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100% Occupancy? Let’s See If You Can Achieve It

Price and duration, or length of stay, are the two fundamental levers for revenue management. Successfully striking a balance between the two by managing length of stay is how you get your hotel closer to full occupancy.

See if you can achieve 100% occupancy in our Fill Your Hotel simulation by clicking the game below.

There are several different types of length-of-stay controls. One thing you might want to use during a busy period is called a “minimum length of stay.” Let’s say you have four busy nights and that you’re going to have some slow periods. You’re trying to decide which reservations to accept at the beginning of those four busy nights. If you have people who are willing to stay four nights, you’re going to be a lot more open to having them at your hotel than someone who’s only willing to stay one or even two nights.

Of course, leveraging length-of-stay controls is a delicate proposition: The last thing you want to do is turn away demand to the point where you end up with empty rooms.

To better understand how length-of-stay controls actually work, we suggest you try your hand with the Fill Your Hotel simulation, used in eCornell’s course, “Forecasting and Availability Controls in Hotel Revenue Management,” taught by Dr. Sheryl Kimes. This activity simulates a length-of-stay tool as it relates to variable demand and overall occupancy rate.

 

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The Crystal Clear Benefit of an Opaque Selling Strategy

Opaque online travel agents, which we call opaque OTAs, have recently become an integral part of many hotel properties’ distribution strategy. To clear excess inventory, hotels sell rooms at reduced rates via OTAs, hoping to reach price sensitive customers, while simultaneously selling rooms at “normal” rates to regular brand loyal customers via their traditional channels, including their own websites.

In this report we outline a simple model for setting multiple prices and booking limits at Priceline. Learn how an opaque selling strategy can increase your bottom line through the same advanced revenue management strategies as taught in Dr. Anderson’s eCornell series called Advanced Hospitality Revenue Management: Pricing and Demand Strategies.

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How Staff Efforts at the Property Level Can Increase Your Website Performance

All hoteliers would like to see an increase in the amount of revenue contributed from their website.  After all, direct bookings are the most profitable. Here are some quick, easy and fun ways to get your hotel staff to positively influence your website performance.

Re-market On Property 

Remarketing is a favored strategy in Search Engine Optimization (SEM). If a customer visits your website without making a booking, effective remarketing will continue to serve up ads about your hotel as the customer continues to browse the internet.

While guest are at your hotel, you should continue these re-marketing efforts at the hotel level. There are guest touch points all over the property.  Remember not all guests at your hotel booked their stays through your website. They may have found your hotel in the yellow pages or was recommended by a friend. They may have booked their rooms by calling the property or used a travel agent. So, it’s important to share your website’s URL and inform your guests that they can find the best deal there. This effort does two things; (1) increases awareness to your website, and (2) incentivizes guests to think of your hotel again when they return to your city. Here are several ideas how you can implement this at your hotel:

  • Create posters, flyers, door hangers, tent cards , etc. and display these in guest rooms, elevators, breakfast rooms, and lobby.
  • If you’re taking advantage of digital marketing boards, feature a screen capture of your website
  • Have your website URL printed on guest receipts

You want to continually remarket your website to your guests in an effort to influence their future purchasing behavior by constantly reminding them to visit your website for future stays. For guests who did book on your website, the on-property marketing will reinforcing that behavior.

Local Relationships

Local businesses and attractions are a great place to get referral traffic to your website.  Building partnerships or relationships will help increase referral traffic to your site.  Ask local attractions and businesses to list your hotel on their website with a  link back to your hotel’s website. You can offer these businesses an incentive to list your hotel on their site by giving and exclusive discounted rate. For area attractions such as theme parks or golf resorts, an incentive could be helping them sell tickets through your hotel concierge or front desk.  Referral traffic can convert into a direct website booking just as easily as search traffic.

Socialize Your Staff

Social signals are playing an increasing role in SEO.  Effective search engine strategies require the use of Social Media.  Are you leveraging your hotel staff in social efforts?  Here are several ways you can encourage your hotel staff to promote your hotel on social media channels and increase your fan base:

  • Feature your staff members on your Facebook page
  • Ask your staff for provide “locals’ tips” they can share with current and potential guests to help them learn about the best places to eat, park, things to do in and around your city.
  • Share these tips on social channels and highlight the staff that provided the tip.

These tips may seem basic and possibly even old-school, but getting back to basics can improve performance. Educate your staff on how their efforts on property play into your online success.

By: Heidi Bitar, Director of Client Services, Milestone Internet Marketing. Anil Aggarwal, CEO, has appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our New Media Course for Hospitality Professionals.

*This is reposted from the Milestone Internet Blog.

