The last three weeks have been like no other in our lifetimes. Watching the world of travel, hotels, restaurants and hospitality in general, turn upside down - so rapidly, around the world - has been disheartening and simply surreal.

The Increasing Number of Hotel's Customer Touchpoints: The customer's booking and digital connection journey changes rapidly each day as new platforms are introduced and guests continually adjust their method of connecting with brands (as well as their expectations of the hotel companies).

Hoteliers, marketing directors, and revenue managers in particular are continuously learning how to put the pieces of the puzzle together when it comes to creative and effective options for selling out room nights.

This is a very common question, and yet one which typically has a complicated answer. But should it? It's unfortunate that many hotels boast about how much money was spent on artwork decorating their lobbies and yet compensation increases for the sales managers who book business to their rooms are embarrassingly low.

Hospitality schools and industry professionals have been working together to provide internship experiences that introduce students to different sectors of the hospitality industry, as well as expose students to the corporate culture and skills required by companies the student could eventually work with post-graduation.

Now that 2016 is behind us, we can look back at food and dining achievements in the US and acknowledge a number of interesting trends we all enjoyed and appreciated. Restaurants and servers began to more effectively respect diners with food sensitivities and allergies, for example.

The hotel marketing budget, typically amounting to approximately 4-5% of an asset's total revenue, must remain fluid, so that the marketing director can constantly adapt the marketing tools to meet consumer communications methods and demands.

The dual-branded hotel concept is speculated to have a number of origins; Looking at the hospitality industry as a whole, a comparison that comes naturally is one to dual-branded restaurants. Two restaurants under one roof could be viewed as a close similarity as housing two hotel brands under one roof, but in reality, the two are actually quite different.

With the powerful travel influence of the millennial generation as well as the ever-growing needs of today's geo-traveler, the popularity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly important in the arena of hospitality.

Inefficient algorithms drove various search engines throughout the 1990's. Search results were at times unrelated to the proposed query, and were cluttered with spam. Google soon devised a more organized and systematic search result listing, and the relevance of search results improved exponentially.