Big Brother is coming. He knows where you are. He's tracking your every move. Despite whatever dystopian fiction you've read, seen or had nightmares about, he's actually here to help. And he doesn't go by some tyrannical, cult of personality namesake as 'Big Brother' but rather the far more innocuous title of Location Analytics (or what some call geotargeting).
Central to building your property's awareness and sales generation is its "voice" or unique selling proposition (USP). Specific to the hospitality industry, a USP is defined as the single most identifiable benefit a property can give to consumers.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco. For those of you not familiar with this organization or conference, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the largest society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (O.R.), management science, and analytics.
In providing training for hotel sales and catering departments I usually find that nearly all have a robust sales lead tracking tool. There are many excellent systems out there such as SalesForce, Delphi, and Opera Sales Force Automation among others. Yet when I ask sales leaders the question "How well are your sales associates using their system?" the answer tends to be "Not as well as they should be."
In 1950, the hotel industry picked the late E. M. Statler as the "Hotel Man of the Half Century," even though he had been dead for 22 years. Statler's impact on innkeeping was so great, no one else even came close. While many considered Statler the premier hotel figure, he was not a typical executive. A plain, rugged man who started to work at age 9, he continued to wear $20 suits and $4 shoes even after he became successful, and resembled Will Rogers more than Rudolph Valentino. When Statler began in the hotel business, the following practices were commonplace
As we enter into the final months of 2014, the global hotel industry is experiencing one of its strongest years of the decade. Most statistics are showing a positive path and indicating the long awaited recovery has arrived. As a result, now is an opportune time to evaluate strategies and begin laying the foundation for strong RevPAR performance in 2015 and beyond. While there is always uncertainty about the future, recent technology and marketing innovations are enabling cutting edge hoteliers to gain competitive RevPAR advantages within their local market. Let's take a closer look to better understand how to shape the future with present day solutions and best practices.
Year after year revenue management is gaining wide acceptance as a key marketing and pricing strategy in many hotels. Even the phenomenal revenue gains attributed to revenue management—typically in the range of 45 to 85 percent, virtually all of which drop to the bottom line—have prompted executives to investigate the potential applicability of revenue management to their hotels.
The first hotel online booking engines are twenty years old now, and they are slowly evolving to give users more features and more control over their stay. So why has there has been so little effort made in the evolution of web bookings for small groups. Most hotels are still expecting small groups, which, by the way, are 30% of hotel business, to fill out a form or make a call before they can get rates or make reservations. While this may have been marginally sustainable up until now, there is little hope that Millennials are going to continue to give hotels their business this way.
This week I'm going to "fill in" for Natalie to complete our series on "What can Hotels learn from Casinos"? (Look for parts 1 and 2 here and here, respectively) Today I'm going to address pricing. We all know that great entertainment comes at a price, and we also know that casinos need to manage demand and supply just like any other business. But when we are managing revenue in a casino, there are a lot of interrelated factors at play. The denomination or price of a slot machine can impact demand for that machine. The price and availability of hotel rooms need to be balanced with the ability to offer comp rooms to the casino's most valuable players, as well as with the overall goal to drive revenue throughout the estate. After all, the modern casino resort produces revenue across many fronts (rooms, entertainment, gaming, food and beverage, and more), so any decision that impacts room rates and availability has to consider the broader effect on estate-wide revenues.
Executive Summary: Identifying precisely what consumers are looking at (and by implication what they are thinking) when they consider a web page, an image, or a hospitality environment could provide tremendous insights to the hospitality industry. By using eye tracking technology, one can almost literally see through the eyes of the customer to find out what information is examined at various points during the hotel search process or to assess which property design features attract guests' attention. When eye tracking is immediately followed by interviews that review a graphical representation of the consumer's eye movements, the thought processes behind consumers' visual activity can be uncovered and explored. In this paper we explain how eye tracking works and how it could apply to hospitality research. Today's eye tracking systems are easy for researchers to set up and use and are virtually transparent to the participant during use, making eye tracking a valuable method for examining consumer choice or facility design, or to develop employee training procedures. We argue that eye tracking would provide rich results and deserves to be considered for a wide range of hospitality applications.
The history of the stock market… I'm sure it's not a topic that most in the hospitality industry have ever contemplated in great detail but that should change right now. Why? Because hoteliers and revenue managers can learn a great deal from the evolution of stock market technology that will benefit their property's revenues.