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Cornell University Embraces Flexible Work Plans

In the midst of companies like Yahoo and Best Buy re-evaluating their remote work plans and calling some workers back into the office, Cornell University is only planning on expanding their remote and flexible work plans, including them in a multitude of programs and plans across campus.

In the past 25 years, Cornell University has really shifted from looking at flexible work as a means to accommodate working families to really starting to treat it as part of our organizational business strategy. And I think that this is very evident in our 2010-2015 University Strategic Plan. It’s very specific in stating that we will sustain and expand flexible work arrangements whenever feasible. So I think that the attention is certainly placed on that as a means to driving our university forward.

Another plan that was recently created in 2012 is called Toward New Destinations. And the emphasis of that plan is really addressing diversity and inclusion in our workplace and in our student bodies. You may think that flexible work arrangements won’t have a home in addressing diversity and inclusion, but really the way that we look at diversity issues is that we want to create, foster, support a very diverse workplace environment for all kinds of employees and personal life experiences. And flexible work is just one tool in a large basket of work life programs that can do as such.

A third Cornell University plan, the Cornell Climate Action Plan, really takes a look at reducing carbon footprint, the amount of traffic that we have coming to campus, and the demands that we have on our parking infrastructure. Obviously, remote work among other types of flexible work arrangements like compressed  work is a means to being able to support those goals and those priorities.

And, lastly, I would add that even the federal government is taking a look at flexible work arrangements as a means to creating a very diverse workforce and using it as a tool to address issues like emergency planning and really just trying to have the most diverse and engaged workforce as possible.

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Yahoo’s Remote Work is the Solution, Not the Problem

Yahoo, Bank of America, and Best Buy’s decisions to curtail remote work for their employees has certainly stirred up quite a bit of attention as they come at a time when other major companies are ramping up their remote work policies. Even many government agencies worldwide are urging employees and employers alike to consider remote work as an opportunity for better work/life balances and increased innovation and productivity.

Nearly 25% of Americans are participating in some kind of remote work situation, even if it is limited, and this number is on the rise. Flexibility is key for most people and some even say they would take a pay cut to have more of this flexibility in their work arrangement. With advances in technology and increased understanding of how to manage remote work employees, companies can keep their eyes on the productivity prize.

Remote work isn’t the problem for Yahoo, Bank of America, or Best Buy. Wherever employees work, they need to be well managed and engaged with their coworkers. If productivity and engagement are the real problems behind why they are calling everyone home, they should address those problems directly and deal with the cultural change within the organization.

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Increase Your Brand Site Bookings with The Billboard Effect

When it comes to online distribution, hotels typically prefer to sell rooms through their own websites. Third-party sites, particularly those of online travel agents (OTAs), tend to be seen as competitors in terms of distribution—even though OTAs are instrumental in filling rooms that might otherwise go unsold.

When hotels are able to increase brand-site bookings by listing with an OTA, they are essentially tapping what’s called the “billboard effect.” This reservation benefit enables hotels to quickly tap wider markets through alignment with the right third-party OTAs.

For example, Intercontinental Hotel Group listed their properties on Expedia during the summer months of 2009-2011 and saw increases between 7% and 26% in reservations through their own channel. And remember: These are brand-site reservations that are increasing, not reservations made on the OTA sites.

Dr. Chris Anderson, an associate professor at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, had published a small test of the billboard effect’s on the hospitality industry in a 2009 Center for Hospitality Research study. Now Anderson is back with a new and considerably larger analysis. And it confirms the power of the billboard effect in gaining additional brand-site bookings for hotels listed with OTAs.

Click here to receive both the original and expanded research studies from Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research and learn how you can quickly increase your brand-site bookings through OTAs.

 

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Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned at SXSW

Call me an early adopter. Since graduating from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration in ’03 – I’ve implemented digital marketing strategies for 65 hotels located everywhere from Atlantic City (holy rollers!) to Jerusalem (holy cow!). From San Francisco to South Beach, the digital marketing world moves at the speed of light. In order to keep up, hospitality marketers often have to look outside the industry.

SXSW Interactive, (aka today’s marketer’s Disneyworld), is a great place to catch wind of emerging interactive trends. In anticipation of SXSW Interactive 2013, I took a look back at my big 3 takeaways from SXSW Interactive 2012 (still totally relevant to today’s hospitality marketer!). 

You Are What You Curate: Content is King

Content is viral & short lived. Managing it across your touch points is time consuming. But, give me good content all day long, because good content is a marketer’s best friend. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a two- or four-star property; your physical room ain’t going to sell itself in today’s competitive marketplace. Dismissing content that engages consumers is a lost opportunity. You’re only as good as the company you keep, so choose your content partners wisely. Associating your brand or hotel with the “right” partners is a quick & dirty way to build cachet & generate buzz.

