If you are in the hotel business you want to make money. Being an extremely competitive market, you always need to market towards new clients. Today, nothing makes more financial sense than marketing to the gay and lesbian population. Hughes, Howard L. Pink Tourism: Holidays of Gay Men and Lesbians. New York: CAB International, 2006.

This book focuses on the world of gay and lesbian tourism from a business and marketing perspective. Its main purpose is to show how marketing can best be used in this field. It begins with an overview of the nature of homosexuality and how these issues effect tourism and hotel marketing. The chapter on accommodation provisions specifically focuses on how hotel managers can market and provide desired services to this traveling niche.

This book, and this chapter particularly, is beneficial to the travel professional involved in the hotel industry because it serves as a step-by-step guide to how to run a successful marketing campaign aimed at attracting the gay and lesbian population. Further, it provides sound advice on how to operate a hotel that caters to the needs of gay and lesbian travelers. Finally, the chapter also provides an in-depth discussion of how politics and other issues effect the gay and lesbian travel market and what a hotel manager can do to successful market to and serve all populations at the same time.

A found this chapter to be an interesting overview of niche marketing within the hotel industry. Although I felt many of...

Often times marketing to the gay and lesbian population seems like a Catch-22. On one hand you may gain a paying client, but on the other you run the risk of loosing another. This book does a good job at discussing how to successfully manage this delicate balance.
Iwata, Edward. "More Marketing Aimed at Gay Consumers." USA Today. 2 November 2006.

This article is a feature on the new push for hotels to market specifically to the gay population. As opposed to the trend even just ten years ago when no marketing was done towards gays, "today the market for gay and lesbian consumers is highly coveted and hitting the mainstream in a huge way." According to the article there are over sixteen million gay consumer with a collective $641 Billion in buying power. With this money, the population is now attracting the business of hotels.

This article is important to those who are practitioners in the hotel and travel industries because it highlights an important marketing and business trend. Without understanding what many of one's competitors are doing, one will miss out on reaching this market, which translates to being bad for business.

I think this article presents a basic, fact-orientated overview of why hotels are focusing their marketing on the gay and lesbian population. With the money they spend and time they travel, this marketing trend makes perfect business sense.