138 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Michael Cady

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

The latest and greatest TMG Hospitality Trailblazers episode is here! 👏🔥

Join Suite Spot host Ryan Embree and the Chief Marketing Officer at Charlestowne Hotels, Michael Cady, as these two hospitality experts cover some exciting and insightful topics for viewers, including:

♻️ Sustainability in the Hotel Industry

⚡ The First 100% All-Electric Hotel in the Country: Hotel Marcel

💪 The Critical Importance of a Strong Social Media Presence

📱 Technology and the Guest Experience

🏨 What is on the Horizon for Charlestowne Hotels

Tune in now!

Episode Transcript

Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.

Ryan Embree:
Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. I am here for another edition of our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. Very excited about our guest today, lot to talk about. I’m gonna bring ’em right in. Michael Cady, Chief Marketing Officer at Charlestowne Hotels. Michael, thank you so much for being on the Suite Spot.

Michael Cady:
Pleasure to be here. Thank You.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, excited to to have you on. Obviously being a digital marketing podcast, having the CMO at Charlestowne Hotels, got a lot of talk about. But before we get into talking about that beautiful portfolio you have over there at Charlestowne, talk to me a little bit about your experience and the journey that led you to where you’re at now.

Michael Cady:
It’s been a long, strange trip that’s for sure. I guess I’ve been doing this for 25 years now. Time is happening fast. It’s crazy but yeah, about 25 years in branding, marketing, digital media, creative services. I’ve been with Charlestowne Hotels for eight years. Currently, I oversee an in-house marketing team that executes all our campaigns and initiatives across our portfolio, customizing each plan hotel. Before Charlestowne, I did two marketing director gigs in hospitality. One with Orient Express now called Belmont, so worldwide luxury travel train, cruise company. And then the other, which back in the day was similar boutique lifestyle hotel management company as Charlestowne. Obviously that’s changed a bit, but, uh, back in the day it was, it was a lot like us and also have some agency experience. So use a lot of my agency background into integrating our team. And I work for a company called Saachi and Saatchi, which is a global ad agency working on Walmart, Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, some of those bigger brands.

Ryan Embree:
Let’s lean into that spectrum there. Obviously a wide range of experience segments that you’ve been a part of. I want to get kind of your philosophy, the marketing environments that Charlestowne operates from anything from lifestyle, independent collegiate markets, brands, soft brands, really all across the gamut. Kind of like your experience there. Share with us a little bit about your philosophy with that in-house marketing team that you’re talking about when you approach each project from a marketing standpoint, we’re gearing up as marketers. This is an exciting time. We’re getting into the spring, getting into the summer, getting our summer campaigns ready for the travel season. Talk to us a little bit about how your team’s prepping for that.

Michael Cady:
Well, I guess I’ll cover the, the year to date so far. And then kind of go into our different environments. January and February actually, were pretty slow overall for us. Mostly on the occupancy side. I dunno, I think like January’s becoming this month of like personal focus and reflection, getting back to basics and so just didn’t have the leisure travel demand that, that we’ve had maybe in years past. March and April rebounded nicely. Um, and so now we’re at budget or trailing just a bit. And what’s been cool, even the last years group weddings and events continue to increase from the massive drop off from Covid. So it’s just cool to see those segments finally prosper. But yeah, I’m hoping for a good summer get ahead of budget or at least get on part of budget. I probably think the next couple months we’ll tell the story of our national outlook, maybe even perception as as we head into a presidential election. So we’ll see how it goes. This summer’s crucial for us. A lot of our properties are big time in the summer, but I think getting back to your question about, just how do we do it and, you know, especially in the lifestyle and soft brand world, you’re spot on. Every property we do has a different marketing, branding and creative strategy, no matter the market, the segment, the geography, we do it differently per hotel. And I guess we’re just so used to doing the individualized thinking as like 95% of our portfolio the last 45 years has been independent and mostly in secondary & tertiary markets. So we’re just used to thinking creatively and strategically and per property and really don’t have all the bureaucratic hurdles that I think a lot of management companies have. We kind of control our own destiny. And so that’s the approach and the entrepreneurialship we take here at Charlestowne.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, I mean you guys are storytellers, right? Especially for those independent hotels, you, you really have to build up the value and the, uh, we’ve talked about this on, on podcast past. There’s really no ceiling there, you know, with the story that you can tell and what you can share from a marketing perspective. Well, Charlestowne has, has enjoyed over the course of its 45 year history, a flurry of portfolio growth, especially recently. What about when it comes to a new property? Do you have kind of some steps or a game plan or blueprint when you are either developing a property or acquire one on how to attack marketing from that standpoint?