At SLS South Beach, we recently brought on Net-A-Porter & Mr. Porter as content partners during Art Basel. Net a Porter was willing to create a co-branded SLS South Beach site, featuring Art Basel worthy looks for guests. Additionally, they’d offer free same day shipping for SLS South Beach guests.

In exchange, we agreed to promote the SLS / Net-a-Porter site across our social, web, email, & in room iPad touch points. The cross promotion was a win-win for both partners. Net a Porter gained some sales, but moreover, each brand leveraged the other’s audience to promote a cool piece of content that added to their user/guest experience & brand cachet.

Capitalize on Consumer FOMO

FOMO is the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out on something that your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better. FOMO may be a social angst that’s always existed, but it’s going into overdrive, thanks to real time digital/social updates, and to our constant companion, the smartphone. Smart marketers manifest FOMO in social media-heavy viral-prone campaigns.

To build buzz on the Grand Opening of SLS South Beach and promote Hyde Beach, the hotel’s day/nightclub, we launched the “Hyde Beach Escape Sweepstakes”. We created a PR-worthy package, chock full of indulgent glamour & promoted it across our channels with “last chance” and “limited time only” messaging in order to create urgency and, of course, jealousy. The campaign’s success was multi-faceted–we gained hundreds of new Facebook followers & ended up selecting a socially influential winner amongst hundreds of applicants.  To top it off, we even sold a few Hyde Beach Escape packages for those who couldn’t wait to win!

Practice Agile Marketing

As an interactive marketer, you want to capitalize on consumer’s FoMo. But, suffering from FoMo in your professional life, can be dangerous. For example, just because the hotel down the street hopped onto Spotify doesn’t mean it’s the right social strategy for your property. Social media may be cheap, but it’s certainly not free. Engaging social content & community management requires time & human capital – better to build a community than to build empty house (or profile). Get your Facebook timeline strategy in place,  & chances are you can apply what you learned to the next hot social media platform. Stay nimble & plan in six-month broad strokes. Plan like the industry moves, allowing your strategy to remain nimble & needs based. Work on a great piece of content & get your Facebook Timeline strategy in place before hopping onto the next emerging platform.

Key Takeaways

  • When producing content, audience is the primary focus. – Ask: What would my audience love?
  • We’re moving toward a feed-based system, and companies will have an increasingly tough time squeezing in overly promotional content. For this reason, brands have to be entertainers. – Think beyond your product, evoke emotion, think lifestyle. capitalize on consumer FOMO!
  • Great content published on a persistent basis takes an enormous amount of work, but smart brands understand it can have a powerful impact – Quality over quantity, practice agile marketing.
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Recapping the Effect of Online Reputation on Revenue

Last week, Revinate and eCornell co-hosted a webinar that outlined five ways hotels can improve their online reputation. By measuring their reputation management efforts, involving the entire operations team, and tying compensation rewards to reputation achievements, hoteliers will see improvements in their overall guest satisfaction scores and, in turn, will receive higher review ratings. In case you missed this informative session, you can listen to the recording and view the presentation deck.

As our Cornell University co-host published in a recent study, proactive online reputation has a direct impact on your hotel’s revenue; their Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) report shows that a one-point increase in a hotel’s average user rating on a 5-point scale makes potential customers 13.5% more likely to book that hotel. Moreover, hotels with great online reviews can charge more than those that do not rate as high. Finally, hotels that use social media for service and engage in the space to surprise and delight customers earn more positive guest sentiment scores, which positively effects hotel revenue .

As mentioned during the webinar, eCornell has, in partnership with Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, developed 14 professional certificates and 38 courses in hospitality management. Among them is the new Hospitality Marketing & New Media Strategies for Revenue Growth. This course in new media marketing, called Marketing the Hospitality Brand through New Media: Social, Mobile & Search, is free and open to all.

Revinate received a number of questions that came in during the session via live Twitter chat that are answered in greater depth here:

How again can property management be awarded bonuses or compensation benefits for better online reputation?

By paying close attention to Revinate‘s guest satisfaction (Gs2) reports, hotels can leverage aggregated hotel review data to set goals for hotel staff to meet across all functional areas. Overall guest sentiment scores, for example, can make a valuable incentive for hotel general managers. Department heads could be awarded bonuses based upon departmental sentiment, while front desk managers could be given goals around response time or social media management. To learn how social media will change hospitality compensation plans, have a look at our blog post on the topic.

What are some ways that hotels can involve their entire hotel team when it comes to online reputation management?

