Four Seasons Hotel marketing strategies and service differentiation

¶ … SEASON'S HOTEL

Four Seasons Hotel

Four Season's Hotel

The Four Season's Hotel

The Four Seasons Hotel is a high rated hotel facility founded in the early 1960 to cater for the hospitality and tourism industry. The Luxurious hotel chain is a private business corporation having an estimated number of 33,000 employees. It has operations is 86 hotels scattered amongst 35 countries world wide. The hotel is globally managed by a two- person counsel office (Kingsbury, 2010). Throughout its marketing operations, it has conducted and formulated specific marketing strategies amongst all its chains. These strategies in marketing are mainly planning and the implementation process. The Four Season's strategies have certain inherent attributes such as service differentiation and marker segmentation that assists in the hotel's overall marketing schemes.

Market Segmentation

This is a methodology that companies use to divide their customers in favor of achieving competitive vantages over their rivals. It builds and sustains a company's long-term competitive advantages. This is done by gauging their clients' differences and preferences. Among the three substitute strategies laid down for organizational marketing segmentation, the Four Season Hotel uses the distinctive competence strategy to approach unique service to its customers in reference to their needs and groups (Hill and Jones, 2011, pg 119).

Through this strategy, the Four Seasons chain of hotels assays to provide high-profiled services and accommodation; which are its distinct combination of competence in having an upper hand in the business. For the customers of Four Seasons Hotels, the segmentation is based on affordability or price, functionality and designs available. Several customers prefer a more luxurious environ than others, of which the affordability aspect is greatly considered in foreseeing continued supply of the luxurious amenity.

The quality of the service provided is also an aspect that has led to the segmentation of their services. Four Seasons hotel has hosted high and dignified dignitaries and what is delivered to them is way different from the normative reservations done. The Clintons and the Bushes are examples of these families. Staff servicing such honorary members is also enamored leading to a positive turnover of the employment opportunities under this segment.

However, strategic development of marketing niches for customers is conjoined with several limitations. Other competitors in the industry come up with the same strategies of segmentation. This notion arises without agreeable terms making trade-offs thus, weakening the competitive environment that drives and motivates the conduction of business operations (Raynor and Weinberg, 2004, pg 24). Similarly, the business model created by segmentation of marketing the Four Seasons Hotel provokes limited incentives that marginalize the overall competency of the organizations, eventually providing limited leverage. The Four Seasons Hotel has also undergone a recession of its paralyzed business and service operations. This was attributed to segmentation fluxes experienced in the luxury department (Kingsbury 2010).

Conclusion

Despite the limited experienced confines challenging the four Seasons Hotel, it is still continuing to expand its operational wings to other countries that are promising in the hospitality and tourism industry. Its marketing strategies have helped a great deal in overseeing general marketing functions towards having an integrated and unremitting business entity.