The real mobile question is not if, but how you utilize this channel. This should be guided by your overall mobile strategy and which options meet you and your guest's needs. If you don't have a mobile strategy - you need one. There are almost endless possibilities for communicating with mobile guests, but your business needs to adopt a strategy to be successful. It goes beyond simply identifying all possible revenue and service touch points. You need to understand guest preferences for interacting with your brand and what they expect in return. Mobile guests are maturing quickly and have high expectations. So the longer you wait, the greater the chance someone else will fulfill their needs. READ MORE

The global smartphone market is projected to grow by 24% CAGR and reach 619 million units by the year 2015. We as travel industry professionals are obviously dazzled by the very viable and possibly amazing opportunities for growth through mobile devices. Be it location based applications, pushed SMS; it's all there for the taking. Or are we all wearing blinders? Have we paused to consider the increasingly possible pervasive effects of getting guests so focused on themselves? Meanwhile are we unknowingly fulfilling a core CRM financial principle namely, pushing client servicing costs onto the clients themselves? Are they organizing their myriad of self-servicing mobile nitty-gritty 'bits' rather than appreciating the sensorial value of the services you so dearly hope to sell them? READ MORE

By reacting too slowly to the development of the web, hotels largely lost the opportunity for direct selling online in the late nineties, ceding control to aggressive third party channels that now dominate online booking and extract high commissions. Only recently are hotels recovering that lost ground online through the use of online marketing and social media to reach the guest directly and lower their cost of acquisition. If hotels learn from the past and react quickly now to the explosive growth in the mobile market, they can avoid a repetition of the same mistake and begin serving their customers directly on mobile. READ MORE

Location-based games like Foursquare, Facebook's Places, and IMGuest are growing in popularity and evolving into more social venues daily. There are more than five million Foursquare users today and that number is growing daily. Hotels have a unique opportunity to benefit from this new channel. Find out how claiming your venue can help you drive more traffic to your restaurant, sell more weddings or create more employee engagement. It's simple and for now, it's free. READ MORE

You have arrived, your moment of anticipation is here, you are about to open the door to your sleeping chamber for the evening and your temporary living quarters. You are about to experience perhaps the strongest impression making moment of your hotel stay. You have activated your contribution to the REVPAR of that property. You are entering - The Bedroom. What makes the guest room experience memorable? What are the dos and don'ts of bedroom service and how does each department/role of the hotel impact that intimate space? What kind of service will you experience in the bedroom? Read on... READ MORE