85 – Lodging Conference 2021 Special Edition

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this special edition episode of Suite Spot, we recap the recent 2021 Lodging Conference, which took place at the beautiful JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort in Phoenix, AZ. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Travel Media Group’s Director of Enterprise Sales, Danielle Rummel, as they analyze the current state and future of the post-pandemic hotel industry. Listen and learn as they discuss shifting guest expectations, emerging trends, and how to overcome labor challenges. This episode is a great way to get insight into what the road to recovery for the hospitality industry looks like for hoteliers. Suite Spot Podcast · 85 - Lodging Conference 2021 Special Edition 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. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for listening. Today we've got a special edition of the Suite Spot and I am so excited. I've been waiting for a couple years to finally do one of these, episodes again. We used to do them all the time. As I've mentioned on this podcast before, Travel Media Group, we are at the forefront of digital marketing in the hotel industry. So we are trying to get to every single conference out there to try to figure out the trends, what is going on in the hotel industry. And one of the best conferences and events year after year continues to be the Lodging Conference out in Arizona. So 2021 gave us the opportunity to attend that conference. And with me today, I have Danielle Rummel. She is the Director of Enterprise Sales at Travel Media Group. Danielle, first off, welcome to the Suite Spot. Danielle Rummel: Thank you so much for having me, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And this is your first time here on the Suite Spot, but not your first time to the Lodging Conference. So I want to go ahead and start off. We always love to do these kind of recap episodes with these live events, because we know hoteliers might not be able to make it out to all of these events that we're going to. So let's start off just from maybe a macro level, Danielle, and just talking about, maybe, what was the big theme? Cause there always seems to be this theme and topic from these events. What was this year's theme? Danielle Rummel: Well, I think nobody's going to be surprised by this, but the theme of this year's conference was definitely resilience and our industry has been hit hard by the global pandemic with COVID and that is no surprise to anyone. We've also been hit hard in the past by the economy in 2008, when the economy fell, as well as in 9/11. And much to everybody's surprise, we recovered then. And I think it's safe to say that we are the only ones not surprised this time that we are on our way back and we are as resilient as ever. And it's very exciting to be in this industry now, as we come back and look at all of the opportunities, how much everything has evolved, how we have been forced to change, but potentially make some changes for the better to improve guest experience and improve on everything that we are offering. So it was really exciting to be at the Lodging Conference, we had 1,900 attendees, so that was one of the largest conferences we've seen yet. And everybody was so excited to just see people face-to-face, in-person and really get out there and talk about what we've experienced, collaborate with each other on what we see moving forward and ways that we can really support not only each other, our owners management companies, vendors, but really support guests in this exciting time as they get back on the road. Ryan Embree: