Dragonfly Media Curacao

The Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA) three-day Caribbean Small Hotels Retreat on Barbados started yesterday. During this retreat owners and marketers of small hotels throughout the Caribbean will talk about subjects relevant to their business.

Yesterday, Billy Jonckheer (long-time marketer from Curacao) spoke about how hotels with a small budget for marketing should spend their dollars. His two most important points were that they should spend more money on their websites (and marketing those) and that they should make sure that they target their niche market. You can read the full article on nationnews.com

Yesterday’s internet marketing presentation for the HSMAI Curacao Chapter was, in our book, a success! People were hanging from the rafters and were pushing for attention (well, that’s actually not true - no rafters in the room ;) - but the room was packed to the brim).

Bo started off the presentation with an introduction to what DGF is and what we do. She talked about some of our design clients and introduced little old me. The idea of the presentation was to give people an idea of what internet marketing is and to talk about some of the basic concepts in SEO. I talked way too long and finished just in time, but it looked like people remained interested throughout the presentation (which was very cool). (more…)

Coming thursday we will give a presentation on Internet Marketing (or: How you can understand what your internet marketer is talking about) for the Curacao chapter of HSMAI.

HSMAI is an international association of sales and marketing people in the hospitality industry. The first caribbean chapter was founded last year in Curacao and the idea is that its members learn more about their profession through events (like this presentation), conferences, the main HSMAI website and their magazine.

The hospitality industry of Curacao is a real growth sector and new hotels are being built left and right. This is good for the island (provided there are enough tourists and means for them of coming here, of course), but it also means that they need to work harder on marketing their properties because of the extra competition. This is less relevant for a Marriott or a Hilton for whom much of the marketing is handled centrally from the US, but it is very relevant for the many independent hotels on Curacao (Kura Hulanda, Floris, Avila, etcetera). (more…)