While being out on the road the, your lodging options are between a traditional hotel room or an Airbnb residence. Here we will compare the advantages as well as the drawbacks of each option.

Advantages of Traditional Hotels

1. Business Services

• Just about any hotel property that is at least 3 stars has a business center (computer and printer) and conference rooms available for guests to reserve for meetings.

2. Receiving Shipments

• Almost every hotel will accept packages and hold them for you at a safe location as long as you are a registered guest.

3. Rooms are Guaranteed with Reservation

• It is extremely rare for a hotel to not have a room for you if you have made a proper reservation. You can also check-in at just about any hour of the day/night after 3pm. This is critical for long drives when you might be arriving to your destination late at night.

4. Free Breakfast

• Unless you book a full-service hotel, most hotels provide free breakfast as part of the rate for the stay.

5. Room Service

• Free room cleaning is a great amenity to have particularly during longer stays.

6.Reward System

• Every major hotel chain has a reward system that will allow you to accumulate points to redeem for free nights.

Disadvantages of Traditional Hotels

1 .Lack of Kitchen

• Unless it is an extended stay property like the Homewood Suites by Hilton or Residence Inn by Marriott, you won’t have the equipment to cook your own food.

2. Big Surcharges During Major Events

• A 2-star motel can run over $400 per night during large-scale events like Daytona, Super Bowl, or Kentucky Derby.

3. Rooms are Small

• Most hotel rooms simply have one or two beds and a bathroom, making them an uncomfortable option for more than two people to share.

Advantages of Airbnb

1. Space

• Many Airbnb choices are entire properties, so you can rent a multi-bedroom house for the price of a hotel room.

2. Cooking Equipment       

• Even for shared rooms options, with an Airbnb you will have access to a kitchen and maybe even additional cooking equipment like an outside grill.

3. Less Surcharging for Major Events

• Airbnb prices will certainly surcharge for major events, but almost never as much as traditional hotels.

Disadvantages of Airbnb

1. Limited Parking

• While hotels have a designated parking lot, Airbnb properties are private residencies. Therefore, parking for large tour vehicles can be very limited.  

2. Hosts can Cancel

• For a number of reasons, an Airbnb host can cancel your stay several days prior to arrival. This can then become a particularly bad situation if there is a major event in town and other options have already been booked up.

3. Limited Business Services

• Usually the Airbnb will provide Wi-Fi, but that’s it for business amenities.

4. Lack of a Rewards Program

• There are certain partners, such as Delta Airlines, that reward miles for booking directly through their portal. However, as of this writing Airbnb does not have a formal rewards system. 

5. Difficulty Checking-in

• ​Some Airbnb properties do allow self check-in by using a lockbox system. Other properties, however, require you to meet the host at a designated time in order to check-in. This can become a problem if your travel is delayed. 

Planning for the fixed costs such as permitting, vendor fees, vehicle rentals, insurance, and staff salaries for your mobile-marketing project is generally straightforward. However, don't forget to budget for the variable expenses that almost inevitably occur during the course of the tour.

Vehicle Repairs and Maintenance
This is a particularly big one if the tour is running with an experiential vehicle, like a BizBox. Graphics, staging, doors, and flooring will likely need repairs/replacement during the tour. For this reason, it is important to try and negotiate some kind of warranty with your fabricator during the production phase of the project.

Generator
If the tour travels with an onboard generator, even a simple PM service can cost up to $500 for a heavy-duty diesel generator.

Shipping
Throughout the tour you will likely need to ship supplies, premiums, uniforms, and other items to the field team. Larger items can easily cost hundreds of dollars to ship, especially for rush deliveries.

Technology Support
Whether it’s registration tablets, TVs with promotional content, VR systems, internet servers & routers, or photo booths, today’s mobile-tours incorporate many different technological elements. Very often these functions will need professional troubleshooting when systems are jarred during transit.

Unexpected Labor Costs
What if the Tour Manager must suddenly leave for an emergency? Or your tour driver is out of DOT hours due to severe weather conditions, therefore not being able to finish the drive to the next market. Finding last-minute replacement is always costly, and can really strain the operating budget if not planned for in the beginning. 

While retail activations are nowhere near as glamorous as music festivals, sporting events, or trade shows, they are an important piece of the fast growing experiential marketing field. Retail events provide the opportunity for instant metrics in terms of tracking sales during the activation. In addition they substantially reduce or even eliminate one of the biggest costs that an activation incurs at a major event - the vendor fee.
Whether it be a food/beverage sampling, a new product promotion, scheduled mobile-tour stop, or a store grand opening event, the field team can greatly increase the success of the retail activation by implementing the following strategies:

• Contact the store management to see if they could share the upcoming event on their social media, send an email blast to their customers, and put up signage advertising the event.
• Plan with the store management ahead of time to make sure they can block off the best location inside or outside the store for the upcoming event.
• Send out a flyering team to distribute flyers promoting the event in the surrounding neighborhoods and shopping centers several days prior to the activation.
• For activations taking place outside of the store doors, it is important for the event team to send consumers inside the store as much as possible to generate onsite sales.
• Find an incentive for consumers to buy during the activation. This could be in the form of offering exclusive discounts during the promotion, or giving away special premiums to consumers that purchase the product/service at the event.
• Always have a backup plan for inclement weather, such as doing a modified version of the activation inside the store.

 

When creating an experiential marketing plan, selecting the right events is a critical factor in the success of the activation, as well as the overall ROI for the program. Some brands are universally accepted and can therefore activate at virtually any kind of outing. These include Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, and General Motors. Other brands like KeVita, Subaru, or Razer electronics have a much more selective following. These niche brands need to be strategic in selecting the right events that represent their key customer demographics. Trade shows, conventions, and ethnic group cultural events are examples of targeted events, while art fairs, food and drink festivals, and sporting exhibitions are considered general public events.
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A NASCAR event might bring over 100,000 attendees over the weekend race, but it might not be a good fit for your brand to activate, A cool experience can certainly fill a footprint making it seem like thousands of people were interested in the promotion. However, if only a handful of those attendees end up converting into customers, that will not result in a positive ROI. That is unless the goal of the promotion is to purely increase brand awareness, like social media engagement, without a concern for driving sales.

When researching potential opportunities for your activations, try these tactics to get an understanding of what the event will be like:

• Google photos of the event from previous years
• Contact the event coordinator or public relations department to see press releases targeted for potential exhibitors
• Try to speak to people that have attended the event in the past
• Look to see what other vendors will be set-up at the event
• Follow the event on social media channels to see what consumers are saying/sharing

 

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In recent years the upsurge of digital and content marketing such as social media, blogging, SEO, eBooks, and online publications have changed the face of the entire advertising industry. Some facets of marketing like yellow pages and newspaper are virtually nonexistent today. One channel of marketing that has seen a consistent rise is experiential marketing, and here is why it is here to stay:
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• As consumers increasingly grow bored with traditional marketing tactics, experiential events provide the opportunity to entertain. Once people have a great experience with a brand, that association tends to stick for a long time.
• Brands are able to build lasting connections with their customers through experiential marketing by truly creating memorable experiences.
• During live events, consumers are more likely to provide their personal information as part of the registration process to participate in the event activities.
• Experiential events enable companies with sophisticated products to create a fun and interactive demonstration experience for consumers. An automotive ride & drive event is a great example of this. Another example is the Samsung 837 experience center in New York City which provides consumers an opportunity to test the technology manufacturer’s latest smartphone and other releases.
• With experiential marketing brands have the power to turn people into advocates via word of mouth marketing – considered the most credible form of advertising.