A unique piece of street art appeared in Mechelen this week to celebrate the launch of the new free breakfast at Holiday Inn Express hotels. The drawing was commissioned by IHG and they chose to put the Holiday Inn Express Mechelen in the spotlight for this exciting promotion.

Street artist Eduardo Relero took his inspiration from breakfast items available on the buffet to create an optical illusion on the pavement outside the hotel. The process took several hours and, if you click this link you can watch a short video of the Holiday Inn Express Street Art Project Mechelen which attracted quite a crowd.

Hotel General Manager Joris Keimes was the spokesperson for the event, as well as featuring in the video he organised extra publicity with radio interview, giving away free breakfasts as prizes to lucky listeners. Visitors to the art project were also given a voucher for free coffee and croissant to encourage them to visit the hotel, take a look around and the great new breakfast by Holiday Inn Express Mechelen.

The finished 3D effect is amazing, please visit the Holiday Inn Express Mechelen Facebook page to see the completed picture and more photos taken of the process.

We are delighted that Transport and Tourism Minister Leo Varadkar has announced the 9% VAT rate will be retained until the end of 2013. The reduced rate has enabled our hotels and apartments keep rates competitive to attract international and encourage domestic tourism since its introduction last summer.

With tour operator contracting for 2013 already well underway, the confirmation enables Ireland to retain our competitive edge marketing the country as destination with so much to experience and enjoy while still excellent value for money.

I’m very proud to announce PREM Group UK has been recognised as one of the top 50 best hospitality employers in the country! Additionally we have been shortlisted in the Best Small Group Hotel Employer category for the Best Employers in Hospitality Awards 2012 England & Wales.

The finalists were selected following a colleague survey and its fantastic to know our team enjoy working with us.

Congratulations to Evelyn, Chris and all the team in Britain and wish you best of luck at the finals in June.

The Holiday Calais team have won another award! Last week, the Privilege Club Rewards Champion Day was held in Paris Le Grandand the Holiday Inn Calais received the award of “Most enrolments 2012” for the hotels with less than 100 rooms! Special congratulations to Aline who is the hotel’s PCR Champion. Congratulations everyone and keep up the good work!

Premier Apartments in Liverpool have been shortlisted as finalists in the Mersey Partnership Liverpool City Region Tourism Awards 2012. This is the second year in a row the team have made the finals and great achievement for General Manager Marie and her team.

A panel of experience industry professionals reviewed more than 100 applications before compiling their shortlist with the second round to begin next month. The winners will be announced at the Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership – Tourist Board awards on Thursday 14th June.

Congratulations to all the finalists and best of luck to Premier Apartments Liverpool.

The information available these days is staggering, especially in the world of website analytics. While we have the function to know more about our site visitors than ever before, the volume of information is overwhelming and even the most determined GM doesn’t have time to investigate the detail which is why our eCommerce team have been developing a new set of reports to give meaningful insights as part of our managed hotel website package. We have been trialling the reports in selected properties for 3 months and will begin wider beta testing to half the hotels at the end of this month.

A very popular topic at the moment is the move to mobile. Almost every day I see one article or another urging us to adapt to mobile (we began rolling out mobile friendly websites for our hotels last summer).

Forecasts for the number of people accessing the web on their phone, and the changes to their purchasing decision process vary but everyone agrees it will continue to grow and grow.

Naturally we have been monitoring mobile traffic to our sites for some time and its interesting to compare the properties. Last month several hotel websites had over 24% of their visitors using their phones, iPad or other tablet device (the lowest was just 6%).

We’ve also seen a marked difference in usage for our Irish and UK hotels compared to Belgium.

Of course this doesn’t give the full picture, knowing your website visitors are “on mobile” is fine but an iPad is very different to an old Nokia and the user’s needs and expectations need to be met regardless of platform. To ensure our guests can see the hotels at their best, our team monitor the rise and fall of the different platforms to ensure our sites are optimised to our guests devices.

Again it’s interesting to compare preferences in the different regions we operate, but also to see the similarities: steady rise of iPad and decline of Nokia/Symbian.

With all the data, and the industry leading software tools to interpret it, its easy to get carried away. We looked at many different options before sifting out the best ones to include in the reports, including the visualisation below which overlays mobile visitor numbers by location:

We decided not necessary to see this hotel had 37 people in Cork looking at the site on their mobile…

This is an important week for cycling fans with 3 competitions being held in Liege: the Amstel Gold Race last Sunday; tomorrow the Fleche Wallone; and the Liège Bastogne Liège next Sunday.

The Ramada Plaza Liege always hosts at least one team and this year the hotel are very proud to have the Astana cycle team staying with them. Even more so when Enrico Gasparotto won Sundays Amstel Gold!

General Manager Louis and his team are taking excellent care of the whole team and we will all be cheering the team on to victory again.

Most of us have to wait till Sunday for the Easter bunny to visit but he’s been a regular visitor to the Ramada Plaza Liege recently. So much so he’s now firm friends with Louis Sohl, General Manager.

It started when the sales team invited the Easter Bunny to visit local companies, to help them hand out chocolate eggs and invitations to their family event the following week.

The hotel organised a fantastic afternoon for the children of their clients with face painting, games, a musician and of course an Easter Egg hunt. I’ve included a picture below but please visit their Facebook page for more photos from the Easter Bunny sales blitz and the Egg hunt.

In the PREM Dublin office we held a raffle for the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association charity which raised €144. Thank you to everyone who took part and your generosity. The egg was won by Heather, Website Revenue Manager for Ireland, congratulations and don’t eat it all at once!

The Leopold Hotel Antwerp said goodbye to one Lutti, one of our longest serving colleagues who retired this week. Lutti has worked for the company since 1989 and has seen many changes at the Carlton Hotel, Golden Tulip Carlton, Astoria & Leopold. Lutti has been a fantastic member of the team and very much appreciated by everyone. She will now have time to enjoy life even more and to spend more time with family and friends and to sit back and relax. We all wish her all the best for the future, but not without saying a big thank you for everything you have done for colleagues and guests.

With construction work nearly over, the management team at Holiday Inn Lodz yesterday decided to leave their desks and give the builders a hand.

From left to right: Tim, General Manager Jolanta, Kamila, Marta, Karolina and Pawel

Visit the Holiday Inn Lodz Facebook page for more behind the scenes pictures.