Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) recently published The Mobile Revolution Is Here: Are you Ready? They surveyed several hundred travelers and asked about their expectations regarding a mobile offering from their host. The findings support what progressive hospitality brands have been suspecting - that we exist in an industry built on the assumption that guests desire a drawn out welcome as they walk in the door - but that's not what guests say they want anymore. What are they saying? They want what Uber and AirBNB are giving them. They want to know when the car's going to arrive so they don't have to wait. They want to know when their room is going to be ready. READ MORE

Dynamic Content Personalization for hotels includes delivering unique and relevant textual, visual, and promotional content based on a variety of things: demographics, location, how the visitor is navigating the website, their past booking history, reward program affiliation, and type of customer (leisure, business, family, meeting / event planner, etc.). Today, most hotels still operate in a one-size-fits-all approach and serve the same version of the website to the visitor, regardless of what we know about them. However, we don't just have visitors anymore, we have unique personas with a unique profile or virtual biography. READ MORE

People are used to being treated like crap. Have I gotten your attention? Let me explain further. We all “get” social media and understand how powerful platforms like Facebook, Twitter and others are vital in both building customer loyalty and engaging customers. With this in mind, hoteliers have come to understand that social media marketing is not free. While setting up accounts and pages on the social media networks are free, in order for the hotel's branding and visibility to benefit, it requires constant attention which costs money as it relates to hiring people to leverage the social media networks. READ MORE

To keep up with brand standards, hoteliers know they need to invest in renovating their hotel's interior every two years. Just as a hotel's interior features begin to age, the landscape also begins to show signs of aging and looks tired overtime. One of the biggest mistakes hotel property owners and managers make, however, is investing an immense amount of time and money into a lifeless landscape. In order to collaborate effectively, hoteliers should think about their long-term and short-term goals so they can invest wisely. This will also help determine which contractors they will need to involve at various points in their plan. READ MORE

To really appreciate our guests' requisite for personalization we can go back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that we learned in school. Maslow taught us that people are motivated to achieve certain needs; when one is fulfilled, they move on to the next one. By definition, a hotel satisfies the first two levels of physiological and safety needs. It provides shelter, water, in many cases food, and of course a safe place for guests to stay. The third level includes guests having a sense of belonging and acceptance, of being part of something special. But it is Maslow's fourth level where this personalization trend really kicks in. He called it Esteem and loosely defined it as our desire to be valued by others and to be recognized as an individual person. In this article, you'll find the ABCs of moving your marketing strategy from globalization to personalization. READ MORE