Growing PR Expectations For Hotels In The PRC

By Danny Levinson
Seven hotels are scheduled to open by the end of 2006 in Beijing, an additional 10 in 2007 and 12 in early 2008. In all of China, 107,725 guestrooms are currently under construction. With phenomenal hotel growth comes the need to find suitable employees to fill the thousands of jobs created by China's tourism boom. But the need for qualified candidates far outstrips the availability of trained employees, especially in the critical roles of public relations and marketing in hotel companies.

Hotels understand that there is a large chasm they must cross to bring fresh faces into their service industry. In September 2006, Sichuan Royalton International Hotel and Tour Management Academy signed a cooperation agreement with CHN University Netherlands to set up a hotel management training center in Sichuan. The project is aimed at enhancing the management level of China's hotel industry through international cooperation and to train hotel managers who are familiar with both international standards and the situation in China. With investment for this project at around RMB850 million, this is less of a gamble than an assurance that future Sichuan hoteliers will have a solid hospitality background.

Rene J.M. Schillings, Director for Greater China and Singapore for HES Global Hospitality Executive Search, says, "The overall problem in China for hoteliers, and not only PR managers, is that they lack exposure to more different hotels, countries and cultures. The majority of the staff in any hotel in China, at all levels, has never even been to other cities in China, has not been to other five-star hotels, not to mention about having worked or experienced what hotels are like in more developed countries. So they have little reference and little chance to see, observe and learn from what other hotels do."

In answer to these problems, this year InterContinental Hotels Group partnered with the William Angliss Institute and Box Hill Institute to create the InterContinental Hotels Group Academy in China. Launched through Shanghai University's Advanced Polytechnic College prior to a staged rollout through Greater China, the Academy has been developed to address the Asia Pacific hotel industry's growing demand for trained talent. It will begin by offering a two-year Advanced Certification program, combining theoretical instruction from industry academics and InterContinental Hotels Group executives with internships at the Group's hotels. The Academy will also offer a series of four- to eight-week certification programs on specific areas of hotel operations such as front office, housekeeping and food and beverage functions.

I have dealt with hundreds of hospitality marketing and public relations professionals over the years in China both as editor of the daily China Hospitality News website and its monthly bilingual print magazine, and also as a managing partner at BDL Media, where we enable the online marketing and campaigns for hundreds of hotels in China. I have seen the general preparedness of marketing professionals decline, especially in the last two years since many hotels have been bursting with new growth.

"There is a serious shortage of highly skilled Mandarin-speaking PR talent in general. PR managers traditionally come from a journalism background. Hotel PR executives also need to have an understanding, if possible, of previous operational work experience in hotels. Hotel schools in China, as well as the 1-2-3 year overseas courses that Chinese nationals now follow, tend to focus more on the operational side of hotel operations, not on general sales, marketing or PR skills," Schillings says.

Take press releases, for example. Many hotels incentivize their PR staff with bonuses based on the amount of times press releases are picked up by local media. This has resulted in a couple of interesting phenomena.

First, I am starting to receive more press releases from hotels about inconsequential things. The hotel might think that the installation of a new chandelier in their lobby warrants a feature-length article, but good public relations professionals know that peppering editors with too much frivolity can cause future big stories to go unnoticed.

Next, press release formats are going out the window. With the advent of email, traditionalists bemoaned the end of formatted missives. Multiply that ten-fold for press releases delivered via email and you have all sorts of "xinwengao" in China that lack essential Who, What, Where, When, and Why in their content. A few months ago I received a press release from a hotel that had just completed a charity event. The content contained all the essential information, except it lacked the total amount of money raised during the charitable event and which charity benefited from the event: the PR manager was too focused on getting her General Manager's name in the release that she forgot an essential reason why the event was held and why the release was created.

