The travel and hospitality industry uses a broad array of products to fill customer needs.
Distributors are always on the road; it's the nature of the job. But, while traveling to meet that next potential client or sitting in a hotel room practicing a presentation, don't forget the potential of the travel and hospitality industry itself.
"One of the unique things about the hospitality industry is that it uses a broad spectrum of printing—color labels and packaging, commercial sheet printing, etc. There's a lot of design opportunity," said distributor Tom Leavesley, Global DocuGraphix, Houston.
Steve Michel, color applications manager at Printgraphics, Vandalia, Ohio, noted that common documents used by travel and hospitality accounts include marketing brochures, event fliers, letterhead, membership cards, and loyalty and frequent stay programs. "In the past five years, we've seen a greater emphasis on targeted mailings from end-users," Michel noted. "This means smaller runs with frequent copy changes, often reflecting seasonal variations. Savvy distributors are taking advantage of digital imaging and running a larger base run of forms, changing only the message."
Keys to Profit
The same approach is taken with the production of plastic cards used as room access keys for guests, housekeeping and maintenance personnel in hotels. Bill Mulligan, vice president of sales and marketing at Plastag, Elk Grove Village, Ill., provides cards for national hotel chains. "We'll handle their loyalty programs and produce the base card, which is then customized with the name and account number of the member," Mulligan said. He believes that personalization provides opportunity for distributors. "It's not cost-effective for a manufacturer to print individual cards," he noted.
Judy Miller, label product manager at Printgraphics, has seen orders for membership and loyalty cards plummet from quantities of 100,000 to as few as 2,500 as such production runs became more cost-effective. A Florida beach resort, for example, uses a generic affixed vinyl card during check-in, personalizing it with the guest's name and room number for use as an in-house charge card for all on-site amenities. Casinos use process-color integrated cards with richer graphics personalized for "players," offering access to more exclusive parts of the casino, she said.
If the hotel, resort or casino is a big-name venue, such items as room access cards are looked on as a promotional item since guests will take them home as souvenirs, said Glenn Kenney, a Plastag distributor with Computerized Lock, Perkins, Okla.
Kenney, who began working in the mid-1990s for companies that installed hotel door locks, saw the beginning of conversion to key card access. "It boomed when AAA told its member hotels that they had to change over," he said. Soon, he began selling the cards himself. "Hotels want service. If they can't get keys, they can't rent a room," he noted. He works late into the evening, if necessary, producing smaller orders in-house for next-day delivery. "Quite a few of my clients are with me because they know that if they're in a bind, I can help them," he said.
Kenney's experience enables him to provide the proper product. "No one key works on all systems," he said. Since margins are small, "If you make two to four cents a key, you're doing well," he said. A mistake on 20,000 cards can wipe out any profit.
Kenney has grown from a bedroom operation to one employing nine people in a 7,500-sq.-ft. building with just under $1 million in sales by combining advertising with the access cards. Programs may include advertising for a specified length of time or for a specific number of cards. Although the cards are necessary for business, hotels would rather get them for free than pay for them, so Kenney began selling ad space on the back and providing the cards gratis to hotels.
Local restaurants, drugstores, golf courses, theaters, malls, taxi services, car rental companies and other businesses clamored for ads. "People look at those cards an average of three to five times a day," Kenney noted. "We get more calls every day."
National chains will also advertise, and hotels will advertise their own amenities, often with a discount. Conventioneers may find their key cards advertising a particular booth at a trade show, or hotels may advertise discounted meeting rooms to event planners.
Some hotels in high-traffic destinations, such as Los Angeles, are even charging outside advertisers $1 per card for distribution, Kenney said. Advertisers still find it a relative bargain. He noted that very few ever drop out of a program once they try it.
Travel Packages
Although opportunities abound in the travel and hospitality market, there have been changes in its printing needs. For instance, multi-part forms have given way to laser cut-sheets. "Years ago, we did a ton of travel itinerary forms for travel agencies, but that's gone away," said Rick Pasco, sales rep at Data Papers, Muncy, Pa. "We're still doing statements for hotels and inns, but it's a one-part cut-sheet or continuous form."
Mulligan, whose background is in a division of Rand McNally that produced 90 percent of all of the airline tickets in the world, noted that as e-ticketing took hold, "Originally, everyone thought that it was the end of the world for paper tickets."
At the beginning, however, there were actually more tickets produced, Mulligan said. "There were three tickets behind the counter that the customer never saw, and our ticket production went up instead of down." A subsequent correction by the airline industry made the boarding pass, rather than a paper ticket, the audit trail for payments between airlines, and the paper tickets gradually faded away.
On the upside, Leavesley said, "There is more emphasis now on staying longer, and far more travel packages are being sold," which requires more promotional mailings, confirmations and four-color brochures.
Overlooked Opportunities
Rental management companies are another overlooked source of business, Leavesley said. Many vacationers stay in houses or condos managed by such companies, which have a variety of forms and printing needs. Leavesley, for instance, has a contract with ResortQuest, which manages more than 20,000 units nationwide.
Advertising on the envelope and key holder is another revenue source, as are goodie bags distributed to hotel rooms by chambers of commerce, convention organizers, casinos, travel agents and resorts. The bags themselves are a revenue source, and may countain discount cards, products or other printing.
Miller noted that promotional mailings may integrate a Post-it Note to remind recipients to call for a hotel reservation. "These can be personalized, along with the letter itself," she said. Magnets can also be integrated into mailings.
There is also a lot of opportunity in the travel industry for cooperative ventures, Miller said. A beautiful, four-color brochure may be too expensive for a small bed and breakfast, for instance, but distributors could partner it with travel agencies or bridal fairs for honeymooners.
Gain Credibility
Packaging applies to distributor sales tactics, as well. "People are willing to pay for putting the cards together with their database," Mulligan said.
Such packaging is a "new frontier" for software companies, Leavesley said. "They're just starting to put together databases on guest preferences and struggling with how to get return business." Hotels are using direct mail, e-mail and Web promotions to garner loyalty, he noted. "The database is now a valuable weapon that has turned into a tool to get repeat traffic," he said.
Michel agreed, "The neat thing about these mailings is that you're not tapping into the forms budget anymore, but into the marketing budget, which is huge."
Leavesley had been formerly trained in the needs of the hospitality industry, which he deems a tightly knit community. He noted that his company, first as Western Business Systems and now as Global DocuGraphix, has been exhibiting at HiTech, the trade show for the hospitality industry, for 10 years. "We're the only forms and printing company there, which gives us high credibility," he said.
Attendance at industry shows, membership in statewide hospitality associations and a competent software team for personalization jobs are all key for distributors in gaining credibility, Leavesley said. But, according to him, although it's very difficult to win business away from competitors, once a distributor has demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the hospitality industry, he or she can quickly outdistance everyone else.
By Janet R. Gross