Michael Cady:
I mean, first off, our growth has always been organic. So through referrals, word of mouth being in the news, we don’t even have a dev person. And so that’s just on purpose. ’cause we can’t do what we do for hundreds of hotels. It will not work. It’s impossible. And so, you know, we either obtain a property, as you said, through new development or take it over really like the first 60 to 90 days. We actually do use SOPs and, and like structured methodical ways to onboard. But then after that, the creative and the strategic lines start working. And so if we get organized up on the front side, we then start to evaluate the guest programming, the future improvements needed for branding. Is the guest experience good enough? And so that’s where my team really gets involved after the first 60 days, is we think about branding and obviously branding’s way more than a name, a logo and a font, which I think, you know, is good to point out because every touch point can be some type of brand experience. And so, you know, basically Ryan, like eight years ago, we developed our own in-house creative agency. And so we do all the branding and programming and guest experience in-house, and we work alongside all of our operations team in developing or repositioning brands. And so the hope is with that sort of integrated approach, it’s like a kind of a 360 guest journey that you and your operator can focus on in hopes that you’re delivering a really killer experience for the guests. We just, we found we can do it faster than third party agencies. We can do it cheaper and we can do it a lot more effective because when I’m developing the branding, the operators are right next to me and we’re working together to develop it. And I think that’s really the key when you take over or you’re doing new development, is developing the brand experience alongside your operator.

Ryan Embree:
Absolutely. And we’ve talked about it on this podcast. There’s opportunities to also customize, put a little bit of that local art or, uh, experience wise. And then that’s when it opens you up to be able to say, let’s start incorporating these things, see how it impacts the, the journey. And then it’s always important as you mentioned, to take a look back and say, okay, where are there some gaps? Where can we optimize? Where can we shift and analyze that data and guest feedback to make sure that you’re creating these experiences? Which then in turn, turn into hopefully recognition, which Charlestowne Hotels has had a lot recently on TripAdvisor, Travelers Choice Awards Best of the Best for the Latrell French Quarter Inn and the Spectator, along with several other hotels recognized in the portfolio with regional accolades. As marketing people, we love to be able to shine the trophy a little bit, showcase those and highlight those. But what do you attribute the success to? And how do you from a marketing standpoint, leverage these awards to help win business?

Michael Cady:
Great question. I mean, first and foremost, when you have three properties in the top 25 in the country for TripAdvisor, that’s just a straight up a testament to our operations team, both at the home office and of course our hotels. I mean, we receive a ton of accolades, right? But I think the TripAdvisor one hits differently for me, just ’cause it’s a hundred percent awarded by guest rankings. There’s, there’s no gray area there. And so I attest that to employee wellbeing and guest experience, if those are your sort of core areas to me that relates to TripAdvisor and getting good guest scores. So I just think, let’s not forget the word hospitality amongst spreadsheets and AI and development and investment deals and mergers and minutia. Like it actually is about hospitality, which is, you know, creating a really cool brand experience and then delivering upon that once guests arrive. And if your employees are happy, usually your guests will be happy. And so I think that’s why the employee wellbeing is good. Again, kudos to the operations team. They’re the ones that do that. You gotta be creative and agile and, generating those curated yet organic experiences, you could tap into guest preferences, guest needs, maybe lean, lean into some consumer trends, but all of it happens on property. And those are the people. That’s why we got those awards, not me. I can tell you that now. Yeah, sure. We leverage the awards in pitching. Um, there’s no doubt about that, right? I think we should. It’s an honor and we’re proud of it. But we do it pretty subtly honestly. We want owners who wanna work with us, but just as much we wanna make sure we wanna work with them. And I think that’s been a real key to our success in the 45 years is like, if it’s not a good fit, we’re not interested. And so having contracts for 15, 20, 25 years, that’s what it’s all about to us. And not just gobbling up as many hotels as we can as soon as we can.

