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
Well hotels with a small marketing budget are good but it also may bring a lot of problems… so if you can cover that up then it will sure will get you on top…
The article on nationnews.com is rather short to convince anybody.
Also this applies for many sectors in Curacao. I have spoken personally to people and explained the importance of SEO & Web development but there are lot of barriers. Many businesses have encountered bad experience regarding web design and are simply not willing or too scared to repeat such experience. Also once they understand SEO the only request would be “first place on google”. The costs and details surrounding this scares them off unless they get lied to. The worse part is that many believe in “free 50$ google adwords” and will think that’s all that is needed to rank high in google. It’s all about education i believe. No company is really into agressive SEO in curacao. I believe a new generation of companies will emerge in a couple of years that will be extremely web savvy and put many local companies out of business at a fast pace.