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Travel Media Group & Ryan Embree, Travel Media Group, and Ryan Embree에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 Travel Media Group & Ryan Embree, Travel Media Group, and Ryan Embree 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.
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123 – State of the Industry with William “Chip” Rogers
Manage episode 386529629 series 2338664
Travel Media Group & Ryan Embree, Travel Media Group, and Ryan Embree에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 Travel Media Group & Ryan Embree, Travel Media Group, and Ryan Embree 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.
It’s time to catch up on the state of the hotel industry with special guest Chip Rogers, President and CEO of the AHLA! Ryan and Chip have important conversations around some of the most pressing and relevant current events happening in hospitality and give hoteliers key insights into how staying in touch with these developments directly affects your businesses and travelers. Tune in now to discover how staffing, work flexibility, new trends, and hotel technology keep evolving and how you can stay one step ahead of the curve. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining, watching us. If you're watching us from our YouTube channel or joining us from any of the streaming platforms that you're listening to, if you did find us, you know, we've got a great guest today, someone that really doesn't need any introduction. Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Chip, thank you so much for, being on the Suite Spot with me today. Chip Rogers: Hey, Ryan, it's so good to be with you. Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: Really technically not your first time on the Suite Spot. Last time we were together, Chip, we were in Las Vegas on a busy trade show floor after a very successful hospitality show. About six months removed from that now, what type of feedback are you getting about that event and maybe give us some insights into what you're looking for from the next one in October in San Antonio? Chip Rogers: Well, first feedback was the opening party, seems to have taken on historic status. As folks who have been, at that property know that the nightclub TAO and we packed it out, there was a line that lasted, some estimates over two hours long to get into it. And so you, you almost created that, fear of missing out. But people absolutely loved the opening party. And from there it went to, an incredible lineup of keynote speakers. And what we tried to do is make sure that we are entertaining you, informing you yes, hitting on those things that are unique to the hotel industry, but also remembering that everyone's a person, they have outside interests too, and, and could we get speakers that are funny, inspiring, educational. And I, and I think we hit all that. In fact, the most popular speaker that we had, Admiral McCraven, it was interesting. I was at an event literally last night and it was a political event and people were talking about, oh, you know, these two candidates that this seemed to be the two candidates running for president. And someone said, if there's a third party candidate, why don't we just get Admiral McCraven? And I'm like, that would be great, because now I know the guy and if he became president, that would be kind of cool. But it's that type of level of speaker that we had that I think really set us apart from many of the other shows that you go to. And so from the trade show floor, that was just amazing. We sold it out in year one to the speakers. And again, starting with that incredible opening party, it, it was quite an event. And, you know, Las Vegas always has something special for everybody. We're gonna try to redo that again in San Antonio. San Antonio, a very unique place. One of the most visited cities in the United States for people that are going on a leisure trip. And so we wanna make sure we're capturing that, that you're coming to the event, you're going to have fun, you're going to be entertained, you're gonna learn something,
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156 에피소드
Manage episode 386529629 series 2338664
Travel Media Group & Ryan Embree, Travel Media Group, and Ryan Embree에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 Travel Media Group & Ryan Embree, Travel Media Group, and Ryan Embree 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.
It’s time to catch up on the state of the hotel industry with special guest Chip Rogers, President and CEO of the AHLA! Ryan and Chip have important conversations around some of the most pressing and relevant current events happening in hospitality and give hoteliers key insights into how staying in touch with these developments directly affects your businesses and travelers. Tune in now to discover how staffing, work flexibility, new trends, and hotel technology keep evolving and how you can stay one step ahead of the curve. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining, watching us. If you're watching us from our YouTube channel or joining us from any of the streaming platforms that you're listening to, if you did find us, you know, we've got a great guest today, someone that really doesn't need any introduction. Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Chip, thank you so much for, being on the Suite Spot with me today. Chip Rogers: Hey, Ryan, it's so good to be with you. Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: Really technically not your first time on the Suite Spot. Last time we were together, Chip, we were in Las Vegas on a busy trade show floor after a very successful hospitality show. About six months removed from that now, what type of feedback are you getting about that event and maybe give us some insights into what you're looking for from the next one in October in San Antonio? Chip Rogers: Well, first feedback was the opening party, seems to have taken on historic status. As folks who have been, at that property know that the nightclub TAO and we packed it out, there was a line that lasted, some estimates over two hours long to get into it. And so you, you almost created that, fear of missing out. But people absolutely loved the opening party. And from there it went to, an incredible lineup of keynote speakers. And what we tried to do is make sure that we are entertaining you, informing you yes, hitting on those things that are unique to the hotel industry, but also remembering that everyone's a person, they have outside interests too, and, and could we get speakers that are funny, inspiring, educational. And I, and I think we hit all that. In fact, the most popular speaker that we had, Admiral McCraven, it was interesting. I was at an event literally last night and it was a political event and people were talking about, oh, you know, these two candidates that this seemed to be the two candidates running for president. And someone said, if there's a third party candidate, why don't we just get Admiral McCraven? And I'm like, that would be great, because now I know the guy and if he became president, that would be kind of cool. But it's that type of level of speaker that we had that I think really set us apart from many of the other shows that you go to. And so from the trade show floor, that was just amazing. We sold it out in year one to the speakers. And again, starting with that incredible opening party, it, it was quite an event. And, you know, Las Vegas always has something special for everybody. We're gonna try to redo that again in San Antonio. San Antonio, a very unique place. One of the most visited cities in the United States for people that are going on a leisure trip. And so we wanna make sure we're capturing that, that you're coming to the event, you're going to have fun, you're going to be entertained, you're gonna learn something,
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
In this episode of the Suite Spot, we welcome Micajah Sturdivant, CEO of MMI Hospitality, as the newest addition to the TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. With a background in hospitality and hotel management spanning generations in his family, Micajah gives audiences a unique take on how hospitality has evolved over the decades and how MMI Hospitality has cemented itself as a pioneer in the industry. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. Happy 2025. This is your host, Ryan Embree. We are here back in the new year with a great new episode at continuing. I think we’ve been doing this for about two years now. This TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series, as a reminder of this is your first time, this is all about the hospitality trailblazers that have been blazing a path in hospitality. Our guests has been doing it for over five decades, we’re gonna talk about in a second, but it’s about those people and management companies and brands that are pushing our industry forward. As we get into a new year, I think this is the best way to kick it off. So without further ado, I’m gonna bring in our guest today, CEO of MMI Hospitality, Micajah Sturdivant. Micajah, thank you so much for being with me on the Suite Spot today. Micajah Sturdivant: No, it’s a great honor. Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re excited. We’re gonna, we’re gonna talk a lot because we got a lot of history to cover with your hospitality group, MMI. But before we do that, this is your first time on the Suite Spot. First time guest, hopefully first of many visits, but as, as I always like to do as is tradition. Talk about a little bit about your background and hospitality and the journey that led you to MMI Hospitality. Micajah Sturdivant: No, I appreciate the invitation and opportunity to share about our organization that originally was founded in 1956 when Kemmons Wilson was conceptualizing Holiday Inn. My grandfather and his roommate from grad school were early adopters to the idea of what the Holiday Inn and Internet Interstate system expansion could really provide, not only for the travelers, but from their perspective and specifically my grandfather. The opportunity for a Mississippi workforce that was going through a major transformation in the late 1940s and 50s where primarily agriculture focused economy was modernizing. In many ways, technology was being brought in and it was negatively impacting opportunities for workforce to have a quality meaning of quality lifestyle. And so saw that the opportunity within hospitality could be a great employer and so was one of the first Holiday Inn franchisees. That company has since grown to work with all the major franchisors as owner and operator, as well as adding a contract food service management company and a restaurant brand as well. So it’s a mixed bag across the spectrum hospitality. But in many ways, they’re businesses that were born out of one another or very much build off of the knowledge and information that our corporate shared services team is able to provide across the entire enterprise. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, hospitality, I mean, even 50 years ago, it was definitely a profession. I mean, we talk about hotels being the oldest profession out there. So a lot of rich history, storied history there. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of evolution. I mean, there’s been tons of changes just within the last couple years with this being part of your family. Talk to us a little bit about how you were first introduced into hospitality and how you ended up where you’re today. Micajah Sturdivant: Yeah, no, I appreciate it. So interestingly it is a family business. I’m the third generation on the Sturdivant co-founding side, but I didn’t grow up in the business in the sense that my father is not involved. I grew up on the ag side, so as I remembered earlier, you mentioned earlier, our family was in agriculture, and so that’s the business that my father is involved in. And so the second generation was actually an uncle. So family business, but went where we now today, work for either a uncle or uncle in-law if we do have the opportunity to return back to a family business within the kind of larger start event related organization. With that being said, being from Mississippi, like you said, hospitality is one of the oldest professions out there. You know, I kind of say, look, Mississippi finds itself in some tough rankings nationally, but hospitality is one of those that we can hit out of the park. And so really found it as a great thing to double down on what comes naturally to our team members and love celebrating that across our organization. For me personally, I didn’t grow up working a front desk. I grew up working on the farm and found the respect and that comes with earning your role and opportunities within a family business. Worked first hospitality related job, I guess was working as a dishwasher. And then made my way up to a food prep guy at a summer camp, and then did internships and different opportunities before being invited to join the MMI organization after completing an MBA and then worked through asset management, ops management, led our hotel management company, and then three years ago was invited to be named CEO. Ryan Embree: Well, listen, Micajah, I would tell you that you are not the first dishwasher that, or that got his start dishwasher. You’re talking to a bellman that started his development. So, you know, it’s so important to, I think, you know, especially right now as we’re going through this staffing shortage is to appreciate those line level employees because a lot of them have hospitality journeys and careers. Your spans over, you know, your family’s career spans over, you know, five decades in hospitality. But a lot of senior leadership get their start at the line level and then work their way up. And I think it gives a greater appreciation for those everyday employees and certainly creates a strong culture. You mentioned the southern hospitality, we’re gonna get to that in a minute because you’re talking about how Mississippi does hospitality, the right way. They got a whole term for it, right? Southern hospitality. Talk to us about how southern hospitality’s kind of incorporated in MMI Hospitality and how that’s evolved over the years. Micajah Sturdivant: Well, I would say for us in many ways, taking it even more than the general Southeast, kind of cultural elements is specifically the family of being from an agriculture family. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, and when you’re out in the middle of nowhere, it doesn’t matter what your last name is, you know, when the rains come or you know, the electricity goes out or whatever it is. And so that kind of shared community across, you could say everybody in the org chart from the farm very much applied to the sense of family that we have lived out over the decades, almost seven decades now within the MMI organization that paired with the family having been, or excuse me, the business having been founded by two men from very different backgrounds. Mr. Jones was from California. They met in Boston. He moved his new bride, Mrs. Jones, to Mississippi in 1956 to become innkeeper of our first Holiday Inn. And as Mr. Jones, 50 years after that, he said, we never had a fight. We had some healthy discussions, but we never had a fight. And that sense of respect, not only as peers, but as believers in the larger business, wherever again you may be within the organizational structure, has been an underlying element of how I’ve looked at our organization and have built on those who’ve served in similar roles performing. Ryan Embree: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure that’s an easy thing to sell to employees, you know? What I mean, taking care of one another and that background leaning on that, that sometimes gets lost, you know what I mean? With a lot of management companies, a lot of brands out there, it feels like a new brand’s kind of popping out every single day. I’m sure being able to kind of rely on that history, that story of MMI Hospitality and the way that you’ve done things, over the past almost 70 years, like you said, that’s something that instills confidence to employees, associates of this thing’s gonna be around, it’s gonna be around a while and we’re gonna do things the right way. You got a whole, we kind of talked about it. We got a whole section on your website labeled differentiators. And I think at the time right now where there’s a lot of consolidation in management companies, right? You know, more brands than ever, more opportunities. How do you stay relevant and, and differentiate yourself from those other management companies out there? Micajah Sturdivant: I think one of those items is our roots run deep. So recognizing we’ve been through the cycles. We recognize there’s a reason why we have more than 90 team members, pictures, headshots on the wall in our office here in Mississippi for having served the organization for more than 25 years. There’s a reason why we’ve created, I believe, or those before me, have created a sticky opportunity of turning a job and truly into a career. But we’ve had a diverse portfolio that is not any easier. Versus having cookie cutter, core branded, all one franchise, all select serve, et cetera, and stacking those PnL’s next to each other. I get that there are great benefits and efficiencies to that, but that’s maybe not what always will resonate for a certain stakeholder, whether that’s not only just the guest but a team member, you know, an investor and just a general market. But I guess those differentiators are thinking about our diversification in that we can pull best practices and apply across our portfolio, but also digging into the details, which comes about, because in that diversification, we have both franchised and non franchise properties. My soapbox is, I get on my soapbox when I say is that it’s not whether it’s branded or not, because you can have wonderful brands like in the southeast will say the Peabody or the Roosevelt or the Grand Hotel, or the Broadmoor, you know, wherever it might be, the plaza. Those are brands that people assimilate a certain feeling and experience with that aren’t necessarily franchised. But we have franchised and non-franchise properties. Our intent is to build brands either around a collection or an individual asset so that not only the guests, but even more so firstly, our team members can understand what it is that they’re being asked to deliver on. What is the hospitality they’re being asked to provide. And that comes back to taking care of your team members. A phrase that I like to talk about, which is psychological income, recognizing that yes, we need to pay our team members well, but we also need to provide it to be a safe, comfortable place that they enjoy coming to work while they’re respected and honored in sharing their talents every day. Otherwise, they’re not gonna be able to deliver that for our guests and create that virtuous cycle of returning guests and credit card swipes. But it’s a fascinating business. We think that we’ve got both as owners and operators as developers, franchise and non-franchise branded and independent full service and select service. We’ve got a mixed bag but that’s what keeps us on our toes, I think. Ryan Embree: Well, I mean, just to think about everything that’s happened in the last decade to then be able to say, yeah, well guess what? We’ve been around for seven of those, right? Micajah Sturdivant: It gets faster though. It’s not as fast back in the day as it is now, but yeah, there’s been some, been some changes. Ryan Embree: Yeah, you’ve been through a lot. But I think that also says something, I mean, there’s something about longevity in this hospitality business and something that you mentioned a couple of those brands. A lot of what those brands have in common, those hotel brands is, they’ve been around for a long time. They’ve been able to give those guests experiences throughout generations, which is something that you can hang your hat on there and then all of a sudden you add the diverse assets. You know, being able to say, hey, we’re not just successful. We can do it in a variety and multitude of ways. That is absolutely differentiator right now, especially in one of those segments that, that you’re really invested in is the soft brand. And would love to hear as someone with multiple soft brands within your portfolio, kind of what you think the draw that pull is to a soft brand today in 2025 and, and maybe where you see soft brands heading in the future. Micajah Sturdivant: So there’s a lot to unpack there. The soft brands of course have, we’ve seen the rise of the soft brands, rightfully so. I’m excited about what they can mean for a community so long as the investors are keeping those appropriate capital reserves to go deeper in terms of, and faster, I guess I should say, in terms of the ID side of things, when we think of the big grand legacy properties, kind of like you were mentioning a second ago, and some, I listed some of those just geographically around us, so much of the investment was around the building, right? I think about the hallway at the Roosevelt in New Orleans, or the lobby at the Peabody in Memphis, et cetera, right? And you could have take out every single piece of soft goods and walk in there and go, wow. So much of design today is not about the box, just because it’s unfortunate as that’s where we are in terms of CapEx costs, but a lot of it’s about the forward-leaning design elements and taking those design elements and creating a lifestyle associated with it and localizing it. That will have to be something that people pour back into. And I think that, like where we are, I would say within the core branded is that there are those groups that totally rely or strongly rely on their franchise partner to really deliver on what the guests expect. And then there are hoteliers who believe that, I’m the operator of this hotel and this is my responsibility and I’m gonna deliver with my team, and we have a franchise partner here at the table with us, and we will work together. Within the soft branded space, I would say that we are in a still a little bit, I would say in the honeymoon phase almost of the soft branded industry. We’ve had portfolios build pretty quickly with a lot of conversions. We have franchise partners who have, I think, done a good job in holding to certain standards of really wanting brands to be created, but it’s gonna be how do we sustain that and how do we sustain that, not in holding, but continuing to evolve and push forward. You can’t just hire a great interior designer to design a restaurant and launch a menu. It’s about how is your team living out that experience? How is that menu rotating and evolving so that it’s continuing to resonate not only with the traveling public, but locals alike. These properties cannot work, I don’t believe if you don’t resonate and work well for your locals, not only because I think the guest is seeking out sitting next to a bar with a local and hearing about, okay, which one of those breweries downtown, you know, should we go visit kind of a thing and getting the local intel. But the other is a lot of these projects also the balance of revenue coming through the various revenue segments of these properties, is you know, adding food and beverage and spa and whatever other programming might be within the box other than just the room’s revenue that a core franchise properties is historically been focused. Ryan Embree: Yeah. That’s such a smart observation there, Micajah. These locals, I think it was something probably, you know, during the pandemic where a lot of us were like, well, can’t travel anymore via airplane. Look at this hotel. Lemme go check this out and maybe put my travel radius a little bit closer to home. And they found out that they had some pretty awesome hotels, pretty awesome restaurants here. But you’re totally right about the guests wanting, we’ve always heard that, I’m trying to get a local experience. Well, who better to give you a local experience to having that experience with local people in that area. That’s so smart. And if you can create a mixture of both, I mean, first of all, you don’t have to rely so much on out-of-towners. You’ve got different revenue streams and soft brands definitely hit the mark, but it’s exactly what you said. It can’t just be a building, it’s gotta have a story. Those brands, they lasted over time because of the stories that were told and experience within the walls of that lobby. Like you were talking about. So how can you tell your story? And that’s obviously us being a digital marketing podcast, that’s where we spend a lot of our time talking about is how can you tell the story of your soft brand, even if you’re branded property, right? How do you sell not just the hotel, but the community and local experiences. So can you share with us a little bit about the MMI Hospitality’s philosophy and how you sell that entire kind of guest experience? Micajah Sturdivant: Well, I mean, I’m almost thinking about it through the lens of this as if it was a case study. King and Prince, historic beach and golf resort on an island off of Brunswick, Georgia, built in 1935. This is the 90th anniversary of that property. It is a neighboring, it is nearby to Sea Island, which is world renowned fabulous, just amazing experience. And I think that we are too. Number one, you gotta be honest about who you are, I think is important as, while I know your audience is much larger than the Southeast U.S., I kind of almost sometimes find myself explaining or reviewing things internally or externally through comparisons around like, if the King and Prince is Southern Living Magazine, Sea Island is gardening gun. You’ve got a different audience and don’t try to be the same, you know, as your neighbor. You’ve gotta instead go not run the other direction, but find your corner. The King and Prince is a perfect example, I think, of where while we had seven acres and about 200 keys, a lot of different room types, et cetera, and programming on property and addition to our golf course there, St. Simon’s has a ton of amazing experiences at the Lighthouse through its history, through retail and quaint village, et cetera. And for years, our food and our corporate director of sales and marketing really led the charge around fam tours and through digital marketing of saying, we are not here to sell the King and Prince. We’re here to sell St. Simon’s. And when you’re coming to St. Simon’s, the King and Prince is the place to stay. And so, almost thinking about it through the lens of what we’re just talking about, some of these soft brands, et cetera, is that, look, you’re not gonna be, you’re not gonna have everything within the walls of your property. So recognizing how you leverage your community, the other is, I was thinking about like, you know, the stories with years of service like Peabody Hotel in Memphis, they’re famous for their ducks. They didn’t open that hotel with that plan. It just happened to become because of a certain guest, et cetera. And where I’m going with that is that by having your hotel act as the living room for your community creates the opportunities for locals and visitors alike to find themself the results of stories that then build kind of folklore, that then builds legacy, that then builds brand and, you know, 50 years down the road, or 90 years down the road, you realize, wait a second, all these little things added up to something much bigger than I ever thought it could and would. And so it’s about recognizing your voice and your voice relative not only to your peer set, but to your neighbor who’s just your general community and making sure that you’re not speaking outside, above or below what resonates with and for them. And in doing so, you get credit for so much more than what you actually are controlling or had to foot the bill for. Ryan Embree: Well, we always talk about the best story that you can tell, even if you’ve got the best marketing team and and budget out there is the story that your guests are telling on places like online reviews. So I think you make a great point because there might be some hoteliers out there that feel like, you know what, this is my value prop, this is why my hotel is the best. Yet their guests are telling them something different about, I actually like this hotel because of this. And if you’re not, if you don’t keep an open ear and an eye on that feedback and have alignment there, it’s either gonna come off as inauthentic or you’re gonna be missing the mark. Like you were just talking about, you’re gonna be targeting the wrong people. And that it’s a very, it’s, it’s a tight rope that you have to walk. But I think your advice of staying open and organic for that story to be told between both you and the guest is so, so critical, so key and some really great advice there. Micajah Sturdivant: Well, one of the things that we found really interesting kind of at portfolio level is, our franchise partners, our franchise hotels have done guest surveys and at all the technology channels for a long time and they’ll get scores. What’s really interesting, and I don’t think it’s because of price point, because we’ve got independently branded properties that might be a hundred dollars a night and we’ve got other ones that might be $900 a night. And regardless of the price point, the amount of verbatim that is provided in that communication loop in our soft branded and independent properties is fascinating. It’s almost like there’s this innate sense of that there’s an innkeeper there, there’s a person that’s either the muse or whether that’s our GM, really kind of acting in that role, or it’s just the general sense of the community that your overall team member groups create. But there’s a lot more calling out and share showing love and but also given constructive criticism because they feel there’s a person and an identity to whom will listen and that this is a place they wanna come back to and want to continue kind of be a part of its evolution. Ryan Embree: No, absolutely. We talk about that all the time about guests leaving you literally breadcrumbs and clues to the perfect guest experience. Now not everyone is going to, mistakes happen and things happen that are out of our control. But you have to be open, have an opening ear to that feedback. Because when you’re right, Micajah when they give you that advocacy, that is the strongest piece of endorsement that you can get from traveler to traveler is someone else saying, listen, this place felt like home. It did a fantastic job of hosting me and my family. I will certainly be back next time and hope that you’ll stay here when you visit too. There is no, listen, I’ve been on the other side of that front desk. There’s no better feeling in the world when it’s just like at a holiday. We just had the holidays go by when you host someone. You love that feedback. You love to hear that. Being recognized. You put your heart and soul and kind of hosting them. So here we are, beginning of 2025, always a great time of year to do some sort of reflection on this past year. What stands out to you as whether you hit any milestones, accomplishments for MMI Hospitality as a brand? Micajah Sturdivant: Oh, gosh. I find myself, I think about that. Well, kind of moving out of portfolio because that might be an answer that portfolio related answer might be. More usually provided, I would say I’d go to people and I’m excited about what our executive council was able to accomplish in 2024 in terms of listening to team member engagement and circling back on taking action. But one specific, I guess is we hired a new CFO. Doug Heinrich has come to us from 21C museum hotels, and we think that his food and beverage and hospitality hotel experience and repositioning historic assets for world renowned art gives some interesting insight for us as we’re looking at our portfolio for the future and what that means in terms of growth opportunities for our team members. So that’s a little vague in a sense, but we’ve got the kind of standard milestone numbers, but I think it’s the people side. What Doug is already kind of drumming up for the future of MMI is exciting. Ryan Embree: Puts you in position to take advantage of some of these travel trends that we’re seeing. I mean, we were, I was fortunate enough at the end of 2024 to cover the hospitality show and one of my big takeaways we do a takeaways episode from that was F&B is, I don’t know if it was ever gone, but it is certainly back in hospitality. And it is coming back with a vengeance. And a lot of hoteliers are capitalizing on this. People just seem to, it’s a community thing like you were talking about. People just love to experience this. Whereas, I mean, maybe a couple decades ago it wasn’t the fad to go to the hotel restaurant. It certainly is now. And some of the best restaurants in cities that we’re seeing are in hotels, in resorts. So certainly positioning you to continue on that success and stay up to date with those trends moving forward. Let’s move into some rapid fire