Hotel Marketing
The value of hotel brochures is often overlooked, however, these branded booklets can make or break the overall image of your luxury hotel in the eyes of discerning travellers. It’s all in the details when it comes to luxury hospitality! Brochures offer a great way to showcase your facilities, rooms, offers, food & beverages, as well as your hotel’s mission and values.
Brochures tell a story of your luxury hotel to your guests, they have the ability to evoke emotions and convey an enchanting image of exclusivity and luxury, which will stay in the minds of your potential guests for a long time. Understanding the fact that a luxury hotel’s brochure holds so much value when representing your establishment, brings up an important question: How do we get this right? With so many different styles, fonts, and paper types to choose from, how do you make sure your brochure represents your luxury hotel correctly while successfully connecting to the guests and highlighting important information? In this article, we will showcase a few of the dos and don’ts, when it comes to the intricate art of choosing the right brochure for your luxury hotel.
If your brochure doesn’t cover the basics, no amount of intricate gold foil accents will save it. It’s crucial to double, or even triple-check, the grammar of your copy. Having spelling mistakes, no matter how small, will be detrimental to all the hard work you’ve put into your hotel’s brochure, as they will make the text hard to read and break the immersion of luxury and exclusivity.
It’s also critical to make sure your brochure provides potential guests with all the information they may need to make a booking. The hotel’s contact number, email, website and address are necessary to provide a good experience to potential guests, as without this information most of them would need to do additional research to find ways to get in touch with you and book their stays. Remove potential barriers by ensuring potential guests have all the information they need to easily make a booking at your hotel.
Consistency is key when it comes to good brochure design and brand identity. Not having a consistent brand identity will make it really difficult to connect with potential guests, and even more so if you wish to leave a lasting impression of your luxury hotel in their minds. Therefore consider utilising a consistent colour scheme, icons, fonts and tone of voice throughout your brochure. This way readers will find it much easier to connect with your hotel and will remember it much better, leading to greater brand recognition in the future.
It sounds simple but it’s surprising how often a call to action is missed in a brochure. It is important to let potential guests know what you want them to do and how they can go around it. If you want them to make a booking, let them know how - if it’s by visiting your website, utilising QR codes can bring great value and make the guest experience more immersive.
A luxurious paper with a high-quality hand-feel, along with extra touches like foil stamping, embossing and debossing can add an additional layer of luxury to your brochure. This provides the opportunity to show potential guests that you consider every detail in order to give them a luxury experience, whether this be in your printed materials or the overall service at your luxury hotel.
On top of that, it’s also crucial to ensure consistent text alignment and review how your content fits within the layout. Inconsistently aligned headings, images and text will ruin the image of luxury and quality, no matter how good the brochure’s content is. It’s important to make sure the layout is neat, organised and easy to follow.
Not every inch of your brochure has to be filled with content, colours, images or icons. Leaving white space, in many cases, can elevate the look of your brochure design, as it makes it look more neat and light. Meanwhile leaving no appropriate spacing can create quite the opposite effect - making the brochure look chaotic and crowded. Less is often more when it comes to luxury design.
Wanting to showcase all the beautiful rooms, luxurious facilities, tasty food and beverages alongside all the other amazing features of your hotel is completely understandable. However, it is crucial not to get too carried away, as overcrowding your brochure with information can become detrimental to the potential guest’s decision-making. Instead, make sure every word in your brochure holds substantial value, as after all - quality always wins over quantity. You can include web links to more information if you need to, allowing you to keep the brochure layouts clean and clear without too many messages and content in one place.
Utilising the right fonts, ideally those from your brand guidelines, offers a great way to diversify the layout and make the brochure more aesthetically pleasing and dynamic. However, it is critical not to get carried away with typography, as having too many different fonts can create a messy look and inconsistencies in branding. We recommend using no more than three fonts for headlines, the main content and CTA’s.
When it comes to luxury hospitality - every little detail holds value, therefore it’s crucial to show this attention to detail in your brochures. Using low-resolution, poor-quality images can ruin the reader's immersion, as they will stick out like a sore thumb from the overall luxurious look of your brochure. It’s crucial to highlight the importance of quality at your luxury hotel, as after seeing a brochure with poor-quality images, potential guests might subconsciously relate this oversight to your hotel’s services and brand too. Instead, choose high-quality imagery that creates a sense of aspiration and exclusivity, leaving an undeniable impression in the minds of potential guests.
Although stock imagery can provide you with some great visuals, it does not showcase the true spirit and sense of your hotel, making it difficult to build a genuine connection with the reader. Using stock imagery, and highlighting pictures of facilities, rooms and even any little details that can’t actually be found in your luxury hotel will only confuse those travellers who end up visiting your hotel. Therefore it’s important to stick to high-quality photography and visuals of your hotel wherever possible, creating a lasting impression on your guests and ensuring they know what to expect from your hotel.
Don’t overcrowd your brochure with sales slogans and CTA’s. Although having some calls to action is crucial, overusing them can frustrate and drive away potential guests, who simply want to have an honest feel of your brand and get to know what they can find in your luxury hotel. Remember, people love to buy but hate being sold to. They want to interact with brands who get them and understand their problems, so aim to use your brochures to build trust and show off your luxury hotel rather than going for the hard sell.
Brochure design can hold many more intricacies, depending on its purpose and the brand identity of your luxury hotel. Creating a brochure that truly represents your brand can be a timely and demanding task. At Big Bear, we offer comprehensive luxury hotel branding services, which include helping you fascinate your guests with a stunning brochure. If you wish to learn more about our branding services visit our services page.