Ryan Embree:
That’s a reputation within itself, right? And testimony to the company over there is, is the partners that you’re working with. But I wanna circle back on that TripAdvisor point that you make. And I think it does hit different with TripAdvisor. Obviously the amount of reviews from that source has certainly slowed over the years with Google and some of the OTAs being able to generate more feedback just because of character limits on TripAdvisor. But I still would argue with that TripAdvisor is still the trusted source of guest feedback. It’s still one of the first links that you see on that SERP page when you’re looking at hotels in the area or even a specific hotel. So to be able to be recognized by TripAdvisor is a huge accomplishment. And what you were saying about the experience in the hospitality, I love that you’re preaching that ’cause you’re so right. I mean, we can get caught up here and yes, there are places in that feedback where people talk about things like, you know, it was priced this much or, you know, this was a great deal. But the things that stick out in those reviews and the feedback when you read them are the experiences, the aha moments, the good surprises as we like to say in our industry and the stories that are being able to tell, and especially for soft brand independence and lifestyle hotels. Those are the things you wanna hang your hat on at the end of the day because maybe those, it’s not gonna be brand standards that, that you’re gonna see, but you didn’t come to that property for a brand standard type experience. You came there for a unique one and a unique stay. So let’s talk about another one of my favorite topics and something you touched on a little bit. Technology and innovation. Obviously it’s a balance, right? In a hospitality world, we just preach to our entire audience, you gotta keep hospitality in there. Don’t get caught up in the flashy AI technology of the day. But there are some things that can obviously help with innovation. And with that being said, hotel Marcel in your portfolio, I wanna make sure I get this right. First 100% all electric hotel in the United States. Is that correct?

Michael Cady:
It’s so impressive. Thanks for bringing it up. It’s the first, there’s a lot of words here, but it’s the first all electric, solar powered LEED platinum certified fossil fuel free hotel. That’s a lot of words.

Ryan Embree:
You got them memorized though, Michael.

Michael Cady:
Oh, that’s been in my PR sort of mind for a long time. But it is an amazing accomplishment. This thing is I hope a trendsetter for the country and the world, basically the very entrepreneurial and innovative owner. Again, we love working with people like this. He established his own microgrid. And so it’s like this grid inverter, it’s, it’s located in the hotel’s lithium battery rooms and it allows for off the grid operation and emergency power. It’s not only is that amazing in itself, it’s unbelievable what he did to an adaptive reuse hotel. This thing used to be a tire factory and he made a hotel out of it. But wow, the design, the branding and the architecture of those hotel is second to none. It’s a home run and our owner deserves all the credit. And that’s what gets my company excited is working with people like this and we’re just blessed to be working with him. But yeah, you’re right there, there’s tech that needs to happen. There’s no doubt. Especially I think the tech that helps the actual guest experience. I know less and less people wanna interact and they just look down on their phone all day long. It’s like their best friend, which there’s more to life than that. So hopefully that gets across to your viewers. But there is some good technology. I mean, we’re doing the easy ones, right? Mobile checking and checkout SMS texting I think is a great way, not only for in-house communication on service issues, but to guests when they’re coming and at the property I think is a great thing. We do some chat bots with AI, we’re looking into beacon technology. We haven’t really done that just yet, but it’s something we’re looking into. And then simple operation stuff like integrating with smart devices, that’s a no-brainer, which a lot of hotels are doing. I think the biggest thing we’re focused on today and this year is we are building a very robust CRM platform. So we’re doing that for our entire portfolio. I don’t think it’s gonna get to the level of how Las Vegas does it, but for a company such as ours with, you know, 60 plus different brands, to be able to build a really thoughtful strategic and innovative CRM is a big deal for us. So that’s a big one for us this year.

