With exercise, balance is an all-important factor to getting the results you seek. This is also the case with managing a successful fitness facility. A well-balanced fitness amenity is critical to keeping your guests happy and realizing your property's business goals. Too much strength equipment and not enough cardio? Too much noise or too little breathing room? These areas and more are things that must be considered and addressed to create and maintain balance in your facility. This article will teach you about the factors most-critical to a well-balanced fitness amenity. READ MORE

Usage rates for hotel/resort fitness centers have increased steadily, increasing the priority that hotel operators are placing on these environments as a source of both customer satisfaction and revenue generation. After fifteen years of focus in the fitness industry, and working with thousands of hotel and resort properties, I offer you some of the top-line considerations, when embarking on a new or remolded fitness facility project. With competition on project bids as fierce as ever, this unique and detailed knowledge should help to further set your company apart from the rest. READ MORE

What factors inspire guests to utilize your fitness amenity? Are they purely driven by an acceptable level of equipment offering? Not any more. Properly outfitted and substantive fitness equipment offering some time ago moved from being an option to an expectation. Today, the best examples of hotel based fitness amenities incorporate a thoughtful design of space, not simply a supply of gear. The most challenging aspect of this endeavor is that an offering in fitness should not simply be static in nature, but rather a continually evolving and dynamic space, incorporating inspiring esthetics while always remaining functionally relevant. READ MORE

Whether managing the front desk, or the fitness center, every hospitality professional strives to provide a satisfying guest experience and exceed expectations. The challenge is the fact that guests may vary in the level of quality and service they expect, but several non-negotiables exist in relation to the fitness amenity. In this article I break down the practical measures anyone tasked with the management of a fitness facility should take to ensure a fitness experience that's satisfactory across the board. Check it out. You may be surprised at how cost-effective customer satisfaction can be. READ MORE

Hotels have a rich history of shaping American society - and a hotel's public space is a crucial part of its service to travelers and to the local community. So now's a good time to re-think, re-shape, and re-new your lobby. Whether your hotel is economy or extravagant, your interior design professional can help make more effective use of your available public space - through architecture, through selection and placement of furniture, and through use of artwork and accessories. In the process, you'll make some living history of your own! READ MORE

Hoteliers face two trends which are seemingly at odds with each other, but now a definite winner seems to be emerging. On the one hand, the economics of franchise brands and real estate development call for a uniform product that's easy to build and monitor regardless of where in the country the property is located. It's the "cookie-cutter" or "one size fits all" syndrome. On the other hand, recent surveys show that having a memorable experience - whether at dinner, in a store, or on a trip - is quickly becoming more important to Americans than accumulating material wealth. This is the customer's request to "wow me" or "show me something special." In short, "wow me" is beating out the "cookie-cutter." Here's why and how. READ MORE

In a recent report, TravelCLICK, the E-commerce services company catering to the hotel industry, showed that Internet reservations received at the central reservation offices of the major hotel brands grew a staggering 34% in 2003 over the previous year. The report also shows that last year, brand Web sites were the source of 66% of the brands' centrally booked Internet reservations. The resounding message, of course, is that Internet-based business is rapidly becoming the preferred method for booking reservations. Importantly, this trend is only the latest in a series of transitions of hotel business operations to electronic protocols. Food and beverage transactions...automated check out and electronic room keys have been standard operating procedure for years. Why is this important? Along with the wonderful employee productivity and financial payoffs of electronic operations has come an enormous new challenge for management: Cyber-crime. READ MORE

According to the surveillance director of a major Las Vegas hotel/casino, "No matter how aggressive you are in fighting hotel fraud, you can be almost guaranteed that you're not catching all of the theft. There are too many ways that employees, vendors and guests can steal from you." That may be true, but it also is true that there's an awful lot that hotel management can do to prevent and detect illegal activity that they're not doing now. And-now is a good time to start getting serious about fighting fraud, because, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), internal fraud alone (not counting such crimes as credit card fraud by guests and vendor scams that don't involve a hotel employee) robs up to 6% of gross revenue every year. A special challenge for hotel industry security managers is the fact that hospitality properties generate enormous amounts of cash. Whether it's guests paying cash for rooms or restaurant and bar patrons paying for meals with cash, without strict controls on how that cash is handled...and by whom...there's no question that a significant chunk of it is going to end up in employees' pockets. READ MORE

Fraud in the hotel, resort and restaurant industries is a constant and costly problem. While some hospitality companies choose to think of fraud as an unavoidable cost of doing business, more and more are realizing that because fraud losses often are extremely high, even a fractional reduction in those losses can mean millions of dollars in "found" profits. For companies that don't believe they have a serious fraud problem...or simply choose to ignore the subject altogether, consider this: According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners in Austin, TX, the average American company loses 6% of its annual revenue to internal fraud. In other words, a hotel or resort company with, for instance, $1 billion in annual revenues, loses $60 million to employee embezzlement...expense account fraud...theft of inventory, etc. READ MORE

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) reports that the average US company loses 6% of gross revenue to internal fraud every year. When you add frauds committed by outsiders-dishonest hotel guests, vendors, restaurant patrons, etc- the loss figures become even more startling. For hospitality security personnel, auditors and controllers, the biggest anti-fraud challenge is the seemingly limitless variety of ways that employees and outsiders find to steal from the organization. READ MORE

The news headlines are chock full of accounts of massive volumes of confidential corporate information being stolen, including customer credit card data, medical records, Social Security numbers, corporate trade secrets, trademarked and copyrighted intellectual property and more. The results of these attacks, though hard to accurately measure in dollars and cents, are nonetheless devastating for both the victimized company and the customers, employees and contractors whose personal identifying data is stolen. In the largest theft of confidential information ever, the apparel retailer, TJX Inc., had its databases attacked by outside hackers to the tune of over 45 million retail transaction records, involving countless numbers of credit and debit card files. READ MORE

The problem for hospitality companies, among others, is that thieves have found more and more ways to steal customer credit card and other personal information in order to create counterfeit credit cards in the victim's name.,..or to use the credit card information to fraudulently purchase goods over the Internet with the victim's identity. In addition, restaurant and front desk point-of-sale locations are common "hang-outs" for dishonest employees armed with credit card "skimmers" that record guest credit card data for later use in identity fraud. READ MORE

Industry experts estimate that up to five cents of every dollar of revenue in a restaurant or bar is stolen. Of the five cents, it is estimated that four cents is stolen by employees. Pretax net income for successful restaurants and bars is generally between four and ten percent. Therefore, by merely preventing one-half of a business's fraud, pretax income would be significantly improved. For a hotel food and beverage operation generating, say, $1 million a year in revenue, that 5% or $50,000 represents a significant loss. For large chains, the math can easily produce some fairly staggering loss figures. In this article we'll explore the major reasons for this high rate of fraud loss including scams in hotel bars, and Front and Back of the House. READ MORE

This summer, gays and lesbians will spend on average $2,300 on business and leisure travel, almost $1,000 more than heterosexuals, according to the "Gay and Lesbian Travel Snapshot" by Witeck Combs Communications and Harris Interactive. Are gays and lesbians magically immune from this global financial crisis? No, but there are reasons why they are a coveted, treasured segment in this down economy. Read this article for additional facts about this segment and learn which hotel chain earns more than $5 million in revenue annually from "out" gay and lesbian travelers. READ MORE

GLBT athletes travel for regional, national, continental and international sports competitions and the gay sporting competitions generate millions of dollars for local economies. Gay sports remains an emerging growth market as evidenced by the increasing number of sporting competitions and the steady growth in attendance at those events by athletes and spectators alike. READ MORE