questions here. Get to know you and MMI Hospitality portfolio. You mentioned a couple of the properties. You know, I typically save this line of questioning for a single property, but you’ve got such a nice portfolio. Let’s, let’s move through some of these. Favorite view at one of your properties? Hopefully I can make this a little difficult for you. Micajah Sturdivant: Favorite view, I would say the valley range at Switzerland Inn in little Switzerland, North Carolina. It’s an amazing 1910 rehab old hotel that has just this beautiful view out of the North Carolina mountains. Ryan Embree: Picturesque. I like it. What about a favorite fun fact about one of your properties? Micajah Sturdivant: Favorite fun fact, I would say the James Madison Inn, an hour east of Atlanta was constructed, this is a quirky one, was constructed with chandeliers and stained glass windows and the exterior columns of a big old antebellum, or not old. It was built new antebellum home from a story in the early 1990s of this guy who laundered all this money from the US government and disappeared internationally right when his plane crashed. And so they dismantled his house and moved all pieces got put all over the place and this little inn ended up with the columns, the windows, and the chandeliers. Ryan Embree: Wow. That is a fun fact. I wonder how many guests are hearing that story every single day over there at the James Madison. And what about favorite signature dish at one of your properties? We just talked about the F&B. Micajah Sturdivant: Yeah. I would say is probably the King and Prince muffin at the King and Prince. My grandparents bought that property when I was three and my whole life I have gone of having this particular oatmeal raisin breakfast muffin. Ryan Embree: Okay. All right. So it’s their signature. Little sentimental. I like that. Last one here. Favorite piece of art at one of your properties? Micajah Sturdivant: Favorite piece of art would probably be something at the Ian in Memphis, Tennessee Tribute. We built that property three or four years ago. Worked pretty much solely with local artists and there’s some wild, crazy art there. But there is a local Memphis artist that loves to take animals and figure out how they represent you. And our partner in that property had worked with them in the past. And so we have a rooftop experience called the Tiger and Peacock, but there was kind of almost like an a, not a monogram, but, or a logo, but a crest. A crest made that represents this property’s essence. And it’s things about grasshoppers because they can only move forward and it’s tiger and it’s all stacked. And so it’s original piece of art that’s hanging in the lobby. And then we took a turn on tone silhouette of it and turned it into a wallpaper and used that as an accent wall in the guestroom bathrooms. Ryan Embree: That’s so cool. Since I’ve been starting and it’s starting to do this, one of my new things now is when going into a new property with, you know, a little bit of character, a little bit of, you know, even a new build, because they’re, they’re doing this in new builds now too, is asking about the artists and if there were local artists because most of the artwork now I’m hearing from either these new builds or even older hotels, a lot of the times they’re working with local artists, which is so fantastic to hear and to see. We just talked about the local experience, community feeling that that’s something that gets overlooked sometimes at these hotels is sharing that, you know, all the art in this hotel is done by local artists here. So you’re truly getting that authentic feel when you stay with us at our property, because this is part of the community. It’s just something I think it’s so cool to see. And, it’s such a nice change from maybe, again, a decade ago where it was all just printed photos. Nice little photo in the room. So, so here we are, we’re at the end or beginning of 2025, already shooting ahead. . We’re in a very critical time, obviously for hoteliers. They’re looking at their occupancy as even 60, 90 days into spring, spring break. What are you most looking forward to this year and as we turn the calendar to 2025? Micajah Sturdivant: I don’t know if I would say I’m looking forward to, but I’m cognizant of is that we have an inauguration later this month. We don’t have any properties in DC but what’s gonna happen in DC in the next several weeks is gonna be really influential as just general mindset and opportunities that the American public feels they have as it relates to travel and just confidence in their pocketbook and sense of whimsy and desire to get out and experience across the street and across the country. Both. Yeah. So I think that’s, that’s a big influence for us across all of our operating companies. But when we think about the messages that we can share, hospitality, you know, it’s one of the things we talk about with our team members. It’s like, we never know if the person checking in is here for a funeral or for a wedding. We don’t know if they’re here for a terminal doctor’s visit or a first grandchild, you know? And so, and we don’t know that about our team members. I mean, we don’t know that, wherever we are, whatever industry we in, we, we never know what it is that somebody may be caring or just so excited about inside and feels like they can’t share. So we just have to be respectful and be mindful of that. This is a, we are, we are complicated beings and hospitality is such a gift that we have that we can share with others regardless of where we are or what the product type might be, regardless of what the position is that I might be serving in within a property, that I can make an impact in someone else’s life. And that’s a gift and something that we should not take for granted. Ryan Embree: I love that. Love that. Yeah. No, what a message. And you know, again, as we go in this new year, and there’s a lot of things, what your hospitality is a gift. I love that message because we kind of look and see a lot of things on the horizon with AI and how is this going to change the landscape of everything that we do day to day. But at the end of the day, especially an organization that’s been around for almost 70 years, you know, it’s people serving people. And at the end of the day, it’s those guests that are having those experiences, but also the team members that are hosting those guests. That’s what makes the magic happen. And as you mentioned its a gift. It’s something that we get to be a part of and, and sometimes we’re lucky enough to be a part of that story. We’re lucky enough to make that impact. Micajah Sturdivant: I know that I have a friend I was talking to the other day who’s also the sixth generation in a family business. His family business is wholesaler of convenience stores. And you know, when you think about it, six generation ago, there were not convenience stores, there were not cars. . And, and, and how many few generations ahead of us or, you know, in the future, what’s a convenient store gonna be? As we move away from gasoline, as, you know, just so many different things. But hospital, hotels, restaurants, et cetera, are there, they’re gonna stick around. And while there’s a lot, have been a lot of interesting influences in our industry from the outside, while there might be a kiosk in the lobby, or we may not be doing housekeeping every day, et cetera, there’s still gonna be the opportunity for warmth and sharing. So we look forward to hopefully being a part of that story for many years to come. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And like I said, we, we wish you the success 2025. We’re gonna keep a close eye on MMI Hospitality and all the things that you’ve got in the years, decades to come. You already have the track record to show it. Any final thoughts? We covered a lot today, Micajah, any final thoughts we close out? Micajah Sturdivant: No, I just appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today and think about how digital is a piece of that and can become much more ingrained into not being this outlier. You know, it’s moved into the core kinda of what the guest experience is. Not only in introducing, but while people are on property and truly experiencing the offerings, how that then leads into that full circle upon exit and return. So it’s a big piece of how we can serve and preempt even more so going forward with AI and more information and knowing who the guest is before they walk in the door, et cetera, all that stuff to ultimately still greet them with the smile and preempt what their needs might. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. It all circles back to hospitality and creating that memorable experience. So we appreciate you Micajah being on here at TMG Hospitality Trailblazers Suite Spot series. And again, we look forward to, continuing the success. Hopefully, we can have you back on the Suite Spot. Micajah Sturdivant: Thanks so much. Ryan Embree: Thank you so much. And thank you for listening to The Suite Spot. We’ll talk to you next time. To join our loyalty program, be sure to subscribe and give us a five star reading on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree, and Travel Media Group Director of Product – Respond and Resolve™, Jackie Avery, break down the top 5 guest sentiment tags of 2024 and give explain what insights these tags hold for hoteliers. Tune in to the first episode of 2025 and learn how to leverage this data for your hotel portfolio to kick off the new year. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you for listening or watching wherever you’re joining us from, hopefully watching in our brand new Suite Spot podcast here in Maitland, Florida. Very excited to bring you another great episode, a very popular episode with a lot of hoteliers, wanting to know some of the top five sentiments of this last year. So it’s one of my personal favorite episodes and a personal favorite guest, Jackie Avery, our Director of Product Respond and Resolve™, which is our review response solution, award-winning review response solution here at Travel Media Group. Jackie, thank you so much for joining me back on the Suite Spot. Jackie Avery: Yeah, thanks, Ryan. It’s so great to be here. I look forward to this every year. I’m so passionate about this and just spending the time reflecting on the past 12 months and what really resonated with travelers. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. What do you think of the new studio? Jackie Avery: I love it. It looks so good. So comfortable here. You know, I am so happy to be back. Ryan Embree: Awesome. Well, we’re happy to have you back. Let’s get into it. Let’s start talking some numbers. If you’ve heard this before, this isn’t kind of an annual tradition that we do at the end of the year, but we look at all of the guest sentiment that travelers left. For those that might, again, this might be their first time listening to this style of episode, give us a quick definition of guest sentiment and reviews and maybe some numbers that go along with that. Jackie Avery: Yeah, absolutely. So, if it’s your first time here, you just wanna refresh. Thanks for listening. You know, we love that you’re taking this time to really, dig in and learn some, some of this stuff and kind of, you know, again, reflect on what travelers care about. So guest sentiment, these are things being mentioned in reviews, right? So, as Ryan mentioned, I’m overseeing the review response team here at Travel Media Group, and my team to kind of put it into perspective number wise, during our slower months, we’re processing and looking at 25,000 reviews ish, during peak travel season. That number jumps up to mid to high thirties. So, as we’re going through this and kind of sharing reflections and really, you know, deep diving, the information that we’re going over today is coming from right around 41 million sentiment tags. Ryan Embree: WoW, that’s absolutely incredible. You think about that 25,000 per month to about 30, you know, high thirties, but 41 million in sentiment tags. So not only are guests leaving the reviews at a record pace, but they’re also talking about so much about the guest experience. And I think that’s really important when we talk about this type of episode because there’s so many elements to a guest day, things that can go right, things that can obviously go wrong that we hear about in these reviews and see in these reviews. And today we’re gonna review the top five sentiments. Let’s go ahead and start at number five. Jackie Avery: Yeah, absolutely. Before we jump in real quick, I wanna say, because you said there might be some people listening this year who weren’t here last year. I know that a lot of times, you know, negative reviews gets a lot of talk time, it gets a lot of focus, right? You may have your team meetings, you may be going over data, and you know, you’re kind of focusing on the negatives. Again, this year, similar to last year, we saw the trend that more often than not, travelers were leaving positive remarks and there were positive sentiment tags. So, going through this, I am gonna try to point out the times where there were higher neutral or negative tags just to kind of pinpoint like, Hey, where’s the discrepancy there? But kind of speaking with that, I would love to kind of jump in. So number five, our fifth most common sentiment tag this year was facility amenities showing up over 2.8 million times. So this tag can often be seen alongside things like price, food, and odor. And while those three, they’re not in the top five, I mentioned them because those three specifically. So again, price, food, and order, they have a higher neutral, negative combined, number than the sum, that sum is higher than the positive tag. Ryan Embree: Sure. And you know, one of the things we hear, I mean, price, right? Big industry news, not just in hospitality, but overall is inflation, right? The price of things and what a room might cost this year in comparison to maybe back in 2020 could be significantly different. So if you, if the guest comes in with those different expectations because they paid this price and they’re not seeing it, that might be something there where that neutral or negative sentiment comes into play. Same with odor. It’s typically something that when we talk about odor and you bring that up in a review, you know, unless you have a really nice fragrance in the lobby, perhaps that that new car smell or something like that, it’s usually not gonna be met with positive sentiments surrounding it. So let’s go ahead and move on to four. Jackie Avery: Yeah. So fourth, pretty fitting kind of with what we were talking about, uh, is gonna be cleanliness. So that came up over 3 million times. And this is often mentioned alongside of beds or bathrooms. And so while all three of those tags were primarily positive, they do have a high neutral second place. So when you consider that, you know, overall the experience was a positive one, many travelers still note this kind of feeling where, okay, it could have been a little better, or they have these hint of almost dissatisfaction. So I think that’s important to note because you wanna really dig in and find out, like, you know, where am I on the cusp of losing this positive feeling for my guests? Or where am I just like, okay, I know I’m, I’m exactly where I need to be. Yeah, Ryan Embree: Yeah. Cleanliness, something that’s been obviously, I don’t think we’re ever going to do a top five episode sentiment episode without mentioning cleanliness. It’s just such a priority in the guest experience. And one of the first things you’re gonna notice when you open that door for the first time, the first thing you do and we talked about on this episode, it’s not even the cleanliness sometimes of the room. I think when people think about cleanliness, they think about, they go directly to, well, it’s a, uh, it’s not a clean room or it’s an unclean room, whereas they might’ve seen trash in the hallways, right? Uh, food service that was left out in the hallways, dirty elevators, your lobby. Uh, so there’s so many things that go into that sentiment tag of cleanliness. It’s important not to just to look through the silo of just saying, this is just a room issue. It could be an overall cleanliness issue. Jackie Avery: Absolutely. Ryan Embree: Let’s move on to number three. Jackie Avery: So looking to number three in third place, we have location. So this can often be mentioned alongside noise, parking, and safety. It’s important to note, because I think often people write this off like, oh, it’s something I can’t change, right? But I really challenge everyone to change their perception on that, to really think, was there anything that I could have done more proactively or anything that my team could have done if a concern was brought to their attention? So for example, noise, noise came up over 890,000 times. Around 400,000 times that sentiment was negative. So was there information that could have been provided or is there a way that the team could have been empowered to more properly address a concern? If it was something that did come up that couldn’t be avoided, and then I would say, really thinking about that, if nope, there was nothing that could have been done, you know, this is what happened, I would then reflect on, okay, well did that guest get a very genuine response? And, you know, kind of communication from your team. Ryan Embree: Yeah. Location is always gonna be in play, right? It’s very much like cleanliness. If you’re 30 miles away from where you want or need to be, you’re going to be at a disadvantage from a hotel. That might just be a few steps away from that. But in saying that, the onus is on the hotel to really paint a picture of location of where they are. Oh, you know, we’ve had reviews that we’ve responded to where someone has presented themselves as near the airport and near the airport could be 30 minutes away to one person. It could mean I only wanna be five minutes away from the airport. So it’s really important, like you said, Jackie, just to, I would say, try to look through a traveler’s perspective, maybe even someone that you don’t know and send them, whether it be your social media, whether it be your reputation, and say, without looking at my location on a map, tell me what you can gather from these data points. Because this is what the traveler, the prospective traveler is seeing. And if they can paint a pretty accurate picture of, well, it sounds and looks like you’re near a bunch of restaurants, it sounds, it looks like you’re near this or that, or these attractions in the area, then you’re hitting it spot on with location. And sometimes, I know we’ve mentioned a couple negative things about location, but positively too, right? Everyone has some probably great restaurants that, you know, I’ve been a front desk agent before, and that business traveler or family goes, I just want a good place to eat. I want to eat like a local, what do you recommend? So being able to make sure, because some of these mentions are really positive and saying that it’s great, it’s near great shopping, great attraction dining, use this to your advantage. So locations such a, such a great tag. Moving into the top two now. Jackie Avery: Yeah. So our second most popular tag in 2024 was staff with over 4 million mentions, and over 3 million of those being positive. What a testament it is to just the impact that team members have on a traveler’s experience. Almost every single tag can somehow be related to staff. So if you think about it, right, there’s a server at breakfast who really just brings joy in the morning, or unfortunately there’s a plumbing concern, but there’s a team member who went above and beyond to make sure that the rest of this day was wonderful or you were staying somewhere to celebrate something special. And instead of it being a one-off that now, you know, a special event has become your tradition. So team members really just can be connected to so many other tags. So we just, I’d love to see when it’s positive. I love reading when travelers are expressing joy about things that they’re experiencing on site. Ryan Embree: I mean, that is absolutely incredible to think that number two, the number two most talked about thing on online reviews is your staff. And it’s something that when we’re talking about prospective travelers, it’s something that you can see, shine through your reviews, but you don’t know who works there, right? You don’t know the individuals that work there. You can know everything you can about the location, you can know everything about the price, you can know a lot of these different factors, but one thing you don’t know is about the staff, but yet it’s the number two most talked about subject. And in a time where a lot of hoteliers out there are still struggling and have this staffing shortage, it’s a testament to what you said that the majority of this is really positive sentiment. And that’s great. I mean, that always should be the case in hospitality where it is hotels, hosting people, people serving people is what is what we say. Right? So great to hear, great to see. You know, I think a great, this is a also a great reminder for the hotels listening to this episode that I love the fact that this year, this format, we’ve changed a little bit up and talked about, the negative and positive. Sometimes those swings there because I think it is, if you are seeing that maybe you are more of a 50/50 split on your staff and your personal reviews, there’s a gap there, right? So it is, it is a great time to reflect this time of year and say, all right, what do we want to focus in on? What are we maybe falling short of and the guest expectations or, or guest experience at our hotel? So here it is, the audience has been waiting, we’ve been building it up. Jackie, what is the number one top sentiment of 2024? Jackie Avery: Yeah, it can’t be beat, everybody is talking about it with close to 7.5 million mentions, we have accommodations. So right around 2.8 million of those were neutral and negative tags, meaning over 4 million were positive. People felt comfortable, they liked their space and they had a lot to say, beds as mentioned over 1.6 million times, room amenities, 2.5, obviously it’s not all good. Pests came up over 200,000 times and furniture had a significantly more neutral and negative tag than positive. But it’s really interesting to see because, you don’t need to guess. They’re telling you exactly what they like and what they don’t like about your specific property. Ryan Embree: Yeah. Well, and that is the product that essentially we are selling to our customers, right? It is the room. So you can learn a lot from that. There’s a lot of aspects that go into it. Cleanliness being one of them, one of the other tags that we talked about. But at the end of the day this is where we’re hosting our guests. This is where they’re sleeping. So no, I don’t think it’s any surprise that accommodations and rooms is the number one sentiment tag. This is, I always love looking at this. I always love really dissecting the data during this episode. Obviously you and your team respond to a lot of reviews. I asked you off air how many reviews we’re up to at this point. Jackie Avery: Yeah, we’re just a little over a 1.9 million. So it’s exciting stuff going on here. Ryan Embree: And hopefully 2 million, we will hit some point in 2025. A fantastic milestone we’re all looking forward to. But, you know, with that much experience, when you see some of these tags, whether positive, neutral or negative, I guess maybe, I think we’re always getting questions from hoteliers of how can I be the best review response writer out there? What, what advice would you give them? Jackie Avery: Yeah. So I guess to kind of pre answer that question. First thing I would say is, of course, if in the moment if something has gone right or something has gone wrong, empower your team members to properly handle situations, have training on site, use the information that you’ve learned when you’ve reflected on the past year and really, go through that with your team. But let’s say you didn’t know, let’s say they didn’t stop by the front desk. They had an early morning checkout or you know, your team did everything they could. Ryan Embree: Mobile Check out. Walked right by. Jackie Avery: Exactly. Yeah, you might not know. So, you know, let’s say they left a review, that guess deserves a genuine response. You have to be open to feedback, you have to really hear what they’re saying, and they deserve a real reply. They don’t need a template where, you know, you don’t care at all. It seems like you don’t care. You can make things right by hearing them, by being empathetic by truly, listening and responding to them in a real way. Ryan Embree: Yeah, authenticity is a big word that we use around here. And having an authentic, empathetic and genuine response to feedback. We can tell as travelers, as consumers, when something is, is genuine, when something is empath empathetic and authentic. And if you can get that feeling and that sentiment in the, the traveler that left that feedback feeling that way, that’s what you can do. You know, and going back to your empowerment, your team empowerment point there, I just want to talk about how many times we’ve seen in reviews empowerment or what your staff has done to try to improve a situation. If it’s negative, right? That I was having this issue and then it was solved by Jackie. And that is such a cool testament to see online because that shows service in action, right? Your customer service is not just implied, it’s not a five star review, but it’s actually shown that there was an issue, there was resolution, and that’s shown online. It can’t, you can’t ask for a better story there. So empowering your team to make those changes, however, however that may be at your hotel, however it operates, sometimes that can show in your reviews, and we’ve noticed that before. Jackie Avery: Absolutely. And right, that guest, they left your property and they took the time to highlight the team member who made it right, or to highlight the policy that you had in place that did improve their state. They did not have to do that, but they did. They didn’t just share the negative that went wrong. They then told the whole story and you should then take the time to thank them for that time, show how much you appreciate their flexibility, their willingness to be open to the stay turning around and ending up positively. You wanna actually hear what they’re saying and give them that time because they gave it to you. Ryan Embree: Great point. That’s a great point. We can, we could probably do a whole episode on responding to reviews. I know we’ve done tons of webinars, masterclasses, bootcamps, they’re all over our TMG YouTube Channel. If you are interested in hearing more of this and some of the tips that Jackie and her team of professional writers here at Travel Media Group, takes such great care of our hotel partners. So thank you for spending a little time with us, judging by these numbers. It is not slowing down and you are very, very busy over there in the Respond and Resolve™ department. So thank you for taking some time and sitting down with us. Jackie Avery: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It’s, it’s always a great time. Ryan Embree: Awesome. Well, we’ll talk to you next time on the Suite Spot. Thank you for listening. To Join our Loyalty program. Be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
1 154 – 2024 Year in Review with Travel Media Group President, Dana Singer 13:47
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13:47Catch the 2024 TMG Year in Review episode with Travel Media Group President, Dana Singer as she joins the Suite Spot to discuss all the milestones and monumental achievements this past year and what hoteliers can expect from TMG in 2025. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embee. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining us. Wherever you’re listening or watching us from. If you are watching us on our official TMG YouTube channel, you will see that we are in a brand new space. We’re in a brand new area. I’m so proud to launch and announce our very own Suite Spot podcast studio. This is a long time coming, my guest here in a second, we’re gonna talk about it. We’re really excited. You know, we put a lot of time and effort into this podcast studio to bring you the listener, our hotel audience, the best quality and video, and hopefully we can have more and more guests come in studio and do these podcasts with you today. But for now, we’ve got a very familiar guest, an annual tradition, one of my favorites, President at Travel Media Group, Dana Singer. Thank you so much, Dana, for being on the Suite Spot once again. Dana Singer: Absolutely. Good morning, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re excited. We’re here to, as the titles talks about, talk about 2024 TMG year in review. Again, one of my favorite annual traditions that we do here. We cover a lot of ground in 2024 as a company, as an organization, but more importantly for our hotel partners who’ve had a lot of success. Talk to us. We’re gonna talk about 2025 and, and maybe some of the foundation that’s been built for moving forward, but this is a great time of year to also reflect back on all those successes. Talk to us a little bit about 2024 and the journey for our hotel partners. Dana Singer: Absolutely. I mean, 2024 has truly been a special year for travel media group in so in so many ways. Most importantly, for the hospitality partners that we work with every day. You just mentioned the success that we were able to experience with all of them. And one of our most important milestones though, was really moving into our new headquarters. And it’s not just about a bigger building, it’s about creating a collaborative space that supports the growth of our teams. So we can continue to innovate and serve our partners at the highest levels of support and expertise. Internally, we’ve developed a number of exciting new solutions. We’ve enhanced our services and support, and we continue to find ways to better understand and meet our partner’s needs. And to do that, we’ve intentionally dug deeper, into the challenges and opportunities our partners face, and we’ve created resources around them. We’re so committed to giving hotels the tools they need to achieve their goals and succeed, especially as guest expectations evolve. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and that’s key. We’ve talked a lot about on this podcast, you know, almost feels like technology in our industry is moving faster than ever. Something that maybe took a couple years to implement is now changing within the quarter that’s due to technology, AI all sorts of different factors. Guest expectations certainly have changed over the past couple years. We’ve talked about it on this particular episode, over the years. Let’s talk about those ever changing guest expectations and what Travel Media Group continues to do to innovate and kind of keep pace with those changes. Dana Singer: I mean, guest expectations are constantly shifting, so it’s crucial for us to not only keep up, but stay ahead. And at TMG innovation has been at the heart of our adaptation. One of our significant advancements this year was the introduction of the Guest Experience Snapshot. And this tool has really been a game changer for our partners, giving them an in-depth but very clear look at guest feedback trends and enabling them to make smarter, faster, transformative decisions to support their reputation. But innovation isn’t just about technology, it’s also about our people. And when we think about all of our teams across the business, everybody plays such a key role in that. But our client success team, for example, has maintained a world-class NPS score of 75 or above over the past three years. That consistency reflects the dedication and care we bring to every interaction. We don’t just provide a service. We build aligned relationships that support our partners ongoing success. And beyond that, all of our teams are constantly working to find new ways to enhance our solutions. Whether it’s refining how we respond to guest reviews or evolving our social media strategies. The goal is always to make our partners lives easier and their businesses more successful. And it’s so exciting to see how these efforts have made a real impact on so many hoteliers. It makes our job that much more meaningful and enjoyable. Ryan Embree: Yeah, I think one of the key themes of this episode that we’re gonna start to uncover is the communication that lies between our team and our hotel partners and the alignment there, right? The guest experience snapshot. We heard from our hotel partners that they felt that they weren’t implementing AI in their everyday operations to the degree at which they wanted to. So the guest experience snapshot gives them a great view, a different view with the power of TMG one view AI to really dig in and see what guests are actually saying and having those meaningful conversations. A lot of the new solutions and enhancements come from the conversations that we have from our partners, which is really, really cool to see. Obviously we have our CTO Jason Lee on this podcast lot, and he talks to us about the origins of some of these updates. But I have the pleasure of doing this podcast, hosting this podcast, which is coming up on its seventh year, which is crazy to me in 2025. But we have all sorts of channels and ways that we can communicate with our hotel partners, whether it be our award-winning educational webinars that we put on on a monthly basis, and we hope to up the amount of webinars we’re doing in 2025, whether it’s this podcast, whether it’s physical events, right? That that was something that was taken away from us in 2020 and now has come back stronger than ever, which I’m sure the hotel audience loves to hear. So getting a lot of corporate and business travel, talk to us a little bit about all of those ways of communicating and that interaction between our hotel partners and travel media group. Dana Singer: Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, it’s the only way to really understand what our partners are going through, right? First of all. But no matter how we do it, talking to them deepens our understanding of how to better serve them. And so we did that this past year, by attending the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference, the Independent Hotel Show, most recently the Hospitality Show. But we also continue to educate hoteliers about new trends through our social success series webinars, our Hotel Marketing Insider newsletter on LinkedIn, our FAQ Friday videos, and of course, our continued Suite Spot podcast to ensure that we do this as impactfully as possible. We unveiled a brand new podcast studio, as you already mentioned, which our viewers are seeing right now. And we did this so that we could continue to raise the bar to provide top of the line content to hoteliers worldwide and be a leading voice in the hospitality industry. Ryan Embree: Yeah, it’s so cool to see and be a part of and hear our hotel audience, really appreciate because things like social media, technology, reputation management within the hospitality, I mean, Booking.com just rolled out an update that’s gonna be implemented in 2025. These are fast changing things. They don’t stay the same. So being able to have a direct line of communication to our hotel partners is vital. But that line of communication works both ways, right? And that’s what’s really cool to see is when we hear feedback from our hotel partners about either the things that we’re putting on or the things they wanna see and that we can implement in our every day. And I think that’s one of the reasons. I mean, our goal is obviously, you know, TMG to be the premier solutions reputation solution provider for the hospitality industry. So Dana, looking back at 2024, how do you think a lot of initiatives you covered, so many of them have impacted TMGs reputation as a leader for hospitality and moving forward for its hotel partners? Dana Singer: Yeah, I mean, it’s inspiring to see how our work this year has helped solidify our reputation as a trusted leader and partner in the hospitality industry. Earlier this year, we reached the milestone of our hotel partners collectively having over 1 million social media followers. And that number is a direct reflection of how our strategies are helping hotels connect with guests in meaningful ways. We’ve also been fortunate to gain recognition within the industry. The Suite Spot was ranked among the top 40 hospitality podcasts. These accolades mean so much because they demonstrate that we’re not just producing content, but we’re creating resources that resonate with hoteliers and provide deep value. It’s also worth noting the diversity of voices on our podcast this year. We welcome guests from multiple hotel brands and numerous management companies, which allows us to give attention to different perspectives and ideas within the industry. And this kind of collaboration, it just reinforces TMG as a go-to resource for hotels and the impact of all of these initiatives. It boils down to the feedback we’ve received, whether it’s from our partners, listeners, or industry professionals. It’s clear that our work is making a difference, and that’s what drives us to keep innovating and pushing boundaries. Ryan Embree: It’s so cool. I was obviously able to take part in that 1 million social follower celebration and to reflect on that, to think that over the course of all of our hotel partners out there that we’re partnering with their social media, that there’s 1 million travelers seeing the content that our hotel partners are putting out. So impactful, right, to think about. So cool to think about. Obviously, like you mentioned, we had some really cool first time guests here on the Suite Spot, including a couple major brands. Just had a collaboration with Booking.com and their giant, worldwide rollout of their guest review, score update. These are the type of things that I think hoteliers look for. I mean, it’s such a tight knit community out there, hospitality in this world. So to be able to Provo provide a resource for all hoteliers out there is really cool to see and be a part of. So obviously this episode is called TMG Year in Review, right? We take a look back, but, let’s talk about the future. Let’s talk about 2025 because it’s right around the corner and it’s moving faster than ever. What can we look forward to? What’s on the horizon for TMG, you know, looking forward? Dana Singer: Well, I don’t wanna give too much away just yet, but I can say that our teams are hard at work brainstorming and solidifying new initiatives for the year ahead. Every conversation we’re having is centered around one question, how can we better serve our hotel partners in the industry as a whole? And 2024 has been a transformative year, but we’re determined to build on that momentum in 2025. And again, while I can’t share a lot of specifics right now, I promise we’re gonna continue to innovate, find creative solutions, and introduce tools and strategies to help our partners continue to succeed. And there’s just so much to look forward to. We’re very excited for the year ahead. Ryan Embree: There really is, and you’re right. I mean, 2024 transformative year, 2025 looking even better. Great outlook for the hospitality industry. We’ve already got, you know, sneak peak. We’ve already got some amazing guests and Suite Spot podcast initiative. So make sure if you’re subscribing on YouTube, follow us on LinkedIn as well so you can, you’re not gonna miss a second of the action and everything that we’re gonna be bringing to you in 2025 as we wrap up here. Dana, one of my favorite things that we do with this episode, and I think we started this back in 2020, is kind of give just a message of inspiration and hope moving forward for the upcoming year. Any final thoughts as we kind of wrap up today and look towards the future? Dana Singer: Yeah, I’ll leave everyone with this. When I look back at this year, what makes me the proudest is seeing how everything we did, it’s really resonated with our partners and helped them achieve their goals. We’re consistently receiving feedback about how our services and support have helped save time, improve guest satisfaction, and ultimately drive more bookings and strengthening reputations. And so that’s what it’s all about for us, making a positive difference for the businesses we serve. And we look forward to continuing that momentum in 2025 to our listeners. If you’re interested in learning more about what we do at at TMG, this is a great time to reach out. We’re getting ready to kick off the new year. There’s no better way to do that than to ensure your online reputation is in good hands. So I wanna thank all of our hotel partners for their continued support and trust in us. And thank you Ryan, for letting me sit in on the Suite Spot today. I always love being able to spend this time with you. Ryan Embree: Well, thank you for your time. I think it is one of my favorite episodes of the year that we do, reflecting on all the amazing things, that both TMG and our hotel partners have accomplished. Here’s to an incredible 2025. As you mentioned, we’ve got a lot of stuff teed up, so thank you to our listeners, thank you to you, Dana, for joining me today. I hope everyone has a happy new year, and we will talk to you next time on the Suite Spot To join our loyalty program. Be sure to subscribe and give us a five star reading on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host, Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
In this episode of the Suite Spot, the head of marketing at Springboard Hospitality, Jason Pirock sits down with podcast host, Ryan Embree, to discuss the incredible Springboard Hospitality brand, exciting hotel developments, social media strategies, and much more. Tune in now to learn more about what makes the Springboard Hospitality brand one-of-a-kind. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embee. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. We’ve done quite a few of this, but if this is your first time hearing it to set up the series, this is all about those individuals, brands, management companies, all paving a way forward for our hospitality industry. Trailblazing a path, and we have a great guest with me. It’s certainly an embodiment of a TMG hospitality Trailblazer, Jason Pirock, head of marketing at Springboard Hospitality. Jason, thank you so much for taking the time. Jason Pirock: Yeah, thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: Now, I asked this on every single Trailblazer episode. Always get a different answer. But since this is your first time being on the Suite Spot, we love to hear stories about how you made it into hospitality. Sometimes we just fall into it as a career. Sometimes we went to school for it. What was the hospitality journey that led you to Springboard Hospitality? Jason Pirock: Yeah, absolutely. So I probably have more of a non-traditional background when it comes to hospitality here. A lot of folks have sort of been in the industry for their entire career for a very long time. I actually started my career in retail coming out of college. I was recruited to work for Target Corporate in Minneapolis. And so I started off in merchandising there actually merchandise presentation, which was at the time their entry level marketing. They didn’t really have an easy way to get into the actual marketing department, but that was the closest point. And then spent some time with Target and moved into marketing and then found my way through a, a few other companies throughout the years, Sears Corporate. I worked for a company called Brookfield Retail, formerly, uh, General Growth Properties. And then I had sort of a reflection point in my career where as much as I was having fun with retail and liked it that’s all I knew. And that’s all I had done. And I knew that I was super passionate about travel, I loved hotels, all aspects about it. The experience, the design just always gave me such a great feeling. And so I thought, I wanna try out hospitality, I wanna move into that space. And I was very fortunate to find an opportunity with Hyatt Hotels, their corporate office out of Chicago. And so spent some time there, then moved over to a company called a Perim Hotel Group and helped them build their marketing department and marketing team. And that actually is part of what led me to Springboard. Springboard was looking to sort of revolutionize their, their marketing department, really rebuild it, take it to the next level. And they found me as someone who had, had done that with Perim. And so here I am today. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And let’s talk about that role that you have of head of marketing, this being a digital marketing podcast, I’m sure there’s a lot of hotel marketers that are just getting started in their career. Talk to us a little bit about your role as head of marketing and really the story as marketers. We love telling stories, right? Of Springboard Hospitality. Jason Pirock: Yeah. Well, I’ll start with with Springboard Hospitality. We own, operate, and develop hotels, restaurants, and bars all around the country. We’ve got about 50 hotels in 14 states, and we’re predominantly in destinations, sort of urban environments as well. And we’re truly across the whole U.S. we’ve got, we’re about 80 to 85% independent. So we really lean into that sort of boutique, independent, non-branded space. A few brands here and there. But again, that’s what makes up a majority is is that independent. So in my role, my role is sort of all encompassing when it comes to marketing, brand and communications. I oversee those functions that impact not only the Springboard brand, the brands within our collection. So we’ve got some independent brands within the portfolio, and then all of the actual hotels themselves. So that role is everything from traditional to digital, to social media, PR, communications, lifestyle, and experiential. So it really is a gamut, creative, you name it, all folds under me. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And so important too, especially with a portfolio where you do have a lot of independent hotels, because it’s just so crucial that travelers might not know that story. I’m sure there’s a lot of creativity that you and your team can bring to that to be able to tell that story of the independent hotels in the portfolio. We’re gonna talk through some of those methods a little bit later in this episode. But you’ve seen scrolling through Springboard Hospitality’s LinkedIn, so much impressive growth. And you’ve touched on the variety of properties, both branded and independent. You know, this is a time we’re in November right now. We were just talking about how the end of the year is coming up quick, typically a time of reflection. Looking back, can you share with our audience maybe this past year, Jason, some of those notable hotels, whether they’re rebrands, acquisitions, some of those 2024 projects you’re most proud of? Jason Pirock: Yeah, absolutely. So, a few that stand out for me, one is Luana Waikiki, really, really great property in terms of where it’s situated. We’re sort of at this, this crossroads of, you know, the hustle and bustle of the shopping district of Waikiki, but nestled in this park that’s really close to the beach. And so I love the, the juxtaposition of being more in this serene environment, more nature focused, but being so close to everything that, you know, Waikiki has to offer. So that’s been a great project for us and a great property that we brought into the portfolio. We actually have undergone a light rebranding, um, in terms of just refreshing the brand and really leaning into what is there and how we sort of cascade that across the, the different customer touchpoints. Or the guest touchpoint. So that’s one that stands out. Outbound is a collection of ours, Outbound Hotels. And we’ve got, um, there’s currently four hotels within that portfolio, one of which opened earlier this year in Stowe Vermont. And it’s a really neat property. I mean, Stowe is absolutely stunning. It’s a, it’s a really beautiful destination and not just a ski destination, but sort of all year round for outdoor enthusiasts. And this property is converted sort of older motel, but that we added some other buildings to and created these cabins, created more of these sort of apartment style lofts, if you will. And so it’s a really great property. That one definitely stands out. And then finally another one is Paia Inn in, Maui. So this is a smaller footprint for us with 17 keys, but great restaurant that’s getting ready to relaunch right on the water event space. It’s absolutely stunning. All different and unique room types, which is kind of fun too. So this is, this is gonna be a really exciting one for us as well. Ryan Embree: You certainly paint a great picture. We can tell that marketing background there with the terms like, you know, nestled in the heart or serene and stunning views. So it’s all about telling the story, right? And, you know, some of those, I think you also make a a great point too from a marketing standpoint. Sometimes we think of whether it be a refresh as a giant renovation in a giant project. And sometimes those little touches to a project can make all the difference, right? To a property. And if it’s told that story is told the right way to your, to your guests, you know, because we’ve also seen major renovations that sometimes is lost on the guests. They come in and they don’t even notice that. So being able to communicate and use that messaging is so important when telling that story. You know, we talk on, on this podcast, Jason, a a lot about reputation management, right? And the importance of a strong reputation, Springboard Hospitality, obviously no stranger to reputation success has seen a lot of fair share, especially in 2024, recent recognition in the Michelin Guide, TripAdvisor, traveler Choice Awards all over the portfolio. Talk to us a little bit about these incredible recognitions, what they mean to springboard hospitality, and then in your position, Jason, how you can use these awards, accolades, recognitions to grow the SpringBoard’s reputation within the hospitality industry. Jason Pirock: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, thanks for calling those two to the attention of the audience. I mean, we’re super proud of the awards and accolades that we received this year. And a lot of that goes to the caliber of products that we have in the portfolio and, and really the caliber of the teams that we have so super grateful for, for all of those that come our way. But I think for us, it really is about showing what we’re capable of, what we’re capable of to guests and putting their trust and their investment into us, in terms of, you know, wanting to stay. There’s a lot of choices out there, right? That they can, they can select from. And so I think those help us stand out a little bit more. So it’s really important for us to kind of get that stamp of approval. And then I think, showing owners and investors what we’re capable of too. Like not only are you coming into our portfolio and we’re here to offer the services that we have to provide you and, and making sure that you are running smoothly, efficiently, and profitably, but that we can get you a lot of exposure and engagement from folks through awards and accolades like this. Ryan Embree: Yeah, no, I’m glad you brought that up, Jason. ’cause you’re right, you know, we think about these reputation awards and obviously these, these were made for travelers, right? Sometimes they’re picked by travelers like the Traveler’s Choice Award, but I think it’s a great point you make about ownership and investment and assets these owners are looking for. Reputation is a great place to be able to kind of wave your flag and say, this is a huge differentiator. We’re gonna take care of your asset. We’re gonna win these awards, these recognitions, and make sure, you know, that’s going to be our, that’s gonna be kind of our seal of approval, that we’re doing the right things, right. Uh, there. So let’s get into that a little bit about hotel management. It, it’s certainly becoming a crowded space in 2024 became even more crowded. There’s tons of consolidation that’s happened recently. I feel like there’s either some sort of strategic partnership or merger happening every single day on LinkedIn that I’m seeing a new hotel management brand erupts, uh, you know, every, every week. How does Springboard Hospitality differentiate itself? You talked about the reputation, but how does it differentiate itself to owners and investors for hotel management company? Jason Pirock: Absolutely. So I think the first way that we differentiate ourselves is we’re really focused on independence, as I said, at the top of the podcast, right? And there’s not a lot of management companies that are really leaning into that space. And so I think that does make us stand out because a majority of our portfolio is independence, and we know them and we know how they, they operate a lot of times it’s not a one size fits all. It’s very tailored and, and customized. So I think that’s one way that we differentiate. I think also the collaboration we have with our owners, there’s a lot of calls that you are getting our CEO you’re getting our leadership team. You’re not just getting your your day-to-day contact. You’re getting access and you know that accessibility to a lot of the strategic minds that have a lot of experience and knowledge in all of these different areas. And just to prove the point that we’re here to support you and it’s not just selling a deal or whatever it may be from the CEO, but he’s actually involved in revenue strategy calls, right? So I think that’s a way that we differentiate. I also think our focus on, you know, everybody’s talking about data and reporting and, and those are all important and, and should be expected in a management company, but we try to take it a step level and focus on what we call hospitality intelligence. That is not just reporting out on numbers, but talking about the why and the how and what we’re gonna do differently in order to improve the business. So I think that’s another thing that sort of stands out to me in terms of what we offer. And then finally, with from a marketing perspective, you know, we offer a lot of the, the different services that you’d probably see at a number of different management companies, but we also have capabilities and expertise and things that you don’t traditionally see. You know, we can run brand marketing workshops. I’ve, I’ve hosted several of them, two day immersive workshops to really get to the bottom of, you know, your brand architecture and your pillars and those types of things. We can run PR, agency RFPs, we can run influencer, you know, management campaigns. There’s a lot of different things that maybe go above and beyond what you typically see out there. So I think all of those are just ways that we help to set ourselves apart. Ryan Embree: Well, you make a couple great points there, Jason, especially about the data. We talk about it all the time. We’re seeing it all over the place, is how can we use AI, how can we use data to improve the guest experience? Numbers are just numbers until there’s actionable insights that are created with that data and being able to track that whether it’s social media analytics, whether it’s guest feedback, sentiment that you’re seeing trends over time, it’s really gonna be those hotel management companies, as you put it, hospitality intelligence, right? That really use the data to their benefit. And then as far as far as the power and numbers go, that’s also fantastic for independent hotel owners as well. Sometimes they don’t have the leverage that a big brand does. We’ve heard that from time to time. We visited the independent hotel show. We go there annually in Miami and hear that from, they’re just like, I, I just don’t have the resources that these big brands do. So being able to have kind of that white glove service approach certainly helps those independent hotels and can pack a punch too when you’re talking about marketing and some of the trends that you were talking about, you touched on social media and that’s another topic obviously we’re very, very passionate about on this digital marketing podcast, as you can imagine. What’s the relationship with social, with Springboard Hospitality and social media, and what role does it play in your overall marketing strategy? Jason Pirock: Yeah, for us, social media is extremely important. And I mean we’ve really, we really try to follow the, the trends and the data that are out there. Expedia had released a report not too long ago, I think it was earlier this year, showing sort of the, the guest journey and how social media ultimately dominated the inspiration phase. And that was a really powerful statistic for me, which helped us to further double down on evolving our model. We went from more of a centralized social media support effort to now being more of a in-market kind of cluster. So we look at, you know, contractors, in some cases, agencies where it makes sense to really be there to provide more content, more frequent posting, more real time types of actions on our social media accounts to ensure that we are staying relevant in that inspiration phase, that we are discoverable. And we know that that’s such a big part of that guest journey in terms of planning their trip. And so just making sure that we’re very front and center on on those channels. Ryan Embree: Yeah, you touched on it and it carries throughout that, that traveler journey too, Jason, we’ve talked about it before. I mean, think about how excited you might be to go on a trip and you’re anticipating, you know, you’ve booked already, you got that pre-booking phase where you’re getting excited, you follow them on Instagram, you’re looking for events that might be popping up that they might be sharing on their Instagram feed, maybe, you know, some seasonal drinks by the pool or something like that that you’re looking forward to. So it really follows you social media from inspiration. Huge great place to obviously be discovered, but also to carry it throughout the entire journey. Even asking for advocacy at the very end of, you know, make sure you follow us for any deals, specials, promotions that we might have running, you know, if you, if you’ve taken any pictures, please share that with us so that we can repost and use that user generated content to how help our, our guests tell their story, right? Because sometimes they’re our best storytellers if we’re giving them the tools. Jason Pirock: I think one thing, you know, it’s important for us as hotelier to meet people where they are, right? And social media is a great place to do that. And I think that it’s ultimately you’re putting yourself out there and it’s a reflection of your brand. So the more that you are engaging with that channel, the more that you are sort of taking care of that channel, it’s gonna take care of you, right? Because ultimately to the point we’ve both made is that a lot of people are looking there for that inspiration. They’re looking there after they’ve looked at the website or maybe even before the website, right? But it’s probably the second most visited next to the website where they’re doing that additional research. So if you’re only posting once a week and you don’t have a really clear vision on what you want to get in front of the guests, they’re gonna notice that. And that’s gonna be reflected in their purchase decision Ryan Embree: Sometimes in itself tells a story, right? The inconsistency there, outdated information on your social media profiles you haven’t posted in the last six months. You’re posting a picture of a beautiful swimming pool when it’s the dead of winter and it’s not matching what the experienceis like today. This is a great way to reaffirm booking confirmation in a time where, you know, over the last couple years with the pandemic guests have come accustomed to saying on the fly, if I don’t like what I’m seeing, I can make an easy switch to a hotel across the street. So keeping them engaged during all the way up till they walk into your lobby and then some more, right? Follow us. Because we’re gonna be doing some really cool events and we’ve got some great programming that you can follow on our social media. So obviously me and you are in agreement there, social media, if you’re not on it certainly need to be. This is a great time going into 2025. We’re just doing a webinar this afternoon on doing conducting social media audits for hotels and make making sure that you’re set up for success in 2025. We’re gonna switch gears a little bit. Talk about an unfortunate headwind for our industry over the last couple years has been staffing unfortunate as it’s been, it’s really risen. I think the creativity level of brands, hospitality management companies that are looking for hospitality workers, whether it it’s more flexible schedules, they’re doing some different style of recruiting, what have been some maybe ways that Springboard Hospitality has recruited and retained talent and continued really to thrive and grow your portfolio in a time where it’s really hasn’t been that easy for most? Jason Pirock: Yeah, absolutely. I think from a retention perspective, I’ll sort of start there. We do an engagement survey, which I ultimately think is a really intelligent move on our part in terms of checking in on team members all the way across the organization, right? And really getting a sense for how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking is working and not working. And I can tell you as sitting on the leadership team, that we really do take that feedback to heart and discuss it and look at ways to better improve the organization. So I think just by listening and hearing, what our team members have to say is a way that, you know, we do keep that engagement. I think things, we do have some unique incentives that I think are help with that retention piece as well. And I also think that like, at the end of the day, sometimes what makes people happy and what keeps people there is not always monetization or it’s not always truly a perk or a benefit. I think a lot of it is about leading with empathy. I think being grateful, showing appreciation, a simple thank you, and a text or an email goes a really long way. And so all of those things I think are ways that you keep people engaged, you keep them retained and you kind of keep that workforce or, or that team sort of motivated. Ryan Embree: Yeah, no, absolutely. And one of the common threads that we’ve been hearing in this series is mentorship. And I think to your point about the monetization, sometimes you hear stories sometimes of saying, you went across the street, just for a little bit of a pay bump, but having someone that they feel like is a mentor to them is a really, really strong incentive to keep someone in a position. So making sure that you have leaders, that you have really, really transparent path to success stories within your organization as well, I think is really big for you and sharing that with your employees. So yeah, fortunately we’re hearing that this is hopefully slowing down and, you know, the staffing issue, but I do think, again, some good will come out of this because it really has turned our industry upside down on where we’re recruiting and the opportunities that it’s created for some. So this is my favorite part of the episode and I typically save this line of questioning for our spotlight series, where we typically will look at a one particular property, but in seeing your portfolio. Jason, you guys have such a fantastic portfolio. I want to quiz you on this, so I apologize in advance if these are tough, but favorite view at one of your properties. We’re gonna do some rapid fire questions here. Jason Pirock: Yeah, I would say Pacific Edge in Laguna Beach, just staring out at the Pacific Ocean is pretty magical. Ryan Embree: I’m sure very Instagrammable, as we were talking about those social media, there’s tons of photos that come outta that view there. Fun fact about one of your properties. Jason Pirock: Yeah, so this one’s interesting. One of our property in Anchorage, Alaska, there’s a retaining wall that holds up fourth Avenue and it runs underneath our hotel. So it’s almost like our hotel is holding up the street. Ryan Embree: That is a fun fact for sure. Favorite signature dish at one of your properties. Jason Pirock: I’m gonna actually, I’m gonna go with cocktail kind of in the same realm, but Green Lady, which is a speakeasy that we have in in Waikiki at Honolulu. Every cocktail is incredible there. A great old fashioned and great Manhattan. Shout out to Maddie, the bartender there. She’s incredible. Ryan Embree: And then last but not least, favorite piece of art at one of your properties, Jason? Jason Pirock: So at Hotel Irwin in Venice Beach, there’s a lot of great artwork scattered throughout the hotel in terms of the history of Venice Beach, but within one of the meeting spaces, it’s called Larry’s Loft, there’s a lot of really neat old photography in there. Lots of movies have been shot there from, from years and years ago, and so it’s just sort of, sort of a time capsule. So I think that one’s really cool. Ryan Embree: As we wrap up, I’d like to say you’ve taken us all over the country with this portfolio and this those line of questioning, I don’t think you duplicated any of the properties there. So, again, a fantastic portfolio. You have really cool, fun facts about that. As we wrap up as marketing professionals, you know, we’re always excited for the next thing, right? We’re ready to market and advertise that next big project or announcement or milestone as 2024 comes to a close. You talked about some of those acquisitions what are you most looking forward to for Springboard Hospitality in 2025 as we look to next year? Jason Pirock: Yeah, so there’s a couple of things that stand out for me. We have a project in Palm Springs that we just transitioned, so look for more to come on on that one in particular. I’m really excited about this property. I think internally really a couple of things that I’m excited about. One is shifting a little bit more into that commercial mindset and really bringing our disciplines together to solve problems. I go back to that hospitality intelligent piece and I think that having siloed data doesn’t benefit anyone. And so really it, it is a shift because it’s a way we haven’t done things before, but, you know, really getting everyone’s buy-in to start thinking about these properties holistically and thinking about them commercially. So I’m really excited about that for what’s to come in making some shifts. Jason Pirock: And then I think the other piece from a marketing perspective is having been with the company for about a year and a half, there’s a lot of foundation that’s been built, a lot of groundwork that’s been laid and going into 2025, we’ve got a lot of that in place now. And so we can, we’re now in a great position to sort of take it to the next level and do some more testing and learning, do some more creative and cool things to really help take these properties to a new performance level. So that’s super exciting. Ryan Embree: Awesome. Well it sounds like you got your hands, you and your team got your hands full for 2025. We’ll keep an eye out for Springboard Hospitality and its continued success. Any final thoughts as we close out today, Jason? We covered a lot. Jason Pirock: Yeah, no, I really appreciate lots of great questions and appreciate the conversation. Ryan Embree: Well thank you so much for joining us, Jason, on the Suite Spot. Thank you all for listening and we will talk to you next time on The Suite Spot. To join our loyalty program. Be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
