an ability to operate a hotel, particularly in Australia with hotels of 100-200 rooms, with very little overhead and I think that’s one of our strengths.” What Minor needs to work on, says Hooley, is establishing new brands in a crowded arena. “The challenge is to clarify our brands and make sure the market understands those brands. Avani, NH and Atara, those brands haven’t really been seen on Australian shores, and our role is really to bring those into the market in the next five years to give ourselves a greater brand presence in Australia.” As the volume of data people are bombarded with daily grows exponentially, cutting through the static is hard, says Hooley. “One of the big challenges is that because there’s so much data out there, you’ve got to ensure you have strong brand definition and people can understand what that brand is. For instance, we call Oaks ‘a hotel room with a kitchen’ so people will know straight away ‘if I want a long stay or something with a bit more space or cooking facilities, Oaks is the brand for me’. “Having clear brand definition and strong brand presence is really important to penetrate through all that data and get to the consumer and grow the organisation and the brand strength.” Asked if he feared the growth of internet giants such as Expedia, Booking.com, Amazon and Google owning customer data, Hooley says: “To own guest preference data actually is incredibly powerful, but we’re focussed on building our database of our loyal guests and using that to drive our business. Outside that, I guess the challenge of using different channels is you then don’t control a lot of the data that comes through. I think data storage is going to be a challenge, but ultimately our challenge is to grow our brand, to grow our direct business which holds our own database.” One way of growing that business is to position yourself to tap into a booming tourism market. Last year Oaks was awarded Best Hotel Partner for Oceania by Ctrip at its annual hotel awards, and also took out www.accomnews.com.au
the Chinese travel agency’s Guests’ Choice Award for Australia and New Zealand. “With the Oaks brand, we found the ‘room with a kitchen’ was a really compatible type of product for the China market,” says Hooley. “The Chinese like that space and they usually travel in twos and threes so they like the apartment-style product and we decided to focus our resources. We branded all our supplies in the room to have simplified Chinese writing on them all, we’ve done a lot of work around being China-ready - having people on site who can speak Mandarin, for example - so that we can actually try and grow that market and become well known in that market. It also allows us to understand how learnings from that market can be applied to other markets, and we’re seeing now the Indian market is similar to that, so it’s been a good learning for us and it’s a strategy that we’ll
continue to pursue as long as its growing the way it is.”
They’re all just channels that people have a preference for.
Hooley says the single biggest challenging moving forward will be for Minor to understand its role in defining hospitality for the future.
“An example is that Airbnb don’t usually want two to three days, they don’t need servicing for their room, they look for a different type of product, so if we sell through Airbnb, we position our product slightly differently in what the inclusions are.”
“People say a hotel room will always be a hotel room, but we know that but there’s a lot of things happening around that hotel room that really change the way hotels operate,” he says. “Airbnb is changing not just the room but the model of the hotel by definition, and I think that’s an opportunity, but what we’re finding now is that we are starting to understand that really there’s different markets and that comes back to the brand point. “There’s people that will shop through Airbnb and there’s people that will shop through an OTA like Booking.com and there will be some that shop through what we call brand.com, which is the owning website.
PROFILES
After almost a year at the top of the speedily-evolving world of accom, Craig Hooley says he is relishing the pace of change. “Ten years ago, we only had ten hotels, now we have 600 and we’ve grown astronomically fast,” he says, “so it’s an exciting time for anyone at my level to come on in and be able to create the future. “There’s lots to do, it’s a very challenging role, but the company is very supportive, we’re in a very strong financial position and we have a really defined mandate of how we’re going to grow the organisation.” AccomNews - Winter 2019
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