By Tatiana Rokou: Many travellers revel in opening their hotel room door and taking in all the wonderful amenities – a plush robe, gourmet coffee, luxury bedding – that make the room feel like home, or even better. However, 35 per cent of global travellers take it one step further and take these amenities to their home according to a recent survey by leading online accommodation booking service Hotels.com.
Where Is the Caribbean’s Most Expensive Luxury Hotel?
The two-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda has earned the distinction of being home to the Caribbean’s most expensive hotel. In a new survey conducted by CaribbeanResorts.net, Barbuda’s Lighthouse Bay Resort landed in the number one spot as the costliest luxury resort.
What to Ask Before Dropping Your Children Off at a Hotel Kids’ Club
By Debbie Dubrow: Face painting, puzzles, and sand castles? Please! That's so '90s. The kids' club at 2013 Gold List property, Chiang Mai's Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi ups its game (and puts other clubs to shame) with activities like rice planting, water buffalo riding, and muay thai (kickboxing).
A Call to Arms: How to Shift Market Share from the OTAs to the Hotel Website
By Max Starkov: This year, the hospitality industry is in for a lot of pain. OTA dependency continues to plague the hospitality industry, despite gains in the past three years and positive trends in all three industry indicators. Painful commission checks due to Expedia’s ETP agency model have started flying out the door, and hoteliers are seeing for the first time the true financial ramifications of their dependency on the OTA channel. Now more than ever, the main focus and priority for any hotelier should be to sell as much inventory via the hotel website as possible. The hotel website is the most cost-effective distribution channel that also preserves rate parity and price erosion.
Expanding Into New Hotel Markets with Limited Resources
By Chris Mumford, Doug Rosen: In a service business such as hotels, signing up new dots on the map leads to the inevitable questions of 'how will we staff these hotels?' With such rapid expansion come significant human capital implications. Larger hotel chains obviously have some advantages in that they have the ability to transfer existing staff and knowledge from other hotels, there are well developed support structures in place, and their global brand names carry influence and trust. This article will focus on those companies with portfolios ranging in size from a handful to a few hundred hotels; companies that are more limited in the resources available to them to fight the human capital challenges that international growth brings.
Hotels Get More Creative with Digital Screens
By Nancy Trejos: Hotels to guests: Put down your iPads and SmartPhones. There's something much more visually appealing to distract you in hotel lobbies these days.
Braving New Frontiers: Five Pointers to Help Travel Brands in 2013
Nobody said it was going to be easy for online travel businesses and it isn’t. EyeforTravel has been hearing from some of our top speakers at this year’s Travel Distribution Summit Europe to find out what keeps them on their toes and awake at night.
Does Money Really Affect Motivation?
By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Research suggests that even if we let people decide how much they should earn, they would probably not enjoy their job more. Even those who highlight the motivational effects of money accept that pay alone is not sufficient. The basic questions are: Does money make our jobs more enjoyable? Or can higher salaries actually demotivate us?
Hotel Tonight: Can an App Revolutionize Last-Minute Travel?
By Katie Morell: Sam Shank says entrepreneurs must be fearless. Shank has certainly learned a lot, persevering through numerous rejections from venture capitalists to start Hotel Tonight, which produces a smartphone app that allows users to book hotels for about $100 a night with less than 24 hours’ notice. Though the company is only a little more than 2 years old, it already has more than $35 million in funding and 100 employees in its San Francisco office.
Keeping Employees Happy at Work Part 2
By Noelle E. Ifshin, President, 4Q Consulting, LLC: As we explored in Employees are Your First Customers – Happy Employees Part 1, we know that happy, engaged employees are good for your restaurant's business. However, what makes people happy in their jobs is subjective, can be elusive and varies by employee. Here are 4 basic things that you can do to increase employee satisfaction.
