Today’s travelers are increasingly seeking authentic, independent experiences. They want to feel like locals. Now, tourists, they’re often comfortable with technology and often prefer digital solutions to human interaction but this creates an interesting challenge for hoteliers. How do you market and build trust in a hospitality experience that intentionally minimizes human contact?
That’s exactly what today’s guest of Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition with Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton, Chad Ludeman has figured out. As co-founder of Lokal Hotel, a pioneering boutique hotel brand that’s revolutionizing the hospitality industry with its innovative invisible service concept through thoughtful design and strategic marketing, Chad and his team have successfully created and promoted a new kind of hotel experience that resonates with modern travelers today.
[Listen to the full episode below, or read along for the transcript of the Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
Could you explain what an “invisible service” means at Lokal Hotel in San Diego?
Chad Ludeman: Originally, honestly, we didn’t have the invisible service concept in mind. We were focused on creating a boutique hotel in the way that my wife and I like to travel both by ourselves and with our kids.
So we were focused a lot more on the design of the rooms and the whole building, but they turned out to be very small locations.
The first location was only six units. So, as we were trying to make the numbers work, we realized, hey, we don’t have the real estate area in the building for a front desk. And we do not have the budget to staff full time for only six rooms: a front desk attendant, maybe even two covering different shifts.
We had to work our way backward. Throughout our travels, we saw some similar places that were starting to pop up. One in particular, when we were visiting family and exploring Nashville, we went out to eat at a place that had a small hotel above it—I think it was just four rooms—and going through their website, I saw the term invisible service.
That was the first time I had ever seen that term.
Now understand what it means in luxury hotel hospitality. It’s everyone behind the scenes that you don’t see. You don’t see the kitchen staff, obviously, that’s cooking your food or washing your dishes at a restaurant. But that just clicked with us, and we said, “All right, well, these guys are doing it, we think we could make this work. Why not?”
We’ve had no choice but to do it at the scale we want—to get the design-driven kind of place by starting out doing our first hotel from scratch.
So, yeah, it came out as a necessity rather than planned from the very beginning.
What were some of the marketing challenges that you faced due to this non-traditional approach to hospitality?
Chad Ludeman: Yeah, good question.
When we started out, we had a very strong focus on brand. So we focus on developing the brand really well, bringing in professional brand designers to create this new company and brand for us. So that was one. We started in 2017. Instagram is still very popular, but it was in its prime right then, like even people would look at images.
So it was perfect for this design-driven hospitality. So that’s where we put the majority of our focus, building up that Instagram following even before we opened the first location. So that worked out well.
We grew quickly there, and we booked, I think, about $40,000 in bookings and six rooms before we even opened before anybody had walked through the rooms. This is just on pictures, a website, and Instagram.
We have two in Philadelphia, one in Old City and one in Fishtown, which is kind of a hipper, Brooklyn-type neighborhood of Philadelphia. And then we’ve got one in Cape May, New Jersey, which is right off the beach, and then we have two vacation homes, which are more like cabins in the woods between Philly and Cape May. So they’re about 50 minutes outside of Philadelphia.
How are you using Instagram and social media in general to build trust with potential guests?
Chad Ludeman: We obviously use the professional photos and stuff we had, but there was a big focus on showing the process of checking in. We had iPads in the rooms at the beginning showing how you could use those for different concierge services or to play music in the rooms, or showing how we would respond to you via text message.
At the beginning, we definitely did a little bit more in-depth on exactly how the whole experience would work out from a technical standpoint to make sure that people felt comfortable and understood how they’re going to check in, stay there, check out, and all that. Don’t necessarily focus on that a whole lot anymore, but that was a little bit more of a focus at the beginning to build that trust.
Mike Allton: I could certainly see that applying to almost any industry: when you’re asking somebody to do something that they have done before, show them how to do it. Not just tell them, but show them. And I love the idea of just simply having iPads already in the room that to me elevates the experience.
Let’s talk about the design because your properties are known for their design aesthetic, and I’m wondering how that plays into your social media strategy.
Chad Ludeman: The design is obviously very important. It’s a key principle for us. We’re very design-driven in the build-out of every location, but they’re also very local, which is where the name comes from.
So, we have a lot of local artists. We use local furniture makers and local lighting makers, and as much as we can is made by small local businesses it is key to our whole brand. Showing that design is fairly easy compared to showing the difference between us and a typical hotel because we’re not just a small little hotel room with one or two beds in a room. It’s our apartment style, so it’s a little bit bigger, giving it a lot better light, for sure.
And it looks more like a very well-designed apartment without all the clutter, so it does very well on social media compared to a typical hotel room, for sure.
Can you share an example of one of your social campaigns that you thought did particularly well?
Chad Ludeman: At the beginning to gain awareness, we brought in professional photographers and allowed them to do their own shoots that did very, very well.
Nobody had ever seen the room before, and we just let people bring in their own clients, their own products, whatever it was they needed to shoot. And that helped us gain awareness and get those locations off very quickly. That was probably the best campaign that we did. We probably tried a dozen, and that was the best when we were launching a new location.
Now what’s doing the best is certainly influencers. We’re relying on them more and more. The creator influencer content is definitely being boosted and preferred by the algorithms. Something they post, we could post the exact same thing. It won’t have nearly the traction, but they also have different audiences there looking for design-driven or travel-type content. We are focused a lot more on influencers and the influencers that seem to do the best not just showing the rooms, we encourage them to show their entire experience, their entire stay. The ones that do the best are a Reel that shows them, you know, maybe checking in and enjoying the room, but getting half of it or over half of it are they exploring the neighborhood and what they did, and what made their trip so, so fun because we’ve taken a lot of care into what neighborhoods and the specific streets and blocks that we’ve located our locations on that a large hotel can’t, you’re immersed more in people that live there in an apartment or condo or townhome next door to you.
So you feel like a local, as though you’re living there for a couple of days, rather than staying in a big hotel room in the hotel district.
How are you balancing highlighting that independence of the experience while still ensuring that guests feel supported?
Chad Ludeman: Originally, we were more concerned about that and thought that people would want more hands-on assistance.
We even showed up the first day and offered to help people because it was a walk-up to help them with their luggage. And they were like, “What are you doing here? Get away from me,” kind of thing. So we’ve found out very quickly [that] a part of our niche was stronger than we realized … people want privacy.
We call our guests, more professional travelers, more experienced travelers. They don’t need to do all the check-in. They don’t need to talk to anybody about whatever local things they’re trying to peddle to them. So, that was a pleasant surprise. Through our marketing, obviously most people are doing some research on us, finding our website, finding us through social media, the vast majority of our bookings are direct.
So the majority of people know exactly what they’re getting into. We have zero problems. They love the whole concept. We definitely have a little bit more of an issue with the OTAs. Somebody books on hotels.com, and it might say like a queen deluxe when it’s a studio apartment with self-check-in.
Sometimes we get people from OTAs who don’t look at their emails or the text messages we sent them before. And they get there and call us and say, “How do I get in?” Then they’re expecting a normal hotel room. So that’s sometimes a problem, not too big of an issue.
Usually, when they get in, they’re pleasantly surprised by the size and quality of the room compared to what they thought they booked. And then I would honestly say like 1 percent of our clients, maybe don’t fully understand what they were getting into and are expecting that high-touch kind of experience, which we don’t cater to. We don’t have any on-site food and beverage. We don’t have people who can run … something quickly to their room that they might need. We have lots of ways of handling that. Honestly, my wife hides things throughout the hotel rooms and throughout the hotel itself.
So, that’s how we handle those problems. Everything you could possibly need is usually there somewhere. But it’s not an issue with 98 percent of our clients, they understand what they’re getting into.
Are you guys doing much with UGC? Are you seeing that? How does that play into the rest of your marketing strategy?
