Walt Whitman in New Orleans

Tips How To Write a Hotel Blog

It is no surprise that “The Best Written Blog in New Orleans” has it’s fair share of longstanding fans who have been with us from the beginning.  La Belle Esplanade’s blog has been going strong since before we opened seven years ago.  We have sometimes hit slumps.  We have occasionally published guest submissions from elementary school students, journalism interns, amateur Orleansologists, people looking to break into the professional blog-writing business, and sometimes from people who ring our doorbell looking to do odd jobs for a meal.  People ask me all the time for tips how to write a hotel blog.  I’ve been doing this awhile, now.  Some people in the industry consider your humble narrator an elder statesman.  His admirers call him a magician.  His detractors call him dumb lucky.

Your man in New Orleans, standing by to assist.
Your man in New Orleans, a source you can trust, a pillar of the neighborhood.

Some people consider your humble narrator the most interesting man in New Orleans.  The rest of them consider him the best-dressed.

YOUR FIRST TOP TIP TO WRITE A HOTEL BLOG

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking that La Belle Esplanade, the fine establishment that I run with the better half of this operation, Frau Schmitt, is a bed and breakfast, not a hotel.  Alright.  It’s a bed and breakfast in the sense that you make a reservation to sleep here in a bed, and, in the morning, you can enjoy a curated breakfast of local delicacies paired with interesting conversation about all things New Orleans in our dining room.  That’s the bed and the breakfast parts.  There’s more.

La Belle Esplanade is not grandma’s house, stuffed full of antiques and run by amateurs.  You won’t be walking through our living room to get to your private suite; you’ll be walking through the New Orleans Odditarium, a real museum of local curiosities that is based in our lobby.  Everything at La Belle Esplanade is pure New Orleans, through and through, off the usual tourist radar.  You belong here.

We prefer to say that La Belle Esplanade is small artisanal hotel that offers personalized hospitality in the authentic New Orleans outside the tourist bubble that most people experience at a chain hotel.  This is a professional operation.  We’ve been ranked the #1 place to stay in New Orleans on TripAdvisor since April 2014, and #2 in the United States, AND, #16 in the world, as I never get tired of repeating.  The Lonely Planet Guide calls us their Top Pick place to stay in the city.  For whatever reason, Frommer’s hasn’t discovered us, yet.  No worries.  They’ll come to their senses some day.

The first of many tips to write a hotel blog is to be confident.  Punch above your weight class.  Engage in some monkeyshines but always with your eyes on the prize.

Walt Whitman in New Orleans
When the muse hits you in New Orleans, you’ll need a raw steak on your eye—or you can just start writing a book of essays.

YOUR SECOND OF MANY TIPS HOW TO WRITE A HOTEL BLOG

What do I know?  Why do I think I have any useful ideas about any tips how to write a hotel blog.  My business, a small five-suite boutique inn in the magical city of New Orleans, Louisiana, is microscopic in the wide, vast sea of the hospitality industry dominated by mass appeals, manufactured authenticity, and industrially produced experiences in controlled environments approved by insurance companies, anodyne.  No, La Belle Esplanade isn’t as big as Marriott, Sheraton, Ritz-Carlton, Motel Six, Hilton, Holiday Inn Express, Fill-in-the-Blank-Here.  Those hotels don’t really have blogs.  Those hotels aren’t interesting.

Here’s your second tip to writing a hotel blog: be interesting.  If you are Marriott, Sheraton, Ritz-Carlton, Motel Six, Hilton, Holiday Inn Express, your hotel should have a blog, even if your great hotel the Exit 17 La Quinta Inn and Suites.  Every hotel has a story.  Every hotel is interesting, except when it’s not.  That’s the problem with writing about your particular branch of the Marriott, Sheraton, etc. family of hotel brands.  The reason every hotel doesn’t have its own blog is because very few of these hotels are interesting.  It’s not that can’t be.  They just aren’t.

I know one small hotel in New Orleans that is very interesting.

My third tip to writing a hotel blog is to attach your train of thought to some germ of an idea that will launch you on a soliloquy.  You’ll be talking to yourself most of the time, anyway, you may as well do it about something that inspires you.

Tip #4:  You don’t have to rhyme but the reader should be able to hear how you talk in his or her head by the rhythm of your speech on the page.  (Bonus tip: It never hurts to be eccentric, like, by pretending the blog audience will be reading the hotel’s blog in a book instead of on a screen.)

An artisanal hotelier runs a craft hotel.
Never a moment to spare—even when it’s happy hour you’re humble narrator is hard at work bringing you the best of The New Orleans State of Mind!

WHY I DON’T READ HOTEL BLOGS.

Hotel blogs are boring.  This one is the exception that proves the rule.

Just as La Belle Esplanade is unlike any other hotel, our blog is equally unlike any other hotel’s blog.  Good for them.

I don’t care if your hotel just signed a contract with a new dairy supplier in order to serve better milk.  I don’t care about the thread count in your sheets.  I don’t care if you’ve got a new brand of rum in the bar or that “Chef Tim” has come up with a new eggs Benedict recipe.  Zip-a-ding.

You won’t be able to convince me that karaoke night in your hotel’s bar is the best thing going on in town, unless it really is the best thing going on in town, in which case, I guess that’s going to have to be okay.  Whether it is or not, don’t bother to try to convince me.  I’ll figure that out.  Why should I stay at one hotel over another?  Price is what you pay, value is what you get.  I don’t find a lot of value from reading most hotel blogs.  If it isn’t interesting, how do you expect people to read it?

On the macro level, I don’t have much patience for reading the corporate blogs for the big hotel chains.  You know what’s nice about working for yourself?  After your guests, you don’t have anyone else to make happy.  If they are happy, you are happy.  That’s business and that is what has to come through in a hotel’s blog.  Be yourself.  Be happy.

THE BEST-WRITTEN BLOG IN NEW ORLEANS

This blog that you are reading right now has long been recognized in the industry as “the best-written blog in New Orleans.”  That’s why this blog is called that.  We do what we can here with our crackerjack team of researchers, message runners, transcriptionists, field agents, anonymous sources, patsies, pigeons, and moles.  It’s a shoestring operation but we make it work.  If Walt Whitman were alive today, he’d be writing for La Belle Esplanade.  The only other place I can think of him writing, if Walt Whitman didn’t have his own blog, is our sister blog:  New Orleans State of Mind.  You can waste a lot of time reading those archives, too.

Will it be a waste of time to read all these hotel blog posts?  You’ve read this one this far.  How are you hanging in there?  Are you game for more or are you lame?  If you enjoy these blog posts, you’ll enjoy staying at La Belle Esplanade, two-time consecutive winner of the coveted TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice Award.  No time spent in New Orleans is wasted.  Good memories are made in New Orleans.  The best New Orleans memories are made at La Belle Esplanade.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019:. It’s going to be Halloween soon.  People will dress up but it’ll be nothing like Mardi Gras.  Halloween is nothing like Mardi Gras!