Any time I meet with a prospective nursing home owner/operator client to offer my pitch, I inevitably compare nursing homes and rehab facilities to hotels.

I argue that the same issues affecting hoteliers, equally impact the nursing industry and visa versa.

Both industries are obsessively concerned with census and filling beds and rightfully so. Nursing homes wish to fill beds with patients and hotels need to fill beds with guests. A beautiful private subacute room in a nursing home is easier to fill than a Medicaid bed in a semi-pvt room on the LTC unit, much the same way a hotel room with the balcony overlooking the ocean is easier to fill than the room with the balcony obscured by the parking garage.

Same concept, similar problems, same net effect. An empty bed is lost revenue, period.

But that’s not where the similarities end. Not by a long shot.

Hotels have traditionally suffered from a big problem. They typically spend a veritable fortune on their traditional marketing, including billboards and silly magazine ads seen by a relative few, while remaining oblivious to the negative press (or limited positive exposure) they may be receiving online (think TripAdvisor.com).

It has always been positively mind boggling to me that many of these major hotels have literally nobody “watching the house” online, while they are being flamed and excoriated daily by an unforgiving cadre of disgruntled consumers.

Then, when the bigwigs sit in a corner office each month to discuss their census issues and why they are leaking money like a sieve given the thousands they are spending in advertising dollars, nobody in the room with the Brioni suits and smart ties has a thought to look into their online reputation?!

Perhaps they figure, why bother, we have a gorgeous website!

Huh?!?!

Sounds absurd, right. But think about it for a second, as a nursing home owner/operator, does this sound like an observation I might fairly and equally apply to your own profession? If it does, you’re already in trouble, BIG trouble, you just don’t recognize it yet.

Well, given my proclivity for making the comparison, I was positively thrilled to read a very important an engaging article yesterday (published in Voyagers World Online Magazine), entitled “Hotels Continue to make headway in digital marketing.”

Apparently, the hotel industry is learning…..and now they are desperately trying to catch up.

As a nursing home owner/operator, don’t you think it’s time you did the same?

Here is an excerpt from the hotel article and I encourage you to read the whole thing by clicking thru.