Hotel marketers looking to implement the holy grail, a 360-degree personalized marketing strategy tailored to each guest, are faced with a substantial set of challenges. At a hotel attached to an indoor water park – with restaurants, arcades and outlets to boot – the number of potential roadblocks increases exponentially.
IHG® Hotels & Resorts is one of the world’s leading hotel companies, with around 325,000 colleagues working across more than 100 countries to deliver True Hospitality for Good. But IHG’s strength goes beyond providing great hospitality for guests on property. In fact, IHG’s corporate vision is to build a digital advantage. This focus on digital goes beyond the stay and impacts how IHG connects with guests across their entire journey.
The Mandarin Oriental is a chain of premier business hotels, designed for corporate and high-end guests. The Mandarin Oriental currently has 29 properties, stretching across North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. In order to fully service the needs of its guests, the company needed to ensure that the quality of its Wi-Fi was as high as its other guest services.
Year-round balmy weather; magnificent scenery; cultural attractions from UNESCO sites to cobbled streets and the historic, whitewashed buildings of centuries past. Few island destinations offer the range of spectacular natural landscapes, unique architecture, and colorful traditions that these popular Spanish isles do, just off the northwest coast of Africa.
Club Quarters Hotels has been a well-known hotel brand for over 30 years that caters to the business traveler segment. In more recent times, thanks in part to COVID, their model has pivoted to attract leisure travelers who were visiting their destination cities.
After spending a few years in a global pandemic, travelers have never been hungrier to see the world and have a great hotel experience wherever they go. One of the best ways for hoteliers to ensure guests are having incredible, personalized experiences is to keep teams engaged by utilizing technology to deliver the latest and greatest in industry innovation.
You’ve heard it before: Compared to other industries like retail and banking, the hotel industry has traditionally been slow to adopt modern technology. But owners and operators received the ultimate wake-up call in March 2020 and, out of necessity, swiftly turned to digital tools to more effectively communicate with guests and keep the doors open with fewer staff members.
It’s a common thread throughout the hotel industry: Operators are looking to remove much of the back-office work from staff at the property level and take on more of that responsibility at the regional or headquarters level.
Martin Resorts is a collection of 5 gorgeous hotels on the Central Coast of California. Like many hospitality groups, as the team leveraged technology to help grow revenue, they found themselves suffering from tool overload. As it turned out, the solutions had such a high degree of complexity that they were unable to use them efficiently. Digital Marketing Director Lindsey Roberts estimates that despite their best efforts, they were only utilizing 10% of their softwares’ capabilities because the systems were so difficult to use. As a result, they weren’t able to build the strategic digital journey needed to scale direct revenue. Thankfully, that changed with Revinate Marketing.
In 2011, Rick Hayduk, a long-time and experienced hotelier, was inspired to open a hotel that employed individuals with intellectual disabilities with the goal in mind of positively impacting the lives of others and giving everyone a chance for forward advancement in the hospitality industry. After learning the ins and outs of the hospitality industry for over three decades and becoming a true hospitality veteran, Hayduk opened The Shepherd Hotel in April of 2022 with the help of Rich Davies, a third-generation real estate developer, and incredibly involved Clemson Alumni.
In 2018, Blackstone Group purchased the Turtle Bay Resort on the North Shore of Oahu with big plans for a new, five-star Hawaii destination. The midmarket hotel wasn’t the main draw, instead it was all about location, location, location – Turtle Bay sits on prime seaside real estate in a surfing mecca, with five miles of beachfront and 20 miles of trails.
The Ibis Budget Tbilisi Center, part of the Accor chain, is perfectly positioned for leisure and business guests and close to everything the Georgian capital offers. Only a twenty-minute drive from the airport and just a one-minute walk from Rustaveli Avenue, this brand-new 158-room hotel has a lobby bar and a restaurant.
For EOS Hospitality, travel demand has been strong over the last couple of years, especially in the drive-to markets serving leisure guests. But with rising operational expenses due to inflation, a recession on the horizon, and a changing privacy landscape that makes it harder to market to guests online, the e-commerce team wanted to ensure they were prepared for changing market conditions.
Taylor Hospitality is one of the nation's leaders in golf club and hospitality management. The company has an arrayed portfolio of select service and boutique hotels throughout Virginia and West Virginia. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Waynesboro, VA, the company's goal is to deliver an unmatched guest experience and positive financial results to all clients.
At Tennessee-based McNeill Hotel Company, an owner-operator of 24 branded hotels across the U.S., change management was already underway prior to COVID. Leadership had outlined a plan for centralization - moving many of the back-office operations away from the property level and under the purview of the centrally located leadership team based outside Memphis.
At Tharaldson Hospitality Management, it’s all about staying current with hospitality technologies, finding the best people to work at their properties, and overall providing the best hotel experience possible.
Our world runs on bold ideas – but bringing new ideas, especially those which aim to break the molds we’ve grown most accustomed to, is a feat that requires a great deal of heart. That is, perhaps, the best way to explain the evolution of The Shepherd Hotel – a one-of-a-kind luxury hotel located in downtown Clemson, which started as a big idea with an even bigger heart. Founded by Rich Davies, a third-generation real estate developer, and Rick Hayduk, a seasoned luxury hotel leader, the Shepherd Hotel not only fills a gap in the Clemson community by offering a home-away-from-home to visiting sports fans, Clemson University students, and their parents, it also exists to change the lives of an under-engaged portion of the population.
Sharing information with owners might not rank as OPERA Cloud's top benefit for hoteliers, but it's certainly key to making them happy.
It was mid-June 2022 and Vito and Carlo Cinque, two brothers at the helm of the world-renowned Italian 5-star hotel Il San Pietro (ISP) since 1996, had reasons to rejoice. Located in Positano on the Amalfi Coast, south of Naples, their 56-room iconic property was enjoying its best year, as unprecedented numbers of pandemic-exhausted travelers were flocking again to Positano. Charging an average rate of €1,882 each night for a room, the hotel boasted a 99.9% occupancy rate1 and was fully booked until mid-October. This was in stark contrast with the preceding two years during the Covid-19 pandemic, when ISP struggled to keep staff onboard and attract guests as Italy endured a catastrophic drop in tourism.
SBM (Société des Bains de Mer) is a casino and luxury hotel group with more than 150 years of history in Monaco encompassing four properties that include four and five-star hotels. For more than 12 years, Benjamin Caprini has been the revenue manager for the hotel group. The hotels using IDeaS today include The Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, The Hôtel Hermitage Monte-Carlo, and The Monte-Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort.