Travel Is The New Club

In-room hotel entertainment used to be remarkably simple. A TV with access to terrestrial channels and pay-per-view movies was about as far as it stretched until tablets, streaming and a desire to link home devices to in-room tech began to emerge. The Caterer recently published a round-up of what it expects to be the in-room entertainment of choice for hotel guests during 2019, and it caught our eye. If you haven’t read it yet or would like it summarising, we’ve done just that (you can thank us later). “Casting” will be the new buzzword If you’ve invested in a Google Chromecast for home entertainment purposes, you’ll be acutely aware of how wonderfully convenient it can be to beam video content from your smartphone or tablet to the TV. If ‘Chromecast’ means nothing to you, think about the number of times you’ve found a YouTube video on your phone but have become frustrated by the small screen’s inability to immerse you in the content when you have a perfectly good (and big) TV sitti..

Hotels are about the people. The people booking in for a comfortable stay. And, the people who work to make that stay memorable. Moreover, it is the personal touches that are remembered. Excellent and personable staff increase your hotel revenue with excellent salesmanship. And of course, by creating a desire to return to the hotel at a later date. This is all well and good. However, the world has become technologically driven, and it stands to reason that your hotel must cater for that. Without a deeply-functional PMS, a hotel has its work cut out. There are many ways that a PMS will increase your hotel revenue. Let me walk you through the top 5. 1. Administering the customer experience If there is a member of your team hugging a desk, shuffling papers, or performing some other thankless administrative task, then they represent a hole in your customer experience. Nobody wants to be juggling bookings in a dark room, especially when they can make a difference out on the floor. A PMS ..

A question for you: is your hotel the main reason for guests to be visiting your area? Perhaps you have a spa and run relaxation weekends. Maybe you host major events. It would be nice to think that your venue is the epicentre of your guests’ weekend, but for many, it’s probably more a matter of convenience. Sorry. This is why destination marketing is important. Outside the swooshing doors of your lobby lies a town or a city worth visiting, and to help you sell rooms, it makes sense to highlight this to potential guests. Here are 3 reasons to make your surrounding area the focus of your marketing. Destination marketing creates local partnerships Your area probably contains a rich environment of activities and facilities. Is there a local museum, or art gallery, that is open to the public? For the more rural locations, perhaps there are local walks and parks that are worth traipsing around, or local produce that can only be bought from your area. If that’s the case, tell everyone an..

From soft white sheets to marble lobbies adorned with the finest décor, luxury hotels make it a point to treat their guests like royalty. So at what point do hotels leave the world of luxury and enter the realm of insanity? Bvlgari Hotel in London offers its VIP guests private shopping trips. Guests staying in the Fenway Park Suite at Hotel Commonwealth are granted selfie ops with the World Series trophy. And at the Westin Austin Downtown, you’ll find rooftop guitar lessons. But, the “world’s most luxurious hotel” easily took the cake in 2013 for craziest guest amenity: 24-karat gold iPads. Introducing… The Burj Al Arab Jumeirah. After a quick scroll of their website, it should be no surprise that this famous Dubai hotel considers itself to be the world’s most luxurious hotel. Known for its iconic sail-shaped silhouette, this property is the epitome of high-end hospitality. Its sprawling terrace stretches out to sea with two glistening pools, meanwhile the spa offers only the best rel..

The coming year will see a continuation of many of the current trends in hospitality – personalization, wellness, local partnerships and unique activities, to name four. The common theme or goal for all of these, though, is to enhance the guest experience, so I ask: why start only when the guest arrives? As travel in 2019 becomes increasingly aspirational – even for business segments where bleisure is now common practice – the average person has immersed himself or herself in exciting and exceptional experiences from around the world well before any money is exchanged through what can be called the ‘sense of discovery’ to couple it with the onsite term of ‘sense of place’. And indeed, this sense of discovery is often half the fun! While social media, travel blogs and word-of-mouth dominate the initial research phase for this, where hotels can and should look to improve is in the prearrival experience – both from the time someone books to physically arriving on property as well as fro..