While many of the hotels in Ulster and Sullivan counties have faded away, Pinegrove Ranch & Family Resort, a 126-room, all-inclusive Western-style resort located in Kerhonksen, is an exception.
The resort has not only survived, but flourished.
A key to its success is a targeted marketing campaign, said owner and operator David O”™Halloran at the Ulster County Chamber of Commerce”™s monthly breakfast. The well-attended event was held June 21 at the Holiday Inn in Kingston.
“Ulster County is not a resort destination any longer,” said O”™Halloran, who was the chamber”™s featured speaker. “We”™ve become a destination ourselves.” He noted that his competition isn”™t the handful of other Catskill resorts, but “places people think of as a summer resort: Nantucket, the New Jersey shore” as well as the New York City cruise lines. “People need to know the difference between the cost of a room here and in Wildwood, N.J. That”™s who we compete against.”
The days of walk-ins are over. Rather than rely on the whim of customers, Pinegrove spends approximately half-a-million dollars per year ”“ more than the entire budget of Ulster County Tourism ”“ on advertising to bring people in. “We try to squeeze every dollar marketing to people in urban areas,” O”™Halloran said. “We look for the concrete.”
Pinegrove advertises on a billboard at the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel on the Long Island Expressway and runs full-page ads in The New York Times, Newsday and the Daily News. Besides the New York papers, the resort also advertises in the Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Enquirer and even the Pittsburgh Gazette. O”™Halloran said it also has created an identifiable, consistent brand with a fresh new logo. And it recently changed its rate structure to a per-night, per-person basis to reflect a shift in the marketplace and better highlight the value proposition.
The resort has an aggressive direct-mail program and applies 72 filters to its list to better analyze its guest profiles, including place of origin, number of cars and number of children. As a result, “we get twice the average national return from our list,” said O”™Halloran.
All of its advertising, whether print, radio or TV, directs people to its Web site. Online bookings are key to making the sale, with 72 percent of Web surfers booking travel online, said O”™Halloran. The resort also analyzes how the surfer found the resort ”“ what searches the person did and what words were typed in ”“ so it can keep up to date on its keywords. The ranch”™s Web site averages 300 to 400 hits a day, although this time of year it is receiving double that amount. Staffing has to be sufficient to handle the huge volume of e-mail traffic that results, he said.Â
The final piece is sales training. The sales force “has to know our property and love it,” he said, noting one of the first things a new recruit was instructed to do was get on a trail ride. “You can”™t understand my property without knowing what guests experience,” O”™Halloran said.
Being in Ulster County, which has a strong day business and second-home market, but which is no longer thought of as a resort destination, is a challenge, he said. “We”™re here despite our location,” said O”™Halloran. “There”™s less rooms in Ulster County” than in competing destinations. He said he and other resort owners are forming an Ulster County lodging coalition to help with educating and lobbying legislators at the county and state level on important industry issues, such as the need to foster more employment.
O”™Halloran opposed a proposal that would have allowed the county to double the 2 percent bed tax. (It has since become moot, after the state Legislature, which had to approve the measure first, failed to do so.) He also took issue with the fact only 10 percent of the revenues raised by the current bed tax are spent on tourism promotion.
Across the river, in Dutchess County, there is a 4 percent county bed tax, all of which goes into the general fund. However, Mary Kay Vrba, director of Dutchess County Tourism, said the county contributes about $700,000 to her organization, so tourism businesses generally feel supported.
In contrast, fiscal difficulties in Ulster County resulted in the tourism budget being slashed in half two years ago, with the budget currently $347,786, according to Rick Remsnyder, director of Ulster County Tourism, who was also at the chamber event. The state provides $81,000 in matching funds, with the remainder consisting of county money.
Another chamber breakfast attendee, Paul Rakow, who is director of marketing at the Emerson Resort & Spa, in Mount Trempor, said the funding cuts are unfortunate. “If you think of the tourism department as a county sales force, then to cut its funding is to make it less effective in doing its job of bringing money into the county.”
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