching and waiting for an all clear to be given by regional authorities.

While the two of us can only prognosticate as well as any other hotelier, for most of us here in the Northern Hemisphere, where new active cases of Covid remain in unhealthily high numbers, it’s looking as though some form of stay-at-home orders will persist in most localities through some part of the holiday season. Most governments recognize that if they open up their cities too early, this will only lead to many more indoor winter gatherings and in turn, cause further Covid spikes.

Hence, most travelers won’t be effectively ‘empowered’ to start traveling and meeting up in small groups again until sometime in Q1 2021. And, while the vaccine news is reassuring to all of us in the hotel business, we all know that the task of distributing and inoculating hundreds of millions of travelers is not going to take place overnight. Knowing this, it’s your job as a senior manager to develop a strategic plan for this eventuality.

How will you extend the holiday spirit into January, February and March to help drum up leisure sales during this dearth-of-occupancy period (at least outside of the sunbelt)? How would you go about discerning what rates and packages would be most enticing to guests who are chomping at the bit for a weekend sojourn after delaying their trip which was previously scheduled for the late autumn or holiday season in 2020? What channels would be best for promoting your availability during the winter and early spring?

There are many ideas and programs to consider for priming your hotel for success in this regard, and all must be discussed on a per-property basis, as no two will be quite the same. We can give one such example as inspiration to help your team prepare a viable offering for transient guests.

One program from our playbook that we’ve helped deploy at a resort location here in Canada was a touchless in-room dining experience for small groups. In its broad form and without mentioning all the bells and whistles, this package contained a two night’s stay for two rooms (at double occupancy) that would be assigned as close to each other as possible within the PMS. One (or both) of these rooms would be a suite product which would then be set up with a prix fixe dinner for one of the nights, with all courses and beverage accompaniments delivered on a cart for the four guests to then bring into the suite and serve themselves.

This self-serve aspect allowed the multicourse plated dinner to be delivered in a safe and contactless manner while still delivering a bespoke dining experience. Overall, the project wasn’t all that hard to get rolling operationally, while promoting it to drive-to markets required a nimbler hand. For your own hotel or small group of properties, something straightforward like this shouldn’t be an insurmountable hurdle to deploy for the first half of 2021. At this stage, it’s all about quick wins and setting yourself up for accepting any form of revenue, so consider all options for the New Year.