I would say your welcome, but for all the eyes not hitting this… you have been warned. The future is Google Plus, because the future is still search, and your future revenues depend on it.
Why are Hotels slow to innovate?
This Quora question here finally provided me an outlet to sum up all my tired cliches. The best in this business are constantly innovating, but here’s why the overall industry is a conservative bunch
Hoteliers need to start using Tripadvisor Forums (or) Hotels are the new Destination Experts
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.
“Big Data” & Data Ethics’ Role in the Future of Hospitality: Unlocking the Silo
Do I think we need to remind ourselves that the way hospitality should be respectful and noble in how we manipulate, interpret, extrapolate, and use all this data, in lieu of guest privacy and respecting them? Yes. Yes I do. I am going to ask our travel professionals an hoteliers to think deeply about how they want to treat a guest – and to understand their is a difference between understanding their datas, and using it to manipulate them. The pace of business is too fast for people to have gotten to this last sentence, but those that did might proactively walk forward into the world of big data with respect to the people that choose to keep our hotels in business. The hotel business is conservative for a reason – we don’t have the money to get burned on trying new ideas. If you exploit your guest’s data in a way that burns bridges, no amount of data analysis will ever fill your hotel again.
Why The Academy Awards are relevant to Local “Best of” City lists, the future of social in hotels, & why it should matter to your employees.
I think it’s time to realize we can not readily energize a fan base for something like a hotel, and the real way these “Best of the City” local contests are *truly* won is with your staff. Consider what it’s like to receive endless credit card offers in the mail, or to have someone call you multiple times and talk only of themselves. Trying to urge your fan base to do work for you might only not work, it might be counterproductive. Those who will vote for you on the best-of list are already prone to do it, so they don’t need encouragement, which means you may just be spamming your precious contact list, instead of proselytizing them to action. So how are you going to win these “best-of” lists? You’re going to do it when you understand the future of social media in hotels, and when you understand that PR & Marketing need synch with all operations, and now it’s time to consider how PR & Marketing will fit into the world of Human Resources.