Ryan Embree:
Well, that leads to what a growing trend right now in our industry. Hear it all the time, is personalization, right? And trying to match expectations and preferences to your traveler prior to arrival. And especially with such a unique portfolio, I can definitely see where that would help and kind of streamline and hopefully optimize the guest experience there. But yeah, going back to Hotel Marcel, it’s such a cool story to see and ahead of its time in the sense of, you know, you’ve got a lot of travelers that are caring more about this organizations, companies. Now I’ve heard the phrase we’re not giving you a travel budget, but we’ll give you an emissions budget, right? And you have to start traveling emission friendly. These are the type of things that trends, overall trends that you want to kind of see so that you can be ahead of the curve is certainly sounds like you are there with that property and owner. Let’s continue down the trend path. This is on the other end of the spectrum, kind of a challenging trend. It’s been frustrating in our industry is staffing, we’ve heard a lot of innovative creative solutions to try to combat the staffing shortage right now it’s getting better, which is nice. But I am curious with such a unique portfolio, I mean, you can probably offer some pretty cool things to retain and recruit staff. Anything that you’re doing on your end to try to take advantage of that?

Michael Cady:
I think some of the things are just like blocking and tackling that in the day-to-day world of hospitality. You can lose focus pretty quick. So I mean, just things like developing a mentorship program in our company. We do continuous learning. So like, you know, last month was a huge WebEx for our company on AI and where we’re at and where we’re going on that. And then again, blocking, tackling, develop clear progressive paths for your people and let’s make sure they know that. And so we, we encourage all the cross-functional collaboration, having different people join some of the pitches I’m in, right? So they can hear how I communicate about our company. But property level, you know, stuff that we, we’ve executed cashless tips, gig pro, both of those I think are really needed in our industry and really came to light post Covid for us. And then, you know, the home office, I think last year we hired 19 new hires and introduced a completely new leadership structure for more property supporting career advancement. We even created a layer of vice presidents for our company, which was really cool. So there’s some really amazing leaders right below me that are just doing great things from technology to marketing to revenue management ops, you name it. And so I think it’s a multiple of the things, right? It’s some tech things and some processes, but it also is just good old fashioned human resources and communication.

Ryan Embree:
We’ve talked about tech in this episode in regards to the guests, but also in regards to associates, your employees and how you’re incorporating to make their life easier, better, more efficient. Those things can weigh on you if you come in and you’ve got inefficient operations or systems that weighs on a work life balance, and you want to make sure your employees are happy and they feel like their jobs are as easy as possible to do. And then you touched on mentorships. You know, one of the things I always ask that question at the top of the episode about journeys. And more often than not, and I’m sure you have several in your career, but everyone seems to stick on a mentor. You know, they’ve got that one person that they’ll do the shout out on the podcast at the top of the episode and say, I probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for X, Y, and Z. So those mentorships are so important to see someone to what your career in hospitality is gonna look like 5, 10, 20 or even 40 years down the line. So very, very important. And then those all create stories throughout the organization. So really cool. Talking about that, I read Michael, in a recent interview, you gave some best tips and practices for obviously marketing your specialty. You mentioned social media, that is a hot topic on the podcast, being a digital marketing podcast. Can you share your thoughts about the importance of a consistent social media strategy and then maybe the power of social ad spend, that you really honed in on.

