There's a "war room" in the basement of Marriott International's headquarters, and it's not one where its executives plot against Hilton. No, this war room is part of Marriott's new 10,000-square-foot Innovation Lab, a place where employees and hotel owners brainstorm, design and refine their ideas for what the hotel of the future will look like.
China has become the biggest travel spender in the world, and hotels are taking notice. Across Europe and America, back-office planners and front desk clerks are learning Chinese customs to attract the new travelers and keep them returning. The market is large, and growing. China’s economy included $102 billion spent on travel abroad in 2012, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. Rising incomes, combined with a relaxation of foreign travel restrictions and the sheer number of citizens, have fueled the Chinese growth.
Frits van Paasschen is standing with his bike on the edge of Central Park. It's a brisk autumn morning. The city has yet to fully wake but he's eager to ride. The CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts — best known for brands like Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis and W — exercises six days a week no matter where he is in the world. These are not light workouts. Van Paasschen, 52, just completed his first Ironman triathlon — 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of cycling, and a 26.2-mile run. It took 12 hours and 44 minutes.
High-end hotels are hiring highly specialized butlers and staffers who attend to very select needs of guests, be it their love lives (romance concierge), hangovers (recovery concierge) or cleanliness (bath butlers). Just this year, Westin Hotels & Resorts hired a running concierge to cater to the needs of marathon-running guests, and last year Rosewood Hotels began offering guests the services of fragrance butlers, who bring perfume and cologne to guest rooms, in its New York; Dallas; Menlo Park, Calif.; Vancouver; and Saudi Arabia locations.
Major hotel chains are asking for an end to the federal government shutdown, which they say has caused people to cancel trips. In a letter sent to President Obama and Congress on Thursday, the American Hotel & Lodging Association and its members asked for "an immediate agreement to fund the government and establish a degree of economic certainty to allow for continued growth." The group said that the nation's hotels are losing more than $8 million each day because of the shutdown, which is now in its 10th day.
For hotels, they are some of the most maddening of customers — those who repeatedly book and cancel rooms at no cost in search of the best deal. While the customer ends up with a low rate on a good room, the snubbed hotel is left with an empty room and no revenue. It is a practice that has grown in recent years as powerful new search and comparison tools become available on the Web. Now, hotel companies are starting to respond, offering lower nonrefundable rates to those who pay in full when they make reservations. Travelers who need more flexibility will still find it, but they will pay more for that option.
Have you tried searching for a hotel lately on Google? If you have, you noticed a plethora of new Google hotel related search results. This is Google Hotel Finder, a new sexy travel tool much like Google Flights. “Hotel Finder” aggregates all the hotel information you need to plan a trip. This begs the question: what does this mean for hotel industry search? In this article, we’ll be looking at three crucial aspects of Google Hotel Finder. 1.Hotel Finder Ranking Factors, 2.Hotel Finder Profiles and 3.Hotel Price Ads.
In the end, most travelers from around the world are very similar. Price and location are among the top factors in picking a hotel, according to a new study of more than 200,000 hotel guests from eight countries, according to a new study written by researchers from JD Power & Associates. The study was aimed at helping hotel chains, with properties around the globe, better serve guests with different cultural backgrounds.
Providing clients with value for money and opportunities to save will serve travel agents well for 2014, according to the 2013 Portrait of American Travelers released by MMGY Global/Harrison Group. Though American travelers are just as determined to travel this year as last, the trauma of the recession is still conditioning their choices, according to the report, which found that despite their concerns about the economy, Americans expect to spend slightly more on travel/vacations in 2013 than they did in 2012.
New York hotels are at the forefront of a boom in complete makeovers, after years of lower capital spending caused by the steep economic downturn. For hotels that had become rundown and were sold or shuttered for a while, like the Milford NYC near Times Square, or establishments like the New York Palace hotel, where the former Le Cirque restaurant space is being overhauled and a French market added, scaffolding has become as commonplace as the city’s traffic noise.
