HFTP

Transforming Hotel Industry Growth Strategy

by RobertKCole on August 3, 2011

It is not often that one is able to corner three hospitality industry leaders and ask them about the challenges facing the industry – specifically how marketing, information technology and distribution can be better aligned to satisfy hotel brand growth objectives.

Transform Your Growth Strategy Now - Removing barriers between hotel technology,marketing and operations

Industry Expert Panel: Video of HITEC panel discussing the 'Transform Your Growth Strategy Now' RockCheetah/Amadeus white paper

Recently, at the Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals annual HITEC conference in Austin Texas, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel comprised of Flo Lugli, Executive Vice President Marketing, Wyndham Worldwide, Mike Blake, Chief Information Officer, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, and Caryl Helsel, Director Central Reservations & Revenue Management, ARAMARK Parks & Destinations.

The three panelists were refreshingly forthcoming and candid in their remarks concerning some of the most daunting challenges facing today’s hotel industry leadership.

As they recover from a dramatic economic downturn, hoteliers are launching initiatives that rely on information technology to accomplish marketing objectives and profitability goals. However, as staffing and financial resource availability remains highly constrained, executive management must employ strategies that most efficiently utilize technology to help drive business growth.

A key conclusion of the white paper was that over the next three years, organizations within the hotel industry require an IT Pathfinder to help align hotel business and technology priorities. Each of the panelists did an outstanding job of providing examples of how their organizations are managing the challenge of advancing technology initiatives with fewer resources than in years past.

Most enlightening were the panel’s comments regarding critical nature of these initiatives and how they would serve as the foundation for brand and operational success over the years to come.

The following is a twenty-seven minute video summarizing the highlights of the white paper and the panel discussion:

A Discussion Between Industry Experts from Amadeus IT Group.

To read the white paper’s executive summary, please see my blog post from earlier this year, White Paper: Bridging Hotel Business and Technology Priorities.

The full white paper is available, free of charge, for download here: Transform Your Growth Strategy Now [Registration required]

My sincere thanks go to Flo, Mike and Caryl for doing a terrific job on the panel and validating the conclusions of the white paper, as well as Amadeus for its industry insights and sponsorship of the white paper.

NOTE: Please don’t hesitate to watch the video – I am not nearly as stern or grouchy as the placeholder graphic might imply… and, despite the severity of the economic challenges facing the hotel industry, that fire alarm to my immediate right was not a prop… ;)

Tagged as: customer relationship management, HFTP, hospitality, hotel, innovation, insight, marketing, mobile, recession, strategy, technology, travel, trends

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Seven Travel Planning Steps – Impact on Hotel Distribution Strategy

by RobertKCole on June 21, 2011

When it comes to moderating a panel, there is no greater pleasure than having a group of outstanding panelists to simplify the task at hand. This is particularly true when the event is promoted as a “Super Session”, there are 90 minutes to fill, and it immediately precedes happy hour…

For the Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals 2011 HITEC Conference, held June 20-23 in Austin, Texas, I was charged with leading one of only two educational session held on the second day of the conference.

Hospitality

Distribution is not technology. It's about simplifying the consumer experience.

The topic of the Super Session was Seven Travel Planning Steps and Their Impact on Hotel Distribution Strategy. It was also decided to take a highly non-traditional approach to the subject.

Contrary to most distribution panels, the discussion would not focus on Global Distribution Systems (GDS), Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), private sale websites, group buying, XML interfaces, the merchant model,
search engine optimization (SEO), or mobile web versus native apps.

The presentation was built on the premise that distribution isn’t technology, it’s really about delivering the right product in the right place at the right time through the right channel at the right price for the right guest.

To illustrate the complexity facing hoteliers desiring to properly align that series of traveler “rights” to appropriately engage guests in relevant conversations, the following dimensions were highlighted:

    Seven Stages of Travel

  • Inspiration
  • Research
  • Planning
  • Validation
  • Booking
  • Travel
  • Sharing
    Six Hospitality Touch Points

  • Pre-Stay
  • Arrival
  • On-Property
  • In-Destination
  • Departure
  • Post-Stay
    Multiple Traveler Personas

  • Considerable Variation by Traveler

Engaging with a specific guest seeking inspiration for a romantic weekend getaway with a spouse is dramatically different than engaging the same guest who is in-destination, but offsite from the hotel during a family vacation. Under both scenarios, the individual is intensely motivated to create an unforgettable leisure travel experience, but the context is completely different. Unique opportunities for transactions also exist at each touch point.

