Nurturing Your Public Relations-ships

by Sharon B. Drechsler, RRP
owner/operator
Drechsler Communications

Greg Samson is at work and has fifteen minutes before the weekly staff meeting, so he decides to check his private email. He signs onto his account and, boom! There are five messages: one is from his wife, another from a buddy and the remainders appear to be offers for discounted medicine or ways to enhance his anatomy.

But, wait…. He sees an email from his timeshare resort, too. He opens his wife’s message first. Secondly, he glances at his buddy’s and types a brief reply. By now, he has less than five minutes before his meeting. He deletes the junk mail and then opens the email from his resort. Mentally, he has already begun to disengage knowing that he is on a tight schedule. The next few minutes will determine whether or not the resort’s communications will make enough of an impact to cause him to come back later. Catching his interest within seconds is the difference between inciting him to start planning his next vacation or hitting the delete button.

This type of scenario occurs daily, whether it is with email, snail-mail or telephonic communications. And the results you get are very often an outcome of the amount of thought and work you’ve put into developing a preexisting relationship with your owner.

As a resort professional, you are pulled in dozens of directions every day. But one of the most vital to your business is the process of listening and speaking to your customers, that is; establishing a relationship. Larger resort companies establish vast departments to handle their owner communications and public relations in order to build firmer connections. Mid-sized entities may hire an internal PR professional who can focus on listening to and providing owners with appropriate information. But many smaller resorts don’t have the resources to have a dedicated owner communications/PR professional on staff, in which case, often the resort manager must add this role to their many other responsibilities. Regardless of how your resort’s communications function is performed, however, there are some tips to keep in mind:

Communication only happens when somebody listens.

In our example of Greg Samson opening his email, it is likely that he opened his resort’s communication piece for one reason only: he and his resort had developed a trust relationship. For this reason, he was ready to listen to what his resort had to say. In order to know what to say, his resort had better be the ones to have done the listening in the first place. A good communicator will anticipate what Greg’s interests and needs are and will have phrased a message to fit.

For example, if we know Greg and his wife are childless, have a strong interest in history, love sushi and are seeking experiential vacations, wouldn’t we speak differently to him than to someone who has two children, loves kicking back by the pool and has played softball for many years? The more we listen and respond to our owners’ individual interests, the better listeners they will become. We may not be able to customize our communications to owners to consider this level of detail. But ideally, our technology should be able to stratify owners according to broader categories of lifestyles and interests so that we can send different letters to groups that will appear to be fine-tuned just for the individual who receives them.

Plan the work and work the plan.

We can be much more proactive in capturing personalized information and responding appropriately if we begin with a sound communications plan. With advance planning and implementation, we can look for ways to collect information at the various touch-points throughout the system. These may include not only verifying contact and address information during each phone call, but sending out surveys, hosting periodic focus groups and following up on comment cards. A plan helps clarify how to approach dealing with owner preferences and individuality. Planning can reveal that it is possible to group owners according to different interests and thereby, address these groups with different communication pieces.

Prepare for owner communications in the annual budget.

Ideally, your resort’s budget should approach owner communications in several different ways. Firstly, your information technology (IT) budget should be developed with your owner communications and public relations plan in mind. If you want your IT department or provider to supply you with customized reporting, you may need to pay for special programming to accomplish this. Secondly, in-house sales/resales and owner communications need to work hand-in-hand since the best prospects for sales come from current owners.

Community relations should be considered during the budgeting process. Not only is the surrounding community a great source of leads, but a sound relationship with your neighbors plays a vital role in protecting your owners’ interests politically.

What are the practical pieces to this puzzle? Newsletters, events, surveys, focus groups, telephone campaigns, press releases and articles for travel and/or local media – any of these tools can be as elaborate or as simplified as your time and budget permit. For instance, let’s say Greg’s email communication was in the form of a very brief survey. Perhaps the survey might include an offer to reward those who complete it, such as a coupon for a free beverage at the snack bar. Carefully worded questions serve as reminders of what the resort has to offer: “What is your favorite evening activity at the resort: 1) watching the poolside movie under the stars while floating on an intertube; 2) racking up the balls for a game of billiards in the lounge or 3) shouting “bingo” first!”

We can introduce more creativity and ‘spark’ into our communications with owners and prospects by considering every piece from their point of view. After all, we’re not in the business of making them waste, but rather ‘share’ their time.