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Definitely Doug 9/29/23: Experience Matters! (Part Two)
Posted: 09/29/2023

In my last blog, I introduced the topic of software that enables hotel guests to book local experiences. I cited potential key benefits, including commission revenue, guest satisfaction, reduced staff workload, and new direct bookings.

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Three Mistakes Hotels Are Making with Wi-Fi
Posted: 09/18/2023

Wi-Fi is now like the foundation for your hotel: if it’s not solid, it can jeopardize everything.
Your HSIA network has to deliver the performance and experience your guests demand; Wi-Fi has evolved from being an amenity to a necessity and key driver of guest satisfaction.
In the converged world, all your systems for business operations depend on a solid and secure Wi-Fi network. Without it, nothing else works properly—your staff and systems will struggle, and you will waste precious time, money, and resources trying to recover.
Here are three things you may be doing that put you and your Wi-Fi network at risk, and what you should do instead.

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Definitely Doug 9/15/23: Experience Matters!
Posted: 09/15/2023

Hotels are usually the first thing a traveler books within a destination. And hotels usually know that destination better than anyone else (or any website) a guest might consult. But are hotels connecting the dots?

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Definitely Doug 8/25/23: Check It Off the List!
Posted: 08/25/2023

This week I will cover software that goes under various descriptions, including quality assurance, audit, and checklist management. It includes anything that involves a standard list of things that someone needs to perform or verify. In hospitality, this is still an emerging field, but is growing very rapidly.

Between 2020-2022, traveler adoptions fluctuated drastically due to the lockdowns, the impact of the variants, and the vaccination schedule. As the pandemic is behind us and people start to travel in 2023, one question is on every practitioner’s mind: What are the traveler’s current expectations and preferences in the post-pandemic world?

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The Changing Face of the Business of Hotels And the Role of Technology: Part One

11/12/2013

by Dan Phillips

Hotels are a business, and as such need to make money to stay in business. Hospitality is the art of the hotel business. Once the business was all about getting heads in beds, and driving customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing the best accommodations for the price, today the business is different. Today, hospitality is all about the customer experience; it is not sufficient to merely offer the same quality of stay at a similar price.

A significant difference in the business of hotels today is that as in the rest of the world outside of this industry, marketing and technology have converged. Every company, and many individuals, has a digital presence today. To do so, marketing people must use technology to establish branding and manage their multiple forms of communication, all of which are supported by yet more technology. For hotel companies, this convergence is changing the face of business, but more specifically it is changing the roles of staff responsible for technology. From CTOs down to IT managers the skill sets must be widely broadened in order for hotels to compete for shrinking market share.

This white paper will highlight some of the new trends and thoughts from experts in various fields, all of which can be applied to the hotel industry. Though these concepts may appear disjointed at first, when combined into an overarching strategy, one of convergence and one directed at the demographics of today’s travelers, one can see the synergy. The goal is to direct management styles to be more service oriented, increasing guest satisfaction and therefore improving the bottom line.

The old sales model looked something like this:

Product Services & Amenities + Customer Service = Long term loyalty, advocacy and referrals

Notice the plus sign. In the past, a hotel could be a leader in any given area and fail in some other area and still be successful.

The new sales model equation might be better represented as this:

(Customer needs, wants and expectations) X (hotel staff) X (a culture of service excellence) X(business environment) X (product and services/amenities offerings) = exceptional experiential value

In this case the formula is multiplication, not addition. If any of those multipliers is a zero, then the final equation results in a zero. (Brett Patten, Hotel Sales Formula that Goes Against All Conventional Wisdom, http://ehotelier.com/hospitality-news/item.php?id=P26072&goback=%2Egde_110108_member_271836286#%21

In the second equation above the ultimate goal is the generation of exceptional experiential values for the hotel’s guests. Hoteliers can no longer be considered successful by simply providing a clean room with a big TV. Today’s traveler, and more importantly tomorrow’s traveler, is after an experience and not only just a good night’s sleep. This experiential factor is a driving motivator in the convergence of marketing and technology; specifically how it is tailored and deployed to facilitate experiences.

One of the key components of creating an experience begins with communication. Communication is now digital. It isn’t just voice anymore; it isn’t just email. Communication has exploded into Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, text, websites, mobile, apps, social media, and more. Hotels have been forced into the digital media age. Once the first online booking sites started, hoteliers have been in the digital footprint, many of which have been playing catch up ever since. Hotel companies need to become more mature with their digital strategies.

Digital maturity is the combination of digital intensity plus transformation management intensity. Digital maturity is the combination of a company’s investment in technology enabled initiatives plus the vision to shape a new future by developing new IT/marketing/business operations relationships to implement technology based change under governance.

From a company perspective, digital maturity can be broken into four levels of acumen:

Beginners – do very little with advanced digital capabilities
Fashionistas – experiment with sexy applications but lack the vision to gain synergies
Conservatives – favor prudence over innovation
Digirati – truly understand how to drive value with digital transformation

Hotel companies fall into the four levels as listed below. Due to online booking, every hotel company is past the beginner stage. What may be significant here is that 50 percent of our industry is simply spending money to look good while developing no real positive results.

0% Beginners
50% Fasionistas
19% Conservatives
31% Digirati

Why is it so important to become a Digirati? When compared to competitors, companies that can achieve the digirati level of digital maturity are driving 10 percent more revenue, are 26 percent more profitable, and have a 12 percent higher market value.

What is needed to bring the old way of hotel business up to the demands of hospitality today is a radical change in the role of the CTO and IT staff inside of hotel companies.

Please check back on Thursday for part two of this column and for more insight into the Changing Face of Business and how you can transform your business to the digirati level.

About The Author

Dan Phillips
Owner
Dare to Imagine

Dan Phillips is the owner of the consulting firm, Dare to Imagine (www.dare2i.com). He started behind the front desk of a Holiday Inn in 1987 and has been consulting to hotel companies since 1991. Dare to Imagine enlists hotel experts with decades of C-level experience at many of the major hotel companies in the world. He can be reached at dphillips@dare2i.com or by phone at 678-852-5913.