A while back we spoke with Stephen Minall, member of the HITEC Amsterdam Advisory Council and owner of Moving Food Ltd., to address the issue of whether the industry needs to elevate the role of IT Managers. Minall is a man of few words and a brilliant strategist. His answer back then was simple: "it should be a challenge to all hotels."
Franchise contracts are based on a reciprocal commitment between the investor-operator and the brand. Since investment funds set their sights on the hotel industry, such contracts have run into serious pitfalls. More concerned about seeing share prices climb on the stock exchange, financial shareholders have driven corporate communication to the detriment of brand marketing, thereby weakening awareness, the image and the attributes that make up the essential capital of any consumer brand.
You have a beautiful hotel, filled with luxury touches to make your guests’ stay as comfortable and memorable as possible. But are you truly ‘owning’ the guest experience from the moment of booking and beyond? Communication is the key to the new wave of brand loyalty. If you make communication easy, personal and accessible, you open an opportunity to a new level of guest loyalty… And following loyalty, of course, follows revenue. It’s time to own the guest experience through mobile, personalised, digital technology.
Search online for the term "iconic hotels" and you will find scores of fabulous properties like Belmond Hotel Splendido in Portofino in Italy, to Laucala Island in Fiji. Through some quirk of fate or careless oversight all the luxury hotel experts somehow missed the gem of Yalta, Villa Elena. What follows is a very abbreviated history of the hotel, followed by an exclusive interview with the hotel's Director, Kira Zakharova.
This week's briefing jointly organised by Dentons, Horizons and the Global Restaurant Investment Forum/Bench Events proved to be as insightful as expected. It was a mix of market updates and intelligence, news on up-and- coming restaurant concepts as well as a talk on the do's and dont's when expanding internationally and an earnest discourse on Brexit.
During my many years of travel in the service industry and having stayed in hundreds of hotels worldwide, it's clear that the past five years have brought about enormous change in the hotel industry. Innovation with architecture, interior design and guest comfort is at an all-time high. Widespread revitalisation has been incredibly successful in meeting guest expectations. Yet, in an increasingly demanding world, there still also remains a huge opportunity to truly create a home from home for the traveler.
Last week, in Athens, a cast of hospitality and travel tech experts gathered at the Digi.travel EMEA Conference & Expo. The conference was dedicated to online travel trends and developments, and to solutions for the most pressing challenges facing the industry. Here is a synopsis of the meet-up, and the high points from some of the world's most knowledgeable hospitality-tech experts.
Evros Prefecture is located in the north-eastern part of Greece in the natural boundary of the country with Bulgaria to the north and Turkey to the east. To the West it borders with the prefecture of Rodopi, access to which is possible via the Egnatia Odos Highway and to the south it lies on the coast of the Thracian Sea (part of the North Aegean Sea). Over the last decade, the tourism sector has recorded significant development while several investments related to the hotel industry have materialized in the area.
The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) -- the voice of the global business travel industry – and German business travel buyer association VDR – wrapped up their third successful joint conference in Europe this week with record attendance. The event brought together over 950 attendees from 20+ countries for networking, education and top-notch speakers.
Olive Green Hotel had a silent opening at the beginning of the fall, but it's already a hit with its first guests. "We only stayed one night but had we discovered it sooner, we would have stayed longer and explored Heraklion. The rooms are absolutely lovely. Modern, efficient, well appointed," writes Lee T. from Sydney, Australia, in his TripAdvisor review.
Timo E. Kettern is the IT Director at Lapithus Hotel Management and a respected professional in his field. In anticipation of HITEC Amsterdam which will take place next year in March in Amsterdam, we spoke with him about shadow IT activities, technology, and devices that fall outside the traditional IT funding.
The way that British holidaymakers like to pay has been changing for many years, but it's become clear that Brits simply don't like having to bring large quantities of foreign currency on their travels. They worry about taking it out with them for fear of being a victim of a crime in a potentially unfamiliar city, but they also worry about leaving any in their hotel rooms. Research that we carried out in association with CensusWide this summer found that 1 in 8 Brits opted to keep all of their foreign currency with them at all times so that they didn't have to leave any in their room, while 1 in 3 said that they made a conscious effort to keep the amount of cash taken on holiday to an absolute minimum.
Back in July I covered a story of International Space Station (ISS) crewmembers re-acclimating on Crete, for Sputnik International. This month ISS cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka spent mission critical time on the island, ending their reentry mission at the magnificent the Aldemar Thalasso Resort in Hersonissou. I had the opportunity to speak with the Director of Aldemar Resorts, Alexandros Angelopoulos about how these Roscosmos monitored programs for cosmonauts came about, and how the initiatives can benefit Crete tourism.
HITEC Amsterdam will bring together the best of hospitality financial and technology professionals next March, in an event that will show advances in the trade with access to innovative resources, industry experts, and vendors. The European version of HITEC (Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition & Conference) which takes place in North America every year, HITEC Amsterdam is a premiere on the continent and promises to be the hospitality event of the year, with some 60 booths exhibiting advanced solutions and innovative industry-specific technology. In anticipation of the conference taking place next year, Hospitality Net conducts a series of interviews with HITEC Advisory Council members discussing relevant industry issues and offering expert insight on key technology topics.
At the Filoxenia Conference Centre in Nicosia key hospitality and tech decision makers are gathered today for the Digi.travel Cyprus Conference & Expo 2016. Organized for the first time with the collaboration of the Association of Cyprus Travel Agents ACTA, the summit puts leading technology providers alongside travel and hospitality professionals in the region.
Narratives are powerful in moving, inspiring, making feeling unique, orchestrating emotional connections and qualifying a link between the most top-notch hotels and their guests. Today more and more hotels reconfigure their hospitality strategies towards the adoption of an experiential orientation through stories. They script namely unique, extraordinary narratives and stage escapist events, individually customized and personally meaningful for each guest persona.
The debates that are stirring up the French population and are being fed by the beginning of the presidential campaign have cast a pall over the image of a welcoming country. Any demonstration of cultural diversity seems to purposefully goad the perfect model of a secular republic.
Investor interest in fixed-income hotel real estate is at unprecedented levels. Fund managers increasingly see leased hotel assets as an attractive portfolio option amid the current low interest rate environment. The scale of investor appetite was underlined by CBRE Hotels' inaugural Fixed-Income Breakfast, where attendees representing leading UK and European investor groups debated the key challenges and opportunities within the European hotel sector.
For several years, the term Brexit has become a household name in not only countries in Europe but also countries around the world, being the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. In 2012, UK Prime Minister David Cameron rejected calls for a referendum on membership in the European Union. However, he did not rule out a referendum happening in the near future. Fast forward to 24 June 2016, the people in the UK gathered and voted after a heavily publicised and contested pre-referendum period by both the 'Leave' and 'Stay' camps. In the end, 48.1% of those who voted preferred to stay and 51.9% preferred to leave. The vote was largely split by the greater London area and Scotland being in favour of 'Stay', whereas most other parts of the UK voted in favor of 'Leave'.
On the first day of March in 2011, I received a phone call from a reporter from a local paper to let me know that the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in King's Cross was going to open its doors to the public soon and he asked me if I could write a feature on this iconic building for his newspaper. I was in Mumbai when I picked up the call, travelling in an auto-rickshaw outside the Victoria Terminus now known as CST - a building that bore an uncanny resemblance to the one housing the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel except that it was made of sandstone whereas the one in London was made of bricks. I'd like to have been back in London to tour the building that had intrigued me for years whenever I visited the British Library. I didn't know the reason for it being left empty. The clock tower of this Victorian Gothic building actually dwarfed that of the recently-built British Library.