Presidents' Day Weekend is this weekend, and if you are still looking for some inspiration as to where to spend a few days' getaway, take a look at hotels and resorts around the USA where U.S presidents have stayed before, during and after their time in office for a bit of inspiration.
At the fifth annual Revenue Strategy Summit, held here at the Renaissance DC Downtown hotel this week, Kalibri Labs CEO and co-founder Cindy Estis Green posed a question: How much do comp sets matter anymore? “I’ve had quite a few owners come to me and say, ‘It’s just not working anymore to look at some of our traditional RevPAR metrics because comp sets don’t even make sense anymore,’” she said, adding that the merger between Marriott International Inc. and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. complicated matters—many traditional comp sets had to be changed to make them legal comp sets, and as a result, hotels were added to comp sets that didn’t necessarily make sense. “It got me thinking about what needed to be looked at in terms of some of these metrics,” she explained. “Beyond net revenue, do comp sets make sense anymore? In this age of big data, can we do something a little more effective and customized for an individual hotel?”
Once again, the Mayflower Hotel is at the center of a political scandal. On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told the Senate intelligence committee that he did not have any private meetings or recall any private conversations with Russian officials at an April 2016 event at the storied Washington hotel. "Let me state this clearly: I have never met with or had any conversations with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election," he said.
Visitors to a hotel conference in downtown Los Angeles got to witness firsthand how a major hotel company comes up with new concepts for hotel rooms and lobbies. Marriott International took over a city street next to Staples Center this week to display its testing ground for new products under a row of tents. The permanent lab is located in a basement at Marriott’s Bethesda, Md., headquarters.
Meeting Professionals International does a quarterly survey of senior-level meeting planners and suppliers, and then releases a quarterly outlook report, which I always review and use to produce forward-looking strategies for clients and corporations. Being the data junkie that I am, I noticed that the Summer 2016 Outlook contained some interesting responses.
Global business travel topped $1.2 trillion and is expected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2020, according to new research by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), an association representing the interests of corporate travel managers. What’s more, China has now surpassed the U.S. as the largest business travel market in the world, ringing up $291 billion last year.
Hilton published an advertisement in Travel + Leisure magazine that features two men in bed together, and the American Family Association doesn’t like it. AFA leadership launched a petition to stop it from circulating further. Here’s the ad in question... And here’s the crux of the AFA’s discontent, as it articulated in a statement on its website:
San Francisco wants people who rent out their homes through Airbnb and other online platforms to follow some rules, and it wants the platforms to advertise only those rule-abiding listings — or face steep fines.
That means Airbnb and others must stick to advertising San Francisco hosts who have registered with the city and haven't exceeded the number of nights they're allowed to rent. The penalty? Platforms can be fined up to $1,000 a day per violation.
Now, Airbnb is suing its hometown, arguing that it's not responsible for making sure hosts follow city rules and that San Francisco, the place that birthed some of the world's most innovative startups, is undermining a bedrock principle that allowed those companies to flourish in the first place.
Despite some encouraging RevPAR forecasts for 2016, hoteliers who attended ALIS are anxiously waiting for the bad news that the industry peak is over. The Americas Lodging Investment Summit is in the books, and my main takeaway is that some things are not what they seem.
In December we published a simple, but somewhat depressing, stat about the state of hotel and resort Twitter followers. Using each user’s last tweet date we found that only 44% had tweeted during the last month. But the question quickly arose, what about those who don’t tweet? How many of them are still listening? Here’s what we found.
Don’t overdo it when catering to Hispanic travelers. That’s the message from hotel owners, managers and management experts when it comes to this growing segment of the U.S. hospitality industry. Bjorn Hanson, a hospital industry expert and professor with the New York University Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism, said: “Almost as important as what to do is what not to do. Most Hispanic travelers don’t see themselves as Hispanic travelers, but as travelers. And they’re looking for the same things that any traveler looks for: good service and all the things that make up a good traveling experience. Something that looks too obvious or superficial or too contrived can be a negative.”
If you’re the kind of hotel guest who wants room service but finds picking up the phone and speaking to an actual human too much, the Aloft Manhattan Downtown hotel may have the answer. It has just launched Text it, Get it (called TiGi for short), a service that allows you to request services simply by sending an emoji.
Hotel bookings through travel agents are expected to reach a record high in 2015 and have held their share of the market, despite dire predictions for years. It’s easy to fixate on technology when talking about bookings, but one of the most well-established paths to booking a room might represent the most overlooked opportunity for hoteliers. That opportunity? Global distribution systems.
As Airbnb continues to sign up hosts to become the largest provider of lodging rooms in the world (1 million and counting, as reported by Airbnb), hoteliers continue to assess the threat and the potential opportunity this new competitor poses. This article takes a deep dive into New York City by comparing and contrasting STR hotel data with publicly available Airbnb data. (STR is the parent company of Hotel News Now.)
Whenever a large number of media outlets all notice the same story not involving a public figure or obviously newsworthy event, and then all report it from the same perspective within a short period of time, there’s a good chance public relations firms are involved. And when that story is part of an expensive lobbying efforts in Washington D.C. aimed at undercutting a competing business interest, the goal probably isn’t to benefit consumers. Such is the case with a dispute between the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) and third-party booking sites.
Starwood Hotels is making a strong push to spruce up events and conferences held at its properties with its new ProMeetings mobile application, which enables event planners who belong to the brand’s rewards program to submit requests directly to employees for immediate fulfillment. The world of events is increasingly going mobile, with many conferences turning to mobile apps instead of offering attendees print agendas and schedules. Starwood Hotels is establishing a stronger presence in the lucrative industry by rolling out this app, which can help planners request coffee service, extension cords and lighting preferences with the tap of a finger.
John Malone has structured TripAdvisor Inc. like he’s ready to make a deal. Malone, chairman of Liberty Interactive Corp. as well as several sister companies whose names start with Liberty, is known for engineering complex and lucrative financial arrangements. In August, he did a tax-free spinoff of Liberty Interactive’s controlling interest in TripAdvisor, a $9.7 billion website where users write reviews for vacation resorts. That transaction may soon lead to another.
Hotel conference centers are getting major makeovers to become spaces for both work and play. Hotels across the country are spending millions of dollars to attract conferences by upgrading their meeting spaces. The rooms are no longer tucked away in dark underground corridors. Instead, they're appealing spaces often located on higher-level floors or even outdoors. "There's definitely a shift in style," says Jayna Cooke, CEO of EVENTup, an online venue marketplace. She says meeting spaces are "wider, have taller ceilings, much more light and windows, and they're not stuck in basements and closed in."
Many individual hotels, and chains across the nation, struggle to compete with the very biggest brands on revenue per room. But things are changing, with the aid of smart technology. Chains such as Red Lion, and one-off hotels such as El Cortez (Las Vegas’ longest continuously running hotel and casino), are analyzing a raft of big data to help set the best room rates in a much more vigorous and effective way, giving their largest rivals some serious competition.
A NEW hotel company plans to buck the trend when it opens its first property, in Chicago, in January by not charging travelers those annoying extra fees, while allowing reservation cancellations till late on the day a guest is scheduled to arrive. Set to open in mid-January, the Virgin Hotel Chicago will not impose fees on various things that other hotels routinely charge for, including high-speed Wi-Fi and business center services. And travelers will be able to cancel a reservation as late as midnight on the day of arrival without being charged.