Service, Cleanliness, Food, Room Size, Price, Bed & Bathroom Are Mirror Image of Travelers’ Most Mentioned Hotel Compliments & Complaints. Over One Million Online Sentiments Show Guests Top Rants & Raves…

By Renee Radia: Last week, Starbucks announced a new service called Tweet-a-coffee. The program is as intuitive as it sounds – it allows Twitter users to give Starbucks Card eGifts to other Twitter users all from within the social network. Businesses within the hospitality industry should be quick to take advantage of this service, as it is low-cost but could have a big impact. Buying a coffee for someone is, after all, quite a hospitable thing to do! Here are a few ways hotels could Tweet-a-coffee and why this might pay off.

A new national Hilton Worldwide survey of more than 600 U.S. meeting planners reinforces the need for small meeting solutions with nearly a third of business professionals spending an average of two or more hours booking hotel meeting space for an offsite meeting.

By Feature Writer Taylor Short: Maintaining a high ranking on sites is a key component of a robust marketing strategy for hotels. TripAdvisor has approximately 62 million unique monthly visitors and has compiled more than 75 millions reviews. These types of engagement metrics are simply hard to ignore. If a hotel has few reviews, or has numerous negative reviews, it will ultimately hurt their reputation and general revenue. For this reason, hotel representatives must make a habit of responding to online customer reviews. Also, it’s important to note that responding to user reviews encourages more users to submit their own comments. Simply put, having a high rank on TripAdvisor means millions of potential customers will view your brand in a positive light, and will be more likely to stay at your hotel.

By Feature Writer Matt Shiells-Jones: I have already talked about Silent, Professional and Social Complainers, and now I get into the territory of every employees nightmare – the Aggressive Complainer.

By Feature Writer Hugo R. Mechelse, International Butlers: Often I get asked the question how to implement butler service in China. Is this country fit for this concept, and if so, how does it work? For sure it is not a ‘pluck-and-play’ concept. The very reason for this is a cultural aspect related to a major difference between the Christian European countries where the butler service originates from and the Chinese Confucian heritage.

Spanish golf tourism is a €340 million industry, according to research presented at this year's International Golf Travel Market. The study, which also revealed Spain as the No.1 travel destination for visitors from the UK, France, Germany and Scandinavia, also highlighted European golf tourism to be worth €1.55 billion per year.

There's a "war room" in the basement of Marriott International's headquarters, and it's not one where its executives plot against Hilton. No, this war room is part of Marriott's new 10,000-square-foot Innovation Lab, a place where employees and hotel owners brainstorm, design and refine their ideas for what the hotel of the future will look like.

By Feature Writer Brett Patten: In an overall survey around guest loyalty, one of the biggest contributors to guest attrition rates was found to be the noise level of the hotel when the guest was trying to sleep. Twenty-four percent said this was the main reason for not returning to the hotel property or not using that hotel brand in the future.