According to a recent article, a trend among hotel guests is to look for discounts on a couple’s wedding website.
As the article pointed out, wedding websites :
“ usually include guest information, such as where to book rooms and deal codes that often are not password-protected, making crashing a block easy enough to do. A quick search for “wedding block,” with a location and date, yields dozens of examples.”
What some discount seekers are doing is searching on Google for keywords like “room block” for the date and city they are traveling to.
Invariably, someone is getting married on that day and has a room block that these discount seekers can use. So they call the hotel and book a room under this block.
With 68% of all couples having a wedding website, what better way to get a discount in any city.
While the article itself was an eye opener, it gave me an idea
You see, lots of companies offer wedding websites to engaged couples. Some are free and others charge. But one thing they have in common is that these websites can be a great source of information about a wedding itself.
So how can we use these wedding websites to find more business?
We could do the same search as these wedding crashers, except we could search for weddings that are going to happen next year. Upon finding these couples wedding websites, we can contact them to see if they need accommodations.
And if they already have a wedding room block set up, we can offer our hotel as overflow or even as a second option. Also, remember that not every couple blocks rooms. Sometimes, they just put up a list of hotels in the area. If yours is not on the list, this would be a great way to get on the newly engaged couple’s wedding website.
So how can we find these newly engaged couples websites?
Do the following search in Google (replace San Francisco with your city):
“san francisco” 2014 site:http://www.weddingwire.com/wedding/UserViewWebsitePage
Here are the results that come up for San Francisco:
There are 9 pages of wedding websites created by couples who are getting married in San Francisco in 2014. That’s 90 couples that may need a wedding room block.
And the above example is only from using websites created on Weddingwire
There are a host of companies that offer wedding websites that we can get leads from. In the three examples below, we have used Google as the search engine and searched for San Francisco. Try using the same search but substitute your city to see how many results you get.
- ewedding (site: ws3.ewedding.com/sites 2014 “san francisco”)
- www.nearlywed.com (2014 san francisco site:http://nearlyweds.com/sites/index)
- www.weddingwindow.com/ (site:weddingwindow.com/index.cfm?fa=accommodations “san francisco” 2014)
As a general rule, the bigger your city, the more weddings you’ll see. Just conduct the above search once a month and you’ll find new couples that have just created a website for their wedding. Then all you will have to do is reach out and book some wedding blocks.
What should you do next?
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