Marketing and Selling Hotel Accommodation in Central London

This is a short article to dicuss the perspective of an accommodation booking agency based in Central London.

Because of the boom in the travel and tourism industry in the whole of UK, there has been a huge increase in tourists coming to London. London, a very big city is distributed into zones - more for the benefit of an underground traveller which has now become a medium of calculating how costly (in terms of property) and posh a place is. Zone 1, consisting of areas like Victoria, Kensington, Bayswater, Tower Hill, Aldgate and Kings Cross is rated #1 followed by zones 2,3,4,5 and 6.

Together, London has about 2000 hotels/bed and breakfasts/lodges/motels/apartments to offer and the number of agencies selling this accommodation is not much fewer than that number. Therefore, starting a new agency service to sell the same accommodation has to be properly targetted and the rules of marketing should be defined on the table before the work starts, or else it will be a failure with so much competition.

We analysed the market and to our surprise we found that the worldwide market has been taken already by top agencies like expedia, laterooms, bedbank etc. All these agencies have huge presence in almost all countries around the world and therefore all tourism is carried out via their websites or GDS'.

We looked a little within that scope and found that the most easy to target audience is that within England and if that sounds like a narrow view, the figure stands at a staggering much more than 1 million travel tourists per year. And there is no one targetting them wholeheartedly.

That was 2 years ago, and because of the timely and realistic estimates and marketing strategies to sell Central London Hotels, we were able to create one of the biggest booking service for hotels in central London.

There is always a niche market waiting to be explored.

The author has been in the London hotels' industry since the last 15 years and has extensive marketing and promoting experience especially in central London hotels bookings