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What’s in Store for Hotels in 2013

Recently, the team at Web in Travel asked Sabre Hospitality President and General Manager, Felix Laboy, for his 2013 reflections and predictions. Felix has also appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our Free New Media Course for Hospitality Professionals.

What are the three things you think will happen in the hotel space in 2013?

• RevPar will continue to grow, driven primarily by continued demand and decelerating supply. Price pressure created by the unprecedented shopping capability of consumers will direct hotel investment towards converged and interfaced technology solutions that support micro adjustments to ARI and cascade to all electronic channels seamlessly. Channel connectivity will continue to be critical.

• Mobile device activity for hotels will approach 50% of all electronic shopping activity (think all mobile devices or non-desktop  and not just mobile phones).

• Hoteliers will require integrated distribution and marketing technology in order to support the increasing convergence of these disciplines and rise of ancillary selling strategies.

What are the three things hotels should invest in for the new year?

Invest in solutions that will:

  1. Increase profitability;
  2. Maximize efficiency;
  3. Enable the personalization of your guest’s complete experience.

In our space that certainly means investing in better booking solutions, including a device responsive solution as a brand standard. The ability to engage and serve consumers consistently across all devices globally will be paramount.

Also, consider investing in attribution modeling to supplement current tracking and measurement tools.  The key to managing a constantly evolving digital media space is the ability to truly understand contribution of each media channel or touch point vs. just costs or outcomes.

What are your predictions for hotel distribution and marketing next year?

The continued shift towards convergence of Revenue Management, Demand Creation (marketing) and Distribution will be the biggest trend to watch in 2013.

Non-room inventory will become more important to hotel brands.

Innovation around points of sale will encourage Hoteliers to adapt distribution and marketing strategies

Which hotel groups are the ones to watch next year, and why?

Hotel groups to watch are those that continue to focus on customer service and use technology (pre-stay/during the booking process, during the stay and post-stay) to help them provide a better all around experience for the guest.  The web and social media facilitate greater transparency and consumer empowerment. Personalization and recognition delivered in the travel experience has become an (consumer) expectation.

Three important events that happened this year that you think will have significant impact on travel in the future.

• Apple’s increased level of interest in the travel market.
• Continued Political Unrest in the Middle East.
• Fast-growing middle and upper class in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) who are embracing (far) travel.

Most over-used word/s of 2012?

Mobile, Social Media, SoLoMo: There has been too much focus on the new buzz topics – these tend to get over-discussed and explored, often times leading us to neglect the basics of distribution and digital marketing.

Google: We’ve all heard continual concerns from the hotel industry on Google’s intent to become a travel merchant. Google will continue to provide consumers with the best search results and try to monetize advertising, remaining a referral partner to the hotel industry and not a merchant of record

Most under-estimated word/s of 2012?

SEO: A well-optimized hotel should be seeing 50%+ in organic search traffic – too little time is being spent discussing and leveraging this channel. There is a lot of potential in a strong SEO strategy and it deserves the continued buzz in the marketing world.

Ancillary: The airlines have established their approach to ancillary revenue with consumers and smart hoteliers will embrace this opportunity in a manner that will support their brand position and profitability. All inventory sets (hotel restaurant seats, spa beds and retail) will find their way into the broader distribution and marketing landscape.

What word/s will disappear from the hotel vocabulary?

“OTAs are the enemy” – OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) have a critical place in any hotel distribution and marketing strategy – what is critical is to manage them with a holistic view of all true costs by channel and also impact they have on other channels and vice versa.

As the year winds to an end, what will you remember most about 2012?

2012 was the year that hotels started to question whether technology should be a core competency internally or a service that can be successfully outsourced.

What are you most looking forward to in 2013?

Taking a holiday with my family.

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3 Ways to Manage Consumer Generated Media

The continually rising number of people participating in creating media through social networks is increasing every day, which means the amount of consumer generated media about your company is also increasing on social sites like Facebook and Twitter, on review sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, and also on photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube. This means marketers no longer control or have as much control over the brand message. How do you align this consumer generated media with your brand and make it consistent with the target market that your property is going after?

