Harry's Home Hotels & Apartments

Modernes Studio-Apartment mit Küchenzeile, rundem Esstisch und Doppelbett im Hintergrund.

Success Stories / Harry's Home Hotels & Apartments

Continuously Monitor Brand Strength

How present is a hotel brand in the minds of potential guests, what does it stand for, and how does this change over time?

Since 2021, IMARK has been measuring the strength and perception of harry’s home in the Austrian city hotel market – in direct competitive comparison and as repeatable brand monitoring.

The Company

Modular City Hotels for the Modern Nomad

harry’s home hotels & apartments is a family-run Tyrolean hotel group with its headquarters in Innsbruck. Founder Harald Ultsch developed the concept in 2004, and the first property opened in Hart bei Graz in 2006. Today, the group comprises around 16 properties in the DACH region, including Graz, Linz, Vienna, Dornbirn, Villach, Salzburg, Munich, Berlin, Bern, and Zurich.

The brand combines hotel and apartment: guests largely choose room size, amenities, and scope of service themselves, with many units featuring kitchenettes and living areas. Positioned in the lower mid-range segment, the offering targets mobile professionals, city travelers, families, and long-stay guests – target groups defined by needs, not age. Precisely this combination of freedom of choice, homeliness, and value for money forms the core of the brand promise that must resonate in the market.

The Challenge

Key elements of the assignment:

In city tourism, harry’s home is in direct competition with international chains and established Austrian groups. This raises two questions for brand management: How strongly is the brand actually anchored in the relevant set? Does the image guests have of it align with the management’s self-perception or target image?

Determining brand strength across the entire brand funnel: from spontaneous recall to aided awareness and booking preference, up to the actual overnight stay experience
Surveying the brand space: which associations the brand spontaneously triggers and how positively or negatively these are perceived
Direct profile comparison with the relevant competitor brands in the Austrian city hotel industry
Establishing the survey as repeatable monitoring with a fixed set of questions to reliably measure changes over time

The cornerstones of our approach:

The survey does not represent the brand through a single awareness value, but through the complete funnel and the brand space behind it. The survey does not question the company’s own guest database, but rather the relevant market (via an external panel of individuals who actually book hotels in Austrian cities).

Online survey in the consumer panel with prior screening

Brand funnel for harry’s home and competitor brands in four stages: unaided recall, aided awareness, booking preference, and overnight stay experience

Brand space via free associations; brand profile via predefined positioning statements

Category Entry Points and brand relevance for them: business travel, city trip, family trip, travel with partner or pets, long-term stay

Fixed set of questions as the core of each wave, supplemented by flexible modules for current issues

Methods

Methods and techniques used (among others):

Brand space – free associations with subsequent evaluation of valence (brand core and brand periphery)
Brand funnel: unaided and aided awareness, preference, and usage
Ranking procedure for the relevance of booking criteria
Online panel survey with screening and quota control
Repeat measurement with a fixed set of questions for time series comparisons

Result & Impact

Benefits for harry's home:

The survey provides a complete picture of brand strength in the relevant market. And with each repetition, a time series that shows whether investments in brand, communication, and expansion are actually resonating.