Chad Ludeman: It doesn’t play in as much as I’d hope, honestly. We don’t get as many people … posting quality user-generated content as you would hope. So it’s certainly out there, but to be up to our standards, it’s not always fantastic.
I definitely have pictures. I’ll see them as soon as I do. I’ll grab them and ask permission to use them. And those will do well in some mashup Reel or whatever we’re showing past guests staying together, but it’s not a huge part of our content strategy.
Are there any other tools that you’re using platforms or resources that have helped you promote your properties?
Chad Ludeman: Honestly, right now we’re trying to focus a little bit more on the basics like email marketing—so just doing a much better job of our email campaigns, both the pre-scheduled workflows and the monthly fresher what’s going on in the areas that we have.
But technology-wise, I mean, my biggest need right now that I don’t have is CRM which makes my life very difficult as a marketer. Honestly, that’s been a little bit more of the property management software that we use for hotels. We’ve used a couple of different ones right now, and none of them have a CRM, and none of them integrate well at all with third-party CRM.
That’s my biggest need that I don’t have right now in addition to probably tracking the stats of social a little bit better but not using a lot of tools right now that we’re super excited about.
Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. CRMs specifically aren’t a topic that we’ve touched on on this show in the past.
Go back to our very first show, Tyler Anderson, who runs Casual Fridays, out of Texas, which is a marketing agency specifically for hotels and hospitality businesses and, and pick his brain a bit.
How do you see this concept of invisible service evolving, and how do you think that might impact your marketing over the next few years?
Chad Ludeman: We definitely saw the pandemic accelerate this business model.
From the larger hotels to small people like us, everyone is gravitating to some sort of contactless check-in. I think that’s good for the industry. I think that’s good for us, obviously. People might be even checking in without going to the front desk at a Marriott. I don’t know. I think we’ve tried it before and it never works, but they’re experiencing it more and more out there in normal ways of travel.
That just makes them accept our model even better. As it evolves, I think that as we grow again, we’re still pretty small right now, but we want to focus a little bit more on the behind-the-scenes concierge. We always say that we want to feel like we are your local friend who lives in the neighborhood that you’re going to, giving you all the best local recommendations on what to do.
Our staff does a great job doing that via text message, as I said, but I think we want to be a little bit more proactive and come up with some more innovative ways of helping people plan their stay in the area that we are, even before they get there.
And then when they’re there, just feel the ability to reach out to us anytime.
Sometimes we get people that stay with us for a couple of days, and they leave, and they send us a whole bunch of questions or a whole bunch of things they wish they knew. And we’re here on text message all the time. You could have asked us any of those questions. We could have helped you with all these things during your stay.
So those are our goals to get a little bit better at communicating that, marketing that, and having ways to be proactive about this behind the scenes, local friend concierge, and curating your local experience when you stay with us.
Do you have plans to continue to expand in the area?
Chad Ludeman: The pandemic threw a wrench in some of our plans, and we ended up taking almost five years off of expansion. We also have kids who are teenagers now, so we’ve been trying to spend a little bit more time with them while they’re still at home, but we are working on our next project right now. My wife will not allow me to say anything about it, but let’s just say it’s a landscape hotel concept, which is what we’ve always wanted to do from the beginning.
Our investors and what-not were not interested in that concept in 2017 before hardly any of them had been built in the U S and the pandemic has helped escalate that kind of model.
So. Think of more hotel rooms as separated little pods or cabins or whatever you want to call them, rather than one, big building spread out on a larger landscape with a lot of shared amenities and stuff like that. So that’s what we’re looking to do next. We started the design process this week.
Hopefully, all goes well. It takes us a month or two to get out of due diligence before we know our project’s happening. Hopefully, we’ll have more details soon, but right now the boss, my wife, will not allow me to say anything more than that.
Thank all of you for reading the highlights of this episode on luxury hotel hospitality. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Hospitality Edition on Apple, and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Don’t miss other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Retail Edition, Agency Edition, and B2B Edition.