The challenge is letting go of that need to control the brand message and figuring out how best to manage the consumer generated media instead. The key to managing instead of of controlling lies in a few strategies of engagement and understanding.

1. Engage in a Dialogue with your Customers

Use social media to respond to consumer comments. It may take some time, but a customer who receives a reply, a retweet, or a thank you feels connected to your company. Knowing that someone is listening and taking their opinions and comments seriously creates a relationship. Responding to negative feedback and letting a customer know that “that isn’t how we run things” and “next time, your experience will be more ____” gives you the opportunity to say what your brand promise is. Replying and retweeting comments and photos that are aligned with your brand promise is another way to promote what  your brand promise is to more eyes online.

2. Promote Conversations that Align with your Brand

You can encourage customers to talk about some of their brand experiences along key brand themes. If your resort is family friendly, marketers can invite customers to share their stories, photos, videos, testimonials, etc. of their family having fun on your property either on their own social networks or directly onto your company website.

3. Analyze What People are Saying

A tool that I found to be very insightful and illustrative in gathering social media data is to create a word cloud with a tool like Wordle. Just copy and paste anything from one review to dozens and it will use a kind of algorithm to count the words that are used in consumer text. It then emphasizes certain words that really stand out, or that are used the most, and it creates a visual picture of what people saying.

A more involved approach is what’s called content analysis. And this would require a team of analysts or managers reading through customer comments and manually pulling out key themes. What do people seem to be saying the most?

Given the deluge of customer data that’s appearing in social media today, it seems clear to most that a more efficient and effective way to measure brand consistency across multiple channels is a necessity. Few have time to crawl through five or even fifteen social networks looking for and analyzing comments and photos.

Fortunately, a fast emerging vertical in the hospitality analytics space is ORM, or online reputation management. There are a number of new firms (such as Revinate, newBrandAnalytics, and ReviewPro) that have appeared in the past few years that have looked at this problem of this massive amount of qualitative consumer comment data, and asked “How can we make sense of this to enable hospitality managers to understand what people are saying as well as to make better decisions?”

What they do is they capture consumer conversations across a range of social media channels. They then aggregate and even score this comment data to give marketers both a sense of what people are saying, and whether this they call sentiment is trending in a desired direction or not. Such intelligence generated by these and other online reputation management providers is an enormous leap in our ability to assess brand consistency. Not only in terms of the marketer generated brand messaging, but perhaps more importantly in terms of consumer generated messaging, and whether or not the two are aligned as intended.

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Following the Consumer Path in Decision Making

Why would a hospitality company want to invest so much into creating a strong presence through video, Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, and other social media? Frankly, it’s part of the dreaming and planning process that consumers might consider with regard to a property. Moreover, it controls for consistency with your brand promise, your target market for the property, and even your hotel’s objectives.

The fact of the matter is, today’s consumers take alternate paths over time to making a booking and even sharing their experience while at your property.

Think for a moment about the pre-stay. You could have a leisure customer checking the national or state tourist organization site to find out what’s available and what the destination has to offer. They could be contacting the convention and visitors bureau to find out what information there might be about that particular location. And they could be using a website like Passkey to find out information about what leisure activities are associated with some event.

Pre-stay can also involve interactions with an online travel agency, your brand site, or even sites like Groupon where individuals may be putting together a package to offer before they even think about staying at your property.

Continuing along that time continuum, you can think also about the stay. With over a billion bloggers and Facebook users, 500,000 Twitter accounts, and 100,000 Instagram users out there, you can bet that a good percentage of your consumers are saying something while staying at your property. Did they snap a pretty picture of the lobby, the lounge, the view from their room? Did they have an especially helpful interaction with a concierge while staying at the property? Did they find interesting things to do or places to eat using your property’s interactive mobile application?

And finally, there’s the post-stay. That opportunity for the customer to savor the experience, download or upload pictures from the property, or post a TripAdvisor review.

And it’s not just the leisure consumer. There are business consumers, there are individuals who are traveling by themselves, with groups, or as part of a large event as well. There are even transition consumers such as your business travelers who also stay at your property for leisure purposes.

There are many paths, many consumers, many objectives.

The entire decision making process is evolving with media and often can involve multiple forms of imagery, emotion, and cognition before arriving at a complicated decision. The time has come to forget about the traditional one dimensional view of the consumer.

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Getting into the Movie Making Business

It’s doubtful that hospitality firms, and for that matter, any company, will completely veer away from traditional advertising media such as print, television, outdoor billboards, PR, etc., but more and more each day, resources are being redistributed to make way for new media channels such as social media, internet search, and mobile. Some firms are even transitioning their entire marketing budgets over to new media!

New media offers an exciting and innovative way to communicate the brand promise. Today, where anything and everything can be online in a matter of minutes, potential customers have come to expect the ability to get a sense of what kind of experience you will offer to them, even before they buy. They want to know more about your brand and the promise it offers if they do choose you. And hotels have answered. Hotel websites have evolved from kind of of the web 1.0 version of online brochures to much more interactive sites where visitors can take virtual tours to explore property, check availability, engage in virtual experiences such as taking the guest’s view as they go down a water slide, and even watch short movies.

These short movies have recently exploded onto the scene as a particularly exciting medium which allows a consumer to be engaged with you brand promise for longer than the thirty or sixty second TV spots that used to be the industry norm. The ability to add live streaming video to websites or host entire YouTube or Vimeo channels of short videos has certainly ushered in a new era of very creative hospitality marketing, and a growing number of companies such as the Drake Hotel (featured video), the Ritz-Carlton (below), and Royal Caribbean are taking this opportunity to produce very slick, professional videos. And these videos run the gamut from one- to two-minute lifestyle videos that use highly stylized images of model target customers, to even longer video vignettes of ten minutes or more that tell a story of the brand through a fictional customer’s eyes.

Another branch of video marketing that many companies are now starting to explore is consumer-generated video. While these videos don’t require much time or effort on your part and they can reap huge benefits in the form of positive and organic testimonials shared by customers to customers, there is the risk of brand drift.

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Entergy Corporation Renews Partnership with eCornell

Integrated energy company offers online learning as a professional development option

Entergy Corporation, an integrated energy company, has renewed its partnership with eCornell to help employees meet their professional development goals.

By offering the entire eCornell portfolio of courses and certificate programs, Entergy can give managers throughout the United States access to Ivy League learning and development.  Subject areas include leadership and management development, human resources and financial acumen.

eCornell’s unique approach to elearning combines the most effective elements of a world-class, Ivy League classroom with the flexibility of an online learning environment. eCornell courses—self-paced and 100 percent online—are “instructor-facilitated” to help guide a cohort of 20 to 30 participants through challenging, real-world exercises with practical on-the-job application. Classes enable learners to be immersed in learning that also fosters collaboration, interaction, and networking.

“We are pleased have continued our relationship with Entergy,” said Tom Abogabal, vice president, global sales for eCornell. “We are glad to be a part of Entergy’s mission to empower their talent across the organization and be a part of their professional development portfolio.”

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About eCornell

eCornell, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cornell University, provides many of the world’s leading organizations with online professional and executive development in the areas of leadership and management, human resources, financial management, healthcare, marketing, and hospitality management. eCornell’s proven course development model and asynchronous instructor-led course delivery provide for engaging, rigorous, and interactive learning. The company has delivered online courses to more than 50,000 students in over 180 countries. For more information visit ecornell.cornell.edu/enterprise (enterprise buyers) or ecornell.cornell.edu (small groups and individual students).


About Entergy Corporation

Entergy Corporation, which celebrates its 100th birthday in 2013, is an integrated energy company engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution operations. Entergy owns and operates power plants with approximately 30,000 megawatts of electric-generating capacity, including more than 10,000 megawatts of nuclear power, making it one of the nation’s leading nuclear generators. Entergy delivers electricity to 2.8 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Entergy has annual revenues of more than $10 billion and approximately 15,000 employees.

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The Evolving Online Course: Can a Course Get Smarter As It Ages?

Much has been written about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their potential to change how people access course content, and discussions abound on how faculty might change their style of teaching and how learning might become more personalized. These questions are an extension of the ongoing dialogue related to the potential opportunities afforded by online education.

One of the untapped areas of potential for schools, faculty and students is how to best take advantage of the digital assets created during the development and delivery of online courses. If you begin to think “outside the box” of the traditional course, or even the traditional online course, you quickly identify a variety of potential issues with how we use, re-use and re-combine these digital assets, which could lie at the heart of a future transformation of the course.

What is a course and who owns it?

Faculty members have traditionally been good curators of content, aligning readings and guest speakers with their own lecture topics to create a unified course. The faculty member regularly updates lecture content, adapts new reading lists and chooses new textbooks as new material becomes available.

In the digital environment, the faculty member now has a much broader menu of options for course content, increasingly supported by the learning management system being used by his or her institution, which makes it easier to integrate, link and embed third-party content into the course. Some of these options take the more traditional form (such as e-textbooks and journal articles) while others include online assets such as blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. Over the past several years, faculty members have had access to content from various open educational resource repositories, as well as YouTube or iTunesU videos. Added to this list now are MOOCs, which could serve as rich course material sources or pre-requisites, depending on the platform being used. Lastly, the new format for online courses has led to an explosion of student-generated content. Student discussion posts, blogs, tweets, etc. from prior courses could also become a rich set of new content.

For administrators, the questions will arise:

  • “Where does the definition of what counts as course material stop and start?”
  • “What ownership does the faculty member have over the course, its content and its design?”
  • “How does this new world of aggregation change how we think about stipends and other compensation for course development?”

New opportunities for aggregation and social sharing

Indeed, some of these issues related to IP ownership, rights and access have been part of the discussion for many years. And, certainly, the creation of a fully digital course is nothing new in some circles. But where it gets really interesting is when you factor in the ability to aggregate the student-generated and socially-shared content of an online course.

One of the unique characteristics of an online course, compared with a classroom course, is the digital footprint created by the students and the faculty member. At eCornell, where we typically offer short courses (two to four weeks long), each session is still populated with hundreds of unique discussion posts and dozens of student-created projects, papers and other assignments by the end of the course. Recent attention and focus has been turned to the field of learning analytics and tools like Knewton that can help faculty identify students in need, and offer more targeted and personalized content based on the aggregation of data on the student’s progress in the course. While interesting in its own right, I think there is another, more interesting use of student data.

When we move beyond the binary distinctions of faculty member and student, and instead look at everyone as having the role of a contributor to the learning experience, you can ask new questions. What if you could systematically capture, tag, anonymize, analyze and aggregate the various types of student contributions to an online course, such as discussion posts, blog posts, tweets, projects and assignments? The result could be a new set of course assets, based entirely on the insights, wisdom and questions of students. In professional programs, you could create “Best Practices” or new types of Case Studies that draw on the real-world experiences of those in the class. As enrollments in a particular course grow (through a MOOC, for example), or as you aggregate contributions from multiple sessions of a course, you have the opportunity for a true “wisdom of crowds” type of learning experience.

In essence, what if a course could actually get “smarter” in each successive running, not solely based on the updates of the faculty member, but based on the knowledge, insights and experience of prior students? Imagine a course with new assets that could reflect recent trends drawn from the diversity of its students. This could could enable the construction of new knowledge in a way that is possible but may not be happening in a systemic way.

Of course, there are questions

Do the students have to explicitly consent to the use of their contributed materials in this way? What types of tools do we need to aggregate and analyze this unstructured “big data”? How should faculty members adapt their own teaching and content to best leverage this student-generated content? Are they comfortable with this latest evolutionary step, which turns them from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side”? Do institutions see this type of learning as a competitive advantage or disruptive threat?

With so much hype about the disruptive potential of video-captured lectures (arguably a significantly old technology) and the transformative effects of blending digital content with human-powered learning (a not-so-recent development), I suggest we turn our attention to figuring out how to do things in the online environment that take advantage of its unique ability to capture learning that truly reflects the collective knowledge of the learning community.

Guest Post on The Evolllution

 

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Starwood Hotels & Resorts and eCornell Sign a Two-Year Partnership

Global hotel group continues long standing relationship to offer online learning with eCornell

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. has entered into a two-year agreement to continue its partnership with eCornell to deliver online courses in hospitality management, leadership, strategic management, supervisory skills and human resource management to its worldwide employees.

eCornell offers Starwood access to courses developed by Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration that align closely with their talent-management approach.  Offering these and other courses helps Starwood achieve its learning goals on a global scale at both the property and corporate levels.

eCornell’s unique approach to elearning combines the most effective elements of a world-class, Ivy League classroom with the flexibility of an online learning environment. eCornell courses—self-paced and 100 percent online—are “instructor-facilitated” to help guide a cohort of 20 to 30 participants through challenging, real-world exercises with practical on-the-job application. Classes enable learners to be immersed in learning that also fosters collaboration, interaction, and networking.

“Starwood continues to be a great partner of eCornell, and we’re approaching almost 10 years of success together,” said Tom Abogabal, vice president of global sales at eCornell.  “We are thrilled to continue our partnership to be able to help Starwood reach thousands of employees across its worldwide portfolio of owned, managed, and franchised properties, and to help develop all levels of employees including individual contributors, supervisors, managers, GMs, and senior leaders.

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About eCornell

eCornell, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cornell University, provides many of the world’s leading organizations with online professional and executive development in the areas of leadership and management, human resources, financial management, healthcare, marketing, and hospitality management. eCornell’s proven course development model and asynchronous instructor-led course delivery provide for engaging, rigorous, and interactive learning. The company has delivered online courses to more than 50,000 students in over 200 countries. For more information visit ecornell.cornell.edu/enterprise (enterprise buyers) or ecornell.cornell.edu (small groups and individual students).

 

About Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world, with 1,128 properties in nearly 100 countries and 171,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels, resorts, and residences with the following internationally renowned brands: St. Regis®, The Luxury Collection®, W®, Westin®, Le Méridien®, Sheraton®, Four Points® by Sheraton, Aloft®, and ElementSM. The company boasts one of the industry’s leading loyalty programs, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), allowing members to earn and redeem points for room stays, room upgrades, and flights, with no blackout dates. Starwood also owns Starwood Vacation Ownership, Inc., a premier provider of world-class vacation experiences through villa-style resorts and privileged access to Starwood brands. For more information, please visit www.starwoodhotels.com.

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Viable Business Models in Sight for MOOCs

Coursera and eCornell both recently announced new models for their respective Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that could potentially generate revenue from the free educational programming.

Cornell University’s eCornell is planning to offer their own MOOC in hopes of attracting a high volume of new students. The university has designed this MOOC to serve as an introduction to a follow-up course, for which tuition must be paid. Furthermore, this follow-up course leads into a certificate in Hospitality Marketing and New Media Strategies from Cornell University.

MOOC provider Coursera is also taking steps to generate revenue from their courses, and simultaneously allay any concerns related to the integrity of the certificates they award students who successfully complete their courses. The company announced on Wednesday a new pilot program for some of their MOOCs where, for a fee, students who complete the course will receive a verified certificate, which will dispel any concerns related to whether or not the student in question actually completed the course. Coursera plans to guarantee the identity of certificate applicants through “keystroke biometrics,” which is the process of tracking a student’s typing pattern to validate their identity.

