As hotel group meeting business grows in 2016, groups are looking to hotels to offer cutting edge technology and environments that are especially conducive to collaboration, creativity and fresh perspectives. Gone are the days of professionals working alone in their rooms—across industries, people want to work in open areas, interacting and socializing seamlessly. With this in mind, Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, located between Silicon Valley and San Francisco, recently completed a top-to-bottom transformation to become a hub of connectivity for professionals and group meetings. The Burlingame-based property welcomes approximately 330,000 guests each year, with almost half the hotel's overnight guests visiting for meetings and events. READ MORE

Hotels and chains are looking to meet the rising demand for more bandwidth as they ramp up their hotel group meetings business. Throughout the industry, hotels are upgrading (or have recently upgraded) their Wi-Fi to serve in-room guests. Now that these properties are growing their group meetings business, they're finding that their existing bandwidth is no longer sufficient. Problems can arise when your Wi-Fi service becomes stretched too thin. This can diminish your competitive advantage and even lose business. On a broader level, it can also damage your branding because, let's face it, few things are more frustrating that attending a conference with spotty, unreliable Wi-Fi. READ MORE

More and more, smaller independent hotels striving for success in the group meeting business find out they're not truly on their own. Vying for this business remains highly competitive. Some strategies, however, can increase their chances to attract, impress and retain a significant amount of group meeting business. When you're responsible for a lifestyle or boutique hotel's success, go with your strengths. Be unique and distinctive, target a niche in your community, and emphasize how you offer guests a truly different and memorable experience.That's not to say it's easy. Successfully booking group sales at an independent hotel relies less on sheer volume and more on savviness READ MORE

Since its infancy in the late 90s and early 2000s, paid search has been a highly effective tactic for capturing would-be travelers that are actively exploring travel options. There's seemingly no better way to attain a new hotel guest than by delivering an ad promoting your hotel when someone is searching for “hotels” in your market area. For instance, if you are promoting hotel rooms in Las Vegas, you would likely deliver relevant ads to people searching for keywords such as “Las Vegas hotel,” “Las Vegas hotels,” and “Vegas hotel reviews. ”According to Prognosis Digital, 79% of people that book hotels online search for that particular hotel on a search engine before buying. Thus, having a presence on search engines is essential for any hotel. READ MORE

As simple as it sounds, knowing which customers are profitable is a challenging task for many businesses. Predicting which customers have the most profit potential is even more challenging since it requires estimation of future business. Applying these same modeling techniques and profit calculations to potential customers adds yet another degree of difficulty. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a (relatively) old concept. Businesses have been calculating the expected operating margins received from a customer from long before the birth of the internet and modern data tools. READ MORE