Executive Summary: Booking a hotel online involves two major stages, namely, browsing and deliberation (followed by booking a hotel). A study that tracked 32 individuals' eye movements as they worked on selecting a hotel to book found that during browsing, consumers quickly glance at many hotels (sometimes scrolling but often just taking the first screen) as they check the names and prices of available hotels. During this process, consumers apply personal heuristics to identify hotels that warrant further scrutiny. During the deliberation phase, consumers review more detailed information for the consideration set—usually no more than about seven properties—from which a purchase decision is made. During the browsing stage, consumers fixate primarily on firm-supplied information, including hotel name, images, price, and location, in addition to user ratings. Within the consideration set, consumers fixate most on images, closely followed by firm-provided descriptions. They also fixate on price and room offers, as well as user-generated ratings and reviews.
Do you know any hoteliers that have been putting off creating professionally produced videos for their small luxury hotel? I'll bet you do and the reason is most likely that they are just too expensive. Really? This is perhaps the most common reason a company, including hotels, will use when it doesn't want to purchase something. Sure, it will cost money, but what are the benefits? How much revenue will videos produce? What will be your return on investment? It's not about how much something costs, but how ROI a hotel can expect.
Next week I will be presenting at the Cornell Hospitality Research Summit on big data and revenue management. In preparation for the Summit, I have recorded a short presentation that outlines how big data can help augment revenue management.
One of the worst jobs in history had to have been Nero's Public Relations (PR) Officer. Can you imagine trying to put a spin on an image of the emperor serenely playing his fiddle against the backdrop of raging flames shooting skyward from a burning Rome? Ouch! The bizarre part of this story is that historians tell us Nero actually tried to help his people in the midst of the tragic conflagration. When he heard about the tragedy, he rush back to the city from his palace on the outskirts of Rome to coordinate fire-fighting efforts, established temporary shelters for homeless residents in public buildings along with his own gardens, and brought in grains from other cities to feed his citizens. But, none of that ever made the front page of the papyrus scroll. The only image that circulated was that of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. It persists to this day. Why? Because he didn't have a good public relations strategy.
Which one are you, strategist or tactician? Or, do you even know the difference? It's subtle, but very important to remember. Strategists are the big picture idea generators and recommenders of this world. They are the ones who get the prestige for coming up the winning concept that reaped a heavy payload down the road. Oftentimes a single thought or suggestion can save a whole company or launch it into an entirely new marketplace. Strategic planners, consultants and corporate advisors all fit this role for the purpose of helping an organization find that 'next big thing' to propel it forward.
In the past, revenue management was a practice that only high-end, luxury properties implemented for two major reasons: first, it was hugely cost prohibitive, and second, it required the hotel to hire a revenue manager to execute the processes (or oversee the revenue management system - RMS). Only properties with large budgets – both for revenue management and personnel – could actually afford to use revenue management to price their properties, leaving smaller, boutique properties struggling to keep up.
Every DMO marketer worth her salt knows that the key metrics of a website's effectiveness are reach and conversions, but knowing how to increase these two numbers is an ongoing puzzle for most DMOs. These days the standard DMO website includes several areas of loosely organized content, along with a hodgepodge of external links, booking engines, and social plugins. This approach could loosely be summed up as "more is more", a belief that visitors want something, so let's throw as much stuff on the site as possible and hope they find what they need.
The Hotel Carter was constructed in 1930 as the Hotel Dixie by Percy and Harry Uris who were active hotel developers in New York City. The Dixie was built as a bread and butter, no-frills hotel with small-sized guestrooms. It had no pretensions to luxury and was created to provide inexpensive rooms in the Times Square area. It included a bus terminal in the basement just below the street floor. The terminal consisted of a large waiting room with an information booth, ticket counters, station offices, baggage storage, checkrooms, lunch counter and automobile parking spaces. Ramps for buses led to and from Forty-third Street. A thirty-five foot turntable served to maneuver the buses into their allotted loading stalls and to reverse them when ready to leave.
With the growing popularity and availability of online reviews and ratings, consumers have more information than ever before when purchasing a hotel stay. In order to build effective pricing and positioning strategies, hotel managers need to understand how consumers are using all of this user generated content with price to make a purchase decision. Dr. Breffni Noone, Associate Professor at Penn State, and I have done a series of studies to understand how consumers use all of this information to assess value, and ultimately, make a purchase decision. Our latest research looked at unmanaged business travelers.