Tune in to the the latest Suite Spot episode to hear from Senior Product Manager at Booking.com, Laura Xhaferaj as she breaks down the guest review score update being rolled out by Booking.com and how this new innovation will impact travelers, hotels, and hotel management groups alike. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Very pleased to bring you another incredible episode here, a unique episode, exciting episode. As you can tell from the title. We’ve got an update with one of the major players in hospitality, Booking.com and with me today to kind of break down this all important update is Laura Xhaferaj, Senior Product Manager at Booking.com. Laura, thank you so much for being on the Suite Spot with me. Laura Xhaferaj: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. Ryan Embree: We’re excited to share this news. I mean, this is a huge update that Booking.com is about to roll out that has a huge impact on hoteliers and travelers alike. But before we get into sharing this news, I’d love to start, since this is your first time on the Suite Spot, share a little bit about your hospitality background and your role at Booking.com as Senior Product Manager with our Suite Spot audience. Laura Xhaferaj: I am the Senior Product Manager for user-generated content at Booking.com. And you may hear me refer to my team as UGC, I have been leading initiatives that improve how we showcase guest review across the platform. My journey in hospitality started years ago, even before I joined Booking.com, and I’ve always been passionate about enhancing travel experience, whether it’s helping hotels connect with guests or finding new ways to elevate guest satisfaction through reviews. Working with UGC, I got to build features that bring authentic travel voice into the booking experience globally. Ryan Embree: Yeah, I think this is one of those, I’m sure, an amazing role that you’re in to be able to kind of look and see what travelers are saying about their experiences with the hotel partners that you’re working with. Making sure that information is as accurate as possible so that guests and hotels alike can make the best booking decisions, make sure hotels are making the best operational decisions to improve the guest experience. So I’m sure it’s a really cool role to be in. You get a lot of feedback probably from both hoteliers as well as guests. At Travel Media Group we do a lot of innovation and, and updates and rollouts, sort of like what you’re going through and what we find is there’s always typically a why behind making these changes. Right. So I think maybe the best way to understand and update like this is to maybe talk about the guest review score update and the why behind it. Laura Xhaferaj: Of course, we initiated this change based directly on partner feedback partners highlighted that on our previous system, which calculated overall score using a simple average of users from the past three years had some key limitations for those who had made significant improvements such as renovations, upgrades in services or new guest facilities. The all the reviews still had too much weight slowing down the reflection of their progress. In response to this feedback, we are introducing a weighted review score where recent reviews have bigger influence. This adjustment means that hotels actively enhancing guest experience will see those efforts reflected more quickly in their scores, rewarding their commitment improvement. And it’s an update designed to encourage continuous progress and ensure travelers see the most relevant and recent experiences. Ryan Embree: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean this is what we talk to hotel partners all the time about, when they come to us and say, how can I improve my reputation? And maybe they have those reviews that just have been plaguing them for years. Obviously we’ve been having a staffing shortage in this industry for a while. You know, maybe there was a time where you were short staffed years ago that could still be having a really bad, uh, impact on reputation and you’re trying to play a little bit of catch up. So I think this is such a cool update needed. We spoke previously about, because with a rollout like this, Laura as you know, can’t just flick a switch. Right? I’m sure there’s a ton of research, ton of testing that’s done. We had spoke previously about the pilot markets and the comprehensive rollout of this update. Can you walk us through, give us a behind the scenes look of what that rollout looked like and really all the things that you did prior to officially announcing this guest review score update? Laura Xhaferaj: Certainly we took a phase approach to this rollout, starting with pilot countries to ensure a smooth transition. Our goal was to validate the concept with real data and learn directly from our partners about their needs. We began with smaller markets like Mountain and Iceland, and then expanded to larger regions such as Greece, Brazil, and Australia. During this pilot phases, we conducted interviews, sent surveys, and kept a close eye on how the change impacted partners and guests alike. One major insight was that partners prefer the preview period of two to three months to see the upcoming score change before it went live, which allows them to prepare and understand how their recent efforts are impacting their score. Another takeaway was the importance of clear accessible information about the change. Partners want detailed documentation, so we are committed to providing them with all the support they need. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and we’re gonna talk about a little bit about that support. Because obviously with a rollout like this, there’s always questions, right? There’s always a little bit of anxiety that comes around with any sort of change. So what would you say to those hoteliers that are wondering, listening to this podcast, maybe hearing about this guest review score update for the first time on this podcast? How is this gonna impact their score as this score update is rolled out and implemented? Laura Xhaferaj: This update is all about recognizing and rewarding effort for hoteliers. It means that they have a real opportunity to influence their review scores more quickly by focusing on guest satisfaction. The more you invest in the guest experience, the sooner you will see that reflected in your score. It’s a powerful motivator to keep listening to feedback and continuously improve, not just after the stay, but even during it. As guest share their experiences by addressing feedback during the trip hotel have a chance to make adjustments, real time turning potential issues into positive experiences that are reflected in their scores sooner than ever. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we talk about that all the time on this podcast, Laura, about trying to keep a close ear to your guests. That every touch point in the guest experience, it doesn’t, we don’t just have to wait until afterwards till we get that feedback. If you’re able to meet that guest where they might be having an issue or a positive experience too, that could be a great opportunity to encourage them, we see that you’re having a great time here. We’d love if you left us some comments and feedback. When you get that request for a review or solicitation for a review. Going back to the pilot, you know, we spoke about one of the things you looked at was seasonal properties, and I think this really demonstrates, Laura, when you do a rollout like this, just the meticulous planning of this rollout. You talked about seasonal properties and you talked about properties with fewer rooms that really could see a smaller review flow, right? I mean, a property with 500 rooms gonna see a lot more review flow than let’s say a 32 room bed and breakfast. Talk to us about the pilot results for this segment of properties and those that might be concerned, Hey, I’m a seasonal property, or I don’t get that many reviews. How is this gonna impact me? Laura Xhaferaj: Great point. Seasonal properties were definitely a focus. Imagine a beach villa in south of France that only operates in the summer. Reviews will likely peak during the season while the rest of the year it’s quieter. Through the pilot, we learned that partners of seasonal properties sometimes worried that a single negative review in the off season might drag down their overall score. In order to address this, we designed a system to weight reviews by recency. So even if you get a lower rating in the off season, it won’t have a major impact. Those fresh high season reviews will carry more weight and reflect the experiences that guests are having in your busiest times. Also, having the score logic be more sophisticated enables us to make the score more fair to different review volumes and distributions across the seasonal home and chain hotel properties. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we saw some of the results from that pilot and some impressive stats when it came to seasonal and even smaller volume of review properties still not having an impact, but not having a negative impact on their scoring. I think it really comes down to what you said, Laura, at the top of the episode. It’s gonna be for those hotels that are focusing on the guest experience today, how can they improve that today that are gonna really see the benefits of this rollout? And I think overall it’s gonna be great. We’re gonna talk about that in a second, but what about those properties that are a part of a hotel group or chain? Laura Xhaferaj: This update is especially positive news for hotel chains. We know the chains often maintain high standards across their properties and work hard to ensure consistent experience for guests. With a new weighted review system change that are actively improving guest satisfaction, we’ll see those efforts reflected more quickly in their scores. In fact, through our interviews and feedback sessions, we have found that many chain properties are genuinely excited about this change. They’re eager to see their score more accurately reflect the experience they have been they’re delivering today for change. This update means that they can make swift strategic adjustments and see the effort rewarded in their scores. This visibility into recent improvements is valuable asset for change committed to providing great stays globally. Ryan Embree: Yeah, I mean we’re hearing the same sentiment from our hotel partner our reputation hotel partners as well, Laura, that really put a lot of effort. I mean, think about how encouraging this will now be to, we just talked about it, a staffing shortage to say, Hey staff, let’s go out. Let’s get some five star positive reviews and now all of a sudden you can actually see an impact a lot quicker to your overall score than you might before this rollout. So this should be a really exciting and motivating time for hoteliers and their staffs to say, “Hey, we can make some major jumps on our score on Booking.com.” So really cool. But we really focus a lot on the hotelier and obviously this is a hotel marketing podcast, but ultimately I think this is gonna be mutually beneficial. That’s the beauty of our industry, right? We’re hoteliers as well as travelers. We do our own traveling and I think looking from a traveler’s perspective, this is gonna ultimately benefit them as well to put them in the best decision to make an informed booking decision based on recent review data. Laura Xhaferaj: Exactly. It’s a win-win for travelers. Recent experiences are crucial when choosing a stay. Research shows that travelers are more influenced by recent reviews than those from years back. So by focusing on recency, this update ensures that guests see an accurate reflection of the current guest experience at the property. For hotels, this means that guests will see the results faster, leading to better matches between traveler expectations and actual guest experience. This in turn, will trust and boost satisfaction for everyone. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. We talked about set the importance of setting proper expectations prior to a guest arriving. Some of those properties that have been performing at a four or 4.5 star service rating, but really in their overall store has been reflected a little bit lower because of maybe historical data. Should be really excited about this. I think this is a great way and way to look about this guest rollout, right? What advice, Laura? One of the biggest questions we get at Travel Media Group from our hotel partners is always looking to improve, right? Nobody’s satisfied with where they’re at. What advice would you share with hoteliers looking to improve their score on Booking.com, 2025 when this, this new rollout happens and beyond. Laura Xhaferaj: There are a few practical steps that hoteliers can take. First, make sure your property information is always accurate and up to date from photos to room description so guests know what to expect during their stay, provide helpful resources and ensure that you are available for any urgent issues after checkout. Encourage guests to share their feedback on Booking.com and remember, small gestures can make a big difference. A welcoming touch or a quick response to feedback can elevate the guest experience and boost satisfaction. Your score now reflects those efforts faster. So every improvement counts. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. I love that you brought up the speed of reaction, responding to a guest, the quicker that you can do that we even talked about even before leaving the review and trying to meet them at the guest experience to try to solve any issues or even solicit feedback during that time, I think is gonna be crucial during this rollout. Another thing I would say is just to be mindful of the score at all times. I mean, with something that can change so quickly now and you can have such an impact on it so quickly, it could be very fast changing. So making sure that you’re aware of getting notified, checking Booking.com of any recent reviews and feedback that are coming in. It’s gonna be very important to keep a close eye here because now those impacts can happen at a much faster pace. As we wrap up, as I mentioned at the top of the episode with a rollout like this, a global rollout like this, Laura, I’m sure you’re getting questions. You know, people want resources, they wanna find information. Where can our Suite Spot audience go if they still have questions about this rollout and the impacts that it’s gonna have? Laura Xhaferaj: We’ll provide extensive resources on partnerhub and through our review management platforms, partners can access documentation, best practices and guidance on these channels to understand the full scope of the update. Our support team is also on hand to answer any questions and guide partners as they adjust to the new system. Ryan Embree: And Laura and I will be conducting a webinar in early December as well to hotel partners to kinda roll through this, this guest update, make sure everyone has their questions answered. But overall, this is super exciting. Congratulations to you and your team. I’m sure this is a long time coming and I’m sure you’re anxious to get this rolled out for everyone. So as we wrap up today, Laura, any final thoughts, anything to share with our audience? Laura Xhaferaj: This update is all about valuing continuous improvement and enhancing guest satisfaction. We believe that we believe and have heard from partners that their system is fairer for everyone from partners to travelers, and it fosters healthy competition in the marketplace. For partners, it’s a chance to show their commitment to guest experience and see that care reflected in their score by focusing on creating memorable stays, staying engaged with guest feedback and keeping property details up to date partners can build strong reputations and attract even more travelers. Ryan Embree: Which is what everyone wants here listening to the podcast. And Laura, we appreciate you and your team, listening to that feedback from hoteliers and implementing these changes so that again, really a win-win situation for both the hotelier and the traveler. Thank you so much for joining me, Laura, explaining and understanding this new guest review score update. Thank you again. And we’re excited to be collaborating with you on a webinar like I said, next month with Booking.com. Laura Xhaferaj: Sure. And thank you for having me. We are super excited to see this change go live and thank you. Ryan Embree: All right, awesome. Thank you so much and thank you for listening to the Suite Spot. We will talk to you next time to join our loyalty program. Be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
In this special episode, Suite Spot Host, Ryan Embree covers 5 key takeaways from the 2024 The Hospitality Show that took place in San Antonio, Texas. The industry event was one-of-a-kind and featured incredible panelists, vendors, guest speakers, interviews, and much more from the hospitality industry. Tune in now to get the latest details from the event and why you should be excited for next year! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Ryan Embree here with the Suite Spot. Thank you so much for joining me today. Today is episode 151. Just want a moment to recognize 151 episodes. Wanna thank our audience, uh, for being with us, uh, whether this is your first episode or 151, thank you so much for all the support and we are so excited to bring you another incredible episode. This, as you can see from the title The Hospitality Show, are five key takeaways. We just returned from San Antonio. In fact, again, just like last year’s takeaway episode, I haven’t even had the opportunity to do my laundry to get in my normal Travel Media Group attire. So, I was just so wanting to get these takeaways to you from the episode. First off, an absolutely incredible event. The Hospitality Show, this is the second annual one put on. The first one was last year. Inaugural show was last year in Las Vegas. This in San Antonio. Want to thank the city of San Antonio for hosting to our A HLA Questex. They put on an incredible show to all the sponsors. If you have not already looked into or are thinking about attending the hospitality show, it is a must attend event. So many interviews, so many insights, content. They had some incredible keynotes, guest speakers, so many cool activities. And of course, hospitality. You have to be able to throw a party and host people, right? And they absolutely nailed it in San Antonio, celebrating Dia de DEOs. Just did a fantastic job. So let’s get into some of these takeaways that I got, and it’s gonna start with one of the most prevalent topics and patterns, ai, in fact, in these top five takeaways, two of my key takeaways have to do with ai. The first is, from a hotelier’s perspective, seems to be this just battle right now of where AI is best utilized with our industry. And there’s this push and pull, whether it’s for efficiency, reducing costs, which we know right now is really, really hurting a lot of hotels across the nation, whether it’s rising construction costs, operational costs, staffing and wages continue to grow, uh, and get more costly. So is it for efficiency that it’s best use? Or is it to drive revenue? Right? Top line revenue. And, and there was kind of this, this little just debate of, of what is AI best used for right now? And, uh, you know, there was a, a incredible panel on ai. There were several of them, but the one I had the pleasure, uh, there was one guest speaker who kind of talked through the stages of AI and where we are and actually broke it down into three stages. And we’re on the precipice of, of the third right now. So go through the first one, which was predictive, right? That’s your chat, GPT just kind of giving us maybe, hey, write me an email answering sort of questions for you. Uh, and then we kind of slowly moved into this co-pilot. You know, you see a lot of these big companies kind of roll out this co-pilot that was really supposed to do actions for you. And now the panelists has had kind of challenged that were into this third, which is assistive and, uh, autonomous and agent kind of stage of ai where this would be kind of the human touch mix with ai. And I think he’s, he’s definitely onto something as far as, you know, some of the things that we really could make more efficient portfolio requests, right? That was the great example of how many portfolio requests. And yet there still has to be human touch involved. And if we can just figure out a way to kind of use AI to really, you know, help us expedite that process and become more efficient, think of how much time that’s giving back your staff. How many times, uh, we’re answering that phone call, answering that email, text message for a portfolio request, right? You know, in fact, one of the panelists was talking about kind of the, the gap in technology in our industry specifically and saying that we’re definitely making progress, but are we there? And, and her cited example was, was ordering room service, right? So we’ve got this great QR code, you look at the menu and everything like that, you still have to pick up a manual phone or your cell phone to order it from the hotel. So we start there, we start at this technologically, you know, sound place with the QR code, but then at the very end we’re, we have to get these, we have to get that human touch involved. And if there’s a way to automate that process, again, how much smoother and efficient and for the guest side that’s gonna feel and impact the guest experience, which what we’re trying to do, you know, I was talking to Alexi Kajavi president at Questex Hospitality and Wellness about this in our interview, which, um, all of the interviews that, that I’m gonna be talking about today on this episode, you can find on our YouTube page, we’re gonna be releasing them over the next couple weeks. And I was talking to him about, there’s gotta be a feeling of this fomo when it comes to AI for hoteliers. You know, there was someone from Salesforce on a panel talking about how they have implemented AI into their work processes and order to essentially get a year’s worth of rollouts and updates into one quarter. And you hear something like that from a hotelier standpoint and you say, am I really taking advan full advantage of what AI is? And I think we have these grand ideas of when we hear ai, when we hear, you know, technology within the hotel industry. I think we go straight to maybe some sci-fi esque type things where, you know, you’ve got the robots delivering things, you’re going ultra speed when it comes to your operations to processes, you can cut down on staff. And I certainly think that there’s going to be a time where we get there, but really right now it’s becoming small steps. How do we implement the power of AI in our everyday lives as hoteliers? You know, one of the things we did at Travel Media Group was launch the guest experience snapshot, which looks at your guest reviews. AI gets that information and kind of summarizes that information, gets it back to you, not just with emojis or a thumbs up or thumbs down, but actually blurbs bullet points into what guests are actually saying about their stay. And then it actually provides you with suggestions and recommendations on what you can do to improve the guest experience. So, small example there, but a very powerful way to implement AI into your everyday operations so you can feel a little bit better about when that question’s asked of, are you truly taking advantage of AI and it’s power and capability? You can at least say, yes, I’m on the path to doing that. ’cause I think right now we’re at that place where a lot of hoteliers, if you ask them, are you taking full advantage? They’ll probably answer no. But if you ask them what pieces of the hotel operation have changed since you implemented ai, I think there’s a lot of hoteliers that can say yes. You know, we have implemented some AI into our everyday operations, and if we can just take those baby steps, you know, hospitality, we love it as an industry, but we’re very slow to implement technology. You know, COVID, uh, certainly accelerated that path. AI’s gonna continue to do that, but overall, there’s a whole panel and session on this is how can we accelerate technology into our industry? But it really should be about empowering, uh, your employees. So how can I use AI to again, assist with portfolio polls a request when guests are are asking me, how can I summarize my guest feedback like the TMG guest experience snapshot, these little things. And, and with a younger generation kind of coming into the workforce, a lot of these college kids right now have had chat GBT for the last two years, right? They’ve probably been told not to use it in their college courses, but as they graduate and get to the workforce, guess what they are going to be used to working with these AI and new technology. So if you don’t have something laid out or if you have an inefficient process, a manual process, it really could hurt you in the recruiting front too. Your younger generation, that younger generation coming up into the hospitality, that new generation that we’re talking about on the college campus call that we did at the Suite Spot, they’re ready for that. They’re, they have an appetite for new technology. Make sure that you’re providing that for them. So AI from a hotelier’s perspective, number one, key takeaway number two, FMB is the place to be. Okay? So a lot of talk about FMB in the hotel. Now, FMB has always been ingrained in the guest experience, the hotel. And in fact, we had an amazing guest that we interviewed at the Hospitality Show from Hampton by Hilton, uh, sharing some really tasty news about a, uh, brand new waffle that was just introduced at Hilton. But now hotels are starting to think beyond breakfast. You know, there’s a reason why that is. On our guest sentiment reports at Travel Media Group, there’s a reason why breakfast and f and B always find its way into the top 10 and sometimes even top five most mentioned tags in guest reviews. It’s a major piece of a hotel experience. And hoteliers are seeing that. The hospitality show really leaned into that this year for the first time, they had an outdoor hospitality showcase where they were showing really creative ways that you could use your outdoor space for f and b, whether that’s bar, whether that’s food. You had, uh, uh, an incredible keynote from Jose Andres, the, uh, famed restaurateur and philanthropist who had just some incredible stories with some recent natural disaster and how food and hospitality, he was also really grateful and thankful for those hotels that stay open during those natural disasters so that he and his team can go into these disaster areas and provide food for those that are most need at that time. But it goes beyond that, you know, hotel restaurants, you know, I had Paul Cory on from Cory Hospitality, he mentioned it. Hotel restaurants are now becoming community gathering spots. We’re seeing at Travel Media Group more interest than ever on hoteliers and properties that we work with that wanna manage their online reputation and, and respond to their, uh, guest reviews that are leaving reviews about their restaurants because they know that that’s a powerful differentiator for their property. This is also a really amazing opportunity for you to showcase your local area, your culture, personalization, hotels, new developments. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing multiple GMs, managing director of brand new developments. And the place where I really hear the passion shine through in those episodes is when they’re talking about their f and b and the meticulous planning that goes around those restaurants, hoteliers, developers, they’re seeing this as a, a revenue generator. It’s a differentiator. And it’s also, again, a way for you to really embrace your local area, your culture. I mean, San Antonio, we had the Chief Strategy Officer from Visit San Antonio, another interview we conducted at the Hospitality Show. He was talking all about how they’re really focused on Michelin’s coming to Texas for the first time, how they’re really focusing on cuisine and, uh, f and b travel, which is, is is a growing, growing trend right now. So f and b, certainly the place to be. My second key takeaway at the Hospitality show. Third key takeaway, sustainability. I love these conferences be, I love the hospitality show in general because all of the brands, all of the power players from management companies are present at this show. They have a a, a really big presence there. And what you find is in hospitality, obviously there’s a lot of differences, but there’s a lot of the same. And those big issues like sustainability, responsible, uh, green travel starts to rise to the top. You had multiple brands making commitments that we’ve seen over the last couple years to green initiatives. One of the panelists kind of use the phrase little to bigs. So over the years, if you’ve traveled anywhere, you’ve probably seen those small shampoo or lotion bottles, body wash, and now those were used to be those little plastic containable. Now we’re in kind of a dispenser mode, right? So you’re little to bigs. There was some incredible stats shared of the plastic and frankly, the savings that were, uh, monetary savings that were associated, uh, with that trend and how more and more ho hotels are adopting this. But one thing I would challenge the ho hotel and hospitality industry to do is to really educate the guests on why we’re making these changes. I think one of the best things that really became popular, you know, three to five years ago was the housekeeping rule, right? Keeping your towels up versus throwing ’em on the floor knowing if you wanted a fresh towel or not, right? That was effectively communicated to the guests and there was a real reason and kind of responsibility around it as your guests to make that decision. You almost felt accountable for that. If you were keeping your towel, you know, you felt maybe a little bit like you were doing a little bit of good, right? A little bit of green travel there. Some of these changes that we’re implementing are fantastic for sustainable travel. They just have to be properly communicated to our guests, right? Recent example for me personally was at a a, a great hotel in San Antonio. The water pressure was a little bit lower than I preferred, right? But as, as I’m sitting there thinking about that, wishing that water pressure was a little higher, I started thinking, well, maybe this was a, a something implemented from the hotel for a low flow, uh, water system for green as kind of a sustainable initiative for the property. But I didn’t see any sort of cards talking about that. You know, I didn’t see anything that communicated to me that that was the case. Now, I knew that because I work in the hospitality industry and I knew that that is a sustainable practice that hotels do, but for a lot of guests they don’t know that, right? So challenging hotels to really communicate any from anything locally sourced food at your f and b, if that’s locally sourced, that goes a long way. Your guests will appreciate that. Any green initiative, make sure that’s communicated. It makes for some great social media posts. Goodwill could be a differentiator for you, especially with the younger generation, which we’re gonna talk about. You know, corporate travel, they’re gonna start looking a lot closer at this. I heard, you know, the other day talking about monetary budget and a carbon budget on corporate travel. They are going to start really focusing in on those properties, those hotels, cities in general that have really green sustainable practices that they’re implementing at their properties. You know, some of the questions that were raised on the sustainable panel, things like renovations, right? I think a stat was brought up where there was actually more of an environmental impact on bringing in all the materials that they needed for that renovation than it was actually the efficiency savings that they were gonna get post renovation. So how do we manage that? Sourcing our materials for renovations? What do we do with the waste Best? Western was talking about how they implemented something where there needs to be 50 inch TVs in all of their hotels by a certain date. Some of the franchisees were asking, what do we do these existing TVs, right? Isn’t that creating more waste? So these are important questions that our industry has to answer for the most part. The good news is, is that we’re getting there, we’re making progress. A lot of commitments. A HLA, there’s some amazing things with Green Key Global, which they just announced this past year, absolutely amazing to see. It’s gonna start impacting bookings. I talked about this, especially younger travelers who prioritize this. This is something that’s important to them, right? We think of when I pick a hotel location, a price, we could see a day where a traveler looks at price, location reviews and they also could look at what’s the green initiatives? What’s my carbon footprint? We’re already seeing that on airlines that will show you the carbon footprint that you’re taking. Which one is most efficient as far as your flight goes. So I it is, it is not within the realm and it’s also gonna be, IM important to recruiting employees, right? When you’re talking about hiring someone and you’re able and, and they’re looking at a job, a front desk agent for your property or the property next door, very similar pay, very similar location. Maybe opportunity for growth is a distinguishing factor that you prioritize sustainability in your operations at your hotel. That is absolutely something that someone would find as compelling and could be a, a positive differentiator for you in your recruitment efforts. So again, keep all of that in mind as you move forward and start to implement these practices moving forward. We had credible idea that’s being implemented right now. One of the Suite Spot guests that we had, uh, I believe a year ago said along with the physical invoice, you know, monetary invoice for your stay, you also were included a carbon invoice. So you know, the carbon footprint that essentially your stay cost quote unquote. I just think really, really creative idea. There could be something where, you know, people get competitive showcase that online could make for some great marketing. So sustainability, uh, my key takeaway number three from the hospi, the 2024 hospitality show. Number four, back to ai. This is where we started the episode. We talked about AI with hotels, hotel owners and and management and operations. What about AI and the travelers journey? Really, really cool things that we heard could be coming down the pike. Travel planning with ai. You know, one of the things that the panelists was talking about, how the younger generation has shown that they are prioritizing experience, overt material. That is fantastic news for the hotel industry. They are gonna continue to do just as much research as you would do on Amazon. If you’re buying a new car. Think about the amount of research that you do when you’re buying a new car. So this younger generation that is prioritizing experience over material. They are going to do their due diligence, they have the channels to do it, and they have maybe different channels that we’ve been prioritizing as a hotel industry, right? Social media, we’ve seen completely be a place where TikTok right now is more of a search engine than Google. For some hotels, that’s a scary thought, especially if you don’t have an account. Instagram is someone where they’re sharing information. But with that, a big thing that they were talking about AI and maybe some of the kind of caution flags for hotels out there in hospitality is we’re gonna fake feedback is gonna become a real problem here soon. Whether that’s deep fake images, fake blog posts, fake guest reviews, we know that that’s a huge problem. This is gonna continue to be an issue for hotels and it’s really going to impact those that really rely too heavily on AI to create content for them online authenticity is was the word of the year last year, right? And it’s only going to become more powerful. If you can create authentic experience that guests share a trusted guest share on credible sources out there, you will have an advantage because this fake feedback is limitless. Really. If you wanted to create as much fake imagery about your hotel, you can, there’s ai, generat, uh, image generators out there, but it’s gonna negatively impact your business. In fact, one of the suggestions was actually to hire a team and that we might see this in the future, a team to audit your online presence to look for fake feedback, look for fake images, fake blogs, anything that looks inauthentic online. The more we see this, the more especially younger generation who’s coming up, they have a lot of money now. They’re getting into the workforce, they’re starting to travel more. They are able to see this with a different eye than we were five years ago. ’cause it just wasn’t as prevalent. So number four, key takeaway AI in the traveler’s journey. I’m excited every, everyone on this listening to this podcast is a traveler. So there, there’s some really cool, innovative ways that you can start searching for travel, but it’s going to be the hotels on the other side that are leveraging that properly and authentically that are going to have the competitive advantage there. Last and final key takeaway, this is the first year that they actually conducted these on the main stage was the GM of the Year awards. And the reason, this is my fifth takeaway. We just work in such an awesome industry. Some of the nominees, winners and their stories. I would absolutely encourage you look up that GM of the year and hear some of the stories and you will just be moved by the hospitality spirit in some of these people. Um, from everything for people that have been in this industry for 35, 40 years and still have a passion for it and have, you know, we talk about in sports how coaches typically have coaching trees and the amount of managers and hospitality leaders that one person can impact is absolutely insane to think about. And when it’s, when it’s recognized, it’s such a powerful thing to, you know, helping people in natural disasters. You know, one of the GMs was recognized, you know, had to go through those fires last year in Hawaii. And to hear the stories and how that hotel opened its doors to its employees, to the local community and the impact that that hotels and hoteliers have on their, their local community can’t be understated. And it was a very, very powerful piece. I’m so happy that that was on highlighted and showcased on the main stage this year. I hope they continue to do it again. We just have such an incredible industry. We had the pleasure of interviewing one of the GM of the Year nominees, Michael Milon, and we have an interview with him. He’s also an FIU professor, so we got to talk about our visit there in the Suite Spot college campus cr. But yeah, my fifth and final takeaway, it’s just, we just are in such incredible industry. It’s to hear, uh, some of those stories was just so inspiring. So happy that they do that because that’s really what makes our industry great, is the people that work there. So those are my five key takeaways from the second annual Hospitality show. So happy that I was able, that had the pleasure of, of joining Plan on being there in Denver next October. Plan for it as well. Again, if you haven’t been thinking about it, definitely make the trip. It is well worth it. Thank you for listening to The Suite Spot and we’ll talk to you next time.To join our loyalty program, be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
1 150 – Introducing: Guest Experience Snapshot powered by TMG OneView®AI 22:30
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22:30The Guest Experience Snapshot powered by TMG Oneview® AI is here! Tune in to hear from the Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group, Jason Lee, on the latest technological innovation being offered to hoteliers as a part of our digital solutions for hotels. This new offering uses generative AI in a unique way to help hoteliers interpret guest feedback and dial in on how they can improve the guest experience at their properties Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. If you are watching us here on YouTube, we have a few announcements to make. First, we’ve hit an incredible milestone. This is Suite Spot, 150 episodes. Thank you all. I just wanna take a moment before we get started on this great episode that we have today to thank everyone for taking the time to listen to us for all of your support. You know, 150 episodes is something absolutely insane saying it out loud. So again, thank you. And we have a very familiar guest who I feel like we’ve been on quite a number of these episodes. Jason, our Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group. Jason Lee, thank you again for joining me on the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Thank you, Ryan. Really excited to talk to you about this today. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re super excited. And if you’re watching us, like I said on YouTube, if you’re not, first of all encourage you go to our YouTube channel, you’re gonna find some exclusive content there that you’ll only find on YouTube. But if you are watching us on YouTube, you’ll see we might have a little bit different feel and vibe. We have moved into a brand new Suite Spot. We are so excited to showcase this new space. It was custom built. You are gonna see all types of new looks from this space. New, exciting content, so be sure to follow and subscribe The Suite Spot. We’ve got so much jam packed for you. But speaking of innovation and new, that is exactly what we’re here to talk about. Jason, we have had a number of episodes talking about the incredible developments that you and your dev team here at Travel Media Group and some of the innovation that you’ve put out there. This might be one of the most innovative, the guest experience snapshot powered by TMG OneView ai. Before we get talking about it, what we’ve come to learn is with these innovations, there’s always kind of a story or a why behind it. Walk us through that with this guest experience snapshot. Jason Lee: Well, for a long time, I mean, we obviously accumulate reputation data. So we’re, we get data from all the sites, we get it from all the hotels. And so we have been, anybody who’s seen any of our stuff knows, we have lots of numbers, lots of ways of kind of creating different types of metrics, and showing those metrics in various forms. And I think that’s really sort of industry standard where we get a metric or a KPI, we sit on that, we manage to that. And in some ways you sort of lose like what that KPI is for. So you’re sort of like almost the purpose for your improvement of a KPI is the KPI. Instead of for what the KPI was originally for. And I think with reputation, we sort of get into that where you have so much data that you sort of lose, you lose track of what is most important. And so what we wanted to do is even going deeper than sentiment analysis. So sentiment analysis really was this natural language processing that we have been doing for quite a while where we take sentence chunks and we look at word modifiers and things like that to create positive, neutral and negative statements inside of a review and then take those down further into the various aspects of a guest stay. With this though, with generative AI, we have an opportunity to actually pull even further than that and take, it’s not just the metrics. So what you’ll find is when you look at the guest experience snapshot, there is no metric on it. It’s literally the text of the guest. It’s the experience a guest had and the text that multiple guests had. So the text that of that experience. So for example, if a bunch of guests really loved the experience at the front desk with, with the staff at the front desk, you would see most guests mention an amazing front desk experience. And then there might be a front desk clerk’s name called out inside of that sentence. And then you’ll see maybe 17 mentions. And so what that’s doing then is it’s saying, here’s sort of like, it’s accumulating all of this text and saying from that, here’s this thing that went right. And then the same thing for thing, something that went wrong. And in the industry we really don’t have anything like that. I think TripAdvisors sort of went out there and created sort of a summary of guest sentiment that they put out. They’re like, oh, this is AI generated and it’s a summary of guest sentiment. But inside of like the ops side or where I’m maybe even evaluating what’s going on at this hotel from a management standpoint, all I have is metrics I don’t have unless I read one review at a time. Ryan Embree: Well, to put it in perspective, Jason, the educational webinars that we put on with reputation and social media, one of my kind of best practices was to physically print out some of your reviews and start highlighting those keywords that you’re seeing over and over again. So this is obviously the more technological next step to that, but also can give you some insights on how to improve on maybe the things that you’re falling short of. Jason Lee: No, absolutely. And I think that’s again, what makes this so powerful is that you’re coming out of maybe the emotion of a number, you know, and the emotion around the number to a KPI that you’re now getting into actual guest sentiment. The other issue with single review analysis, let’s say, is that it’s easy, very easy and common for you to take an issue, a single issue that a guest had and discard that as a one-off to say that this was circumstantially, this series of events happened, that this guest had a bad stay or they had a bad experience here, but this only happened to this guest, not to anybody else. So what we sort of see it, we see it in aggregate. So we sort of, of, as we’re responding to reviews or even looking at review data as a whole, we can sort of see this bigger picture. But as you’re sort of ingesting review by review either through alert system of your brand or through one view with TMG, you’re still just getting these little snippets instead of all this together. So what the other big purpose of this is to create this thing called interrater reliability, which basically, so in order for there to be a sentence chunk in the guest experience snapshot, multiple guests are, have to have had the same experience. And so that’s another big, the very, it’s a key point of this. So this is also something, so that’s why we start with positive and then go to negative is that you have a bunch of guests that are having great experiences. Here they are. Right. And then here you have the same, you have another bunch of guests that are having experiences that, that are really an opportunity operationally or an opportunity from a service standpoint, but you can now see them and you can’t discount it as a one-off. Ryan Embree: And sometimes that’s tough to do because, one of the things that now I challenge hoteliers with this, with this guest experience snapshot is say, what do you think are issues at your property? And match them up against what people are actually saying in your reviews, or what do you think people love about your property? And see if there’s alignment there. I think as hoteliers, we tend to think that we know our hotel better than anyone else, but our guests are really telling us at a moment’s notice what are the positive and negative things that they are experiencing at that time. And as we know, not every single person is going to a review site to leave that feedback. So if your inner rate of reliability is 6 or 7 mentions on an issue, that could really be three to four, five times more than what you’re seeing and guests are experiencing. Jason Lee: Correct. I think you take really, like probably the key pieces of sentiment, right? So probably the most looked at piece of sentiment is cleanliness. So you look at cleanliness, often we will see positive and negative cleanliness sentiment, and they will, they will be the top numbers. They’ll be the most people mentioned cleanliness, and the most people mentioned dirtiness. So it fits into that cleanliness, positive negative. So you have the same thing actually in the guest experience snapshot, but what we find in the guest experience snapshot is different types of mentions of cleanliness. I loved how the pool area was clean and beautiful. I loved the lobby. Right. And then there might be another mention there, then there’s multiple mentions of a bathroom issue. So when you see that you can, it’s way more you can diagnose that so much easier than saying, well, some of the guests like cleanliness and some of ’em don’t. It’s a 50/50. Ryan Embree: And it’s one of those things where if guests are reading reviews about your cleanliness in a negative light before they’ve even stepped on property, that has lowered the bar for what they think clean is for your property, they could come in and see if they’ve been reading all day reviews on multiple sites about, Hey, this room is dirty, you’re gonna come in naturally with a different eye than if you would’ve come in and not known that information. So this is really good to kind of take from an operational standpoint, but the AI doesn’t stop there, which is giving you that information. It actually gives you some ways to improve the guest experience too, which I think is really, really cool and unique. Jason Lee: Yeah. So we didn’t want to just leave it at that. And that’s why we also have these bundled in months. That’s why it’s a month at a time. And so we added something called recommendations, and it’s a really cool part of this, and it probably was the trickiest piece of training that we did by far. Because if you kind of leave generative AI to its own devices, it kind of, it says a bunch of crazy stuff. So we had to really reign it in and take real world scenarios and real world fixes. But what’s kind of cool about this is that things that you sort of go, you look at that are, that are maybe causing guest friction, but you as a hotel, you look at and you’re like, eh, you know what, how am I gonna change that? My hotel’s near a busy road? How am I gonna change roads? I can’t do that. So some of the recommendations that we have are really more, maybe not as much about how do you fix that? How do you fix the physical plant of your property? But it’s more about how do you inform guests? How do you create a situation where guests know the situation they’re walking into, you put them in the best possible position to set an expectation for their stay. And so some of that has to do with that. It’s about training your front desk to handle these situations in a different way. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And you know, it’s educating the guests before they arrive. We’ve talked about that. By doing that in things like review responses, social media makes for a great way to do that. You know, one of the examples would be if someone says the lack of variety of food within your breakfast, right? Instead of maybe just talking about your breakfast on social media, show exactly what that breakfast looks like. And then all of a sudden, now I know what to expect when I come on property. I’m not expecting this breakfast buffet, this giant breakfast buffet. I know exactly what I’m getting. Might not necessarily turn it around and say, this is a great variety, but it actually will lessen the blow and maybe improving your reputation on a few points. But it could be something where that recommendation also says maybe add variety. Right? And talk about that. And we’ve heard stories. I mean, we talk to hoteliers every single day and encourage them to make little tweaks and changes like that. And the guest experience snapshot, month over month looking at that will give you a good indicator of the sentiment of what guests are feeling about those changes. Jason Lee: Absolutely. It’s that kind of like, interesting thing. So it’s not like we’re telling you how to run your hotel. It’s just giving you some, like, some ideas that these little irritants that are happening. I’ll give you an example. We had a hotel, that we sort of were looking at from the beginning. And so we’ve had this now live for three months, and in the first month we noticed that they were having issues with their shower doors, like the doors specifically. There was a bunch of mentions in the first, in the first time we looked at it. And so the next month came, and again, there were mentions of the doors and it had a little bit of a different text, but it was the same mention. The third one had the same mention. And so, you know, so the recommendations are sort of like varying a little bit, but still trying to be like, Hey, you know, I wanna look into this. And I do think it’s those kinds of things, is keeping it top of mind. You’re not gonna fix everything all the time. You know, there’s things that, that are gonna be stuff that maybe are part of your renovation or they’re part of other things, but it’s about awareness that they’re causing guest friction. And talking to that, one thing that’s sort of hard in operations is you’re, you’re balancing so many other things and just getting to that space where you’re saying, yeah, this is a problem. And admitting that to yourself and saying, yeah, this is a problem. But then being proactive about it. I guarantee any hotel you’re listening to this podcast right now has rooms at their hotel right now that they rent last. It’s like the last rooms I rent because I know there’s problems. So I know there’s gonna be issues down this corridor. But that’s what this is really about. It’s about taking this data and making it very accessible, very usable. Ryan Embree: And we’ve spent a lot of time on this podcast episode talking about the negative things. And one of the things is it also provides all the great sentiment that guests are saying, and this could be a great gameplan and blueprint for you for a social media strategy if you are seeing that people love attractions, restaurants, location, start sharing the businesses that are near your location to just even further amplify all the things that guests love about the property. So I know we’ve talked a lot about recommendations and fixing things and obviously the things, the low hanging fruit that we can fix to improve the guest experience, we’re always looking to do that. But it’s also a great guidebook on using what people, what guests love to market the hotel. Right? Jason Lee: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s a lot of really great points inside there, and I think social media is a great place to use it. So, you know, we have really friendly people at our front desk and our guests talk to us about it all the time. You know, why not, why not mention it? Ryan Embree: And there’s also some really cool use case and potentially using competitor data, right? We’ve talked about that on this podcast, on educational webinars. Sometimes when you’re reading those reviews about guest cleanliness and you don’t happen to have a cleanliness problem highlighting things like a housekeeper for the month, talking about your cleanliness protocols, subconsciously, when you see that and your competitors have struggling with their cleanliness scores, now all of a sudden you have the upper hand competitive advantage. And we’re always looking for that, especially in a really crowded competitive market there. Jason Lee: But I think this type of data to your point where you were just talking about, I think you can print this out and bring it to your front desk meeting. Talk about the positive things that are going on. Really praise people for the, the positive comments that are coming in and then say, Hey, and then we also add some stuff we need to work on for this month, you know, and let’s, let’s, let’s do it. We will revisit this next month. So it’s a, it’s kind of a cool way to, you know, same thing with housekeeper maintenance, but it, I think it’s a very kind of portable, cool thing you can use inside of these meetings to help make things better. Ryan Embree: Yeah. It’s so cool. And, and be mindful also of the season at which you’re looking at this, right? I always talk about summer being the ultimate stress test for a lot of these properties. You might be able to keep that room that you were talking about unoccupied throughout the winter just because your occupancy isn’t there. But all of a sudden, on summer you’re renting that thing every single night. And problems maybe that were like minor issues are now starting to bubble up into major problems during those summer months. We saw an influx, a huge influx. I mean, you guys were on pace for responding to reviews to what, what was the number? Jason Lee: Like over 40,000 a month. Ryan Embree: Yeah. An incredible amount of reviews, which is fantastic, bcause a lot of hoteliers saw those guests. And that made for a very busy travel season. But it also can really uncover some things looking year to year, month to month, all of those variables there are gonna really create some cool patterns and trends. Give you some extra insights into the, the property. Jason Lee: Yeah. We launched this in summer, so we did see a lot of, like, to your point, we saw a lot of AC climate control stuff. You know, because it could be going back to a stress test. It’s your first stress test, with a full hotel and everybody using the AC. Ryan Embree: Let’s talk about AI because I feel like one of the things that we’ve been seeing, whether it be on social media or reading and publications and stuff like that, is the use case for AI within hospitality typically in an industry that I would argue is a little bit slower to get to technology, implement technology, but we respond to reviews. Right. Super important. We’ve talked about the importance of responding reviews, hit some milestones with, I think we’re closer to 1.8 million guest reviews responded to. Maybe there’s some hoteliers on here that are saying, well, why not use AI for responding to reviews? What would you say to those hoteliers? Jason Lee: Generative AI has come a very long way, and it feels like almost like weekly. New models are coming out, new pieces to this puzzle are coming out. So not just text, but also image and other stuff that it’s just unbelievable. Just incredible. But we’re still kind of in this weird space, I think, and especially when it comes to review response. So I think you get to this space where you can, there’s spots where you could use it but not yet hear. And the reason why we have not gone there and, and we’re actually really careful about this and very deliberate about this. We’re using it in tech summary and some of these other places to create better analytics. But when it comes to communicating with the guests, we’re very deliberate in that space. And the reason why we are is because we see that as actual communication. We don’t see that as some sort of throwaway platitude from AI. We see this as, this is a, this is a human being who stayed with us, and we want to be as part of that conduit between the hotel and their guest. Our responsibility is to represent them in the best possible way, not just to the guest who wrote it, but to all the people that read it. And we think, you know, the primary pillars of of review response have to do with communication. It’s authentic communication to the guest who wrote this review. And if you do that correctly, you do that in a really sincere way, it resonates with the guest who’s reading it. And guess what, you get some dividends with the OTAs for responding to all your reviews and other things on top of that, you know, you get three really powerful pieces of ROI out of review response. But I think if you don’t have that first part, if that is insincere and that’s funky, and AI uses very specific language. And you’ll see vocabulary that is not normally used in the course of communication that a lot of AI uses. You could spot it in emails that you get sometimes you spotted in these various spots. And, and I guarantee an insincere, verbose response is probably AI or template. And so we don’t use either at this point, you know, in the foreseeable future, especially for negative reviews, I don’t ever see that happening just because you have to be, I think in the moment, sincere acknowledging the issue and looking to create recovery. Ryan Embree: And what I would say to that is, if not in hospitality, then where, right? I mean, as far as we are looking for a human to human, as we’ve learned, this is the oldest industry out there hosting people. What have we heard over the years of, oh, well at one point we’re just gonna have a virtual check-in and that’s never come to pass. And how many times are we seeing that sometimes a experience is make or break at the front desk because of another person behind the desk? And I think that is a great illustration of why this human to human communication, can it be done? Sure. But it’s not gonna be as impactful. And as you mentioned, as more inauthentic communication begins to rise. And we’re seeing that in our emails every single day. The authenticity is gonna start to bloom out of these organizations and companies and businesses that really embrace that. Well said on your end, this guest experience snapshot, it’s so cool to see AI come to Travel Media Group and this be the first way that it is because it goes back to where Travel Media Group started, which was to help hoteliers. Help hoteliers improve the guest experience. And that’s exactly what this cool innovative tool is doing. So congratulations to and your team Jason, on this. Any final thoughts before we wrap up? Jason Lee: Yeah. You know, I will say, just one last thing. As I always do. Ryan Embree: That’s why we have the question in here. Jason Lee: I think all of this is really what Travel Media Group does or what we try to do. What I aim for on a regular basis with our review response team, our social media team, our development team, is that what we’re able to do is we’re able to focus here, we’re able to focus on reputation, we’re able to focus on the information, we’re able to focus on responses, we’re able to do that because we’re not operating because we’re not doing these other things. And so we’re able to really care about this. And we do. And I think that, you know, really is what all of these tools are about. It’s about giving you the information in a way that’s palatable, giving you the information in a way that’s accessible, but also helping, helping in a way that you might not even be able to help yourself just because of the level of care and focus that we have on it. And, and I really, I mean, I passionately believe in this part of the guest experience that this is their final experience with your hotel and we are just so committed. I know this is a sales pitch, Ryan, but I’m gonna say it anyway, but we are so committed to making sure that that experience is meaningful and impactful. Ryan Embree: Yeah. Well, it certainly felt and the way that you talk about it and the solutions and innovations that you and your team are developing over in development. So congratulations again, any hotelier listening to this or your hotel portfolio of hotels, this is something that if you reach out to us, we can give you a guest experience snapshot. We’ve got a live demo that we are putting on together. Would love to get you this information. If anything, like I said, make it a challenge. I think these are the five things that issues with my property right now. Here are the five things that people love, see how many of them match up. And, you know, it’s just cool information to see and how AI is continuing to kind of change our hospitality world. So thank you Jason. And thanks for joining me on The Suite Spot for 150. Jason Lee: Thanks Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah, thanks. And we’ll talk to you next time on The Suite Spot. To join our loyalty program, be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host, Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