Michael Cady:
Wow. Social media. I mean, I feel like we talk about it more with owners than anything else related to marketing. And I don’t think that’s actually a good thing. I mean social, I think organic social is an important piece for some properties that need highly curated content. Maybe they have high ADR, they need quality, they have a lot of programming to share creativity at their properties at the forefront. We hire a third party firm and give them scope of work and you know, are posting Instagram stories every day. And it is a huge part of the marketing mix. But, you know, there’s a lot of properties in this country they can’t afford that. And so we, we have some properties just like that. It’s not a one size fit all. I think we have a ton of properties that are on a budget and they can’t afford a firm. And so we develop more of a organic social grid, if you will, right? And it’s focused on the active booker. That’s really important to note. It’s not about gaining followers and having everyone join the Instagram page. It’s not that. It’s for people who are visiting your Instagram. Maybe they went to your website and they’re like, lemme go check the Instagram, make sure that’s good. We develop very beautiful grids that are seasonal. We probably do six a year. And it’s simply a real good check of someone saying, that works, right? The photos look nice, it’s well placed and it checks the box for them to be like, yeah, that’s kind of the same experience I saw on the website. Everything’s a go, but it’s not creating a story showing today’s sunset and going into those details. That option is a lot cheaper and very effective for many hotels. And so it doesn’t always have to be this over the top, you know, content all the time on organic, even though maybe all the owners think that. So many different strategies in the organic side. But all that being said, we put most of our efforts on paid social media and that is the key in our opinion, because not only you can focus on offers, email acquisition, brand awareness, but all that’s tracked, it’s analyzed monthly, it’s optimized based on ROI. There’s actually return you can retarget to these people. And so we, we put a lot of emphasis on the paid social side.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, you make several great points, but you know, one I’ll, I’ll really kind of dive into is the amount effort that you put. Because I’ve seen hotels make a beautiful video, like you said, maybe of a sunset. You know, they try to do it. One of those like TikTok trends where they’re going all over the hotel, they get done, they post it, they’re exhausted, they maybe see some engagement on there, but they’re like, man, that wasn’t worth the effort. And it’s like, that doesn’t need to be every single time. What you’re talking about there is making sure you’re right when somebody comes to your page to check you out, to reaffirm their booking. ’cause they’ve booked, they wanna see just some social media presence just as if we were driving by the hotel, we would wanna see the lights on, right? If we looked into that hotel and it was completely dark, you’d be like, oh, I’m worried. Did I get the right place? Are are they open right now? The same thing can be said about, about social media. You come onto the feed, you see there’s a nice picture of the pool that you saw maybe on the website or didn’t see on the website and you say, this looks where, where I wanna be at. You might see a local event. Maybe that’s an added extra there, right? I’m so happy you kind of delved into that because I think a lot of people hear this podcast where I’m constantly preaching about power of social media, how you leverage it and they think I just don’t have the time to be able to create these unique pieces. And sometimes it’s not about that. Sometimes it’s, it’s having a consistent presence there.

Michael Cady:
A hundred percent. It’s like a digital billboard for active bookers. That’s, that’s our strategy for a lot hotels.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, we’ve heard, we’ve heard that a lot, I’m sure with an incredible portfolio like Charlestowne has, you guys are always selling and being a marketing person, you’re always looking for opportunities to celebrate milestones, it projects, uh, new developments. Is there anything particularly you’re excited about or how about top of mind right now that you’re wanting to launch campaign wise?

Michael Cady:
I think we’re well positioned and poised right now as a company with our resources to maintain kind of our stronghold on boutique independent soft brands. So I feel really good about that. Our primary focus is organic growth, as I mentioned. And mostly we like popular tourism markets, but mostly it’s secondary and tertiary markets. In 2024 we’ll add properties in South Carolina, New Mexico. We’re also rebranding and relaunching a ski resort in Aspen, Colorado. We have some really cool things out there. I think our focus as a company is, I’d say guest technology, creative F&B programming and as I mentioned, launching a new CRM platform for the entire portfolio. So we have some really cool things in the pipeline that are in more of the dev phase, where we’re doing the branding as we speak. And those will probably be more in 2025 or 2026. But yeah, I feel very good. It’s nice to feel this way in terms of our path and we’re not trying to do something we’re not. That makes sense.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, no, absolutely. All while celebrating, a 45th anniversary next year, right?

Michael Cady:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Embree:
So super exciting. Well, well thank you so much Michael for being on podcast. We covered a lot of ground today. Any final thoughts before we wrap up?

Michael Cady:
No, I think, you know, just shout out to all the third party management companies because it’s really hard. You can kind of control some of your future, but at the end of the day, a lot of owners hold many decisions in their hands. So my advice, you know, is just the management companies that can adapt and show as much flexibility to owners will win. So thankfully that’s been our, you know, bread and butter and, um, hopefully, you know, all the management companies can continue to do the great work they’re doing. So it’s, it’s really cool to be on the show and lemme know if I can ever help you.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, absolutely Michael. Well, we appreciate it. We’ll definitely keep an eye out for all those exciting developments at Charlestowne Hotels and celebrating that 45th anniversary next year. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Michael Cady:
Thank you, Ryan. Have a good one.

Ryan Embree:
All right. And thank you for listening. We’ll talk to you next time on the Suite Spot. To join our loyalty program, be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.