A visitor arriving at the Hilton Garden Inn or Homewood Suites Midtown Atlanta might be forgiven for doing a double take about the destination. The brands share the same building in what is known in the industry as a dual-branded hotel. As the economy recovers and hotels begin new construction — Smith Travel Research reported an 18.5 percent increase in hotel rooms under construction in April — hoteliers that took pains to differentiate brands are now, if not tossing those notions aside, at least testing their limits.
The first World Luxury Index Hotels examined luxury hotel brands by three categories – Luxury Major, or luxury brands of a major integrated hotel chain; Luxury Exclusive, or luxury brands of a small- or medium-sized luxury chain; and Upper Upscale brands – with Hilton Hotels & Resorts, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts as the No. 1 most-searched for brand in their respective category. Luxury Major is the fastest growing hotel category in global searches, up 12.1 percent from last year.
Freakonomics latest podcast is called “Should Tipping Be Banned?” As we all know, the practice of tipping can be awkward, random, and confusing. This episode tries to offer some clarity. At its center is Cornell professor Michael Lynn, who has written 51 academic papers on tipping. Because Lynn has largely built his career around tipping, it came as a bit of a surprise when Stephen Dubner asked him what he would change about the practice...
Love it or hate it, the fee-based business model appears to be here to stay for airlines. But the hotel business is a different story. Airlines, as even casual fliers are well aware, have been piling on fees for years. U.S. carriers collected more than $6 billion in baggage and reservation change fees last year, an all-time high. For a particularly fee-crazy carrier such as Spirit Airlines, roughly one-third of revenues come from fees—seat reservations, carryon and checked luggage, bottled water—rather than money paid strictly for flights. To some extent, the hotel industry has followed the airlines down the path to a more fee-centered, nickel-and-dime business model. In 2012, guests at U.S. hotels paid nearly $2 billion in fees.
Hotels want to hear your opinion of your stay. But they no longer feel that it is enough to leave a questionnaire in your guest room and hope for a response, not when TripAdvisor and other public rating sites display customer satisfaction — or dissatisfaction — for all to see. So they may send guests who have just checked out an e-mail survey asking about their stay, and sometimes an additional e-mail if they do not respond to the first one. And hotels monitor what is being said about them on social media and travel Web sites.
SINCE people began traveling, everyone has shared opinions about hotels, but until fairly recently the evaluations were spread by word of mouth or through the august evaluations of recognized guidebook authors. Now there are scores of major online travel and social media sites sprouting hundreds of thousands of customer reviews. And the hotel industry is frantically trying to stay on top of the commotion.
Early hoteliers participating in Expedia’s “hotel collect” platform—where guests reserve a room on Expedia but don’t pay until they check into the hotel—are reporting positive experiences. The program, introduced in July of last year, is officially called Expedia Traveler Preference because guests can choose whether to pay up front on Expedia or when they get to the hotel. The program was criticized early on by hotel owners and asset managers because of the potential to increase costs for hotel owners by way of additional training and credit-card processing fees.
A seismic shift in who is buying luxury and what they’re looking for has recently occurred, and marketers of high-end goods and services were recently put on notice that last year’s assumptions are decidedly wrong, and last month’s may be suspect. Speaker after speaker at the American Express Publishing Luxury Summit, held here at the St. Regis Monarch Beach, underscored how an emerging class of relatively youthful, internationally minded, nouveau riche are roaming the world spending money and redefining service expectations.
Nine months after implementing an “exit-traffic” strategy that drives consumers who don’t book hotels on several brand sites to a more comparative-shopping experience on Roomkey.com, results are beginning to roll in. The site—which was founded by six of the world’s leading hotel companies—has grown “enormously,” CEO John F. Davis III told HotelNewsNow.com last week. Davis said the site’s traffic metrics are right in line with the goals identified in the business plan two years ago. Conversion figures are falling slightly short, however.
The University of Delaware’s Department of Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management (HRIM) hosted its seventh annual Hospitality Entrepreneurship Summit earlier this month to a record crowd of students. Designed to educate and encourage promising underrepresented business and hospitality students to consider establishing businesses and/or franchises in the hospitality and tourism industry, the summit brought together university and high school students from UD, the Mid-Atlantic’s historically black colleges and universities, and high schools from Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.