The Suite Spot visits the Hyde Midtown Miami in the next episode of the Spotlight series. General Manager of the hotel, Henry Martinez joins the podcast to give travelers an insightful look into the guest experience and what makes the property one-of-a-kind for travelers. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. We are not here at our Travel Media Group studio. Instead, we are live on-site for another incredible and amazing edition of our TMG Suite Spot: Spotlight series. We’ve got such an exciting property to showcase today and an amazing guest to do it with. Henry Martinez, General Manager of the Hyde Midtown Miami. Henry, thank you so much for being on the podcast with me. Henry Martinez : Well, thank you for hosting me. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re excited about it. Before we get into this incredible property that I just had the pleasure of touring all around and seeing, let’s talk about your hospitality journey. This is one of the most unique things in our industry. Everyone coming from all aspects of maybe not starting in hospitality, but ending up there. Uh, what made you fall in love with hospitality? Where’s your journey and, and led you here to the Hyde Midtown Miami? Henry Martinez : Excellent. Absolutely. Well, first I’d like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with you and your audience a bit about our hotel. So how my journey started, I went to college unsure what to study and with very limited knowledge of the English language. So I took a career exploration test. Now I think it’s called a career workshop, which is an aptitude test. And that test is designed to determine a person’s ability or propensity to succeed in a given activity. Meaning there’s really no right or wrong answer, and to no surprise hospitality came on top. So my career in hospitality truly expands over two decades, working at seven different properties and opening four hotels, beginning as a front desk agent. I quickly advanced through various roles within the rooms division, and eventually stepping into leadership positions such as director rooms and director of operations. In April of 2022, I was honored to take the role of general manager of Hyde Midtown Miami. Each step of the journey has prepared me to do what I love the most, which is interacting with people and trying to make a difference in their lives. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a common story that we hear, is a lot of hospitality leaders didn’t really think about hospitality as a career, and then once they get into it, they really find a passion for it and a love for it. So fantastic to hear. I came from very similar beginnings, front desk, work your way up. You know, that’s what the stories that we love to hear about with this. So let’s move on to this incredible property that we’re at right now. Had the amazing privilege, like I said, to tour it with you this morning to show me the grounds. But before we get into talking about specific amenities or the room types, talk to me a little bit about the history of the project and how the Hyde Midtown Miami came to be. Henry Martinez : Absolutely. Hyde Midtown Miami is a true gem. It offers an intimate, welcoming atmosphere. Our location couldn’t be better right in the heart of Byron City activity and only a 15 minute drive to the beach. Designed by the renowned architect, David Rockwell. The hotel reflects the essence of local art and culture, creating an ambience that resonates with both young professionals and leisure travelers. And it’s really the only property of its kind in the midtown area, making a tough choice for those looking to truly engage with the lively Miami community. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re gonna talk about that incredible location here in a minute, but it really is an immersive atmosphere. I mean, we walk through those lobby doors, everything that you just said about the art from the art being in the lobby, just the feel and the vibe of this hotel is fantastic and I encourage my entire audience to check it out for themselves. But let’s talk about the hide brand. You know, locations all over the world, very fast growing. Maybe share with our Suite Spot audience who’ve never stayed at Hyde before, what they can expect from this brand. Henry Martinez : Sure. At any Hyde location, the guest experience comes to life through key touch points. Guests can look forward to an experience that goes beyond the typical hotel stay, Hyde is designed for those who appreciate art, culture and community. Just like the one that we’re sitting in right now, the moment you step into our expansive art filled lobby, you’ll feel the vibrant energy of the space. We pride ourselves on hosting social events and providing unparallel amenities. It’s all about creating connections here. Hyde is about embracing a fun lifestyle that encourages both relaxation and social connections. Ryan Embree: Well, speaking of connections, we are right at an intersection of art and decor, and we went out onto the seventh floor. You were able to point to me to the design district where Wynwood was the airport. I mean, the old adage is location, location, location. And you have it right here. Paint a picture that you painted with me right outside of these doors of where everything and how centralized this property is when it comes to the different areas of Miami. Henry Martinez : Absolutely. I’ll be happy to. Hyde Midtown Miami has an unbeatable location. As I showed you earlier this morning, in the heart of some of Miami’s most vibrant neighborhoods, just steps from the hotel, you can immerse yourself in the colorful murals of the Wynwood Art District and indulge in luxury shopping at the stylish boutiques in the design district. This neighborhood has so many restaurants, cafes, and even a Dog Park that I showed you earlier, I’m sure that there’s always something exciting to discover. Again, it’s all about embracing Miami culture. Ryan Embree: Yeah, no, absolutely. And it’s felt through these doors. And a big part of that and a big part of the guest experience is art. You know, I want to talk about kind of the relationship of art in this hotel because it seems like it’s really ingrained in the hotel experience. You want people to leave these lobby doors and really appreciate the design, the architecture, and the art associated with Hyde Midtown Miami. Henry Martinez : I’ll tell you Ryan, a feeling that I got from the moment that I joined Hyde Midtown Miami, I recognize the immense potential of incorporating art to enrich our guest experience. We wanted something that will not only enhance the attractiveness of the property, but also connect with a cultural excitement of Miami itself. This vision came to life through our collaboration with Steven Manes, the founder of the Manolis Projects Gallery, one of South Florida’s most renowned contemporary art spaces. After visiting the gallery with my assistant general manager, Robinson Rodriguez and Marketing manager Capri Crescio, it became clear that this partnership will be perfect fit for us. The gallery’s bold, modern look aligned seamlessly with the creative energy we wanted to foster a high midtown. The result is the big picture exhibition that you saw in the lobby earlier, a carefully curated collection that invites our guests to experience art as part of their state. This collaboration has elevated our property without a doubt, transforming it into more than just a place to stay, but an immersive artistic experience. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. It is an experience. We walked into that lobby and your eyes, you just can’t take your eyes off the incredible art, and I’m sure that this is something that really is a part of the guest experience and definitely something I wanted to bring up today. We talked about all the things there are to do outside of the hotel, right? We’re talking about some of the art inside, but there’s also a ton to do with the amenities that you shared with me. I mean, everything, we’ve got almost 90% suites at the property each with a balcony, a giant balcony mind you, overlooking some green space. You’ve got a tennis court out there, which was recognized as one of the best tennis courts by Conde Nast. Talk to us a little bit about the amenities that you have here at the Hyde Midtown Miami. Henry Martinez : You know, very fortunate, to be leading a team at Hyde Midtown Miami. We created a home-like comfort that blends perfectly with our upscale accommodations. Our suites with stunning floor to ceiling windows and most feature outdoor balconies that offer views of the Miami skyline. We have equipped each guest room with modern conveniences, including a kitchenette and spacious bathrooms with premium bath amenities. One of the highlights of our property is the seventh floor rooftop area that I took you earlier this morning, which truly feels like a private retreat. Here you can enjoy an Olympic-sized swimming pool surrounded by large gardens, tennis, core pot and green. And our state-of-the-art gym not only features the latest fitness equipment, but also a stunning bay views. Salva Miami, blends global flavors with the creative fresh approach, serving up the dishes that are as bold, as vibrant as the city itself. Every detail is crafted to make dining an experience to remember. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. We were up there at that space that you were talking about Henry, and it really puts into light all of the things that there are to do at the property, but you can also see everything that you can experience off property. So it’s a perfect blend there at this place, at this special hotel. Let’s do a little bit, a rapid fire quiz you a little bit on the property. Let’s talk about your favorite view at the property, Henry. Henry Martinez : Wow, good question. I have quite a few, but I think if I have to pick one, you know, the view from the rooftop pool area, it is absolutely amazing, especially at sunset. Truly a moment to remember while looking out of the Miami skyline. Ryan Embree: So private too. You were telling me, we both walked out on the pool deck and you’re like, it’s hard to believe this is on the seventh floor. And it absolutely was. I was like, it’s very private, very immersive, really relaxing atmosphere out there. So fun fact about the property. I always love to hear these. Henry Martinez : I think that besides the stunning pool that you saw, which is heated all year round, there’s not really that many properties here in Miami that have that feature, but we also have a fully equipped tennis court and putting green, which is perfect for active customers. And you know, you mentioned Conde Nast Travelers, one of the top four hotels as well in the world. Ryan Embree: What about a favorite piece of art at the property? Henry Martinez : Another hard to pick. You saw our lobby and the many art pieces that we have and we also have an incredible selection of art from all star artists in our hotel. If I really have to pick one, it will probably be a piece for my friend from Steven Manez, Title Citrus. Ryan Embree: One of the cool things, Henry, is that you also change out those pieces of art, right? It’s not something that’s constant the entire year. You’ll actually have different exhibitions within your lobby, correct? Henry Martinez : That is correct. Actually, this is the fourth exhibitions that we’ve done since I got to this hotel and we actually, there’s another one coming out for Art Basil pretty soon. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re excited to see it. Henry, you know, as a general manager, I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down and interviewing a lot of hospitality leaders and general managers, but one of the most important pieces and task of a general manager is really keep a close pulse on your guests, right? You have to know the feedback, the sentiment they’re feeling about the experience they have, especially somewhere like this where there’s so much to experience, right? As general manager, as they walk out those doors, whether they’ve immersed themselves on the art, whether they’ve explored the design district, Wynwood, whether they’ve gone to the beach, which is again just a couple minutes away from this property. What do you hope that they say about their experience at the Hyde Midtown Miami? Henry Martinez : I take a lot of pride in my team as well on what the guest feedback is, but for the most part, the guest feedback has been very positive. Many highlight the engaging atmosphere and comfort of our suites and balconies. Our staff engagement and genuine appreciation receives praise consistently as well. Since the hotel opened in 2018, we rank among the top 10 hotels in Miami. In fact, in 2022 we were the number one ranked hotel in Miami on Triple Advisor. Currently we rank in the number four spot, but this achievement is just as a great testament to our team’s dedication and ongoing efforts to enhance the service we provide. But Ryan, Hyde Midtown staff are really the difference makers. Ryan Embree: Yeah, I mean the hospitality was felt when me and my team walked in here, so we really appreciate you hosting us here. We’re looking to wrap up here. Any final thoughts before we wrap up Henry? Henry Martinez : Absolutely. I invite you to discover, the unique charm of Hyde Midtown Miami firsthand. It’s more than just a destination. It’s a vibrant, immersive experience that represents the very essence of Miami’s culture, creativity, and energy. Whether you’re visiting for the art, the atmosphere, or just to unwind, we strive to create moments, that are memorable and meaningful. And of course I encourage you to go to Instagram, find Hyde Midtown Miami and scroll through our feed. It’ll give you a taste of the dynamic lifestyle we are so proud to offer. Ryan Embree: Absolutely, Henry. And yeah, check out Hyde’s Instagram, give you a great taste of some of that art that we were talking about today. Give you a really good look at the location, some of the award-winning amenities. So thank you so much Henry, for you and your team being so gracious and letting the Suite Spot showcase this incredible property here. Henry Martinez : No, thank you. Thank you again. We hope that to see you again soon. Ryan Embree: Thank you so much Henry, and thank you for listening to The Suite Spot. We’ll talk to you next time to join our loyalty program. Be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
The Suite Spot is spotlighting the beautiful and newly renovated Regent Santa Monica Beach with special guest and General Manager of the property, Younes Atallah! This episode covers all the exciting things travelers can look forward to from their stay at the property including dining, amenities, local attractions, and much more. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, with another amazing episode for you today. Very excited to feature this episode. We are gonna be continuing our TMG Spotlight series, and if this is your first time hearing this, it’s one of my favorite series that we do on this podcast. It’s, it’s taken us all over the world at this point, right across the country, and today we are headed to beautiful Santa Monica Beach. With me today is my guest, Younes Atallah, General Manager of the Regent Santa Monica Beach. Younes, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot. Younes Atallah : Thank you, Ryan, for having me. Good to be here. Ryan Embree: And this series, if this is your first time hearing, this is all about highlighting and showcasing some of the world’s most unique new properties that we’re gonna be talking about. Younes, your property over there, the region, Santa Monica Beach certainly fits the bill. But before we get talking about that, share with our audience a little bit about your hospitality background. We’d love to hear these stories and where we started, where we end up, and, which led you to becoming the first GM of the Regent Santa Monica Beach. Younes Atallah : Again, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here and I was born into travel and hospitality. My family owned a travel agency growing up. And, I’ve told this story a few times. It was a rite of passage for all the kids to work at the travel agency as part of our indoctrination. It was about a 50/50 success rate and the kids sticking to hospitality and travel. But I certainly did and went the hotel route, went to hotel school in Florida. My first job was, picking up the phones at what was then the Orlando Marriott downtown. I don’t even know that hotel still exists. But that was probably 30 ish years ago. I kind of jumped in with both feet and never looked back. I’ve been very fortunate. My career has taken me to some amazing places in the country in North America, actually. I’ve lived in Florida and Texas. I lived in Canada for a few years. And then more recently I was in Hawaii, in Arizona and then landed in California just about four years ago. So not terrible places to live, overall. So it’s been, it’s been a fun ride. Ryan Embree: Well, certainly. And that hospitality has taken you all over the country. We talk about all the time on this podcast how transferable, skills are, and I think that’s one of the beauties that is lost in our industry is that people serving people, you can do that in Florida, you could do that in California, Hawaii, even in different countries there. So to be able to take your talents across the country, I’m sure you have some incredible experiences in the hospitality and started your hospitality roots right here where we are just north of Orlando, Florida. So that’s, that’s incredible to hear. But before we start talking about your journey to the other side of the country, let’s talk about the Regent Hotel and Resorts brand. We got locations worldwide, but this is actually the first one in the Americas. Introduce our audience to this brand and what they can expect from it. Younes Atallah : Absolutely. This is really, an exciting time for region. Some of your listeners, Ryan, may actually be familiar with the Regent brand, especially if you’ve watched one of the most iconic movies of our time, which is Pretty Woman, which was, filmed at Reach Beil the region, Beverly Wilshire at the time. And that was the last region in the Americas. It’s really not a new brand. It’s a brand that’s being reintroduced and reinvigorated as we speak. Region has been around since the early seventies and has gone through various iterations throughout its history, but most recently in 2018, IHG Hotels and Resorts added region to its luxury and lifestyle portfolio. And we’re very much in Regent 2.0 land, if you will, in the last few years, we’ve added and opened some amazing properties in, like the region of Hong Kong, the Carlton Khan in the south of France. The region in Shanghai just opened a few months ago. And so to bring back region to the Americas and to Los Angeles specifically, it’s a little bit romantic because the last Regent was left the Americas from Los Angeles. So to bring it back to the LA area is pretty great and lots of growth in the pipeline for Regent and what IHG is doing with the brand and really growing. It is pretty, pretty impressive and very exciting. So keep an eye on it. Ryan Embree: It sounds like it, and it’s cool to have a history to a brand like that and then to reinvigorate, reintroduce it here like this in such a spectacular form with your property, which we’re gonna talk about in a minute. Have you had the chance to visit any of the other regions? Younes Atallah : I have. I’ve been fortunate in the last year to actually stay at the region, Hong Kong and the region, Carlton Kahn, and both pretty impressive properties, not just from a location and physical product, but really the heart and soul of what we do, which is the people in the service. The brick and mortar is a brick and mortar, pretty building is a pretty building wherever it might be, but the level of service and engagement is really quite special. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And we’re gonna talk about that in a minute and kind of how you’re telling your story as you’re set to open here and invite your first guest into the property, to your incredible Regent Santa Monica Beach. You know, you talked about it, uh, as, as a romantic journey. I’ve learned with new build & renovations, it’s typically a labor of love, sometimes there’s those missteps along the way, but at the end, it, that’s what makes it special, right? So tell us the story about this project, what made it special and how it came to be. Younes Atallah : Absolutely. So, this is a transformation. It’s not a new build. The, the building has been, really an anchor in Santa Monica for 30 years. I personally have been involved with this project and, and have been working in this building for the last four years. And so Santa Monica is one of those cities that is very close knit. People know people, people know each other. The community is very passionate about itself and about its iconicness. And so to have the support of the community is really kind of the first thing that was very important for us. As we embarked on this pretty lofty project, we closed the hotel in its previous form, if you will, in March of 2023. So about a year and a half ago, as you mentioned, we’re going to reopen in just a few weeks. The coolest thing about this transformation is that the vast, vast majority of the employee base who worked for many years in the building have stayed on, which is really great. Just so when we go back and we say, yeah, it’s an impressive project, and it’s a beautiful building and a beautiful location, but the heart and soul of of it is the people are all still here, which is great. But talking about it being a labor of love, we’re about to really bring luxury to Santa Monica for the first time in a long time, just to share a few stats with you. But the property is going to open with 167 keys, which includes 34 suites. It’s going to be the largest room offering in the market, really, probably in greater LA area at 720 square feet is our entry level rooms, which is a suite for a lot of our other friends and competitors. Not only will we have, obviously incredible views, which is very much a region brand distinction, if you will, as kind of these picturesque views and of the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Pier. But we’re gonna have an amazing food and beverage offering. We’ve collaborated with Chef Michael Mina to have one of his concepts in the hotel. It’s called Orla. I love saying this. It kind of goes back to the romance. It’s Michael’s love letter to Egypt, which is his roots. So it’s a Mediterranean eastern, middle Eastern cuisine, which is amazing. We have a really great collaboration with Ayesha Curry for Sweet July, which our cafe concept. And then last but not least, we also have a 10,000 square foot spa that we’re working with Urla, out of Paris to bring, to bring their first West coast flagship, if you will, as far as a spa and well wellness facility is concerned. So lots, lots on the go. Ryan Embree: I love the collaboration between where you started that conversation, talking about the community and the people, and the people that stayed on and, and that are gonna know the property and in and out. And then the new concepts that you’re blending that old in the new and staying local, but also looking for inspiration worldwide. I think is gonna make this, and correct me if I’m gonna make a really unique experience for anyone that goes there. Now, there’s a common expression in our industry, location is everything. It certainly helps when you’re right, the located right in the middle of the most, one of the world’s most famous beaches. But for those who haven’t been in that area, Younes, could you paint us a little picture of the location, what’s around the hotel? What really makes that location so prime? Younes Atallah : The first thing I would say is if you haven’t been, this is an open invitation to come and visit Santa Monica ’cause it truly is one of the most amazing places in the country and very iconic. And, whether you’ve watched, Beverly Hills 90210 or whether you’ve watched Arnold Schwartzenegger training. This is our backyard. It’s really, it’s really pretty cool. But the property itself, the resort itself is located right on the beach, toes in the sand, just south of the Santa Monica Pier. We are, if you were to, I always like to say Santa Monica is a city on its own. We are our own city. We’re surrounded by Los Angeles on three sides and the beautiful Pacific on the fourth side. So, you just have to look west, just look at, look at the ocean, don’t worry about what’s behind you. So, the most amazing sunsets are very much can be witnessed from our pool deck with the Santa Monica pier right in the forefront. And after the sunsets, that Ferris wheel, which is probably top three postcards out of the country is lit up. You can see the reflection of the light on the ocean water. It’s really pretty spectacular. Whether you’re coming to do a little bit of shopping or whether it is to do a little bit of body surfing, a little bit of tanning, it’s all right here, literally in, in front of the hotel. Ryan Embree: Yeah, I was gonna say, I don’t think you’re gonna have many problems with getting some pituresque things for social media, which we’re gonna talk about here. Being a digital marketing podcast, we love to talk about, you know, sharing experiences, but it helps when, you know, your guests are doing the majority of the sharing, right. We can, as businesses try to put out photos and all these pictures and sometimes we pay a lot of money to have things framed up. But when your guests are sharing authentic experiences, sometimes that is the stuff that’s most powerful out there. So that sunset that you’re talking about by the pool, having hundreds of pictures out there on, on Instagram and, and social media, I’m sure is gonna help already just help propel the reach of this incredible property. And we’re gonna talk about that in a minute, but you mentioned some of the partnerships, renowned chefs, celebrities that you’re pairing with. What are you most excited about? You know as those doors are yet to open, right? I’m sure there’s a lot of anticipation, excitement. What do you want those first guests to feel and experience when they walk in through those doors? Younes Atallah : This is not rehearsed. This is truly how I feel. Being in an urban area, the one thing that I think you get out of your car, look, Los Angeles is a busy city. LAX is a busy airport. We are not necessarily the closest destination for a lot of people. So it’s a commitment to come out here and sometimes it takes a long time or have to deal with traffic. And so the one thing I’m most excited about, as soon as our guests walk through the doors or really get into the driveway, it’s this elevating them above the noise. It’s this feeling that they’ve arrived. They don’t have to worry about all the noise in the background. We wanna take all of their worries, all of their stresses, regardless of why they’re coming to visit us and really have them step into a haven of sorts. Ryan Embree: I absolutely love that. That’s the type of experience that you hope, again, talking about digital marketing, you know, you hope that shared and you see those feelings and sentiment shared on online reviews, feedback from your guests, whether it’s face to face through to your employees of just being like, feel like I’ve kind of escaped here. A really, really cool to hear, and, you know, you can’t, can’t really spell luxury anymore in hospitality without incredible food and beverage. I think that’s part of the experience and the escape. And you mentioned it before your Mediterranean cuisine style, Orla, I’ve been seeing a lot of it in the press and the news. Share some details of what guests can expect for this one of a kind dining experience. Younes Atallah : Absolutely. And not only can I share it conceptually, but I actually have experienced Orla now twice in the last week because the Santa Monica location’s actually gonna be the second location for Chef Mina with Orla. The first one opened just a few months ago, in Las Vegas. And I happened to be there last week for work. And I got to, got to experience it twice. And I have to tell you, not only is the service on point, the cocktail programming is, is on point, but the food is very flavorful and very authentic. And I should know a thing or two about Mediterranean cuisine having grew up in, in that part of the world. That’s really such a wonderful takeaway. The restaurant itself, the outlet itself was designed by a roco and they really captured the essence of the beach, but also some of the aspects of that Mediterranean design that you would kind of imagine if you were to step into a restaurant in Egypt, for example. Or something like that. So when you take the design, you take the beverage, and then you take the flavorness and execution of the food, and you sprinkle it with Chef Mina’s love and passion. You just really can’t go wrong. Ryan Embree: This is why I love this series so much, Younes, because it, everything in these types of hotels are so purposeful from the design to the, the programming like you were talking about. And high praise is when you can come out of a food and beverage outlet and say the term authentic. That is what we are craving right now in a world that unfortunately, you know, AI is, we love it, technology is great, but it is also causing some inauthenticity. And so when people see authentic, they feel authentic, that little piece of home. And so really, really eager, excited. Thank you for sharing that. You’ve done a couple interviews that I’ve followed leading up to this grand opening and one recent interview you said, we’re eager to share this incredibly special property with the world and welcome guests to indulge in a modern evolution of traditional luxury. And that was the part that really stuck out to me, that modern evolution of traditional luxury. Can you speak what that means to you and how you’ve implemented it into the guest experience and operations at the region? Santa Monica Beach? Younes Atallah : Yeah, absolutely. This is what I love about these podcasts subtypes, that it’s, it becomes so natural because we did not rehearse this. And, and you just kind of gave me a perfect segue talking about AI and authenticity. I think, and I believe that these days are very dependent on technology. No one can argue that, obviously, whether it’s with our phones or whether it’s with but inherently, especially in for a luxury traveler, we still want to have those authentic moments with other humans. Technology, AI has to be in the background. It has to make things easier. It doesn’t have to be in the forefront. You know, it has to create conveniences, not stresses. You know, sometimes you are, you know, you’re trying to order something and there’s 16 buttons to push and there’s stand in this line and then pick up in this line and then do this, and you’re just like, oh my God, I just want a coffee. Ryan Embree: Yeah. Trust me, I’ve been in front of my hotel door trying to open with that remote key, right. Which was so convenient, and now all of a sudden it’s not working for me. Younes Atallah : No, exactly. Absolutely. So it’s really kind of understanding what the other thing is, the word luxury has evolved tremendously even in the time that I’ve beendoing this. And then more recently, even in the last 5-10 years, really, I think the pandemic has allowed a lot of people to experience luxury and want to experience luxury in a different way. And it’s no longer pinky out and tea with the Queen type of it still exists, and it’s still wonderful. It’s no longer just that. And with Regent, we take a lot of pride in saying that the way that we behave and the way that we execute on luxury is in a modern way, it’s modern luxury. It’s bespoke, it’s really not a one size fits all. You know, I mean, when you look at statistics and studies that tell you that Gen Z they’re going to be the biggest spenders on luxury in the next X number of years, well, you gotta pay attention because you can’t continue to cater to not even their parents, but their grandparents, which I think is the more traditional way. Ryan Embree: No, you’re, you’re absolutely right. And to your point about the AI and technology and we talked about this at the top of the episode of what you’re trying to cultivate over there at the Regent Santa Monica Beach, as you said, you wanna remove the noise, the outside noise. And sometimes that can be physical noise, and sometimes that can be digital noise. And sometimes when you elevate guests and customers above that digital noise, sometimes that’s when the authenticity really blooms and you create some really memorable experiences there. Now, all that to say we are a digital marketing podcast. And so I’m gonna talk about a little digital because as you mentioned, I mean Gen Z, and sometimes this is good and sometimes this helps. I mean, this was something that 20-30 years ago in hospitality, when you’d introduce a new property or brand like this, you didn’t have the benefits of social media or online digital marketing like you do today. And it can help propel and accelerate the pace. I look at your Instagram, I follow your Instagram, follow your social media. You guys already have 3000 followers on social media and you haven’t even opened, had that first guess yet. And that can do a lot of things for a property. And we talked about that. So how have you used social media or digital marketing to introduce the new Regent Santa Monica Beach to travelers? Younes Atallah : I mean, it goes without saying that it was probably one of the very first things that we did was to make sure that our handles were correct and we had the right ones and go through that process, both Instagram and Facebook. You know, the two big powerhouses that we’ve leaned into at the moment. It’s been incredibly instrumental for us to showcase the brand’s identity as the big brand, but also also the resort itself. We’ve been really sort of teasing for the last year and a half because to your point, we want to create excitement and that I want more so that you can continue to come back and see what we have coming. Social media is a way to, for a new brand, is to share really a visual story of what guests can anticipate when they arrive, whether it’s teasing through looking at the views or certain angles of the accommodation or the restaurant. You know, that being said, as our audience continues to grow across the various platforms, there’s gonna be a lot more to share. You know, you start having more user generated content, you start having more actual photography and more relatable programming that that is being executed. And that’s really what people want to dream. And social media, Instagram especially allows us to do that. It allows us to dream. I mean I’ll share something personal. I booked a trip for a year from now to somewhere that I’ve never been. And literally it’s like in August of next year, and I’m already looking at, oh my God, what am I gonna do? Oh my God, look at this. Oh my God, I wanted to, you know, heart this and favorite this and all of that because I’m already dreaming about it. And that’s really what people that’s the sense that we want people to feel before they get here. