In considering the brand that guests associate with your facility, how often does this image match up to what your community offers? In this article, I try to highlight a few innovative approaches that are being undertaken by lodging professionals to align both their community and property branding efforts in a way that provides a stronger product to guests. In doing so, they are able to provide enhanced services to their guests that might not have been possible otherwise while also capturing more revenue from each visit.

New media and technology are driving your hotel's transition to the New Experience Economy. What transition? The linear process you once controlled communicating your brand and experience to your guests is now an open dialogue that your guests control. The good news? Satisfaction remains your guiding principle. Because you still control your guest's experience, you still control their satisfaction. While you could apply a variety of metrics and even more algorithms to determine the satisfaction level of your guests, you simply need to understand why, in this New Experience Economy, (Time + Cost) Experience = Satisfaction.

Marketing managers are continuously being pressured to increase the membership base of their customer reward programs. In this brief article we question that practice on two grounds. First, a membership numbers increase it becomes increasingly difficult for firms to adequately service the needs of their members; and second, the very growth itself challenges the basic notion that reward programs are intended to make members feel special and unique.

Your challenge is to make your call center feel like an extension of this highly personalized high-end destination. How do you make it happen? You realize what we're talking about here: the customer experience. It's a process, a state of being, a measurement, and something to be quantified, optimized, and positivized. Any company with customers talks about creating a positive customer experience, and every company is looking for the best ways to provide and measure customer experience.

Some researchers have suggested that customers who are dissatisfied, but experience a high level of excellent service recovery, may ultimately be even more satisfied and more likely to repurchase than those who were satisfied in the first place. This idea has become known as the service recovery paradox. This article discusses the paradox and reports on a research study conducted in Spain, where we found that hotel customers who had experienced a recovery encounter, did indeed perceive a higher level of service quality.

Hospitality companies need well-rounded talent to help them achieve their goals. That talent comes from many different sources, among them the many hotel schools. And today's students present many different challenges when being considered for these corporate needs. Look around at the young people you know: they've grown up around technology that promotes non-contact communications and interactions. Hospitality however, is all about the personal, face-to-face kinds of exchanges that are missing from their development. And this millennial generation is more about immediate gratification rather than the strategic and long-term thinking needed to achieve success in today's competitive business environment. So the question is: what courses should the hospitality schools promote, and which ones should the students seek out, to overcome the experiences they learned growing up and to be better prepared for the challenges associated with a hospitality career?

A healthier economy, changing consumer behavior and shifting workforce demographics (i.e., hello, Millennial generation, goodbye, Baby Boomers), are changing the talent management game in the hospitality industry. Organizational success is no longer being driven by amenities offered but by the overall “guest” experience from first contact to final check out — and every interaction in between. For hotels that truly want to deliver this experience, the pressure will be on to implement effective talent management programs designed to attract, engage and retain the best and brightest staff.

Hospitality organizations need to recognize that in today's environment they have to compete as aggressively for their premium share of the talented employee base as they do for their Revpar market share within their competitive sets. Developing internal Star Reports can measure who has the premium share of that talent. It is also vital to know where to find and secure that talent if it does not exist in the local market. Frank Speranza, President of New York-based Hospitality Talent Scouts Executive Search, explains in this article more effective ways of looking at recruitment.

Hospitality brands that decide to be present on social media need to set their strategic goals and objectives. Social media objectives can generally be broken down into two types - those concentrating on the 'business' outcomes: increasing sales, web traffic, conversion; and those focusing on the 'connection' outcomes: raising brand awareness, managing brand reputation, building trust. The big question is - how do we find the right balance between the first and second group of objectives to successfully convert fans into customers?

Customer service is evolving in today's fast-moving online social landscape. Customers are looking for speedy resolutions to their issues and questions, and there is an expectation that brands respond quickly. This is of particular importance for hotel brands today, given that travelers share content through their personal social channels frequently and see this sharing as an extension of their travel experience. To stay current with this fast-paced market, brands must integrate social media in their customer service strategies and make it part of long-term business plans in order to maintain a competitive advantage. Hilton Hotels & Resorts and parent company Hilton Worldwide have weaved social media into their business plans to efficiently manage their social channels, and have found ways to effectively engage with their guests through social media platforms that strengthen relationships and encourage loyalty in their guests.