Whether your hospitality niche is timeshare, shared ownership, vacation club or hotel, customer loyalty and retention is at the top of everyone's priorities these days. Since I came from the hotel world into timeshare operations it has become increasingly evident that the most effective way to drive loyalty with our customers, guests, and in our case, owner, is to keep them engaged and continually reignite the flame that motivated them to invest in owning a timeshare. Our strategy to keep our owners loyal and committed to their timeshare purchase is tied to a simple equation: Use + Satisfaction = Lower Delinquency. How do we do that? READ MORE

It is clear that revenue management practices can help hotels increase revenue, but successful revenue management counts on consumers being willing to pay different prices for essentially the same product, based on the hotel's expectation of demand. Hotel managers have good reason to be concerned about negative consumer reaction to demand-based pricing. Research has shown that consumers will punish firms that they perceive to be acting unfairly in their pricing strategies by refusing to patronize them in the future. So, how can hotels balance the risk of negative consumer reactions with the benefits of variable pricing? READ MORE

Over the last thirty-five years I have studied demographic and industry patterns. As a CEO, I understood that one of my key responsibilities was to look into the future, anticipate the markets and place my company clearly in the position to capitalize on the market trends. Demographic patterns have clearly been one of those tools I used to anticipate movement in the marketplace. The Hospitality industry has a repeatable pattern of recovery from economic downturns. Those CEOs who provide services to the Hospitality industry will do well to pay attention to these patterns and position their company's production capacity and marketing focus to provide products and services to the industry. READ MORE

Remarkably, two hospitality companies were named among the ten Best Places to Work out of more than 2,000 that applied in competitions sponsored by business journals in 44 states throughout the U.S. Winners were determined by employees completing a 37-question employee engagement survey administered through third-party data collector, Quantum Workplace of Omaha, Nebraska. The two winning employers--Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which achieved the highest score on valuing employees, and Gaylord Hotels and Resorts, which tied for highest score on senior leadership, are very different businesses, but strikingly similar in their workplace cultures. READ MORE

Having spent over two decades immersed in hotel, travel and lifestyle brands, I've watched marketing trends come and go, and at times despaired at how much the hotel and travel industry has failed to embrace innovation and change. Fortunately, that's not been the case with the world of digital. Today a full 39% of U.S. travel brands engage in e-commerce. But taking reservations electronically doesn't mean that a brand has truly capitalized on the power of the digital marketplace, so I thought it would be interesting to see which brands are especially adept at engaging and serving their guests online, and to benchmark their performance by creating a Digital IQ READ MORE