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And building anticipation, setting expectations. I love the way that you that you’ve used social media over there as a way to tease, we talk about it all the time, but that is a great strategy. It wasn’t just to throw everything out there give everyone, you wanna build that excitement, build that anticipation just like you’re doing for your own personal trip. And we continue to do so. Very cool to see. We’ll continue to follow. We’re getting closer to the end, but wanna do some rapid fire questions. This is always something we do for the Spotlight series to get to know you and the region. Santa Monica Beach a little bit better. Best view at the property? Younes Atallah : It’s the ocean front rooms with a fire pit and a big terrace. Ryan Embree: Alright. Yeah. You can’t really argue with that one there. Yeah, fun fact about the property. I know you have already shared a couple, but any any fun facts? Younes Atallah : Funnest fact is our atrium suite used to be open air. It actually was two stories of nothing, two floors worth of literally air that we have now built into a two bedroom, two bathroom suite. Ryan Embree: Whoa. I think that was probably some fun blueprinting and construction there for that. Most anticipated dish at the property? You mentioned you were at Orla in Vegas. Have you had the chance to try anything over there? Younes Atallah : I have. I will tell you, I’m gonna go with my favorite, which are the lamb chops, the harissa grilled lamb chops. They’re pretty delicious. I’m not gonna lie. Ryan Embree: And then finally favorite piece of art at the property? Younes Atallah : That’s, that’s kind of an easy one. I’m gonna say probably an 800, maybe a 1000 square foot area in the restaurant. And the floor is a handcrafted mosaic piece of art, an ocean scene with an octopus being kind of the highlight of it that was constructed by 15 artisans in Italy and shipped to Santa Monica in pieces. And witnessing it being put together by hand was awesome. I didn’t my video, but then seeing it being put together on the floor has just been amazing. I can’t wait for people to see that something else. Ryan Embree: That’s so cool. Again, just to put this in perspective, if you’ve been counting or playing bingo at home, we’ve talked about artists, chefs, celebrities, designers, all a part of this, and we’re just talking about one property. So Absolutely fantastic. You know, I’ve, I’ve had the pleasure of, of interviewing a few GMs and leaders of brand new, new properties or introductions to properties like the region as they prepare for travelers for the first time. And you kind of walked us through today, but how you want people to feel as they walk in. Give me a sense of what you want travelers to feel as they check out. What, what is that as gm do you want them to say about their stay at the region, Santa Monica Beach? Younes Atallah : I want them to say that they want more. I think that’s, that’s the first thing I would want them to feel is when do I get to come back? I think we all hopefully have had chances, whether it’s at hotels, destinations, restaurants, any kind of experience to say, I can’t wait to go back. And so if someone says, if a guest says, I can’t wait to go back, I’ve done my job, my team’s done their job, we’ve arrived. Right? We’ve accomplished what we need to. And I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. We’re in the business of creating raving fans. We want people to our guests to become our biggest ambassadors. And you kind of touched this on this a little bit earlier. I can say whatever I want about myself, we can say whatever we want about our hotel, but until people, until others are really talking about us and are our ambassadors, that’s what we really would love to have happen. Ryan Embree: Well, from today’s episode I certainly, do not see that being a problem for your property and your team over there. Younes, thank you so much for joining me. We covered a lot. Any final thoughts before we wrap up today? Younes Atallah : You know, again, open invitation. Please come to Santa Monica, please come visit us. We’ve got an amazing destination. I’m incredibly passionate about this city. I’ve been coming here for many years before I moved here. It’s a wonderful place to come and visit year round. We’re opening here in just a few weeks, just under a month from now. And have an amazing introductory offer for our guests, sort of our opening offer that will be, available really for anyone who wants to book from now through the beginning of next year, like now, I encourage on, RegentSantaMonicaBeach.com. Follow us. Ryan Embree: There you go. It’s spirit of the today’s episode. Well, Younes thank you. I encourage all the listeners and audience, check out the Regent Santa Monica Beach. A wonderful addition to our incredible hospitality industry we have here. We’re very excited. Be sure to follow and hear all of those ambassadors praising their experience, that they had there. So congratulations to you and your team. Younes we will look for those doors to be open. Just a couple of short weeks. I’m sure you cannot wait to see those first guests arrive on property. Younes Atallah : That’s right, that’s right. Thank you, Ryan, for the opportunity. Ryan Embree: Thank you so much and we’ll talk to you next time. To join our loyalty program be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
Check out the latest Suite Spot episode where President – Hospitality, Travel, & Wellness at Questex, Alexi Khajavi, sits down on the podcast to discuss the highly anticipated Hospitality Show 2024 in San Antonio, Texas! This special episode will cover what attendees can expect this year from the event, some urgent issues facing the hospitality industry, and how this event is bringing all the major players of hospitality together in one room. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining me today. We have another incredible episode continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series, but we have an original TMG Hospitality Trailblazers, one of the first. Joining me again for the second time. Alexi Khajavi, President, Hospitality Travel and Wellness at Questex. Alexi, thank you so much for joining me once again on the Suite Spot. Alexi Khajavi : Great to see you, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’ve got a lot to cover. Lots change since we spoke just last year. We’ve got a very fast moving industry with travel, a lot of positive changes, and we’re gonna get to some of those a little bit later. But with this being the second time, we kicked off last episode talking about your hospitality and travel journey and what led you to Questex, but I wanna talk about mentor, right? We’re still kind of combating this staffing shortage right now, and we wanna talk about maybe some of the mentors or influences in your career, and then speak to maybe the importance of mentors right now as we try to combat this staffing shortage, especially in an industry like hospitality. Alexi Khajavi : Yeah. I would love to. It’s an important topic. Ryan Embree: You wanna go ahead and share some of maybe the mentors in your hospitality career, or influences in your career? Alexi Khajavi : Yeah, you know, I’ve had a really diverse career in travel and hospitality. I mean, it started out in San Francisco in the sort of the “.com” era of 1997 to, you know, 2001, 2002. And I had the fortune of joining an early stage OTA. There was three OTAs that launched ironically in 1997. One was booking.com and one was Expedia. And I joined the third one. Ryan Embree: And I think that’s where mentorship comes in, right? Is you can show a story to this younger generation of hospitality professionals and say, this is what a career could look like in hospitality 5, 10, 15, sometimes 25 plus years down the line, right? And, and there’s a path there, and it’s gonna also fall on our shoulders to make sure that there is a clear path there, because that’s what this younger generation or maybe even pools that we haven’t explored before, and going to them and saying, this is what hospitality looks like. This is what a career here is. And that’s why, again, I call on our audience. You might not think of yourself as a mentor, but there is someone, and, you know, doing 20 plus of these interviews with industry leaders in this TMG hospitality trailblazer series, one of the consistent thing other than saying, “Hey, I didn’t think I’d be in hospitality”, is there was an impactful mentor a part of their journey that led them to where they are. So you could have a severe impact on someone’s professional and just growth in general as a person. So thank you for sharing that. Another topic we covered last year around this time was the continued resurgence of business and group travel. Every post I see on LinkedIn or social media from Questex, it’s announcing another record breaking attendance at your events that your amazing events that you guys put on. So what’s your feeling on group travel, business travel? You can continue, it’s still bullish on it, still continuing to see this, and maybe how has it changed, right? The sentiment, the energy at these events changed then maybe five years ago, pre covid? Alexi Khajavi : Well, first of all, group and corporate travel is back, and it’s been back, it’s been somewhat, I think overshadowed by just the incredible growth on the leisure side, right? So, travel for recreation or for holiday that has come back, frankly quicker than anybody thought it would. I mean, people were traveling in the summer of 2020, and it’s just continued to soar as more and more markets open up. Certainly domestically in the US 2021 and 2022 were record breaking years. And then 2023 last summer, you know, Europe really felt the return particularly of the US traveler still incredibly, Asia is not back either from a leisure or a corporate side, meaning outbound from Asia. But corporate and groups have been really performing incredibly well. And they continue to, as we’ve seen in some markets, leisure has started to taper off and to, uh, sort of, uh, flatten in some markets, not down, but certainly sort of coming back down to sort of smaller growth year over year. Ryan Embree: It’s hard to follow a Taylor Swift concert tour around the country. Alexi Khajavi : That did have a direct impact on RevPAR, as we saw some from some of the industry data, which is incredible in and of itself, and could warrant a show on its own that one individual drives an entire market’s RevPAR. So beyond Taylor Swift, and thank God we have Taylor in our industry, just speaking from what we see, we have seen both incredible pockets of high demand and high growth. And then we’ve seen pockets, where it’s been a little bit more challenging. Life sciences and healthcare and technology were absolutely booming from 2020 on through about 2022 & 2023. Life sciences and healthcare continue to do very well. And I’m, again, just speaking from a Questex perspective. Of the markets that we serve, technology has been frankly challenged job losses, you know, challenge in terms of stock prices, but also market demand. I mean, AI, as we have seen is an incredible trend and will change, our lives, but also the trajectory of those companies. But it hasn’t translated into profits for those companies yet. And so our events in those markets are a bit more, I would say normal, right? So, you know, still growing, but not seeing the explosive growth that we’re seeing in life sciences and healthcare. The markets that I have the privilege of running hospitality, travel and wellness, really since about 2021, 2022, have been on an explosive growth. And we returned back to really kind of 2019 levels, which is normal if you will, as early as in some cases, 2021. But certainly by 2022, we were higher than 2019 levels in all of those markets. One we’re fortunate in that each of those markets in our portfolio, in each of those markets has both events and media. And so focusing just on the events side, to your question, where it is a market leader, so it is the CES of that industry, you know, the consumer electronic show in Vegas. So it is a tier one or a tier two, so it is a must attend event. It’s already in people’s calendars, it’s already in people’s budgets. And so it just benefits off of being sort of built within the fabric of that sector. So we’re certainly benefiting from that. And as more people, there have been a flight to quality versus quantity. What we’ve seen to answer your second part of that question, is that because of the work from home or the hybrid working, so for example, today I am working from home, but some cases people are working from home full-time, or in many cases we’re seeing this sort of hybrid element, which means not everybody is in the office at the same time. Typically, the purpose that we serve as an information services company is we inform and we connect buyers and sellers in the five markets that we serve. Well, what we’ve seen is that our events have not only become platforms for connecting those buyers and sellers, but they’ve become platforms for connecting our own customers. Typically, an exhibitor or a sponsor that was coming to one of our events to meet clients that we would bring to that event, yes, they’re still coming for that. And yes, corporate travel’s absolutely rebounding because of that very same premise. I mean, if you just found out your competitor flew to Dallas to meet your top account, you better get on that plane and get to Dallas. And that is absolutely, zoom is great, this is incredible. It’s very practical. It does not build business. It does not strengthen, share of wallet, and it does not drive the bottom line. At the end of the day, you’ve got to build those relationships, and those relationships are built in human to human touch. So corporate travel is definitely benefiting from that. But we are seeing more and more this theme and this enthusiasm around bring the team, which is actually one of the mottos around the Hospitality Show. Which you joined us last year in Las Vegas, and we’re seeing our customers bring their team together. So using our event platforms as the opportunity to not just meet their clients and new clients, but meet each other. And so conduct their own incentive meetings or their own strategic meetings or their own cultural touch points around our own events. This effective model of sort of treating it as a multi-sided platform that we don’t just meet our clients, but we meet each other from a company perspective. It’s really interesting and we see a lot of opportunity for us to deliver more value to our communities and the sectors that we serve in that trend. Ryan Embree: Yeah, I absolutely love that. I think it’s a win-win when you bring your team, right? Because not only are they able to participate in things like, if you’re a supplier exhibitor, but you also get some incredible insights that we’re gonna talk about some for some industry experts and leaders, and then you get that connection, right? And that’s where I was trying to pinpoint, because I feel like the events that I’ve been to post Covid, there’s a different energy, and I think you might have hit the nail on the head about talking about how the way we work now with it being hybrid or sometimes just working from home constantly, there just seems like there’s an energy to these events that wasn’t there. And, and it’s probably because what you’ve said, those misconnections of seeing everyone in the office every single day, now all of a sudden you’re traveling out for work, you get to see industry leaders, you get to connect with your teammates, exhibitors, suppliers, that energy and that connection is palpable. And again, speaking from personal experience at the Hospitality Show last year, which we’re gonna talk about. But before we get into that, I wanna talk about a topic that’s always brought up, no matter what event you go to technology, right? It’s certainly risen to the top of these agendas and seminar programs at these shows. Where do you see, I’m gonna put you on the spot here. I want to get your opinion. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for travel in its leveraging technology? Is it on the guest and experienced consumer side, or is it on the professional side, operations side to help maybe with combat staffing challenges and things? Where do you see the biggest opportunity right now? Alexi Khajavi : That’s a great question, and I’m not going to cop out by saying both, but I’ll also step back and give a broader answer for a second. One, our transportation infrastructure is in disarray, whether that be the air control towers that helps power our airline, our aviation industry which is partly due to a labor issue as well, but also our visa and our immigration. I mean, to wait four years for a visa, and then when you just got off, after waiting four years and you just got off an 18 hour flight and you wait four hours to get through immigration, you’re not coming back to the US. You know, and other countries are competing for those same travelers, and they’re expediting those processes at every touch point. The visa maybe not the transportation, but you know, the wait times to get into the country. So technology, and look, let’s face it, most of the border patrol agents, that we’re bringing into that, that field are going at down to the southern border. I mean, that’s just where the, based off of the immigration and and so forth, that’s where they’re being sent, not to JFK, not to LAX, not to Atlanta. So technology is really the solution there, and biometrics, which we know works, or the global entry, which we know works that really needs to be improved because we are competing for travelers. I mean, I know that sounds odd, and I know that we’ve been very bullish and very confident that, hey, everybody wants to come to the US, that’s true. but a lot of people wanna go to France, and a lot of people wanna go to Spain, and a lot of people wanna go to Cambodia and other places around the world. And those countries are really improving their infrastructure, IE their technology in order to facilitate a better visa traveler entry and reentry experience. That’s one. And that affects us all. I know that, whether it’s in the hotel industry or the events in industry, we can sort of think about that as a tangential part of the ecosystem, but has a direct relationship. I mean, we are in markets that we need travelers and business people from Asia, from the Middle East, from Europe, from South America, from Central America. And if they can’t get here, then that is a, a real great on our ability to grow and our ability to sell hotel rooms and our ability to, to drive the industry forward. So that’s a real problem. To answer your question a little bit closer to home, is it guest facing or is it on the business side? Honestly, I think it’s on the business side, because the reality is, is that a tech enabled business ultimately provides the ability for us to deliver a more human powered experience. So I don’t think that that guests are traveling and making travel decisions because your app is better than their app, or your keyless entry is better than my keyless entry. Is it important? Yeah. But it’s really those intangible experiences that are human powered experiences, that is what travel and hospitality is all about. And really where I see technology having an indelible impact on our industry is when you’re tech enabled, it actually frees up time for your people to do other tasks. And if we think about what drives real enterprise value in hospitality, at least, and travel for that matter, it’s about someone having a human powered experience that is personalized, that’s authentic, that’s sincere. And they can only do that within the infrastructure if AI or tech in general is powering the infrastructure of that organization, the procurement, the ordering, the planning KPIs, the logistics, the data, manipulation. There’s a lot of stuff that tech obviously can play a part in. So I think that, not to say that, it’s a zero sum game, you can do both. And in fact, we have to do both. But tech has largely been a vendor to hospitality. It’s not been a strategic tool to drive change, but drive strategy, and to enable more human powered experiences in the industry. And I think we really, we are at a fulcrum point in the industry where CIOs or CTOs are at the executive board table, they are making decisions reporting directly to the CEO and that is a wholesale change in the industry. And we have hundreds, if not thousands of really strategic creative suppliers in tech that are running all throughout the various touch points back of house, front of house. It’s a great moment in the industry. We’re not there yet. But, again, to answer your question, I could say both, but I would say if you had to put it somewhere back of house, because it will free up your front of house to really deliver those truly memorable experiences for life. Ryan Embree: Well, we’ve got a generation that’s on the way up and coming into our industry that’s gonna expect those things. And I heard this the other day, which I thought was absolutely brilliant talking about it, what an opportunity for the industry when we have new people, maybe outside of hospitality coming in to introduce some of these new technology. Because at the time, the way I used to check in guests is a whole heck of a lot different than it is today. And sometimes they’re digitally checking in themselves. So if you have this new cohort of employees, it’s gonna be easier to train than maybe the, the hospitality veteran that’s been doing it this way their entire 20 or 30 year career. So I definitely think it’s an opportunity, I guess if there’s any silver lining maybe with this staffing shortage, we are having new people come in, new voices, and they’re gonna tell you exactly what they want, where the inefficiencies are. And hopefully, like you said, leadership and travel kind of listens to that feedback and acts upon it. And that’s how change happens. So as you know, this is a digital marketing podcast at heart, even though we talk about other subjects, but we always are trying to educate hoteliers, just travel industry really in general, how important things like social media, having a strong digital presences online, we know your background, you have a strong background in marketing. Can you just speak to, give some advice maybe to our audience on, or preach maybe why it is just so critical, especially today to have that social media presence or online reputation? Alexi Khajavi : Yeah, I mean, you’re right. I mean I’ve worked in advertising and creative agencies and been in sales and marketing, you know, the majority of my career. I mean, look, when we first got started, or I first got started for that matter, 25 years ago. I mean, there was five channels you could choose from, right? From marketing. And it was, it was as Hal days, I mean, you still didn’t know it was 50% of your advertising was working, but you knew it was working, right? And so, but you only had five channels to manage. Today you’ve got 500 channels to manage. So I really feel for marketers these days. I mean, I feel for them from a sort of a, it’s a difficult environment, but it’s also a really exciting environment. The one channel that is unquestionably critical to making and influencing travel decisions is social media. There’s no question that when you look at the demographics of who makes travel decisions, let’s separate leisure from corporate, or groups, but focusing on leisure, it’s typically the wife and increasingly the kids. I mean, it is in my family. I mean, my say is very minimal. It’s probably based off of what airline we’re gonna fly because I’ve got points. So where we go when we go and what we do is largely driven by, by the wife, spouse, and the kids. And increasingly kids are making purchasing decisions and influencing purchasing decisions based off of what they see on social media. So a common question in the Casa de khajavi is, what are your top five destinations you’d love to go to? And we’re a traveling family. All of that’s influenced by Instagram and by social media. So the ability to not only influence and really kind of manage all the way through that buyer’s journey. So dream, plan, purchase, experience, share, and then back around again, that is the buyer’s journey in travel and social media not only is a massive part of that because you’re posting whilst you’re on vacation, but it’s influencing the dream stage. It’s influencing the plan stage. You can even buy now through some of these social media channels. You can experience it hence the authenticity and the human power. Fortunately, I don’t think, your Apple goggles or your Oculus will replace that for some it will. I don’t get that. So social media is, um, is a critical part of the buyer’s journey, and that’s where marketers are trying to enter themselves, their brands, their products, into that buyer’s journey. And to be able to do it on one channel throughout that buyer’s journey, for the most part, is an incredible power that social media holds. The challenge with it is that it, there’s so much noise in these channels, and so it doesn’t replace the need one to be in other channels. It also really puts the onus on brands to try and capture first party data, as we’ve seen, if you don’t own your own customer, then somebody else does. And that’s where, again, we at Questex feel so privileged. I mean, we publish every day. We’ve got 5 million records across the five markets that we work in. And being able to know what John Doe reads when he reads it, what are the things that he’s searching for, and piece together a strategy around that is really what all brands should be doing. And again, that part of that can be done on social media, and part of that can be done through your website, through content marketing and even through advertising. So all of it still matters. It’s just where I think we’re at is that I see a lot of marketers these days, again, and it goes back to your question, Ryan, about labor. I see a lot of leadership in marketing that is still using a marketing playbook from 2002. And it’s not only ineffective in driving the business goals forward in achieving the KPIs of that business, but I think it’s, it’s frankly turning off a lot of these younger smart potential creative marketers that come in and go, this is not how I engage with brands, and these are not the channels that I believe in or that I’m in. And I think we’ve, when that shoe drops and this, some of this generation of, of marketing leadership exits, there’s gonna be a dynamic shift in the marketplace. And I think that’s a really interesting, we’re at this really interesting moment right now. And ironically not to throw too many elements into it, but I think it’s really interesting is that you’re starting to see CIOs or CTOs, in some cases, even in hospitality, take over the marketing function. We saw it at Wyndham where the CTO took over from the CMO, and it’s because you’ve got this massive blend of MarTech with marketing, with tech to create MarTech. And that, I don’t know how that plays out because despite MarTech and all of the marketing technology channels that you can use, and you need to be a data scientist, and you need to know data, you still need a strong brand. It doesn’t replace the importance of brand. A brand is a promise. And whether that’s in social media or that’s in a full page ad in the New York Times, if you don’t have a brand, it’s gonna cost you a lot of money to try and move that needle. But if you have a strong brand, but you don’t tactically execute well, it’s also very ineffective. And we’re seeing kind of both right now. So there’s just a lot of noise and transformation in the system, and I don’t think that’s played its course yet, but I think we’ll see that in the next five years. Ryan Embree: Yeah, it’s super interesting to see how these big brands deal with this. Again, keep talking about this next generation coming up. You think about, especially, starting from I’ve got a couple toddlers myself, they’re seeing more ads than we’ve ever consumed by the age that they have purchasing power. So they will have seen, I mean, you think about when the only ads we might’ve seen might’ve been on the tv, talk about YouTube, talk about social media. They are seeing ads constantly all over the place in this visual video form. So if your content is not attractive, engaging to them, they will ignore it very, very quickly. And you have to be, have your ear to the floor to see if they’re listening and what they’re telling you, because I think you are absolutely right, Alexi, you look at some of that data, they will tell you exactly what they’re engaging with, and it’s all in the data, but you gotta be able to keep your ear to the floor and listen and, and look for those patterns and trends. So let’s dive and get into the Hospitality Show, right? This is also talking about this incredible event. I do not envy you in having to top what you did last year, but looking at the agenda, looking at the press releases, some of the speakers events that are gonna happen there, I’m very excited about this. So talk to us a little bit about what attendees can expect for the 2024 Hospitality Show. Alexi Khajavi : Yeah. Year one was top five launch around the world in terms of new launches. It just got nominated for the best new show in 2023 by Trade Show Executive. So we’re very proud of that with our partners, AHLA, but more importantly than the accolades and the success of year one is the purpose of the hospitality show. We launched it with our partners, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, because running hotels and all of the amenities, whether that be the spa, food and beverage, the gym within a hotels is becoming much more complex and much more challenging. And despite the fact that, as we said a few moments ago, we’ve been operating in this really growing top line, RevPAR, ADRs, occupancy coming along with it, environment, profit margins have been challenged. And that’s because one inflation labor and then just the complexity, running all of that under one roof and paying for the utilities and all that, it is really, really challenging. You have issues like insurance. You’re seeing investors sell portfolios of hotels, not because they’re not performing well, but because the insurance premiums from climate change largely is making it unsustainable. Forgive the pun, to run those hotels profitably. So we’ve got this really challenging environment in which owners of which own a small branded or independent hotel in on the side of the road are challenged, as well as some of the largest REITs and private equity and sovereign wealth funds that own blocks of hotels around the world. So that’s why we launched the Hospitality Show, because there wasn’t one show that brought the entire industry together to look at all of the levers for growth with a focus on profitability and optimization of hotel assets. And that can be revenue and that can be costs. And