Compounding the problem most travel suppliers confuse points/recognition programs with loyalty. This is a disturbing misconception. Points programs are games. While consumers derive value from these programs, that does not necessarily translate into loyalty. Travelers may quickly change allegiance if a competitor launches a richer program.

Loyalty sustains customer relationships through both good times and bad. Loyal consumers recognize an emotional bond with the product, a commonality of sensibilities or personalities. For service industries, this most often relates to the core values a brand exemplifies.

There is a big difference between brand value and brand values. Value drives transactions. Values drive loyalty.

Given these complexities and relational nuances, it becomes obvious that when it comes to websites, one size does not fit all.

To illustrate the point, a comparison of six hotel homepages for major upscale hotel brands was presented.

Unfortunately, all six websites were so depressingly indistinguishable (compounded by the fact that a frequent guest number provides little to no assistance in discerning traveler intent) in each case, there was negligible probability that website distribution was being effectively leveraged by hotels to create meaningful connections with their customers.

The good news was that the outstanding panel of speakers provided countless examples of how their companies successfully differentiated themselves from the competition, introduce guests to rewarding experiences and help earn consumer loyalty. For each stage highlighted, these organizations not only proactively solved problems faced by the guest, but in many cases, managed to monetize the value created.

Speaker Lineup:
Robert Cole (yours truly) – Founder, RockCheetah (Moderator/Inspiration)
Alan Glenin – Corporate Director of Revenue Management, Great Wolf Resorts (Research)
Ran Weerasuriya – Director of Revenue Management, Mammoth Mountain Ski Area (Planning)
Thomas Patchin – Senior Vice President of Interactive Marketing, Station Casinos (Validation)
Kurien Jacob – Senior Vice President of Revenue and Distribution, Highgate Hotels (Booking)
Loren Gray – Director of e-Commerce, Ocean Properties (Travel)
Tanya Pratt – Executive Director Customer Information Systems, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International (Sharing)

Below is a copy of the presentation. It may be downloaded by selecting the View on Slideshare link. continue reading →

Tagged as: customer relationship management, customer service, destination, HFTP, hospitality, hotel, innovation, insight, inspiration, marketing, personas, social media, strategy, technology, travel

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White Paper: Bridging Hotel Business and Technology Priorities

by RobertKCole on June 9, 2011

The hotel industry has survived the most dramatic downturn in its history. With a recovery well underway, hoteliers are launching new business initiatives that rely heavily on information technology to drive business growth and profitability.

Transform Your Growth Strategy Now - Remove barriers between hotel technology,marketing and operations

White Paper: Transform Your Growth Strategy Now - Remove barriers between hotel technology, marketing and operations

The challenge is that over the last three years, Hotel IT staffs were reduced, budgets slashed and projects deferred to weather the financial storm of the great recession.

Unfortunately, over the same period, there was also an unprecedented leap forward technologically with cloud computing, mobile technologies and social computing technologies all entering the mainstream.

The result was a more technically savvy guest with increased expectations pitted against a hospitality industry that was struggling in survival mode.

A gap materialized between hotel industry business priorities and IT priorities. Hoteliers will be spending the next three years closing that gap.

With hotel marketing departments, operations groups and information technology teams all seeking methods to advance divisional initiatives, the key question becomes who is responsible for bridging this gap and how can these diverse organizational objectives be aligned?

Amadeus IT Group engaged RockCheetah to explore how hotel companies can align business and IT strategies to drive business transformation during a period of economic recovery; specifically, the three year time period from 2011 through to 2013.

A proposed solution is the identification of an IT Pathfinder.

The white paper provides an overview of the current industry hospitality environment and key business drivers to provide insights into how hospitality executives can bridge business and IT objectives. The report draws on desk research, a global survey and executive level hotel interviews to reach its conclusions.

