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VisitEngland

Where do I tell?

Where can you integrate sustainability to communicate quality?

Certification and awards

Certification has helped you to improve your management. Now use it for marketing. 

Companies get certified or apply for awards partly to gain a marketing advantage, in the expectation that being certified lifts them above some of their competitors. Despite this, they report that customer awareness is low. 

How you use certification and award logos is key. It’s your role to know how and where to display them, and more importantly what they mean and why you gained them. 

Gaining awards gives customers an independent guarantee of your credentials. It helps with quality assurance and credibility. Now you have the independent recognition of your sustainability performance, you should explain what you do with confidence.

VisitEngland awards

VisitEngland encourages those schemes which support, assess and market businesses to a high sustainability standard.

For business hotels, certification is now often a requirement to tender.

In the corporate travel market, certification is essential in demonstrating compliance with buyer requirements, as both buyers and suppliers will find it less time consuming. 

Increasingly, Requests for Proposals (RfP) ask for evidence of independent third-party certification, as well as asking specific questions on environmental and social performance.

Do you communicate your sustainability logos, and more importantly communicate with pride what you did to achieve them?

Where you might communicate your sustainability credentials

Here are some places where customers would expect you to communicate your sustainability credentials: 

  • In your tendering process;
  • In the reception/entrance;
  • In your bedroom pack (if accommodation);
  • On your website;
  • On promotional leaflets and printed literature;
  • In your public relations work;
  • In adverts.

Certification helps sell

All our hotels are certified to reassure blue chip buyers."
Sean Twohig is Risk Safety & Environment Manager at Jury’s Inns Group Ltd.

Online and offline press

You need to do something quirky and unusual to get in the press

The travel sections of newspapers and travel bloggers need fresh, quirky stories to inspire their readers. Newspapers will cover a broader range of issues, while bloggers tend to specialise in specific types of holidays, particularly certain  destinations or lifestyle interests for a certain type of customer. They rely both on the credibility of their content–readers don’t like to feel that they are being fed an advertorial. Blogging has a more personal voice than print journalism. Blog followers need to relate to the author’s experiences and trust their judgement. 

Travel editors and bloggers get bombarded with very similar mailings from companies claiming to be sustainable. Their question to you will be: ‘What makes you different, in a way that my customers will want to read about you?’ 

Press coverage you’ve achieved should not be lost. Make links to it from your website, say in your mailings that you have been highlighted, use quotes from the write up to show your positive side. Even if it is old, there’s a value to it. 

Add a tab to your website called “our recognition” where you gather certifications, awards and press coverage - put the new one on top, and keep all the previous coverage lower down. All of it reinforces the fact that you are a company that can be trusted.

New, quirky, inspiring

I write human stories my followers can relate to."
Kathryn Burrington, blogger at travelwithkat.com

Your website

Here’s an opportunity to share more than a policy and a list of practices

Having a sustainability page that only shows a list of sustainable practices is a missed opportunity. What you do is far more interesting than that. 

Businesses typically have all their achievements on a single page, with an inspired title such as ‘sustainability’ or ‘environment’. Mostly these are dull lists of water, waste, and energy actions, written in management speak – fine for an environmental auditor, but not a customer. 

Customers are hardly going to pick up the phone because they’ve read that you, ‘minimise waste by evaluating operations and ensuring they are fit for purpose’. 

By all means upload your policy and list your achievements, but in general you won’t get many customers visiting it. There are, of course, exceptions, but you need to get more creative.

Instead apply the same principles of how you currently communicate quality in your website. Think which aspects of sustainability your customers will value. And how you can put them across throughout the website to reinforce your quality message. 

Your messages should start with the customer benefit, and finish with the reason. 

You might describe: 

  • A quieter and warmer bedroom (because it is better insulated and uses biomass fuelled heating). 
  • A tastier menu (because of carefully selected, locally sourced and organic ingredients). 
  • A more personally and individually designed hotel (decorated with local crafts and giving a sense of place).

Accommodation: forget the bed

Things to do matter the most."
David and Felicity Brown are the owners of Hoe Grange Holidays, Staffordshire Peak District.

Social media

Get seen by new customers and remembered by old ones 

Social media gives you endless possibilities, but you need to know where to spend your time. The choices are eye watering: Facebook, Linkedin Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram… each has a different purpose, and maintaining them all could be a full- time job. So be selective. 

Although, most social media sites are free, it can be hard to get your voice heard without spending money on paid advertising. If you have something interesting to say and can present it in a visually appealing way, it will be easier to develop a group of followers. 

Social media is the channel. Sustainability is the content. Conservation and community messages provide you with interesting and engaging content to share with customers. 

Talk about forthcoming events, rather than something in the past, otherwise you simply tell customers what they missed. You will need to use last year’s photos to announce what’s coming this time around.

Messages must be short and light-hearted. You need positive messages that customers feel compelled to like or share; moralising messages get ignored. Funny messages work best – as well as those your target market identifies with. 

Give customers incentives to become your friend on Facebook or upload their own photos about your property: for example, a free coffee, or entering into a prize draw.

 

Keep expanding the market

We use social media to keep in touch and attract followers and customers."
Kayleigh Baddeley-Read is owner of Deerly Beloved Bakery in Norwich, Norfolk, a vegan bakery specialising in cakes and pastries.

Online distribution channels

Getting others to do your selling

Direct selling may seem more profitable if you have a high turnover, but paying a commission for someone else to do your selling can have its advantages.

Online travel agents and search engines such as Google, Expedia and Booking.com are showing more interest in differentiating the unique characteristics of accommodation and have also committed to displaying Global Sustainable Tourism Council recognised, sustainability certifications for tourism accommodation. This will make a real difference in helping customers identify and select sustainable products.

Booking.com has developed Travel Sustainable, a programme that aims to help travellers plan more socially and environmentally-friendly stays by highlighting accommodation businesses which state that they undertake a set of sustainability actions. Each award is shown prominently on the property’s listing. The number of Travel Sustainable properties listed is growing and it will be interesting to see the impact this has on customer ratings or bookings in years to come.

Online bookings now account for 68% of total travel according to data-gathering platform Statista, and much of the rest is business travel handled by specialist corporate-travel agents.

Because the bigger online travel agents can sign-up more hotels and negotiate bigger discounts, the small specialists need to find more customised products. Specialising in more sustainable products is an option. For example, responsibletravel.com, Much Better Adventures and greentraveller.co.uk focus on unique products and experiences. Alternatively, Charitable Travel includes a charity donation in every holiday sold.