it can be all of the things in between on that classic P&I. So this year we are seeing incredible growth. I’m really pleased to say, and I’m really, the teams at Questex and the teams at AHLA, I mean, they are doing yeoman’s work. They’re doing an incredible job of working with our advisory board, which contains some of the sharpest minds across the industry. Owners like Mitch Patel, Vinne Patel, big funds like M-C-R-K-S-L, capital operators, like as I said, Scott Strickland from Wyndham Asset Managers like Chad Sorenson, and then suppliers from Oracle to Honeywell to Encore to Worldview. So I mean, this is like, this is the ecosystem that really is, why this is AHLA’s show as much as it is ours, because it is truly where we’re collecting the industry. So this year, San Antonio, October 28th to October 30th, and we’re projecting over 5,000 attendees. We’ve expanded our general manager or our GM awards. That was one of the sort of most exciting, enthusiastic parts of last year to truly celebrate the backbone of our industry those GMs that will be followed by the age and a GM summit, which is content specifically tailored for GMs to discover those innovative ways, again, to drive profitability at their properties. The expo floor, we had so many, we had over 300 exhibitors last year. Were now over 400 exhibitors this year. So that’s grown as well. We’ve got interactive showcases on the show floor for our attendees. So the smart outdoors, the outdoor sort of element really became kind of almost an accelerant from Covid, and it’s really continued. So how do you activate those areas outdoors to make them one, you know, enjoyable, but second tournament into profit centers, interim hotel entertainment sponsored by DirecTV. And then also how do we activate the lobbies with our meet me in the lobby activation. We’ve got a lenders alley as we know, debt has been expensive in this environment, but it’s critical to the capital stack for hotel owners. So that’s designed specifically for our owners that are attending, again, per that advisory board feedback that we’ve got on helping owners find the right debt partners. We’re also now partnering with Clean the World, which is our partners on our sustainability initiative. And that’s helping our attendees build these hygiene kits made from recycled soap, donated to a local homeless shelter. And all that comes from hotels. So, last year I think we built 500 kits and our goal this year is a thousand. So a sustainability and a goodwill component as always. I mean, this is part of the fabric of our industry. And then the networking we’ve got, last year, I think everyone came out of Vegas saying we had the best party that the industry has ever seen, sort of a James Bond theme, which was very popular. This year we’re coming back with a block party on the river walk, a VIP owner’s reception. And then DirecTV is back with that opening reception this year at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio, which is a beautiful venue. And they’ve got a surprise announcement coming up. I won’t steal their thunder on that. So, really there’s a lot of excitement on the expo floor in the networking, just in the leadership that that attends. But also the educational sessions are some of the best in the industry. I mean, we’ve got marquee speakers this year from Jose Andress, which is, you know, world Kitchen and the world famous chef to Aaron Andrews and many others that are on our website. And we continue to announce, so senior leadership as well as CEOs from the companies, which are really dealing with some of the biggest issues facing not just the industry, but the global and the US economy. It is an election year, so there’s a lot of stuff going on in the space. And it should just be, again, most industries have their marquee event, whether it be CES in Las Vegas, or you know, the concrete show for the construction industry or the automotive show. Hospitality hasn’t had its own show. And that’s why, again, it’s so important for the industry to be there. And it’s important for us to be able to learn, network and be inspired around how do we drive profits and a better marketplace and industry for hotel owners, operators and suppliers. Ryan Embree: Well, you got me fired up about this year’s show. That’s for sure. And I think I can say this ’cause I am a Texan, but everything’s bigger in Texas, Hospitality Show, right? We’re excited to hear it, Alexi. And I love the education. It’s so insightful, so informative, so many great takeaways. I mean, we dedicate a whole episode after the hospitality show to talk about the takeaways, the trends, the patterns, things that we’re hearing. But I wanna focus in on the networking. ’cause you were here at the ground floor when this thing was built last year, and you have a really amazing chance opportunity to network at the hospitality show. And I wanna know kind of the thought process behind the thinking and why it was such a priority to make sure that there were these networking opportunities for hospitality professionals at this show. Alexi Khajavi : Well, because it is a people powered industry, I mean, at the end of the day, with all the infrastructure and all the technology there are that are infinitely more important to us, deals are done based off the relationships we have. I mean, that’s just this industry and we’re not gonna change it. In fact, we celebrate it and we build momentum into those relationships. So, that’s really a core component of the hospitality show is to continue to foster those relationships, bring the right buyers and sellers there. And we’re using intelligent meetings to connect specific buyers and sellers that are selling a product versus looking for that same product. But the other really exciting thing about the hospitality show is the extemporaneous or spontaneous connections that are made. And just off the top of my head, somewhat anecdotal, but you know, last year I remember walking through the show floor and I saw Mark Hian, walking around with Kevin Carey, CEO of AHLA. And you know, here you have one of the CEOs of the largest hotel companies in the world going around booth to booth and talking to owners and talking to suppliers and trying to understand what is the thinking and what is the purpose, various products or services that were there. And it wasn’t just Mark who’s, you know, one of the nicest guys in the business. It was also Jeff Baloti was front row of our GM awards and GM Summit and sitting there clapping vibrantly. Yeah, it was so cool to see, again, the CEO of the largest franchise company in the industry celebrating GMs of other brands properties because again, this is the bedrock. So that really is, and it’s not just those two, but it was many, many others which I can. And so it was that real opportunity where the industry, which is, it’s one of the most fragmented industries in the world. So it is a challenge sometimes. And that’s again, that is the purpose of the Hospitality Show. We’ve got investment shows. We have NYU, we have IHIF in in Europe, we’ve got Asia, we’ve got Alice in Lodging Conference and Hunter, great shows. We’ve got the design shows, BDNY, the hospitality design. We’ve got operational shows, we’ve got law, hospitality, law shows. So, there’s plenty of these events in the industry, including our own, but none of them brought the ecosystem together and in order to really understand, but more importantly solve the challenges that we have as an industry, the only way to do that is to do it as one industry, as one voice. And so the privilege, and we really see it as a privilege of being able to do that with our partners, AHLA and bring this industry together from the senior leadership of some of the largest hotel companies or suppliers with a single owner or a new provider to the space is just a, it’s a real honor, but it is critical to the overall success of hospitality in the hotel industry. And therefore I really encourage everyone to make that trip. It’s good for your business, it’s good for your career, but more importantly, it’s good for the industry. And if we’re all together on this, then we will advance our needs and we’ll continue to see the industry grow. Ryan Embree: It is really, again, personal experience. It is really inspiring and cool to see rival brands rally around really important topics, human trafficking, that was still an issue that we’re battling right now. But to see everyone in lockstep together, and rallying around a cause like that, sustainability, another one to see that it’s very inspirational. You’re right, Alexi. And it is great for our industry. It gives you that hope that our industry is moving in the right direction. So, very, very cool. So with this being the second year, I’m sure you have some goals after year one, but when all said and done, that final attendee walks outta the Hospitality Show, what’s that one thing, that one goal where you can sit back and say, mission accomplished, second year, 2024 hospitality show was a success? Alexi Khajavi : Well, first of all, there’s a cold beer in my hand. Ryan Embree: . Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure. Alexi Khajavi : It really, I mean, the first thing is just looking around at the team and really feeling a sense of accomplishment for what we’ve done. And we truly, truly are immersed in this industry, and we’re deeply connected with our own personal relationships as well as just our professional relationships in the space. We hear a lot of feedback and some of it glowing and some of it all around how to make it better. But it’s a symbiotic relationship where our customers and our attendees are that are there, they’re invested in it, right? They’ve spent their time, their money, their resources. So we’re in it together. And there is an accretive or an iterative process to make it better. And we get the feedback and we work with our advisory boards, and it’s, I mean, we work on this thing 365 days a year. I mean, there are dedicated resources that work on this show, 365 days a year, that’s all they think about. But in that moment where, the last attendee walks out and the lights are going down, it really is just looking around at the team and the folks that made it happen, which are hand on heart. It’s not me. It’s, it’s a lot of people that are doing much more work and better work than than I could ever do. And it’s seeing that gratitude in being able to do something that’s impactful in an industry that we love, that’s a real gift. And it’s a real pleasure to have that opportunity. And we don’t forget that. So that’s a real nice thing. Yeah. Ryan Embree: And then I’m sure right shortly after it, its start planning for the next year, but maybe you could take that moment to enjoy it. Alexi Khajavi : That’s what the beer’s for. Ryan Embree: Exactly, exactly. Well, as we wrap up today, Alexi, in our industry, we’re always trying to predict the future, right? Just a little bit. We’re looking at occupancy, we’re looking at airlines, we’re looking at how many seats filled up, you know, 60, 90 days from now. So we’re at a really unique time right now. We’ve got a lot of external factors. You mentioned some inflation interest rates, rising construction costs. And by the way, we’ve got an election coming up. What’s your kind of feeling sentiment on the outlook of our industry over the next couple years? Alexi Khajavi : I’m wildly optimistic. I’m bullish all the way on travel and hospitality. I do think, however, that the industry needs to look at its carrying capacity to demand, particularly in those areas of high demand or sensitive biodiverse environments, whether it’s Venice or Paris or, you know, Ancor Watt. We haven’t even gotten back to global outbound travel in 2019 levels. And we’re, again, seeing destinations really struggle with the impact of tourism and hospitality. And so we are going to have to really get some critical thinking around that. And it will need to be managed. I mean, we need to manage demand. And I know that sounds strange because we typically focus on managing capacity and letting the demand just hopefully go and rise, rise, rise. But we’re gonna have to look at that demand and manage that demand more effectively. Because look, the new generations are absolutely looking at are completely invested in the experience economy. Tourism and hospitality will continue to grow, whether it’s in the Western world where it’s experiences over things. You’re seeing it, the data does not lie. They don’t want to own a car. They want to go travel. Digital nomads aren’t a thing. It is a generation. And that’s not even including new markets opening up again. China is at 10% of its outbound travel to what it was pre pandemic levels, throw that into the mix and then throw more countries, developing countries. I mean, as people, as middle classes emerge, the first thing they want to do is go travel international. It is the way it is, and we’re very blessed by that. But some destinations are struggling with that demand, and we’re gonna need to manage that effectively. And the positive thing is that we can, we can spread that demand out. So it’s not about tapping the brakes, but it’s about managing it effectively. And I think that that’s, uh, that’s something that we can do. We’ve got enough smart people around and the importance on local economies, but the global economy of travel and hospitality, 10% of global economy, 11% global employment, we have to fix it. So, I think that’s I think I’m very confident and very optimistic of our future. We just have to make sure we don’t kill the goose that’s laying the golden egg. Ryan Embree: It’s great observation. And I’m sure some of those creative thoughts and ideas we’ll certainly be brewing at the Hospitality Show in San Antonio in October. So, Alexi, thank you so much for joining me once again on the Suite Spot. We’re very happy to announce it. I don’t think we’ve announced it yet on social media or anything that the Suite Spot is returning to the Hospitality Show in 2024 in San Antonio. We are so excited. Hopefully we’ll run into you along with, it’s a who’s who, as you mentioned at that show, so you never know who we’re gonna be running into interviewing, but thank you again for taking the time outta your day, your busy schedule as we lead up to this incredible show to share with us a little bit about your insights and thoughts about this upcoming hospitality show. So thank you, Alexi. Alexi Khajavi : No, Ryan, thank you. Thank you for your support and love your show. It’s fabulous, I listen to it all the time, so thanks again. Alexi Khajavi: I appreciate it. And thank you all for listening. We’ll talk to you next time on The Suite Spot to join our loyalty program. Be sure to subscribe and give us a five star reading on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host, Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
Join the Suite Spot in this quarterly series to hear from American Hotel & Lodging Association President & CEO, Kevin Carey, on the state of the hospitality industry and recent developments being made by the AHLA to move the industry forward. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. As always, thank you for listening. We've got a fantastic episode for you today. Another industry check-in with Kevin Carey, interim president and CEO at the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time and joining me today. Kevin Carey : Hi, Ryan. Good day. It's good to see you as well. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we're excited to have you. You know, we're gonna jump right into it. We spoke last in the spring season, right before a busy summer travel season. Listen, the travelers have been busy traveling to hotels. Hotels have been busy hosting, but AHLA has been busy as well, advocating for hoteliers and everything that you guys do for our industry. Let's catch up with some of those big accomplishments and some of the most pressing issues right now. We know we, there's always those issues that rise up. What are some of those that hotels should be most aware of right now? Kevin Carey : Oh as you said, it's been an incredibly busy period of time. Certainly first and foremost for the industry. The support and the service our member companies provide for guests and the environment they create for our associates and workers is certainly first and foremost, our team here, both in AHLA and, uh, the foundation have been incredibly busy as well. Um, over the first half of the year, it's been, uh, a, a peak period of activity at a state and local level with state legislators and legislatures in session, uh, and certainly in Washington here, uh, as, uh, the Congress starts to look towards end of the year in the election. So, we've been advancing our work, uh, at a state level on short-term rental sets of issues in Washington here around the passage in the house, uh, of the Hotel Fees Transparency Act. Um, and, and also work to ensure that we defeated the, the joint employer rule as well. There's just a number of areas that we feel proud about as a team and that are really meaningful on behalf of the industry as well. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And but there's still with all those wins, and congratulations to your team, there's always work to do as you know, and some of those pressing issues that are at the forefront right now for our hoteliers. What, what are some of those that, again, hoteliers, even though it might be something regional, they still should be aware of because it has, it's gonna have an impact on the entire industry. Kevin Carey : Absolutely. And really to identify two that are certainly getting a lot of our team's attention and the industry attention. So first and foremost, in New York City, a bill was introduced in the city council several weeks ago, approaching about a month ago at this point. And this bill, the so-called Safe Hotels Act, has been positioned by his proponents as a simple licensing bill. And the bill sponsors have represented that hotels are unregulated, and that there's an increase in crime occurring in hotels. This bill would do grave damage, not only to the hotel industry, to travelers, to workers, who represent and are employed by the industry and the city economy and the tourism economy itself. So this is bad for everyone. And we've been very actively involved in New York several times, meeting with members of the city council organi...…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
1 145 – TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl: UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management 42:47
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42:47In the grand finale of the TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl, we visit one of the top-ranked hospitality programs in the country at UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management. The Dean of the college, Dr. Cynthia Mejia, joins the Suite Spot to discuss the hospitality school and why it is one of the most successful in the world! Check out the conversation with topics, including: 🎓How UCF Rosen Is Shaping Hospitality Leaders 🤝The Importance of Employer Partnerships 📉Navigating Current Industry Challenges And much more. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree and we are here with our TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl, and I am so excited for this episode. We are here at my alma mater, UCF, and who's joining me today is the Dean, Dr. Cynthia Mejia, UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management, the award-winning UCF Rosen College. Thank you so much Dr. Mejia, for being with me today. Dr. Cynthia Mejia : Wonderful. Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure to join you. Ryan Embree: It's so exciting because like I said, this is my alma mater. This is where hospitality was ingrained. We always talk about DNA, but since this is your first time on the Suite Spot, we would love to hear about your hospitality journey and the path that led you to UCF Rosen. Dr. Cynthia Mejia : Wonderful. So, I was recently appointed as the new dean recently in June. And prior to that, I served as the interim dean since October of 2023. But I've been a faculty member here since 2013. When I first joined the college, and this is actually my second career, my first career for over 20 years, I ran food and beverage, and I was an executive chef out in the industry, mainly in the lodging side. And I ran banquets, large hotel restaurants, catering and events and operations. And then slowly moved up into operations within the hotel sector, small hotels and such. And so there, there came a point as people tend to know about our industry, that it's a lot of work. It can take a good number of hours. And after doing that for about 20 years, I took a little break. And I just, I decided to get married and start a family. And then that's when I began my journey into, to higher ed, getting my master's and then my PhD, and then thinking about the ways that I love this industry. I have a lot of passion for this industry, and, you know, how can I give back? How can I be part of the industry and help the future leaders of our industry thrive with what I've learned, good and bad things that I've learned along the way. And then the best practices, of course, that we teach in higher ed. So that's how it sort of all came together and came in as a faculty teaching food and beverage operations, facilities management, supply chain management. And then I moved into administration as an interim chair of my department, and then finally as the interim dean and now the dean. Ryan Embree: And it's quite a journey. And, it's the same mission that we have in this series is we're trying to get more and more people involved in this industry that you can tell by your journey you're extremely passionate about. I'm extremely passionate about, we're going through a staffing shortage. We'll talk about that a little bit in our industry, but 20 years celebrating 20 years at UCF Rosen and this college of Hospitality Management. For those who aren't aware, give us a little bit of history about this college and where it started to where it is literally one of the preeminent hospitality programs in the world right now. Dr.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
Check out the latest TMG Hospitality Trailblazers episode featuring the Executive Vice President of Development at Gibson Hospitality Ventures, Joseph Grieco! This episode takes a deeper look into the Gibson Hospitality Ventures brand culture, hotel portfolio, and company initiatives that are setting the stage for more organizational success. Get an inside perspective on topics such as: The Explosive Growth of Gibson Hospitality Ventures How Gibson is Combating Industry Staffing Challenges Leveraging Guest Feedback to Influence Hotel Profitability The Importance of a Strong Hotel Digital Presence Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have a fantastic episode for you today continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. If this is your 1st, 5th, or 15th episode in this series, it's all about the people and management companies that are pushing and moving our industry forward, the industry that we love so much. We've got a great example and guest with me to share his story and the management company that is recognized as an industry leader. We're gonna talk a lot about that today, but let me bring him in. Without further ado, Joe Grieco, executive VP of Development at Gibson Hospitality Ventures. Joe, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot. Joseph Grieco : Thank you, Ryan. It's a pleasure to be here. I love listening to your podcast and all the other guests you've had on in the past. And, quite an honor to be here with you. Thank you. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And we're really excited to talk about Gibson Hospitality Ventures. You guys have a lot of exciting things happening right now at your organization, but before we get into that too much, we love to start these episodes with just a little bit of hospitality background, the journey that led you to Gibson Hospitality Ventures and your experience so far. Joseph Grieco : Sure, so I actually started on the food and beverage side. Grew up in a big Italian family where everything was always centered around the dining table. So the restaurant industry was always a passion of mine growing up and started as a dishwasher in the kitchen. Quickly learned that I wasn't cut out for the back of the house, enjoyed the front of the house a lot more. So I went off and worked my way around to bartending, serving, managing various restaurants. My first kind of crossover position was doing room service for a Hilton in downtown Knoxville. And it was a lot of fun. Had a blast down there, worked with a great group of people. But from there I realized the restaurant industry was always a passion of mine. And I met a gentleman when I was at the hotel restaurant program and the two of us went and opened a restaurant in downtown Knoxville back in 2002. I was 24 years old and very young, but we went off and, and started our first venture down there. So had a great time. The restaurant was called Pasta Trio. We were there for about seven, eight years in downtown Knoxville. But I had a baby on the way and kind of realized that having a restaurant and a baby wasn't gonna work out too well for me long term. So at the time, I was working commercial real estate and business brokerage focused on hotels and restaurants. That was in 08' or 09' when the market started to collapse. So I had a side job working for the Knoxville Marriott as a bartender and working in banquets as a banquet captain, and knew they were looking for a food and beverage manager.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
TMG Hospitality Trailblazers continues with the Senior Vice President & Global Brand Leader of Hampton by Hilton, Shruti Buckley! In this celebratory episode, Shruti joins the Suite Spot to discuss the 40-year anniversary of Hampton by Hilton by taking a look back on the brand's origins and where the franchise is headed in the near future with exciting expansion plans and technological innovations. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. We've got another great episode for you today continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. If this is your first time, this series is all about the people and groups that are pushing our industry, our great industry forward, and I have such a special guest here to celebrate another impressive and awesome milestone. Shruti Gandhi Buckley brand leader of Hampton by Hilton. Shruti, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot today. Shruti Buckley : Well, thank you for having me, Ryan. I'm really excited about our conversation. Ryan Embree: Yeah, it is exciting. And before we get into that, some of that exciting news and the exciting, incredible milestone that this brand has hit. Let's talk to you, Shruti, this is your first time on the Suite Spot. We love hearing stories from hospitality professionals, the webs and weaves of how people got into hospitality, how it kind of infused into their DNA, as we have heard so much in our industry. Share with us a little bit about your experience and the journey that led you to Hampton by Hilton. Shruti Buckley : Yeah, of course. It's really interesting. I had somewhat of a unique path into hospitality, but at the same time, I actually had some exposure at a very young age. My uncle used to own a hotel in New Jersey, and I actually used to spend my summers there helping out at the hotel, sort of understanding the guest piece of it behind the scenes, stacking the coke machine and folding towels, things like that. And that's when I was very young in elementary school. Years went by and when I graduated from college, I actually started my career in consumer product brand management and marketing. So I led global brands and businesses in a variety of different industries. So I started my career out in the food industry with Nestle. I then moved to Luxury cosmetics and I worked for Unilever and Estee Lauder and Chanel. And then I loved to joke with my friends that I traded in my Jimmy Chews for Converse sneakers and Birkenstocks and actually made my way back to D.C. which is where I'm originally from, to work for National Geographic, believe it or not. So I went from Chanel to Nat Geo. They had a very large product division where they had branded merchandise and retail, and I had a really great opportunity to work there for many years leading many of those efforts on the product side. And being in DC as you know, it's known as the hospitality capital of the world, actually had several friends that were in the hospitality industry and for a few years they kept saying, Shruti, come talk to us. We think you'd be a really great addition to the team. You've got really interesting strategic brand background. A lot of our folks are on the operations side, and it would be really interesting just to talk to you to see where this might go. And that is actually what led me into hospitality. So I actually started that part of my career with one of Hilton's competitors just down the street, in fact, for many years running one of Hampton's competitors. And I did that for eight years.…
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Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast
1 142 – Hospitality Campus Crawl: Florida Atlantic University 44:40
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44:40Join the Suite Spot in this episode of TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl featuring Florida Atlantic University! FAU Professor, Dr. Peter Ricci, joins the episode to shine a light on the FAU hospitality program and tells viewers why it is one-of-a-kind and how it prepares its students for success in the hospitality industry. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, and this is the second part of our TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl series. If this is your first time listening to this brand new summer series, we just launched this, we've talked about it before. Right now we're going through somewhat of a staffing shortage. We're gonna get into that a little bit into this episode. But what we're trying to accomplish with this particular series is talk to the people and places that are educating and preparing the next generation of hoteliers, the next generation of hospitality workforce. So, very excited to just move a little on up I 95 North to Boca Raton. Im a bring in my next Suite Spot guest, clinical professor and director Dr. Peter Ricci of FAU's Hospitality and Tourism Management program. Dr. Ricci, thank you so much for joining the Suite Spot today. Dr. Peter Ricci : Great. Nice to be here. Thank you. So I started sitting back here so you can see my lovely FAU owl. Now I can, move in a little bit. Thanks for having me. I love to see you and I know you're a Rosen grad. I did my doctorate there, so it's great, great to spend some time with you. Ryan Embree: Well, you have, you've got such an extensive and unique journey and, and I was talking to you off camera, how about that is one of my favorite things about our industry is, you know, sometimes our hospitality journeys take us all over the world. Sometimes we fall into hospitality as a career. Typically we meet a couple mentors along the way. And for your particular journey, you've been kind of in and out of academia. Share with our audience a little bit about your journey and the path that led you to FAU. Dr. Peter Ricci : You know it's interesting that I'm spending time with you today. Yesterday was 47 years since I moved to Florida. So I moved here as a little boy and tourism was a part of my life growing up. Always. because we had visited here first. My family also was in California, so we spent a lot of time traveling. And I've always had a love and passion for meeting people and traveling. But as a boy, you don't realize that. You just think Florida's cool because you can swim all the time and you can go play. And so my experience here growing up in middle and high school was fantastic. And, um, I started working as a teenager in a fine dining restaurant and happened to have an absolute amazing mentor who was a self-made millionaire and owned fine dining restaurants all over South Florida. And this was in the eighties when fine dining was all the rage with the flambe, tableside and fancy cocktails before they were called craft cocktails. And he was all about guest service. And of course I didn't know what that meant at that time. He was just instilling me like an etiquette. I'm kind of a casual guy, but I wouldn't say kind of, I'm a casual guy. I don't like suits and ties, but I'm all about treating people with the utmost respect, welcoming them, feeling warmly about hospitality and inviting you into my environment. So hospitality was like a natural thing for me. Undergrad, I worked food and beverage all through college. I fell in love with what they call trip directing, where you would go on a trip as the liaison to the confe...…
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