Below is the white paper’s executive summary: continue reading →

Tagged as: customer relationship management, HFTP, hospitality, hotel, innovation, insight, marketing, mobile, recession, strategy, technology, travel, trends

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Survey: What Hotel Brand Does the Best Job Online?

by RobertKCole on May 5, 2011

Performing an admittedly unscientific survey in preparation for a session I will be moderating at the Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals HITEC Conference June 20-23 in Austin, Texas. Hopefully you can provide some opinions on the topic.

Every hotel and/or hotel chain on the planet is striving to capture more traffic on their website and convert that traffic into hotel guests. The burning question is however: What hotel companies are doing a great job online?

To provide a bit more structure to a highly subjective topic, the seven-step travel process will be employed. Those stages are:

  • Inspiration
  • Research
  • Planning
  • Validation
  • Booking
  • Travel
  • Sharing

So please take a few minutes to complete the survey below. Weigh in on who you think is doing an exceptional job of engaging their guests in each phase of the travel process.

Ideally, use the hotel brand’s Twitter handle in each response – that will make it easier to collate the responses and communicate the results. If you don’t know the hotel’s name on Twitter, just use the brand name. And yes, I am asking for your Twitter ID to sign the survey in an effort to eliminate stuffing of the ballot box (Would hoteliers do that…?) If you’re not on Twitter, please use your e-mail address.

Here is the survey: continue reading →

Tagged as: HFTP, hospitality, hotel, poll, survey, website

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Marketing Your Hotel or Resort in a Web 2.0 World – Presentation at HFTP Annual Convention

by RobertKCole on September 28, 2009

Here’s my presentation on “Marketing Your Hotel or Resort in a Web 2.0 World” from the Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals (HFTP) Annual Convention & Tradeshow, held at Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas. With a 75 minute time slot and about 7.5 days of potential content, the attendees got an opportunity to sip from the fire hose of marketing strategy and web technology.

Web 2.0 Sites and TechnologiesCreative Commons License photo credit: pipeapple

An ever growing list of new Web 2.0 sites and technologies distract the Hotelier trying to focus on profitably filling rooms.

Due to the time constraints, there was not much opportunity to discuss the critical need for alignment between online and offline marketing tactics. The full presentation is embedded below, but for those who are not flash-enabled (hey mobile browser developers, let’s follow Skyfire’s lead & get this done, shall we?) here are some of the highlights:

One key takeaway was straightforward – to be successful, marketing strategy must drive technology and channel decisions. Hoteliers need to avoid getting caught in the slipstream of the rush to use the latest and hottest tools. This does not mean new tools should not be considered or used; just that the marketing strategy and technology tool must work together to provide a specific guest benefit. continue reading →

Tagged as: HFTP, hotel, marketing, marketing strategy, social media, travel, Web 2.0

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HITEC Presentation – Web 2.0 & 3.0 Impact on Hospitality Technology

by RobertKCole on July 2, 2009

Speaking in Anaheim at last week’s Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals annual HITEC conference, I was joined by friend and twice former colleague Mike Robinson, head of product architecture for InterContinental Hotels Group. Our topic? The impact of Web 2.0 technologies on the hotel industry. Given that Web 2.0 is now nearing its fifth birthday, we decided to vary a bit from the program and add in our view of what Web 3.0 might look like.

Expecting a technically diverse audience with backgrounds ranging from technology vendors to hotel operations and marketing personnel, the basic objective of the presentation was to give the group a primer on how key web technology has advanced, the benefits provided and an overview of some emerging technologies that serve as the foundation for Web 3.0. Not to get too academic, we also wanted to to provide some examples of practical applications of these technologies and how the organizations deploying them are differentiating themselves from their competitors.

Progression of Web 1.0 2.0 and 3.0 Technologies

Amazing Advancements in Web Technologies - Now if we can only get the hospitality industry to use them...

One somewhat startling observation – when I was surveying a number of leading industry figures for recommendations of web sites where hospitality companies were
effectively utilizing Web 2.0 technologies, the most frequent response was something close to “none come immediately to mind…” This is a rather painful statement to hear repeatedly, particularly within an industry that claims to be constantly seeking creative methods to showcase product benefits and more effectively engage with its customer base. The good news is that there is ample room for improvement – as organizations update, there are opportunities for strategy to be reassessed and new tools to be deployed. continue reading →

Tagged as: HFTP, HITEC, hospitality, hotel, technology, travel, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

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