I've worked in social media for almost a decade, and from the beginning I've watched many debates about which discipline social media belongs to. Interactive Marketing? Advertising? Customer Service? Public Relations? Social platforms were built by techies for techies, so perhaps developers own social media. Here's the reality: No one discipline owns social media. The platforms and the code were released to the people and it is the people, who mixed the web and added their own flavors, so in the end it is the people who own social media. That said, if you have to pick one business discipline, for most people, Public Relations seems to be the obvious answer. READ MORE

Profitability is not merely the excess of revenues over expenses. It also has an impact in related areas that cost the hotel money. Inventories are one such area. Owners are constantly seeking in hotel managements, a prudent, holistic approach to profitability which includes conserving precious hotel resources like cash flow, inventories and so on. Stakeholders do not take lightly any wastage of resources while running the operation. It will be a good thing if hotel managements realize that over and above earning revenues, managing costs, they keep an eye out for how inventories are managed. This is not just something nice to have but may have an impact on their reputations and continued survival. It is entirely up to hotel establishments whether they will turn inventories into their allies or adversaries. READ MORE

There are a record number of graduates arriving from Hospitality and Culinary schools yearly; universities in Miami alone will have graduates in the thousands this year. But as Harry Truman said, “The buck stops with me” and the current roster of hotel general managers and human resources directors in 2015 have a responsibility to their business to recruit, align, develop and retain the best talent in the marketplace: Human Capital. READ MORE

It used to be that a bad customer experience would be shared with 10 people, on average. Now it is quickly and easily shared with tens of thousands. What you do in the real world will have a big impact on that online sharing. If it's bad, it can send you into a death spin. How can hotels deal with that reality effectively? READ MORE

The time will come when Corporate Offices have to accept that the SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience concept is obsolete, however much technology they embellish it with. The energetic guest experience will replace it because it fulfills the unspoken emotional needs and wishes of guests. Corporate Offices will inevitably reject or resist such a change, and because of this the hotel industry landscape will change radically in the future. The future belongs to independent hotels and small hotel groups, which ignore the Sirens of Tradition, and which create an energetic guest experience, Heart-Based Hospitality, which has no limits. READ MORE