Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Tune in to the the latest Suite Spot episode to hear from Senior Product Manager at Booking.com, Laura Xhaferaj as she breaks down the guest review score update being rolled out by Booking.com and how this new innovation will impact travelers, hotels, and hotel management groups alike. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Very pleased to bring you another incredible episode here, a unique episode, exciting episode. As you can tell from the title. We’ve got an update with one of the major players in hospitality, Booking.com and with me today to kind of break down this all important update is Laura Xhaferaj, Senior Product Manager at Booking.com. Laura, thank you so much for being on the Suite Spot with me. Laura Xhaferaj: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. Ryan Embree: We’re excited to share this news. I mean, this is a huge update that Booking.com is about to roll out that has a huge impact on hoteliers and travelers alike. But before we get into sharing this news, I’d love to start, since this is your first time on the Suite Spot, share a little bit about your hospitality background and your role at Booking.com as Senior Product Manager with our Suite Spot audience. Laura Xhaferaj: I am the Senior Product Manager for user-generated content at Booking.com. And you may hear me refer to my team as UGC, I have been leading initiatives that improve how we showcase guest review across the platform. My journey in hospitality started years ago, even before I joined Booking.com, and I’ve always been passionate about enhancing travel experience, whether it’s helping hotels connect with guests or finding new ways to elevate guest satisfaction through reviews. Working with UGC, I got to build features that bring authentic travel voice into the booking experience globally. Ryan Embree: Yeah, I think this is one of those, I’m sure, an amazing role that you’re in to be able to kind of look and see what travelers are saying about their experiences with the hotel partners that you’re working with. Making sure that information is as accurate as possible so that guests and hotels alike can make the best booking decisions, make sure hotels are making the best operational decisions to improve the guest experience. So I’m sure it’s a really cool role to be in. You get a lot of feedback probably from both hoteliers as well as guests. At Travel Media Group we do a lot of innovation and, and updates and rollouts, sort of like what you’re going through and what we find is there’s always typically a why behind making these changes. Right. So I think maybe the best way to understand and update like this is to maybe talk about the guest review score update and the why behind it. Laura Xhaferaj: Of course, we initiated this change based directly on partner feedback partners highlighted that on our previous system, which calculated overall score using a simple average of users from the past three years had some key limitations for those who had made significant improvements such as renovations, upgrades in services or new guest facilities. The all the reviews still had too much weight slowing down the reflection of their progress. In response to this feedback, we are introducing a weighted review score where recent reviews have bigger influence. This adjustment means that hotels actively enhancing guest experience will see those efforts reflected more quickly in their scores, rewarding their commitment improvement. And it’s an update designed to encourage continuous progress and ensure travelers see the most relevant and recent experiences. Ryan Embree: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean this is what we talk to hotel partners all the time about, when they come to us and say, how can I improve my reputation? And maybe they have those reviews that just have been plaguing them for years. Obviously we’ve been having a staffing shortage in this industry for a while. You know, maybe there was a time where you were short staffed years ago that could still be having a really bad, uh, impact on reputation and you’re trying to play a little bit of catch up. So I think this is such a cool update needed. We spoke previously about, because with a rollout like this, Laura as you know, can’t just flick a switch. Right? I’m sure there’s a ton of research, ton of testing that’s done. We had spoke previously about the pilot markets and the comprehensive rollout of this update. Can you walk us t

In this special episode, Suite Spot Host, Ryan Embree covers 5 key takeaways from the 2024 The Hospitality Show that took place in San Antonio, Texas. The industry event was one-of-a-kind and featured incredible panelists, vendors, guest speakers, interviews, and much more from the hospitality industry. Tune in now to get the latest details from the event and why you should be excited for next year! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Ryan Embree here with the Suite Spot. Thank you so much for joining me today. Today is episode 151. Just want a moment to recognize 151 episodes. Wanna thank our audience, uh, for being with us, uh, whether this is your first episode or 151, thank you so much for all the support and we are so excited to bring you another incredible episode. This, as you can see from the title The Hospitality Show, are five key takeaways. We just returned from San Antonio. In fact, again, just like last year’s takeaway episode, I haven’t even had the opportunity to do my laundry to get in my normal Travel Media Group attire. So, I was just so wanting to get these takeaways to you from the episode. First off, an absolutely incredible event. The Hospitality Show, this is the second annual one put on. The first one was last year. Inaugural show was last year in Las Vegas. This in San Antonio. Want to thank the city of San Antonio for hosting to our A HLA Questex. They put on