By feature writer Kate Berg: An organization’s internal communication can be much the same as your kitchen junk drawer. We carefully craft and design our marketing communications, but all too often we just toss our internal communication out to our team members and promise ourselves some day we will take the time to develop a better strategy.

By Amy Zipkin: Reading material in many hotel rooms has become about as spare as it can be — open the desk drawer and it might hold a Gideon Bible and a Yellow Pages. But some hotels are giving the humble book another look, as they search for ways to persuade guests, particularly younger ones, to spend more time in their lobbies and bars.

By feature writer Dr. John Hogan: Who is taking a serious look at hotels and hospitality these days?  While there seems to be continuing announcements of new brands, the lasting power of many of them remains a hopeful desire in the imagination of the founders.

The Torre di Pisa — or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as most English-speakers know it — is continuing its slow but steady return to “straightness.”

Music and hotels go together like Sonny and Cher. Put your feet up and contemplate the greats of music who have passed through hotels and left their mark, one way or another.

By feature writer Brett Patten: To not only survive, but to thrive in the 21st century will require a whole new business and management strategy approach in every aspect of the hotel management systems. I'd like to utilize the analogy of a survivor's guide in explaining some of these customer experience design elements that I think are so critical for hospitality management to be aware of for growing their hotel business in this new century.

By Arielle Sanchez: Many customers believe that OTAs automatically have lower prices when it comes to hotel rooms as opposed to the actual hotel websites. While this might not always be the case, it is definitely what the OTAs want customers to believe. This belief has the potential to make customers automatically default to viewing OTA’s websites when they are searching for a hotel room, leaving very little chance for hotels to gain direct bookings. This can be a devastating blow to independent hotels and resorts, who often times do not even show up on the first search engine results page of Google.

By Joe Sharkey: While a lot of attention has been focused on fees the airlines are piling on to basic fares, the hotel business has also been steadily gaining revenue from adding charges to the basic room rate.

By feature writer Mike Oppenheim, M.D.: Sometimes having a conscience really gets in the way of making money as this hotel medical emergency illustrates.

By Kate Whitehead: There have been numerous cases involving irate passengers in China in the past year – both in the air and on the ground, and on domestic airlines as well as some international ones. The reaction from airlines has been mixed. But Dr Vernon Nase, head of the department of law at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, warns of the danger of doing nothing.