Building a Hotel Marketing Strategy for Sustainable Tourism

When you market to future guests about the benefits of staying at your hotel, there is an opportunity to make a positive impact that will uplift your brand and set you apart from the competition. Sustainable tourism is a hot topic that should be addressed and incorporated into your hotel marketing strategy to unlock the true potential of your business.

Below, we’ll discuss the benefits of sustainable tourism and how you can create a hotel marketing strategy that implements the best practices for an eco-friendly hotel.

Promoting Sustainable Tourism at Your Hotel

What Is Sustainable Tourism?

Sustainable tourism aims to understand both the good and bad sides of tourism’s effect on the ecosystem with the intent to reduce the negatives and increase the positives. To understand sustainable tourism and create a hotel marketing strategy around it, it’s important to understand the cons of tourism and how sustainable tourism can help solve those problems.

Potential Harms of Tourism

Tourism can have a few unintended negative impacts when the right hotel marketing strategy isn’t utilized, such as:

• Property and nature damage
• Excessive use of resources
• Immense carbon emissions from transportation

Many hotel management operations also use a lot of resources, such as water and electricity. Hotels that don’t deploy sustainable tourism features may cause waste and carbon dioxide buildup, harming the environment as an unintended result. 

Benefits of Sustainable Tourism

It’s important for hoteliers to implement the best eco-friendly practices and support sustainable tourism in their hotel marketing strategy. Sustainable tourism can lead to the following benefits:

• Cleaner environment
• Creation of jobs in the local area
• Wildlife protection and preservation
• Reduced costs of business operations when implementing hotel PMS systems
• Better brand recognition

Supporting Sustainability with a Hotel Marketing Strategy

Use Self-service Options

With the right hotel PMS systems, you can leverage self-service features, such as a guest portal, to make the guest experience seamless. 

Guest and Housekeeping Portals

With hotel management software that supports guest and housekeeping portals, you can accelerate sustainability by:

• Offering paperless options for guest payment documentation
• Providing green housekeeping upgrade options for guests
• Reduce plastic usage by replacing plastic keycards with keyless room entry features for your visitors

Digitize the Guest Experience

You can further the benefits of a paperless experience by fully digitizing your hotel marketing strategy. By removing paper receipts, statements, brochures, flyers, invoices, and more, you can reduce the carbon footprint.

With the right hotel management software, this documentation, along with guest reservation and payment information, can all be transferred and accessed digitally for a more eco-friendly process. For example, emails, apps, and QR codes are already supporting a fully digitized experience for hotels.

Use Social Media to Promote Your Efforts

With social media, you can emphasize your focus on sustainable tourism and show your guests how your hotel is making a positive impact. Let your followers know that you’re focusing on minimizing plastic and unnecessary water and energy usage to promote sustainable tourism.

To help you maximize clicks and engagement, hotel PMS systems can offer automated replies and support on social media platforms. This is a great way for guests who prefer to communicate through social media to talk to you about any queries or concerns they have. By opening up communication through all channels, you can further promote your sustainable tourism efforts and highlight your hotel amongst the competition.

Use Email Marketing to Upsell Guests

With personalized messaging integrations, your hotel management software can individualize each email for each guest. By doing so, you can offer discounts, upgrade options, and promote sustainable tourism amenities and activities to further emphasize your focus on an eco-friendly experience.

Additionally, you can use personalized emails to provide upsell options for your visitors to further enhance their experience. Spa treatments, wellness programs, eco-friendly rooms, and working with local produce vendors are all just a few ways you can promote upselling opportunities for your guests to reduce negative impacts on the ecosystem.

Promote Partnership with Local Vendors

Partnering with local businesses can help support your community and have a more positive impact on the environment. By promoting local food vendors, you can decrease carbon footprints since the distance to purchase food will be much shorter, requiring your guests to travel less. Instead of driving long distances for dining, your visitors can walk or bike to local vendors to decrease carbon emissions.

Enhance the Guest Experience with Sustainability

Sustainable tourism and eco-friendly amenities not only help the environment, but also meet many expectations and values travelers look for when seeking a hotel. Additionally, the mentioned steps toward a more green hotel can all be improved significantly with the right hotel management system.

Learn how hotel PMS systems not only provide a path toward an eco-friendly property, but also a path toward operational excellence.