HOTELS Magazine:

Social Hotel Awards Recognition

Hotel Del Coronado, San Diego’s more prized seaside luxury resort, found itself in an enviable circumstance.

The brand had accrued the largest social media following to date among key competitors. Rather than celebrate the growing community sizes, the brand moved its focus to engagement – the metric in which many brands base their social media success on.

Hotel Del Coronado developed a new social media strategy: Connecting offline guest experiences to online guest conversations.

In order to connect offline guest experiences to online guest conversations, Hotel Del Coronado was required to do three things:

  1. Target potential guests, not just fans of the brand
  2. Use social media as a customer service hub
  3. Reward more guests for their social media engagement

The best way to discover and respond to guest inquiries on social media is to constantly monitor the social space.

Hotel Del Coronado began monitoring and responding to fans across all social networks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

As an aspirational destination, we understood that deals and discounts would not draw as much value to the social media audiences. Instead of discounting the hotel experience, we chose to give away stays via social media promotions

With particular focus on enhancing guests’ stays, Hotel Del Coronado incorporated social media into several on-property experiences.

Hotel Del Coronado expanded conversations related to the hotel by fielding more than 9.3K messages on social media within the year. This, in turn, increased Facebook user engagement by 193%, marking an increase in conversation share.

Hotel Del Coronado generated more than 459 Tweets sent per month, eclipsing competitive set average by more than 200 Tweets per day.

Aggregate TAT metric (the number of users “talking about this”) for the year reached 1.4 million, ranking Hotel Del Coronado number one within the respective competitive set – not only did the property generate the largest aggregate TAT for the year, but Hotel Del Coronado was on top by over 700K.

Social media promotions helped garner more than 77K impressions and reached over 38K users, earning 1.2K likes. These promotions helped drive peak interactions and bolster brand profile.