Category Archives: Social Media

by | November 5, 2014 · 9:48 am

Hospitality Industry Marketing Update: “Becoming Guest-Centric: Why Hotel Marketing Needs to Change”

At a time when guest-centric thinking has become critical for differentiating hotel brands,reinvent marketing hoteliers need solid information about guest preferences and behavior in order to deliver customer-centric marketing. By transforming not only their marketing efforts but their entire businesses in this way, hoteliers can deliver the value that today’s empowered guests crave.

Hoteliers: It’s not about you.

Is your marketing all about you? About how beautiful are your rooms, how delicious is the restaurant’s menu, how soothing are the spa services? All this may be true, but let’s be realistic: Your potential guests are hearing the same thing from every hotel.

There definitely is room for differentiation among hotel properties, and travel searchers yearn for it. Leisure and business travelers alike are usually undecided when they begin the online research process. Sixty five percent of vacationers and sixty percent of road warriors are considering multiple hotel brands when they begin planning. While most business travelers have a handle on the differences between hotel brands, sixty five percent of leisure travelers are unclear on hotel differentiation.

For more: http://bit.ly/1vJxmQh

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by | October 15, 2014 · 9:30 am

Hospitality Industry Management Update: “Reviews Increasingly Drive Booking Decisions”

The next step for the industry is taking those positive and negative reviews into account when setting rates. ratesreviews_featureMolinari said Las Vegas Sands isn’t quite there yet but noticed software developers are innovating in the space…Davis said she has developed her own metrics and is taking ratings and reviews into account when determining her price positioning, although she admits her process is a bit subjective and does not rely on a specific algorithm, such as a software program might.

Online reviews increasingly are affecting booking decisions, although not all traveler segments behave the same way, according to research and various industry sources.

Multiple studies recently have highlighted the importance of guest reviews and ratings in the booking funnel.

A study conducted by TrustYou and Donna Quadri-Felitti, clinical associate professor at New York University’s Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism, concluded that guest reviews have a significant impact on hotel conversion rates as well as the rates that travelers are willing to pay. Given equal prices, travelers are 3.9 times more likely to choose a hotel with higher review scores, the study showed. And when hotel prices are increased for hotels with better review scores, travelers are more likely to book the hotel with the higher score despite the higher rate.

For more: http://bit.ly/1wHkOuy

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Filed under Guest Issues, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Risk Management, Social Media, Technology

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by | October 8, 2014 · 9:22 am

Hospitality Industry Management Update: “How Much Guest Data Do You Have a Right to Use?”

Pillsbury does his best to makes sure the question of data ownership is ambiguous in his contracts, Bosworth says.big data “It’s left as a, ‘Let’s leave it so that the contract is unclear on this point.’” That’s not a bad way to go. “There’s a strong motivation for the parties to play nice together,” Bennett says. “Because if a big fight breaks out over who owns the data, the answer is going to come down to, ‘None of you own this data. This is the data of the individual.’”

Using big data to gain insights about hotel guests is a relatively new development in the lodging industry. When done right, it can provide actionable intel to hoteliers that can boost room rates and drive more business to loyalty programs and marketing campaigns. And there are plenty of tech outfits stepping up to lend their expertise to hotels. “We have 18 companies now that we’ve invested in through Thayer Ventures, our venture capital arm, all in the hospitality travel technology space,” says Lee Pillsbury, co-chairman and chief executive officer of Thayer Lodging Group. “One is able to analyze the number of airline passengers overnighting in New York City in any date in the future.” If there’s a huge snowstorm coming to New York, Pillsbury says, the company will take into account the weather forecast and the 600 flights that will be canceled and determine the number of people who will now be staying overnight in Las Vegas as a result.

For more: http://bit.ly/1rX5JUQ

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by | September 25, 2014 · 8:45 am

Hospitality Industry Technology Update: “Why the Hotel Industry Needs Google, Amazon or Priceline to Clean Up the Mess It Has Created”

 It is time to understand that spectacular innovation will disrupt our industry, and embracing this will help to make this transition go smooth.google-76522_640 Creating a level playing field will cause players in this industry to seize their business. Travelocity seems to be closing down in the next year, and my prediction is that we will see a rise of new players in technology, that can finally interact with us, and cause traditional PMSs, to go under, and with that all kinds of legacy companies that made their business out of the mess we created.

Have you ever wondered why you automatically get the newest version of Facebook on your phone, have made Google a synonym for search, Booking.com has just signed up its 500.000th accommodation and hotels are stuck with legacy systems for decades already, and new initiatives seem to never really take off or struggle to get traction at least? Surely these new systems seem to provide a modern solution to topics we are struggling with (online travel agencies, technology, demand management and pricing)? I started to work in the hospitality technology industry in 1999, to start up SynXis in Europe. We had a revolutionary product, ‘cloud based’, that would connect the PMS to the land of distribution, be a central reservation system for a hotel call-center and would make your scanned brochure (website) come alive with a booking engine that connected directly to the system. In 1999 Google was just starting up, hotels still received the majority of their reservations through their callcenter/reservations department and Booking.com was still Bookings.nl and just signed up their first hotel in Amsterdam.

