Why you should be paying attention to new hotel partnerships

Hotels want loyal customers, and gone are the days of timid partnerships in an attempt to keep you. The forays are slowly becoming more aggressive — some have even made attempts to associate themselves with the clothing industry.

Vanity Group has partnered with many brands to make headway in the hotel amenities space, thinking that consumers will positively associate quality sleep with those brands. You should consider these partnerships and what your competitors are doing, but don’t be so quick to jump on to one without considering the ramifications.

Consumer tastes are changing, and your strategies may need to change with them.

Kansas City-based firm Fortissma suggests that modern customers care about fruit-infused water and other aspects of their stay that would have been unheard of even 10 years ago.

As those trends wind on, it’s your responsibility to try to meet prospective customers where they are if you can. In other words, if there’s a connection or collaboration to be made that would improve your standing in the eyes of the public, you owe it to yourself and that business to do your due diligence on it, at the very least.

In CEO Magazine, the history of luxury jewelry brands and high-quality hotels is on display. They’ve worked together for years with the idea that people who might like one would like the other, but they’ve tweaked these forays in recent years.

Other brands may have more loyalty than yours, which serves as an opportunity.

Mercedes Benz is an example of a company that sees a mutual benefit from a partnership with a hotel brand. Regardless of what you think about the car company, they have a healthy amount of brand loyalty developed over several decades.

It’s also true that fewer car companies exist than major hotel chains, contributing to that strong loyalty. In their case, customers’ relative affluence helps make a natural connection between a luxury car company and the luxury hotels that those car owners might be looking for on their way to an excursion of sorts.

Stay Magazine in June detailed the partnership between Hyatt-Fila in which the former sought to attract sports-focused mothers and others who cared about the latter. Both companies revealed their plans in China, which is an extraordinarily big swing in the most populated country on the planet.

The reality is that neither brand would have felt comfortable making a decision like that without being intimately familiar with the Chinese market and its nuances.

Even if your partnership happens on a much smaller scale, it’s important nonetheless to have enough information on how and why a prospective partnership might perform well. Have no doubt that someone might ask why you see fit to do what you choose, which isn’t necessarily an indictment of your work.