A few ideas that we covered during the webinar included having your front desk employees engage with guests on social media to maintain responsiveness or offering spot bonuses to employees who are recognized by name in online reviews. To ensure that all employees see this feedback, one of our webinar attendees shared that her hotel posts all positive reviews in employee elevators, locker rooms and cafeteria. Ideas like these will guarantee staff involvement and engagement.

Is there any data available that is focused on the limited service or economy hotel sectors? A lot of the studies discussing the relationship between online reputation management and property performance seem to focus on the luxury segment.

While the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research study showed a direct relationship between revenue per available room and online reputation scores, the report did not include the economy segment. Nevertheless, the study showed that revenue grew by chain scale from the top down: A 1% boost in reputation led to a .49% increase in RevPAR at luxury hotels, .74% at upper upscale, .83% at upscale, 1.13% at upper midscale and 1.42% at midscale. Moreover, about 20% of Revinate’s 15,000+ customer base fall into this limited service segment and firmly believe that online reputation is equally, if not more important, in the category.

re-posted via the Revinate blog.

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7 Ways You Can Use Vine to Market Your Hotel

It’s been nearly a month since Twitter launched its new video-sharing mobile application Vine, and it’s not just individuals taking advantage of these six second looping video clips, companies and hotels are joining in this new marketing opportunity too. This app, which is currently only available for the iPhone and iPod touch, allows users create videos which can be straight shots or stop-motion format (which is very popular) with no editing capabilities. Similar to Instagram, the videos can be tracked by hashtags and subject matter as well as Vine’s 12 organization categories such as food, travel, and even how-to.

In just a few weeks, one of the major groups to attach to the new app is not surprisingly travelers, many posting brag-like videos of how great their hotels are. Six seconds can capture an entire tour from the front of your building, through the lobby, into the bar, into the room, and even a view from the balcony. Of the 30 or so videos I watched, at least ⅔ of them showed the bathroom amenities.

So how can you use Vine to market your hotel?

1. Virtual Tours

Make them yourself or encourage your guests to make them and tag your hotel to show off your space. You can do this with your different guest rooms, ballrooms, dining facilities, and even fun things to do around the property.

2. Welcome Message

Record from the point of view of an arriving guest to show prospective customers what a warm welcome you give the second they arrive at the front of the building.

3. How-To

Serving a special drink at the bar or specialty dessert at dinner? Try filming a short “how-to” make it and post it for all your guests so they can take their experience home with them.

4. Daily Menu

Why just post your beautiful nightly specials in just the printed menu? Why not show them off in a short series of styled stop motion videos to give guests something to think about all day?

5. Weather Reports

First thing in the morning, hop outside and film a few views from your hotel to show what it’s going to be like outside that day.

6. Contests

Ask your potential guests to submit their own Vine videos under a certain theme like “what is love” or “fun in the sun” and award the best video with a weekend getaway.

7. You: Behind the Scenes

Take the opportunity to show off your employees doing what they do best. Show off a little personality and you will humanize your brand and give customers a reason to connect emotionally with you.

While it is just starting to find it’s legs in a crowded media market and it’s unknown whether it will stick around, Vine is quite an entertaining opportunity to engage with your customers. Have you already jumped on the bandwagon? How are you using Vine? Or, if you’re new to the game, how would you use it to market your hotel?

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DealAngel Offers Hotel Pricing Intelligence to Other Sites

DealAngel Offers Data for B2B

DealAngel may be best known for allowing consumers to search for hotels and compare the prices to hotels with similar market value to ensure they are really getting the best deal before buying. They are now causing quite a buzz over their recently launched new API that adds an interesting B2B element that Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) and “daily deal” websites will love. While still in beta and private, social trip planner Gogobot has already integrated DealAngel’s new API, but it should go fully public by April.

What Does it Do?

While many hotels often offer “30% off today, what a deal!,” no one really knows the true value if compared to similar hotels or what you would normally pay on any given day. It may not even be a deal at all when compared to its true market value. With this new option, sites can build DealAngel’s technology into their own, letting consumers know if it is actually a deal they are seeing, or just your regular ‘ol “always discounted” rate.

  • OTAs can actually rank their hotel offers by how good the deal really is
  • “Daily Deal” sites will be able to check that “30% off, what a deal” out to verify if it actually is a good deal before adding it to the day’s list
  • Hotel wholesalers or bulk rate negotiators could compare their offer from a particular hotel with historical data

It’s certainly an interesting move for DealAngel, but potentially a very lucrative one. In the age of “deal fatigue,” consumers are going to want to know just how good their deal is compared to all the others and this new API could offer that solution.

Source: TechCrunch originally published “DealAngel Launching API to Let Other Sites Build Hotel Pricing Intelligence into their Wares” – Please see their article for more detailed information on this topic.