Originally Posted by
albertherrera
How do you guys find the "like this photo if you wish you were here" marketing done on Facebook by Four Seasons and Shangri-la?
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...type=1&theater
I personally can't stand it. I feel it cheapens the brands and actually targets a market which is not the kind that they actually hope to entice. The kind of comments also seem quite telling that it's completely aspirational.
I just wish they'd be more discreet and let the superiority of their excellent properties speak for themselves.
Four Seasons, Mandarin and Shangri La run some big hotels that have lots of rooms to fill. The way many of us buy our hotels has changed in recent years- I certainly don't have all the the holiday brochures (with their carefully selected portfolio of hotels) scattered around the Lounge any more, and maybe the "superiority of their excellent properties" is no longer speaking for itself.
Many people go to site scraping search engines and say "show me ALL the 5 star hotels in X city for this date, as a result some of the Hotels run by these chains won't even show until webpage 14 of 15 (who ever goes to Google Page 2?). We can argue that those of us on flyertalk don't do that, but if owners of large hotels relied on the couple of hundred of people who contribute to this forum to fill their rooms and restaurants they'd go broke in no time.
These people are running hotels not golf clubs and they're running them for a profit - and from what I've read it's very hard for Luxury hotels to turn profits.
Yes, they may have set out to attract a certain type of client X years ago, but a lot of the world is in recession, countries that were once rich are now not so rich and countries that never travelled, now travel everywhere. Times change, we may not like it. How many hotels are there that we know of that say "you can only stay here if we want you to", Peter de Savary I think runs a couple of places.
And you know, the feeling that we get that they're no longer targeting their adverts to what we think is their natural audience, namely "people like us" is because the reality may be we are no longer that target audience - it's that wealthy 20 something from Russia who will think nothing of buying $1000 bottles of Krug, which is certainly not me.