Monday Maine Maven: Greg Dugal

Happy Monday! At NMC we hope you enjoyed another beautiful Maine weekend. Today’s Monday Maven is Greg Dugal. Greg has been the Executive Director of the Maine Innkeepers Association since 2003.

Greg’s involvement in the tourism and hospitality industry spans 25 years, most notably at the Samoset Resort, where he held a variety of positions in his 16-year tenure including Food and Beverage Director and Director of Sales and Marketing. Greg also served as the Executive Director of the Camden-Rockport-Lincolnville Chamber of Commerce. During his time there, he was honored with Chamber Executive of the Year by the Maine State Chamber of Commerce in 2002 and received honors as Restaurateur of the Year in 2000 from the Maine Restaurant Association.

Greg was most recently honored in 2009 to become a member of the Maine Tourism Association Hall of Fame. Greg also serves on the Board of Directors of the Convention & Visitors Bureau of Greater Portland, the Maine Tourism Association, the International Society of Hotel Association Executives and was past chair of the Maine Tourism Commission.

1. Greg, you represent a very glamorous industry. Do people typically think that your job is equally glamorous, and that you spend all your time staying in elegant inns and hotels?

 

Well, I can assure you that very little of my time is spent staying in elegant inns and hotels, though it is not something I can totally deny partaking in. More of my time is spent attending industry events at these great properties and commuting back to my place of residence. I am also heavily involved with the American Hotel & Lodging Association and the International Society of Hotel Association Executives. There can be a fair amount of travel associated with those organizations and they are really good at picking some of their finer member properties for us to conduct our meetings in.

My preference, however, is to travel in Maine from Aroostook to York County and from Bar Harbor to Sunday River and be able to actually spend some time in these great lodging facilities that Maine has to offer rather than stopping in quickly, going to a meeting and then heading off to Augusta and the Legislature.

 

2. What does your job entail?  How much of your job involves public relations and marketing?

 

The three main focuses of the Maine Innkeepers Association are legislative advocacy, marketing and education. Certainly public relations is a critical component of all three. We generally work to get two or three bills introduced in the legislative session. Occasionally these result in questions from the media and result in a broader campaign to gain acceptance for the issue.

We also have an Education Foundation that conveys about $10,000 of scholarships per year, so we heavily promote that program with the media. One of our most successful programs is our Hospitality for Habitat program that generally runs in the month of May and results in innkeepers giving half price rates in exchange for a contribution to Habitat for Humanity. This program is promoted exclusively with public relations as there is no advertising budget for it. We have received a tremendous amount of support from Rauni Kew at the Inn by the Sea, a PR professional to help promote this program. Obviously, we are here to market lodging properties in Maine and do so with the Maine Lodging Guide and our web site.  We have also created a mobile web site in 2011.

 

3. How do you use social media to get the word out? How do your members use social media to promote themselves?  

 

Our social media efforts are not as aggressive as they should be and that is frankly a matter of available time. We do have a blog on our web site and we try to use it specifically to provide info to consumers about what is going on in the state for events and fun. We manage our Facebook page to be more oriented towards our members and their needs and to promote our internal events to them. Social media is critical to the promotion of lodging properties and their outlets. Blogging, Facebook pages and the occasional tweet are pretty much the norm for everyone.

Couponing and discounting sites like Groupon, Living Social and Buywithme are also becoming more popular. User generated content sites like Trip Advisor, Yelp and Google Reviews are a must read for lodging properties to engage in reputation management and I am sure if there were more hours in the day, many more attempts to manage content would be undertaken.