We are thrilled to announce a new book by long time contributor to ehotelier, Doug Kennedy. Doug is President of the Kennedy Training Network and has been writing inspiring hospitality training articles for more than a decade. In this book Doug presents these articles as a chronological collection – a valuable resource to all hoteliers.

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.

By Jason Price, Executive Vice President at HeBS Digital: Building a direct revenue channel has become paramount to any other marketing effort the hotel can accomplish. The hotel website is a critical component to selling room nights, preserving rate, and building market share. We've seen the pendulum shift to and from the bargaining power of buyer and supplier, a constant push and pull between OTAs and hotels. Scholars of Porter's Five Forces take note.

By Jason Price, Executive Vice President at HeBS Digital: Hoteliers had relied primarily on others to put heads in beds and applied the same thinking with the web. Hotels gave net rates to their favorite agencies, tour operators and hotel consolidators so the same practice was applied online to the third-party vendors. Anything that sold online was treated as incremental business. Therefore, steep room discounts could be found anywhere but on the hotel's own website, if they even had one.

By Jason Price, Executive Vice President at HeBS Digital: A walk down memory lane for old timers while a primer for new comers to the field of hotel marketing.

Global Staff Movements for February 2013 provided by Spectrum International.

When it comes to a hotel's mobile presence, travelers want to receive only the information that is relative to their stay and designed specifically to fit their device format; Lodging Interactive offers customized, hosted mobile website creation and ongoing management that is quick to load, easy to navigate, and preferred by today's smartphone users.

By Doug Kennedy: Many hotel salespeople seem to be handling the challenge of too many leads coming in electronically by trying to respond to them all with equal attention.   When leads bottle-neck during periods of peak demand, the end result is slower response times and generic proposals.  This levels the “playing field” for all the hotels contacted and does not allow any particular hotel to stand out from its competitors. Instead, hotel sales directors need to take a step back and re-evaluate the processes in place at their sales offices to make sure they have re-organized to keep up with these emerging trends.

By Doug Kennedy: Smart hotel marketers know it’s the customer’s choice of how they want to book.  They understand the interplay of voice, web and email and they make it easy for potential guests to use their preferred channel.  Some guests might prefer to call directly, such as those who have read negative online guest reviews, those with special lodging or dietary needs, or those who just do not believe the rate online is the lowest.  Some want to look online first and then call; others want to call first and then book online. Why make it challenging for potential guests to use their preferred method of communication?