Hotelier Perspectives

In the past ten years of experience working with hotels, I’ve learned that marketing strategies are only as good as the data and information they build on. That’s why it’s mission-critical to have proper analytics and business intelligence handy when making big marketing decisions.

The tech industry is experiencing rapid change due to technological advancements, changes in consumer behavior, and the impact of the pandemic. This creates challenges and opportunities for how the industry adapts to the changing landscape.

The 5th annual international Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) conference took place both online and onsite at EHL Hospitality Business School on February 7, 2023. The theme for this event was the future of education through research, community, innovation, teaching, and learning. The purpose of SoTL events is to understand, improve, and share teaching and learning practices across disciplines and schools to prepare a new generation of lifelong learners.

In a recent interview with Katie Mares, author of CustomHer Experience: The Importance of Tailoring Your Brand Experience to the Female Customer, we talked about creating a five-star experience. Mares had some excellent ideas, and here they are, followed by my commentary. By the way, even though Mares’ expertise is in selling to female customers, these ideas work for everyone.

In 2011, Marc Andreesen wrote that “software is eating the world.”1 That same year, Gartner estimated global enterprise software spending was $269 billion.2 For 2023, Gartner estimates global enterprise spending will be $790 billion.3 The 3x growth since then and the accompanying rise of unicorns4 have confirmed that software has indeed eaten the world. However, the hospitality industry, the lodging sector particularly, has been slow to adapt, with some of the most well-known and valuable hotel brands still relying on legacy tech developed in the 1990s. With hotel industry revenue projected to reach over $408 billion in 2023,5 this represents a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for the next generation of SaaS6 builders.

With more than 50 years under its belt, HITEC is something of a household name in the hospitality industry. Produced by HFTP, HITEC reigns supreme as the world’s largest hospitality technology conference, attracting thousands of industry leaders and technology innovators to its stage each year. This year, the highly anticipated showcase and networking event will be taking place in Toronto, from June 26th to 29th and will, as always, give exhibitors a coveted opportunity to showcase their products, services, and knowledge to key decision-makers in the industry while also making meaningful industry connections. To check out the conference floor plan with all participating vendors and their booth information, click here.

In 2023 it was expected that Spain would see a 30% increase year-on-year in investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI), but as we approach the end of Q1 this forecast has already been exceeded and could even be doubled by year-end. The reason? Open AI’s ChatGPT. Conversational artificial intelligence employed by ChatGPT has reached 100 million users in just the first two months of 2023, and it’s already the fastest growing app in history.

Hotel operations involve numerous distinct processes that are not fully transparent without data analysis. Collecting and analyzing data about hotel operations brings much-needed transparency to these processes, which in turn reveals new opportunities to improve guest experiences and increase profits.

A while back, I shared a post on LinkedIn where I pointed out that, from a digital guest experience perspective, Airbnb is miles ahead of the hotel industry. I warned that if hotels don’t step up their tech game, they might lose customers to Airbnb because, let’s face it, the experience is just a lot smoother.

Customer effort is one of the metrics used in hotels to measure guest satisfaction. It is all about how easy a product or service is to use, or in other words, how easy it is for a customer to do something within the guest journey.