We live in one of the most exciting times in travel advertising history. Digital media has found its groove and most brands are embracing it in big ways. The online advertising space allows marketers to reach their prospects based on their age, income, zip code, online behavior and travel interests. Travel marketers find it exciting to know they are reaching the center of their target audience in innovative ways with very little waste. Exciting as it may be, access to large volumes of data from multiple sources can prove overwhelming and complicate campaign analysis. By understanding the many forces at play with the numbers you will be better prepared to effectively analyze your digital campaigns. READ MORE

While mobile website optimization is becoming common, many hotel websites are not optimized well for tablets like the iPad. It's tempting to nail smartphone optimization and think we're done with it. After all, tablet screens are large, making it easier to navigate traditional websites on them than from smartphones. However, there are hotel website quirks that are incompatible with tablets, which, when seen, cause the affluent tablet user to "bounce" away and go to a competitor. The following are common website characteristics incompatible with tablets. How do your hotel websites measure up? READ MORE

You would be hard-pressed to attend an international hospitality conference these days without a panel or two exploring the $64,000 question: "Where are the deals?" Despite Miami's position as the second-hottest hotel market in the U.S., the suggestion of continued investment in Miami -- and the rest of the South Florida hospitality market - is met with a surprising number of critics. In this article, you'll learn why the notion of a temporary bubble is misguided, and you'll hear directly from marketplace insiders who believe Miami's hospitality space is positioned for a multi-year run of escalating prices and robust investment returns. READ MORE

This article, especially the title, suggests service issues as the percentage of actual negative events that can potentially place your business in a detrimental situation. This will help eliminate the need to be consistently investing time, resources and money on monitoring and having to resolve social media sites for inconsistently or negative situations that they can prevent. Dealing with guest challenges can be done proactively by applying certain operating service standards, best suited for the brand and scale, that will prevent normal issues, but we also encounter a lack of consistency and follow up on these proactive service practices. Hence, we get a dissatisfied guest. READ MORE

Rooms revenue optimization has taken the lion's share of revenue management focus with RevPAR being the primary benchmark to measure success. However, as revenue management practices evolve, customer buying patterns change, and operating costs rise, RevPAR alone cannot be relied upon to provide a complete picture of the hotel's operation. TrevPAR and GOPPAR are emerging as more reliable benchmarks of an operation's overall performance. In determining these benchmarks the application of revenue management principles across other profit centers such as meeting space, and food and beverage is gaining momentum, paving the way for Total Revenue Management. However management teams are finding that traditional performance targets frequently miss out on measuring profitability, and driving revenue management strategies across departments can mean a complete shift in business processes, and re-evaluation of team performance targets. Whilst challenging, aligning performance targets and creating benchmark metrics provide a good foundation on which to base a total revenue management strategy. READ MORE