You can check out, but your heart never leaves.

Red Carnation Hotels

I had been writing the brochures for von Essen Hotels when I got a call from Red Carnation Hotels. Red Carnation were in the habit of poaching star managers, chefs and sommeliers from von Essen. One of the family who owned Red Carnation liked their brochures so much she suggested recruiting the writer.

I was invited to a meeting in their hotel next to Buckingham Palace and offered a monthly retainer for helping their marketing department. For the past few years I have been writing web pages, eshots, brochures, headlines, blog posts and a wide variety of other marketing materials for them.

The product

The collection currently comprises six hotels in London, one in Dorset, two in Guernsey, two in Ireland, one in Geneva, three in South Africa and one in Palm Beach. There’s also a gastro pub in Dorset and a bar/restaurant in London.

Each property is very different, but the main thing they all have in common is world class service – the ethos is “No request is too large, no detail too small”. This service promise is delivered in a way that the guests love. It’s not an empty platitude trotted out by the company but something they invest in heavily The ratio of staff to guests is extremely high, often two to one, they only accept the most exceptional calibre of people employed and training is intensive.

As a result the hotels regularly win more than their fair share of the most prestigious awards and dominate the top slots of the Tripadvisor rankings.

The challenge

The world is full of luxurious boutique hotels so my job is to help them stand out and win customers in a fiercely competitive marketplace by capturing the essence of the guest experience – a combination of superb locations, gorgeous interiors, fabulous atmosphere, brilliant service along with outstanding food and wine.

Essentially I have to differentiate, motivate and exaggerate by painting vivid word pictures that stimulate the senses, whet the appetite and appeal to the heart. These have to be as refreshingly welcoming, elegantly understated and discreetly tempting as every other aspect of the guest experience.

Visit www.redcarnationhotels.com and from here you can access the sites for all their individual properties. Much of the text here has been written by myself, in collaboration with the in-house marketing team.

 

I also write brochures for them:

Eshots:

I also wrote their blog posts for a couple of years (but now they tend to do this in-house).
It has been a pleasure and a privilege working with this team for so many years. Lots of companies talk about their passion, their attention to detail and the satisfaction they get from exceeding expectations – but few, if any, come close to delivering it with such dedication, warmth and panache as Red Carnation. It’s no surprise that the hotels consistently top the TripAdvisor rankings for London, that their Bushmans Kloof property has been voted “No 1 Hotel in the world” by Travel + Leisure and that they were voted Number 2 in the Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For 2015.