I know it might sound needlessly hopeful, but Tripadvisor forums can transform your brand, and help you become more successful in the long term. Having hotels move away from ineffective social campaigns on Facebook, to ROI producing ones that root you as experts in travel and hospitality, is something we have needed to do for years. The internet doesn’t happen on Facebook, Facebook users aren’t consumers. The internet happens on forums, and those forums are populated with potential guests that are ready to spend money. Help out that person asking questions with an interest in having hospitality change lives, and that virtual stranger might just end up as a physical guest. Even if we are exhausted by the end of a work day, it’s still our job to mentor up and coming hospitality professionals, and to help connect them with the spark that you once felt about hospitality. These forums might be a simple, easy first step to making that hourly desk agent who thinks of hotels as a “job”, into understanding that hospitality is a noble profession. When you start helping people, and you feel that positive reaction for having done so, it gives life a sense of purpose and hope…. so let’s get excited about hospitality, let’s realize we can make the world a better place with all that we do…. and helping a stranger in a Tripadvisor forum can be one small part of that.
Where does your hotel lose money – in marketing and distribution?
This is a really big question. I would love to see the industry really delve into this. Â The transition from real world to online has been very fast, and a lot of the “infrastructure” is so much e-duct
Budgets & Vendor-Client relationship in “real time”
Spot on and completely hilarious, I am sure many of you have felt this frustration. Apparently, everything is negotiable nowadays, eh? This makes it nice and ridiculous, for easy lunch time digesting.
The Story of the In-Room Phone, & the future of on property telephony
These conversations about archaic forms of communication will fall to the wayside during the tremendous fervour for hotels’ future comm abilities, where we will have to adopt a more pro-active and less wary view of technology, so the hospitality industry can be carried forward by technology and the advent of 2.0 – at the intersection of commerce and the community that is selling your brand.
IT BUDGETS – Hotel IT questions, and a couple answers about PMS
Someone had asked what systems of PMS are out there… and where you start. Frankly, researching, engaging, and dealing with the endless sales negotiations is daunting, and tiring. I still don’t get