Digital promotion key to hotels

Avi Arya, Chief Mogul, Internet Moguls, believes that the future of digital marketing in hospitality industry is promising and they make sure that every hotel brand creates its own niche.

Vaanya Jain

Avi Arya, Chief Mogul, Internet Moguls, says that he started the digital marketing agency after he couldn’t find an online agency that understood hospitality well. Initially, he started digital marketing for Ajanta, his own hotel in Delhi, and Tamarind, his another property in Goa.

He says that digital marketing changed the way hotels used to do business. “Nowadays, people find digital marketing a better investment than gold,” he claims. “Earlier people didn’t know how to calculate their Return on Investment (ROI) when they put money in digital marketing. However, today we don’t have sufficient staff to give our clients, we have at least a month waiting to onboard a client,” he adds.

Now, Internet Moguls is handling marketing for a number of hotel brands and makes sure that every brand retains its USP. “When we start working with a brand, we have at least two weeks of onboarding, understanding previous mistakes. Hotels basically have four revenue centres — rooms, F&B, spa and banquets. We see where they stand and who is the competition. After that we give an X-ray of the issues affecting their business. Hotels generally don’t like when they are made to stand in front of the mirror, but it is our job to show them the real picture and that is where the journey starts,” he says.

In the digital marketing domain, especially in the hospitality sector, people are making lakhs of rupees every weekend by selling packages on Instagram and Facebook for their restaurants. “It is not possible to compete with OTAs at the same price, but you can do that by giving a package that you have not given to an OTA by running them on Facebook ads,” he says.

Every Saturday, he conducts free trainings for 1,100 hotels from different parts of the world.