USA Today’s hotel hotsheet blog takes note of Hampton Inns new Bed Heads campaign that features young people with tousled hair. Launched as Cloud Nine, the campaign seeks to bring out its bed collection – the focus of virtually every chain – in a different way. Bed Heads is a nice take on the age old “Heads in Beds” focus of hotel marketing with the right emphasis on the surface guests spend most of their living time in hotels.
While the nearly four plus years emphasis on beds and their accoutrements sometimes goes over the top, hotels, particularly at the high end, seem to be converging on a new must have feature – the spa. The LA Times today has a report on spas in hotels with a headline that says it all – Spa Wars. Just about every hotel and resort around the world worth its salt has a spa or is racing to build one. From “smell of drying paint, fresh carpeting and new wood” at the Beverly Hilton to “construction crews and a locked spa door” at the Luxe Hotel Sunset Boulevard, the outcome, albeit temporary, is probably not what many of these establishments intended. But with a focus that takes away from the room as in somewhat blase statements such as “It’s not a question of coming to a hotel to sleep. You need to be pampered” from the General Manager of the Regent Beverly Wilshire in LA, we may be in some danger of forgetting marketing 101 – Heads in Beds.