Upmarket Restaurants and Motivation to Post Content Online

The rise of social media continues with individuals sharing content and opinions, in the form of comments, pictures and video and other new more entrants in the supply market e.g. the arrival of Twitter. This has consequences for traditional marketing tools like advertising and word of mouth, tools that restaurants have traditionally relied on to promote their products and services.

Your hotel might be leaving millions on the table

BOULDER, Colorado—Our industry is accustomed to reviewing and measuring hotel performance in macro terms on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. However, the industry is actually a micro market with a competitive product that perishes and renews every single night.


Much can be learned by measuring the individual competitive interactions between hotels on a nightly basis. Therefore, while owners, investors and lenders primarily are concerned with the performance of their hotel relative to macro market standards, hotel operators, brands and revenue and asset managers must focus on the interactions of occupancy, average daily rate and revenue per available room relative to their competition each night.

Cautious Optimism Returns as Hotel Operators Feel the Worst is Over | Horwath HTL Reports

Results from the latest edition of the Global Hotel Market Sentiment Survey shows that hotel operators believe that the worst of the crisis is behind them and that 2010 will be the beginning of the long road to recovery. The survey, carried out every six months by Horwath HTL the world’s foremost firm of hospitality consultants, concentrates on four key questions to gauge the level of industry feeling in the short term, and the key indicators driving the sentiment.


Robert Hecker who heads up Horwath HTL in Asia said “It is too early to say if this feeling will translate into tangible results this year, but if the market feels we are at the bottom and the only way is up, that can only have a positive effect on the industry”

Readers speak out about hotel VIP lounge closures in Marriotts, Hyatts, Sheratons...

Barbara writes some good stuff that can't be ignored..

Hotels: Here's a tip for you... Taking take away a VIP lounge from road warriors will be like trying to yank a juicy bone away from a dog.
The post I wrote yesterday about how some hotel are closing VIP lounges - some temporarily, some permanently - turned out to be a popular read with road warriors who've come to rely on the lounges. They say the atmosphere, service and food that the lounges provide can't easily be replicated with a coupon for the lobby Starbucks or a voucher for the hotel restaurant. Here's what they wrote.....

Going with GOPPAR? | Not so fast, RevPAR is still the best metric for revenue managers

There has been a ripple of interest lately in a new metric for the hotel industry, GOPPAR. (If it seems strange that an obscure ratio can spark an industry-wide debate, then you should start hanging out at the accounting department water cooler more often.) Proponents of the measure, which computes gross operating profit per available room, argue that it is a more effective benchmark for a hotel’s overall fiscal health than RevPAR is, because it incorporates all operating costs. After all, it is profits that matter most at the end of the day- not necessarily revenues- and having a day-to-day yardstick with which to measure those profits in terms of available rooms is both useful and realistic. The advantages of GOPPAR in this area are obvious; a hotel with both high ADR and RevPAR could, conceivably, still fail to turn a profit, but a hotel with strong GOPPAR will, by definition, be profitable.
For lack of a more original assessment, we like GOPPAR. It’s a great benchmark for overall operational soundness, and we feel that it may well be the metric of the future.

Market Metrix Announces Annual 2009 Hospitality Index Results

With occupancy and revPAR falling in 2009, customer satisfaction held its own during a tumultuous year (+0.4 to 82.8). Satisfaction with airlines increased slightly (+1.0 to 78.7) but declined among rental cars companies (–0.9 to 78.4). Oberoi Hotels and Resorts, Virgin Atlantic, and Enterprise Rent–A–Car ranked number one in hotel, airline, and rental car industry customer satisfaction, respectively in 2009.

With revenues plummeting in 2009, hotel companies focused on making their loyalty programs more attractive — and it worked. The percentage of rooms filled by loyalty program members increased 5 percent in 2009

'Lost Decade' in Overseas Travel to U.S. Cost 440,000 Jobs and $500 Billion in Spending

A new report by the U.S. Travel Association in conjunction with Oxford Economics reveals that the decline in overseas travel to the United States since 2000 has cost America 440,000 jobs and more than $500 billion in total travel-related spending.
According to analysis of international travel figures, the failure of the United States to simply keep pace with the growth in international long-haul travel worldwide has cost our economy..