Setting the standard: Maintaining brand consistency across all hotels properties

The true hallmark of a thriving hotel brand lies in its ability to deliver a consistently exceptional experience across every single touchpoint. From the intuitive flow of your booking engine and the compelling stories on your social media, to the curated scent in your lobby and the genuine warmth of staff interaction, every detail contributes to your hotel's unique identity.

A truly consistent brand doesn't just build recognition; it cultivates trust, fosters guest loyalty and builds equity. If you’re looking at hotel expansion to scale and replicate success, mastering brand consistency is not a luxury – it's a strategic imperative.

This guide takes a look at some of the key strategies you can use to maintain hotel brand standards across multiple channels and locations.

Leveraging data and technology

Collecting and analysing data enables your business to gain a competitive advantage as you maintain and monitor the consistency of your hotel brand standards.

Know your guest

You can’t sell to people you don’t understand. By collecting data on your customers - their likes, dislikes, and what they want to see - you gain a better understanding of what your brand needs to do to be a persuasive and highly valued voice. Consider a unified customer relationship management (CRM) system which allows any property to access a guest's preferences and history, enabling consistently personalized service across the brand.

Streamline operations

It’s not just about knowing your guess, you also need to harness technology to help your teams work more effectively, too. Integrated property management systems ensure consistent booking, billing and operational workflows. Consider embracing AI to better support workers with services like predictive maintenance to ensure you maintain property conditions. Other services such as AI chatbots empower you to provide consistent and timely guest interactions even out of hours. Smart hotel solutions also help provide consistency, whether it’s maintenance management software or using the Internet of Things (IoT) to ensure consistent environment factors such as temperature, lighting and entertainment.

Performance monitoring

Across your portfolio, implement the use of unified reporting dashboards to track KPIs, identify any issues and spot areas for improvement. Technology such as predictive analytics can help you evaluate past and real-time data, turning that data into insights. It’s an effective way to detect trends and identify potential issues that could affect guest experience before they happen.

Your living brand book

You will likely have created an initial brand book for your first property, perhaps revisiting and expanding on it as you grew your portfolio. But you need to do more than that.

A true brand book is a living, breathing document, that should adapt and change with your brand. It’s not just about outlining key hotel brand identity elements like logos and colours, it should include your brand philosophy, voice, service standards, interior design principles (for renovations/updates), uniform guidelines, F&B standards, and sustainability pledges. And most importantly, it should instruct how these are maintained.

You need a centralised brand team whose responsibility it is to maintain the document and to make it available to teams across the company - perhaps on a digital platform or your intranet. You also need regional or local brand champions, whose job it will be to implement the brand book and it is invaluable to provide training on what the brand book is and how it can be used.

Dazzle with visual consistency

With an estimated 55 per cent of all brand first impressions being visual, it’s crucial to maintain a unified visual identity. You want to ensure your customers consistently associate your brand with a cohesive and positive message. You looked at elements like logo and colour palette when you're building the brand, but how do you ensure the maintenance and governance of visuals?

A centralised digital asset management system is essential. It is from here that all teams can find and use approved, current photos and videos, as well as marketing materials. It ensures efficiency in asset distribution and eliminates silos of information.

You also need to ensure uniformity in physical spaces as you renovate and refurbish properties. You’ll need a central list of approved materials, design motifs and furniture guidelines, for example. The environment is key, too, and you should be having discussions about consistency of scent, music and lighting as well as signage and cleanliness - anything that contributes to the overall ambience.

It’s not just about in-hotel visual consistency. You also need to consider the user experience online, from your website to your social media channels. Consider centralised email marketing templates and setting social media guidelines. You also want to make sure that the brand experiences carry over to booking engine flow and don’t forget the mobile app experience.

Operational excellence

Define what good service looks like for your hotel brand and implement it at all locations. Standard operating procedures will help you detail specific processes for every department, from reception and housekeeping to F&B and concierge services. You must also focus on consistency when it comes to problem resolution. How should staff talk to guests? Who do they go to in order to escalate a complaint? All this needs to have been considered and set into guidelines that everyone can access.

Ongoing training is a great way to ensure standards are met and kept. Ensure there are training modules available to cover off all standard operating procedures and make them easily available.

Centralised systems for collecting, analysing and acting on guest feedback are essential. This feedback loop will allow you to identify and address any consistencies across properties. Additional feedback from internal peer audits and mystery shopper programmes can further support improvement.

Your staff are your brand ambassadors and you want to empower them. Continuous brand training, with refresher courses and workshops, will help keep brand values top-of-mind. You also want to create a cohesive internal culture, so that employees feel connected to the brand regardless of their position and location. Finally, you want to train your team leaders so that they actively embody the values of your brand, creating positive reinforcement at every level.

Navigating evolution

Maintaining brand consistency isn't about freezing your brand in time. The hospitality landscape is dynamic, with guest expectations, technological advancements, and cultural trends constantly evolving. For an established multi-property brand, the true challenge lies in evolving without diluting your core identity.

The "Core vs. Flex" model provides a framework for this. The core elements are the non-negotiable elements of your brand identity. This can include your mission, values, core logo, primary colour palette and your fundamental service philosophy. The flexible elements can be tailored elements that incorporate local flair, specific market demands, or innovative new features. For example, you can maintain core design principles but incorporate local art installations, or offer unique guest experiences tied to the local culture. Think about sourcing local ingredients for the F&B offering or piloting new smart room features at specific properties before a roll-out across the portfolio.

When it comes to implementing changes in general, pilot programmes focused on one property, as mentioned above, are valuable. You should also look at phased implementation rather than simultaneous overhauls, and remember that for every innovation, you need to provide training and communicate the changes effectively. Remember, feedback loops can be valuable here, too, collecting feedback from guests and staff in a central location for analysis and refinement.

Enduring brand consistency

Your hotel brand identity is at the core of everything. By being consistent with your visuals, tone, and service interactions, and monitoring performance with a data-driven approach, you build a loyal customer base, who know and like your brand and what it stands for.

At Peregryn, we are proud to be a hotel branding agency working with industry leaders. Our experienced team includes copywriters, SEO strategists, designers, content marketers and creative brand storytellers. We can help with everything from ongoing brand governance and brand guideline updates to consistent content creation and strategic audits. Find out how we can help you sustain excellence through your ongoing hotel brand strategy.

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