A bunch of us consultants were sitting around comparing notes the other night – you can guess the type of location – and realized that we’ve all noticed a common phenomenon recently: few people try to sell anything anymore. It’s not that there aren’t good systems on the market; there clearly Read the rest of this entry »

Integration has been much on my mind lately. It’s pretty much a given that we need as much data integration as we can get across the several management systems typically found at every property to gain a full picture of guests’ profiles and preferences. However, the more travelers rely on their smart phones and tablets for information and entertainment on the go, as well as to make reservations as late as the day of arrival, the more it seems that we need to begin including their social network data, both on an individual basis and in wider social trend analyses in order to have a better understanding of where they’re likely to go and what they’re likely to want to do when they get there.

Only then can we begin to quantify this last-minute demand more accurately, and so have the confidence to create packages and price rooms more appropriately to the actual need than to our increasing anxiety as bookings made further in advance stay low.

Of all the complexities of hotel system pricing, interfaces have always caused the most head-scratching. Why is this? As long as I’ve been in this industry (and trust me, that’s a l-o-n-g time) I’ve had to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to hotel owners why it is that the cost of the interfaces often exceeds Read the rest of this entry »

Discussions with a number of vendor CEOs at the Vendor Summit last week (great conference, Rich!) brought up the frequent challenge of how to present just the right amount of information to a prospective client. This was in the context both of proposals and of system demonstrations, and it’s equally challenging in both situations.

When generating a new proposal every vendor uses standard worksheets to calculate the price for the client’s specific configuration. This is a complex process, needing to Read the rest of this entry »

One of the paradoxes of living in a data-driven management world is that while we have no trouble generating enough of the stuff to drown us all, we’re never entirely sure how accurate or relevant it is, nor how to implement the decisions we base on it.

We’ve become pretty good at consolidating data from the many different management systems usually found on property, and are familiar with the advantages of integrated systems that reduce Read the rest of this entry »