For more: http://bit.ly/1uJF5ii

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by | September 18, 2014 · 8:13 am

Hospitality Industry Update: “2014 Trends in Hospitality” (Infographic)

To view at full size, click on the image below!
 
top-5-trends-in-hospitality-for-2014-infographic

For more: http://bit.ly/1udIk11

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Filed under Hotel Bar, Hotel Industry, Management And Ownership, Social Media, Technology

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by | September 8, 2014 · 9:01 am

Hospitality Industry Management Update: “Hotel Loyalty Programs: No Longer Just About Building up Points, Status”

“Turning casual visitors into active loyalists may be easier said than done, as travelers expect services traditionally considered perks to now be a standard part of the hotel experience.Loyalty Program For example, the study revealed that for frequent traveling millennials, free WiFi ranked with cleanliness and comfort as a top three hotel attribute—not a perk, but as an expected basic.”

Two-thirds (66 percent) of millennial high-frequency travelers rate “unique rewards” as an important factor when choosing a hotel loyalty program, compared with just 43 percent of their older counterparts, according to a new Deloitte study, Winning the Race for Guest Loyalty.

“Our study indicates that customers will wait and see which program will provide them with the greatest rewards before they start to behave loyally, but they will not wait for too long,” said Guy Langford, vice chairman, Deloitte LLP and U.S. Travel, Hospitality and Leisure practice leader. “The race is on for brands to provide swift gratification, particularly for the savvy millennial travelers, who are quick to share their positive experiences or broadcast their discontent over their social networks, and who are acutely aware of the rewards that come to loyal customers. As such, the brand that locks in the customer’s loyalty first and wins that race is the brand that wins that customer, and potentially their loyalty, for life.”

For more: http://bit.ly/1qwWBY5

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by | September 5, 2014 · 8:52 am

Hospitality Industry Social Media Update: “Modern Hospitality: Social Media With A Smile”

Change is not always a good thing, but for the hospitality industry, it has proven to be great! Those companies, who are adapting to social media and developing a strategic plan, are experiencing a return on investment. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Foursquare are among those mentioned as outlets used to: engage customers, handle requests and inquiries, offer direct promotions, and gauge customer experience. Check out the infographic presented by besthospitalitydegrees.com, to learn more about the impact of online reviews and mobile devices within the hospitality industry.

Click For More!

Click For More!

For more: http://bit.ly/1o6Eqn4

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by | August 5, 2014 · 9:08 am

Hospitality Industry Management Update: “Amid Backlash, Hotel Rescinds $500 Fines For “Negative” Online Reviews”

“…San Francisco Magazine ran a long-form piece last week on the complex relationship between businesses and Yelp,500 fines for negative reviews with San Francisco chef Jeff Mason summarizing the Yelp game like this: ‘You’re in it whether you want to be or not, and that’s what’s so frustrating.’ Even a minuscule number of negative reviews can have a disproportionately large detrimental effect on a business’s margins…”

Apparently recognizing that restaurants and hotels can live and die by their online ratings, the Union Street Guest House in Hudson, NY included a table-turning clause in their reservation policies: if you book an event at the hotel and a member of your party posts a negative review, the hotel will fine you $500.

For more: http://bit.ly/1kDwLkk

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by | July 31, 2014 · 9:33 am

Hospitality Industry Technology Update: “Voyat Launches With $1.8M In Seed Funding For Social CRM Tool Aimed At Hotels”

“…For example, he would be welcomed to a property he had visited 20 times before and asked by the front desk if this was his first visit.Voyat The hotels had no knowledge of who he was or how often he had visited. Habbel believes this is due in large part to the impact of online booking, which has taken the customer relationship away from the hotel and given it to the third-party booking engines. Voyat is an attempt to return control of the customer experience to hotels…”

Voyat, a social CRM tool aimed at the hotel industry, came out of stealth today and announced $1.8M in seed funding from Metamorphic Ventures, Eniac Ventures, BoxGroup and several angel investors, including Brett Crosby, who was co-founder of Google Analytics.

Metamorpic Ventures is led by David Hirsch, who worked out of Google’s New York office for 8 years.

These Google connections should come as little surprise given one of Voyat’s co-founders, Benjamin Habbel, worked for Google from 2010-2012, serving for a time as Marissa Mayer’s chief of staff.

The product aims to bring the hotel industry into the 21st century by giving them more insight into hotel customer behavior both online and on-site. Habbel says the idea for the company was born out of his own frustration as a frequent traveler.

For more: http://bit.ly/1koFcQs

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by | July 21, 2014 · 9:30 am

Hospitality Industry Security Update: “Black Hat Preview Shows Hotels, IoT Vulnerable to Hacks”

“…With an increasing number of devices connected to the Internet, the use of insecure or improperly configured devices and protocols becomes a greater riskalertsystem1…Insecurity at hotel locations overall is not a new topic for the Black Hat conference. Back in 2012, security researcher Cody Brocious detailed an open-source system he built that could hack into hotel key-card systems…”

During a session at the upcoming Black Hat security conference that starts Aug. 5 in Las Vegas, independent security consultant Jesus Molina is set to expose the risks of hotel automation systems. In a Black Hat preview webcast July 18, Molina provided a few details on his talk “Learn How to Control Every Room at a Luxury Hotel Remotely: The Dangers of Insecure Home Automation Deployment.”

For more: http://bit.ly/1k8qtsB

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