Editorial Board   Guest Author

Ms. Tukan

Randa Tukan

Senior Vice Principal & Director of Interiors, HOK

Randa Tukan, leading the Hospitality, Retail and Residential Commercial Interiors practice at HOK Toronto, brings more than 25 years of experience in interior architecture and design, both in Canada and around the world.  Her expertise extends far beyond the world of interiors, encompassing architecture, urban planning, landscape, economics, branding and graphics. Her design vision is a fully integrated one, ensuring that the expectations of the client and the market are met and enhanced. As a director of interiors, she uses design to advance clients' branding and market positioning.

 

Ms. Tukan's client list includes many of the world's best-known hotel brands: InterContinental, Marriott, Delta, Renaissance, Shangri-La, Hyatt, and Hilton. Her projects have won numerous design awards and accolades. In 2016, the HOK Toronto interiors team, which she overseas, spearheaded the award-winning proposal, the Driftscape, which received the Radical Innovation Award. The coveted, annual award is juried by global hospitality industry influencers, leaders as well as operators and developers and selected by an audience of designers, architects and hoteliers.

Ms. Tukan holds a Master of Liberal Arts degree in Fine Arts and a Post-Graduate Certificate of Special Studies in Management and Administration, both from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

She is a member of the advisory board for Humber College interior design program, a site visitor for the Council of Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA), and has taught at the Ontario College of Art. Ms. Tukan is fluent in English, French and Arabic.

Please visit http://www.hok.com for more information.

Ms. Tukan can be contacted at 416-342-7201 or randa.tukan@hok.com

Coming up in February 2019...

Social Media: Getting Personal

There Social media platforms have revolutionized the hotel industry. Popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Tumblr now account for 2.3 billion active users, and this phenomenon has forever transformed how businesses interact with consumers. Given that social media allows for two-way communication between businesses and consumers, the emphasis of any marketing strategy must be to positively and personally engage the customer, and there are innumerable ways to accomplish that goal. One popular strategy is to encourage hotel guests to create their own personal content - typically videos and photos -which can be shared via their personal social media networks, reaching a sizeable audience. In addition, geo-locational tags and brand hashtags can be embedded in such posts which allow them to be found via metadata searches, substantially enlarging their scope. Influencer marketing is another prevalent social media strategy. Some hotels are paying popular social media stars and bloggers to endorse their brand on social media platforms. These kinds of endorsements generally elicit a strong response because the influencers are perceived as being trustworthy by their followers, and because an influencer's followers are likely to share similar psychographic and demographic traits. Travel review sites have also become vitally important in reputation management. Travelers consistently use social media to express pleasure or frustration about their guest experiences, so it is essential that every review be attended to personally. Assuming the responsibility to address and correct customer service concerns quickly is a way to mitigate complaints and to build brand loyalty. Plus, whether reviews are favorable or unfavorable, they are a vital source of information to managers about a hotel's operational performance.  The February Hotel Business Review will document what some hotels are doing to effectively incorporate social media strategies into their businesses.

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