GuestSpan Speaks!

Ten years ago, “bringing the hotel industry into the 21^st Century” meant finding a way to patch your Springer-Miller System together with your GuestWare and your Delphi – and when the IT department had trouble integrating the three, you had to hold inter-departmental meetings to coordinate everyone’s data.  This was better than the old-school paper trail?  The argument was always a long shot, because old-school managers have all the time in the world see if a new technology will float.

We’re now ten years into the 21^st Century, and some hotel properties are still using paper to manage their guest accounts – and the computer monitors at the front desk might have LCD screens, but come behind the counter and you’ll see more DOS and dot matrix than most hoteliers would care to admit.

Historically, the hotel industry side-stepped the “new technology imperative,” and waited to see what would happen.  Most people would be tempted to criticize hoteliers, because now they have a lot of old-fashioned infrastructure.  However, what they don’t have is a legacy burden of obsolete technology.  In a market as mature and competitive as the hospitality industry, “incremental increases in profit margin” are simply not a compelling argument.  If you want to introduce new technology into their world, you’ve got to be willing make a serious impact; otherwise it’s not worth taking seriously.

Well…how serious does “zero impact on existing infrastructure” sound?  That’s the kind of magic that software as a service (SAAS) can make for the hotel industry.  All hoteliers had to do was to wait until technology caught up to them. SAAS now provides a way to access 21^st Century technology without such a large capital investment.  Want a “hotel in a box” or “telecom in a box”?  With SAAS, you don’t even need to buy the box – you just plug into it.

Here are five great examples of SAAS technology in the hotel industry:

Again – 21^st Century technology, zero impact on infrastructure…I think the waiting is done.

How many different services and advertising channels can you pack into one television? HITEC in Austin provided us with dozens of vendors that seek to make money through televisions installed in hotel rooms.

And, most of it is just garbage. At least, that’s what the Marriott hoteliers are telling us.

These vendors are trying to feed advertising, hotel information and paid content through the primary entertainment device. For the most part, their value proposition is poor. The television can’t carry all of those businesses. Unfortunately, it is an easy target for expanded services simply because it already exists in every room and tapping into an unused channel is too tempting for vendors.

The problem with TV content providers is that people aren’t looking for information there. When a business traveler turns on the TV, they are heading toward a specific channel or program. So what if Lodgenet is the default channel to pop up? They are one remote control click away from being invisible and irrelevant. Usage and linger rates show that Lodgenet appeals to a very, very small subset of travelers overall. Some people check their bill on the TV. Others order the occasional movie. But, about 98% of hotel guests flip right past those information channels and never return.

These vendors suffer from the same problem that all of those sponsor-driven internet access sites experience; the kind that immediately take the user to the sponsor’s screen upon logging in. When I head to the internet, I’m likely headed there for a purpose (check email, sports, maps, etc…). When the sponsor screen pops up, I don’t even see it. I’m headed toward my destination and that sponsor screen isn’t even a speed bump along the way. When I turn on my laptop, I’ have a purpose and that’s where I’m going.

Same thing with Lodgenet and the other hotel service guides that feed through the television. When I turn on the TV in the hotel room, even if I don’t know the specific channel to watch, I know I’m looking for entertainment and channels that sell me stuff are rarely entertaining.

The best chance I saw at HITEC was a couple of companies that provide scrolling television programming guides. They have timed the guides to take a while and the most appealing stations are always at the end of the list. While the guide scrolls, advertisements are shown. Because they provide useful information, they have the highest likelihood of attracting eyeballs for a few minutes each day. (For an entertaining conversation, call HotelGuide and ask them how they feel about the fact that EGSTV guys broke off and formed a competing service. Three words: “Bitter Cat Fights.”)

In the next couple of posts, I’ll give my thoughts on the proper place for providing information and putting advertising in front of hotel guests.

In the meantime, happy traveling.

We are believers in understanding a market. In fact, listening to clients, prospects and users is almost our religion. If our efforts don’t solve someone else’s problems, all of our work is a glorified ego trip.

But I digress.

We’re still working on our product rollout. However, I was very intrigued by a sampling of data that came back from our Meeting Planner survey conducted this month.

A couple of our questions described a technology device that we are installing directly into hotel rooms. After providing a bit of brief detail about the device, we asked the meeting planners to indicate their likelihood of either being more loyal to their preferred brand or switching away to a competing brand if this device were installed. The results were very strong:

• 46% said they would be somewhat more likely or much more likely to go with their first choice if this device were available to them.
• 30% said they would be somewhat more likely or much more likely to switch from the first choice to a second or third choice if they had access to this device in that property.

Considering the fact that the average meeting planner (and their staff) in our survey plans 20-50 meetings per year and most of these meeting involve 100-500 attendees (with 35% indicating that they regularly plan meetings for 1,000 attendees or more), the dollars in play in these numbers are GINORMOUS!

So, what is this device that was described to meeting planners? We’ll keep a little bit of mystery around this question. Suffice it to say that we’re pulling out all the stops to create a technology device that will satisfy the needs of hotels, travelers, meeting planners and anyone that spends any time in a hotel.

If the data are even close to reality, the potential of our services will provide significant, occupancy rate movements resulting in multi-millions of dollars of revenues for Avant-garde brands.

And, we believe that hotels are looking for that differentiator that will provide an edge. After all, everyone offers a bed, TV, Internet access and shower. Service levels are declining industry wide. Why not look for something that solves multiple problems.

Later, I’ll weigh in with feedback from business travelers and actual hoteliers. Trust me. It’s all good stuff.

Note: Media members may contact me for launch information at cdalley@guestspan.com (801-253-2459)

Yesterday, Drew McLellan of McLellan Marketing Group told the story of FreshBooks, a web-based time tracking and invoice tool, that went “miles beyond the ordinary” to listen to clients. In brief, company leaders struck out in an RV, driving from city to city, hosting barbecues and rubbing shoulders with clients.

Drew says:

This is a company that gets customer engagement. They didn’t sit back and passively wait for a customer to shoot them an e-mail or take an online survey. They got up and went to their customers. Literally. They didn’t do a hard sell, they let their brand’s personality dictate how they interacted.

No wonder 99% of their customers said they’d recommend them to a peer.

This worked because:

• It was fresh and different
• The company was making the effort — not asking the customers to do the work
• It had talk value — people told this story over and over
• It was true to Freshbook’s brand personality

The RV/road tour isn’t the right answer for everyone. But aggressively listening is.

In the hotel industry, everyone talks about listening to the clients (guests), but in my experience, this effort has been little more than a comment card left on a desk. Some bargain chains have begun to email me after a stay to solicit feedback, but I don’t remember the last time a member of guest management went out of his way to personally listen to me.

To find out more about listening to guests all the time, keep our blog bookmarked or subscribe to our RSS feed. We’ll tell you more about the types of real-time actionable feedback available through our systems.