Many hotel brands invested heavily in customer experience (CX) and loyalty programs without a cohesive business strategy. As a result, today they are having trouble measuring the return on their investments. Loyalty programs are hard to measure because they were expanded to include infrequent travelers, offering them perks earlier in the customer journey. Many hotels also plunged substantial dollars into CX without fully understanding their customers – or how to recoup their investments. As hotel brands plan for the future of their loyalty and CX programs, it is important to learn from past experiments. READ MORE

Justin Arest, co-owner and managing partner of Kixby, a boutique hotel opened in Midtown Manhattan in November 2019, describes the current hotel landscape in New York City. He shares how hotels can attract urban travelers in 2020, particularly in the trending Midtown neighborhood. Arest explains the core elements of a successful city hotel, drawing from his own experiences working in every department of a Manhattan hotel beginning at the age of six years old, overseeing the Hotel Metro for over a decade, and leading its recent renovation and rebranding into the modern and sophisticated Kixby last year. READ MORE

The hotel industry is currently facing a labor shortage of unprecedented proportions. This has led employers to look for innovative ways to find and keep their top talent. Recruiting from outside the sector holds tremendous promise for hospitality, because it opens the door for fresh thinking and ideas, best practices from other industries, and a new way of looking at old problems. Technology, in particular, offers a multitude of possibilities for hotels to revamp everything from their financial systems to in-house entertainment, marketing methodologies, and even to introduce environmentally sustainable operations. Here are some innovative ways hotels can implement cross-industry recruitment to build the strength of their organizations. READ MORE

Tired of watching thousands of dollars walk out the revolving door of employee turnover? Have you begun to proactively invest those same dollars on the front end of your employee relationships to help keep people longer? Or is the door spinning faster each year? Too often, it's assumed that the solution to a workforce shortage is increased recruiting. But if the real problem is employee turnover, then a bigger-picture approach is needed. Instead of just putting a Band-Aid on today's staffing shortage, redirect your dollars to solving the source of the problem. Don't make the mistake of investing more in the staff you're missing than in keeping the staff you already have. READ MORE

A long-time pillar of hospitality business education at the university level is that we are preparing traditional and non-traditional students for careers in the hospitality industry. Our students have held jobs to gain experience and positioned themselves for leadership positions with multiple levels of responsibility and authority. A career path model can assist an organization in the planning and retention process at all employee levels. Organizations viewing themselves as career pathway champions can benefit their employees and themselves by creating a great place to work that embraces employee goal and career aspirations, while meeting the employer's business goals creates a positive work environment. For those searching out what direction they should take, career paths need to be obvious, evident and manageable and approachable. READ MORE