Metaverse business opportunities in the travel and hospitality sector
The metaverse is the art of the inaccessible impossible turning into the accessible possible.
The metaverse is the art of the inaccessible impossible turning into the accessible possible.
The reason we qualify a reservation as a "group booking" is because the number of rooms booked requires special booking conditions to be applied by the Hotel, to prevent the risk of incurring massive revenue and profit loss for late cancellations of the bulk of rooms that cannot be replaced to the last minute.
The Metaverse doesn't start and end with web3. There are Metaverses such as VRChat, AltSpace, Mozilla Hubs that run on VR, are centered around events and community, have a big recurring user base.
From my perspective, companies don't need to be fluent in Metaverse lingo but to understand the utility that they can bring from the Metaverse, the "use case" that better works for each business.
Interoperability: Interoperability refers to the ability of different virtual environments, platforms, and technologies to work together seamlessly. This means that users should be able to move freely between different virtual worlds and experiencesin a seamless fashion.
NFTs: Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that are unique and cannot be replicated or replaced. In the context of the metaverse and interoperability, NFTs provide a way to represent and transfer ownership of virtual assets, such as virtual real estate, digital clothes(skins), digital game tools, digital art, and other virtual items.
If companies want to get into the metaverse business, they first must master the "metaverse lingo".
There are many key terms and concepts that entrepreneurs (and not only them...) should understand, early and effectively, to do business in the metaverse and separate hype from business reality.
Frontier Airlines, a budget airline based out of Denver, Colorado, announced an "all you can fly" promotion that offers pass holders unlimited domestic flights, including to Puerto Rico.
Klaus Kohlmayr, Chief Evangelist & Development Officer @ IDeaS estimates that a typical hotel has to make roughly five million pricing decisions every year and that it is not humanly possible for any revenue manager to get every decision right, every day, without the support of an automated system like a Revenue Management System (RMS). Yet, less than 10% of independent hotels have an RMS in place.
In the next five years, the world will have increased its data from 36 Zettabytes to 163 Zettabytes. How much data is that? If a byte were the size of a grain of rice, 163 zettabytes would fill 163 Pacific Oceans! That's a massive amount of data. The hotel industry is not immune to that deluge, and revenue managers everywhere are faced with the challenge of dealing with it. Here are three recommendations:
In economics, one of the most well-known concepts is the Law of diminishing returns. What the law states is: As an investment in a particular area increases, the rate of profit from that investment, after a certain point, will decrease. Translated in Data analysis, one does not need to have 100% of the information to make the right decision.
More than ever data is available to help shed light in dark corners and to support making high impact decisions. When all goes well revenue managers will feel armed with the right data to check assumptions, gather insights and align teams towards profitable outcomes. With the quantity (and quality) of data sources increasing it can get daunting though.
Tipping from data-driven decision-making into analysis paralysis is common, but not unavoidable. As Scott’s original post says, having a strong filter on what NOT to analyse is important. Here are some other lessons we’ve learned in helping hoteliers navigate the world of data and insights.
The purpose of gathering and analyzing information is to produce a strategic course of action which changes or improves our desired outcome. Our goal is to reduce the time between data gathering and formulating and implementing actionable outcomes, or what I refer to as analytics efficiency.
Today more than ever, the hospitality industry is facing a tough call: How to grow sustainably and thrive amidst volatile times influenced by internal and external factors?
Risks affecting the hospitality industry are not only related to inflation, war, and geopolitics. Science has proven that climate-related risks and biodiversity loss are a threat to the fabric of society. The convergence of global systemic risks has a name: 'global polycrisis'[1]. The hospitality industry operates in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Thus, it is challenging for hotel owners, operators, and leadership teams to adapt to the constantly changing circumstances.
In times of uncertainty, many businesses focus on their internal operations to survive. However, the climate and biodiversity crisis as well as the 'perfect storm' cannot be tackled in isolation, ignoring neighbours, other stakeholders, and the environment we are part of. “Everything that we achieve collectively at The Long Run is about protecting ecosystems, restoring, and regenerating landscapes, and connecting habitats. This is more important than ever in the current climate — there are increasing pressures on resources and so land use and management is critical to protect wildlife, ecosystems, and communities.” (Michael Dyer, the MD of Borana Conservancy, Kenya).
An open metaverse for an open, decentralized industry. A necessity or a want?
One of EarthCheck's favourite sayings is you can't manage what you don't measure. Investing in a system that enables understanding of pressure points and consequently overspend, drives performance and value. Data-driven decision-making turns tactical implementations into savings that are good for busienss and good for the planet.
For greater context, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was originally signed by 150 government leaders at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, committing a dedication to promoting sustainable development and recognizing humanity's reliance on biological diversity. The UN Biodiversity Conference serves to address the CBD and the main objective of the conference now is to adopt the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. The first session of the 2020 UN Biodiversity Conference took place in October 2021 and the second session will resume at the end of this month (April 2022). There is increasing global momentum organizing around a rallying cry to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, a rapidly approaching deadline.