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The well-crafted letter or brochure stands out like a beacon, thanks to its rarity
f e i r B s r e t n u o enc
Peter Hancock looks at the means of communication hoteliers need to utilise to promote their business
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hoever decided that Twitter would allow its users to communicate in no more than 140 characters per message must be very clever. It’s just enough to say something but not enough to allow you to ramble on past the point at which your audience has lost interest completely. It focuses the mind on getting one’s message across succinctly, in much the same way as the old telegram service which charged by the word and therefore forced all but the wealthiest to be concise in their messages. Of course, there is a downside. Twitter posts seldom make full use of our rich language and the punctuation suffers terribly, but on the upside we are learning to cut to the chase. Imagine Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet delivered purely in Tweets – it would only take a couple of minutes – perhaps finishing with “Capulets and Montagues now in lurrve. OMG. Bet R & J wish they’d stuck around after all.” I accept this is not great literature, and nobody would pay to hear it, but my point being that a
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lot can be said in very few words if necessary and this habit has benefits in the way we promote our businesses too. When I used to work in guide publishing some years ago we took our inspiration from the hotel brochures we were sent. They were often verbose in the extreme, banging on about fresh local produce and the individually-decorated bedrooms over many textheavy pages. The trend today is to let the pictures do the talking, both in print and on websites, so that people can be instantly impressed and not have to wade through lengthy descriptions. This can be overdone too, it must be said, and I have trouble keeping a straight face when shown a beautiful picture of a girl up to her waist in water surrounded by sepia clouds and a caption underneath that simply reads: “Breathtaking”. Somewhere in between listing the cold facts and using shameless artistic licence is probably the way to go. The language of hotel promotional material itself is also constantly evolving. I have noticed a change of emphasis whereby the guest’s experience now takes precedence over such niceties as the history of the building. A good example would be Milsom Hotels in Essex and Suffolk, which uses the inviting slogan: “EAT DRINK STAY” – which you have to admit says it all, really. Robin Hutson’s latest venture in the New Forest describes itself in equally pithy terms: “The Pig – rooms & kitchen garden food.” A final
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