What are hotels doing to retain their good staff they already have? John Serbrock, Regional Vice President Sales and Marketing (Asia Pacific) for Kempinski Hotels, says, "Traditionally, we have been investing substantially and consistently in training our employees, while offering opportunities to those that have shown a potential to grow. Our TOP 100 program for example, is specifically designed to identify and nurture young, talented managers who will be able to maintain if not exceed the level of quality for which our hotels are known worldwide. We are not worried about the quality of future employees as long as we are able to attract the best talents to train and manage them."

Marketing professionals for many years had a toolbox of skills and experience they could draw on when communicating their messages to the public. But with the Internet comes an entirely new way to interact with the media, and with a hotel's internal organization, and I see China-based public relations managers (both foreign and local staff) failing to keep up with sophisticated means of expressing their company's intentions.

My company runs XZList, one of China's oldest and biggest email list management and online loyalty marketing services. While we have over a hundred hotel clients utilizing our service in China, very few of them use it effectively and get their money's worth (which I guess is good for me short-term but bad for both me and my clients long-term). In addition, the level of knowledge of Internet marketing is low and unsophisticated in China. One head of corporate public relations for an international hotel chain in China told me she wants to build a 100% Flash-based website for her company's corporate image in China. She said she likes Flash because it seems interactive and looks bright and shiny. Sure, Flash looks nice, but it's very difficult to optimize it to be picked up by most search engines and it fails to provide a laundry list of other important features that straight HTML can provide and that are vital to conveying the hotel's message to netizens around the world. Ultimately this greatly affects the hotel's message. When I see hoteliers and PR managers choosing 100% Flash websites I wonder for how much longer the blind can lead the blind.

Part of this comes down to the expected level of sophistication of hotel PR staff in China. Earlier this year, I attended a large email marketing conference in Chicago where I met heads of Carlson, InterContinental, and American Airlines online marketing teams. The understanding they have for marketing their brands in North America and Europe far outstrips the level of knowledge I have seen from their counterparts in China. Same worldwide brand, local expectations, I guess.

Schillings adds, "So for the hotels it's difficult to find PR managers that have both the academic background for a PR role–journalism studies or general sales and marketing–as well as a general understanding of what a hotel product stands for. Another problem is also that being a PR manager is considered an entry-level management position, so the ambitious and eager ones will very quickly move upwards to sales and marketing director or senior manager roles, creating constant need for replacement."

Hotels are being built in China at increasing speeds, and human resource departments are being asked to often do the impossible–find trained candidates to fill critical roles. Winnie Chiu, Area Representative for China and Southeast Asia at Profile Management & Specialist Recruitment, says that her hotel clients are saying the pool of applications are not good enough, but they can be open minded about what type of candidate they choose to train. Chiu says, "I feel that there is a shortage of PR talents not even for the new hotel openings but for the existing hotels."

Ethics and corporate social responsibility are also a very large part of the business. Combine Chinese business with the hospitality industry and you often have a recipe for lost money and wasted resources. Along with purchasing departments, public relations and marketing departments are often provided budgets in which money sometimes silently creeps away to unseen places. Especially for American hotel companies, which by law must refrain from pay-offs and bribes anywhere they operate in the world, better oversight must be maintained to help quantify return on investment for all marketing and PR money. Oversight should be maintained at the same pace as hotel growth.

With more hotels coming online in China, the burden on public relations and marketing managers will increase. Hotels will need to keep better tabs of the return on their investments and balance that with finding niche initiatives to push themselves above the growing crowd of hospitality rivals. With great emphases at domestic and foreign hotels in China already placed on security, cleanliness, service and quality, hotels will also need to constantly maintain their image in a world of different media and burgeoning competitors.

By Danny Levinson
Editor, ChinaHospitalityNews.com
Danny has worked in China for over 9 years and travels frequently. His views are his own and do not represent those of this publication, its investors, owners, or other staff. To comment on this article please email Danny at chinahospitalitynews@gmail.com–though he can't always promise a response, he will read all messages.