The exact price that will be charged for the verified certificates has not been confirmed, however according to Coursera, students would likely pay between $30 and $100.

Featured Article on The Evolllution

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InterContinental Hotels Group Starts Year Two of Its Partnership with eCornell

Global hotel brand offers hospitality-specific online learning

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), one of the worlds largest hotel companies, has started year two of its partnership with eCornell.

Offering courses in hospitality management developed by Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, eCornell has helped IHG successfully cultivate its global audience to become leaders in their industry. With more than 4,000 properties throughout the world, it is important that IHG offer a learning solution that is consistent and accessible for all its employees.

One of the many attractive aspects of eCornell is that it offers employees hospitality courses and also a wide range of business and leadership courses on topics ranging from management to finance to change management. The flexible schedule and ease of access is important for the IHG audience, because their schedules fluctuate and they can be in remote locations.  eCornell’s Ivy League-caliber courses continue to be recognized as valuable to IHG’s learning and development strategy, and have been since 2004.

eCornell’s unique approach to elearning combines the most effective elements of a world-class, Ivy League classroom with the flexibility of an online learning environment. eCornell courses—self-paced and 100 percent online—are “instructor-facilitated” to help guide a cohort of 20 to 30 participants through challenging, real-world exercises with practical on-the-job application. Classes enable learners to be immersed in learning that also fosters collaboration, interaction, and networking.

“IHG has been a great partner of eCornell,” said Tom Abogabal, vice president of global sales for eCornell.  “Their global audience takes advantage of the collaborative nature of our courses.  We are happy to help make the world flat for IHG’s talent across seven continents.  eCornell allows them to connect with each other and learn with and from peers across all industries, all while developing their skills they can apply wherever they are in IHG’s operations.”

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About eCornell

eCornell, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cornell University, provides many of the world’s leading organizations with online professional and executive development in the areas of leadership and management, human resources, financial management, healthcare, marketing, and hospitality management. eCornell’s proven course development model and asynchronous instructor-led course delivery provide for engaging, rigorous, and interactive learning. The company has delivered online courses to more than 50,000 students in over 200 countries. For more information visit ecornell.cornell.edu/enterprise (enterprise buyers) or www.ecornell.com (small groups and individual students).

 

About InterContinental Hotels Group

IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) [LON:IHG, NYSE:IHG (ADRs)] is a global organization with nine hotel brands, including InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts, Hotel Indigo®, Crowne Plaza® Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn® Hotels and Resorts, Holiday Inn Express®, Staybridge Suites®, Candlewood Suites®, EVEN™ Hotels, and HUALUXE™ Hotels & Resorts. IHG also manages Priority Club® Rewards, the world’s first and largest hotel loyalty program with over 69 million members worldwide.

IHG franchises, leases, manages, or owns over 4,500 hotels and more than 672,000 guest rooms in nearly 100 countries and territories. With more than 1,000 hotels in its development pipeline, IHG expects to recruit around 90,000 people into additional roles across its estate over the next few years.

InterContinental Hotels Group, PLC, is the group’s holding company and is incorporated in Great Britain and registered in England and Wales.

Visit www.ihg.com for hotel information and reservations and www.priorityclub.com for more on Priority Club Rewards. For our latest news, visit www.ihg.com/media, www.twitter.com/ihg, www.facebook.com/ihg or www.youtube.com/ihgplc.

 

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The Billboard Effect

In this interview with VTV, I discuss the results of a research study called “The Billboard Effect”, conducted in partnership with JHM Hotels and Expedia. In the study, four properties were cycled on and off Expedia over a period of three months.

Our findings:

– Hotel placement on Expedia results in a 20% increase in bookings on other channels
– Reservations made on other channels (call center, brand.com, other sites) offset reservations made on OTAs
– Rates attained while being listed on Expedia were about 2-3% higher

The bottom line: Hoteliers need to think of OTAs as marketing vehicles versus reservation engines.