Always something new at the Rendezvous!

My placement commenced this week at what is now the Rendezvous Grand Hotel Perth, recently re-branded and refurbished from what it was infamously known as Observation City. I am working full time in the marketing department here at the Hotel, and so am in prime position for my PR393 placement, to report on all the exciting tasks I get to lay my hands on everyday.

This week we have been preparing for second photo-shoot of all the newly refurbished areas of the Hotel. As well as shot lists, talent recruitment and schedules from Art Directors to deal with, we also had to ensure that every department in the Hotel was fully aware of the shoot and the timings and what it would all entail for their staff. I was put in charge of creating a Promotional Activity Brief for all those departments involved (Restaurant, Bar, Lobby, Club Lounge, Housekeeping, Banquets, Kitchen etc) and for distributing it and ensuring everyone was across the message. This was a opportunity for me to put my planning skills to the test and practice some internal communications; something like the public information model of PR, only for Staff. The photo-shoot takes place tomorrow (Friday 2nd August and Saturday 3rd August) and I am very excited to see the professionals in action. I will be taking my own shots in the background to upload to the Hotel's Facebook page as a kind of "behind the scenes" look at what is going on.

The Facebook page has really helped in giving insight into how the local community demographic feels about the Hotel. As it has had quite a bit of negative press in the past, due to a lot of controversial issues that used to plague the property, the Stirling Community are not always fans of the Rendezvous. Turning around this perception and creating a positive attitude towards the property is going to be a challenge, but a fun one! We receive a fair few comments on the Facebook page, some good some bad, and we are always coming up with new ways to make the page appealing to our fans. The views from the Hotel make it easy to encourage likes though!

Another forum which makes it very easy to engage in 2 way asymmetric PR is TripAdvisor. This website is a blog for travelers where they can write about their experiences on the wall of any hotel that is on the website for all other members to see. The Hotel also receives a notification about this posting. There are several different blogs where travelers can do this. Whilst it is great that we have so many different channels in which to communicate, it is difficult to keep track of all of them and something may go unseen. And so Rendezvous Hotels employ the help of a program called Revinate. This collates all the online presence information that the Hotel has and allows us to respond. It's great! I spend about 30 minutes everyday responding to our comments and collating the positives and negatives that arise from the comments. This allows us to really see what issues take place and affect the guests and lets us fix them. An excellent tool for the PR department to have and the Hotel as a whole.

I am really looking forward to our shoot, especially as the weather is looking good for the weekend! We have weather notifications on our phones to look out for warnings (part of the job!). Once the final images come in I shall share with you all!

Loving it all so far and learning more than I could have imagined.