an incredible show to all the sponsors. If you have not already looked into or are thinking about attending the hospitality show, it is a must attend event. So many interviews, so many insights, content. They had some incredible keynotes, guest speakers, so many cool activities. And of course, hospitality. You have to be able to throw a party and host people, right? And they absolutely nailed it in San Antonio, celebrating Dia de DEOs. Just did a fantastic job. So let’s get into some of these takeaways that I got, and it’s gonna start with one of the most prevalent topics and patterns, ai, in fact, in these top five takeaways, two of my key takeaways have to do with ai. The first is, from a hotelier’s perspective, seems to be this just battle right now of where AI is best utilized with our industry. And there’s this push and pull, whether it’s for efficiency, reducing costs, which we know right now is really, really hurting a lot of hotels across the nation, whether it’s rising construction costs, operational costs, staffing and wages continue to grow, uh, and get more costly. So is it for efficiency that it’s best use? Or is it to drive revenue? Right? Top line revenue. And, and there was kind of this, this little just debate of, of what is AI best used for right now? And, uh, you know, there was a, a incredible panel on ai. There were several of them, but the one I had the pleasure, uh, there was one guest speaker who kind of talked through the stages of AI and where we are and actually broke it down into three stages. And we’re on the precipice of, of the third right now. So go through the first one, which was predictive, right? That’s your chat, GPT just kind of giving us maybe, hey, write me an email answering sort of questions for you. Uh, and then we kind of slowly moved into this co-pilot. You know, you see a lot of these big companies kind of roll out this co-pilot that was really supposed to do actions for you. And now the panelists has had kind of challenged that were into this third, which is assistive and, uh, autonomous and agent kind of stage of ai where this would be kind of the human touch mix with ai. And I think he’s, he’s definitely onto something as far as, you know, some of the things that we really could make more efficient portfolio requests, right? That was the great example of how many portfolio requests. And yet there still has to be human touch involved. And if we can just figure out a way to kind of use AI to really, you know, help us expedite that process and become more efficient, think of how much time that’s giving back your staff. How many times, uh, we’re answering that phone call, answering that email, text message for a portfolio request, right? You know, in fact, one of the panelists was talking about kind of the, the gap in technology in our industry specifically and saying that we’re definitely making progress, but are we there? And, and her cited example was, was ordering room service, right? So we’ve got this great QR code, you look at the menu and everything like that, you still have to pick up a manual phone or your cell ph

The Guest Experience Snapshot powered by TMG Oneview® AI is here! Tune in to hear from the Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group, Jason Lee, on the latest technological innovation being offered to hoteliers as a part of our digital solutions for hotels. This new offering uses generative AI in a unique way to help hoteliers interpret guest feedback and dial in on how they can improve the guest experience at their properties Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. If you are watching us here on YouTube, we have a few announcements to make. First, we’ve hit an incredible milestone. This is Suite Spot, 150 episodes. Thank you all. I just wanna take a moment before we get started on this great episode that we have today to thank everyone for taking the time to listen to us for all of your support. You know, 150 episodes is something absolutely insane saying it out loud. So again, thank you. And we have a very familiar guest who I feel like we’ve been on quite a number of these episodes. Jason, our Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group. Jason Lee, thank you again for joining me on the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Thank you, Ryan. Really excited to talk to you about this today. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re super excited. And if you’re watching us, like I said on YouTube, if you’re not, first of all encourage you go to our YouTube channel, you’re gonna find some exclusive content there that you’ll only find on YouTube. But if you are watching us on YouTube, you’ll see we might have a little bit different feel and vibe. We have moved into a brand new Suite Spot. We are so excited to showcase this new space. It was custom built. You are gonna see all types of new looks from this space. New, exciting content, so be sure to follow and subscribe The Suite Spot. We’ve got so much jam packed for you. But speaking of innovation and new, that is exactly what we’re here to talk about. Jason, we have had a number of episodes talking about the incredible developments that you and your dev team here at Travel Media Group and some of the innovation that you’ve put out there. This might be one of the most innovative, the guest experience snapshot powered by TMG OneView ai. Before we get talking about it, what we’ve come to learn is with these innovations, there’s always kind of a story or a why behind it. Walk us through that with this guest experience snapshot. Jason Lee: Well, for a long time, I mean, we obviously accumulate reputation data. So we’re, we get data from all the sites, we get it from all the hotels. And so we have been, anybody who’s seen any of our stuff knows, we have lots of numbers, lots of ways of kind of creating different types of metrics, and showing those metrics in various forms. And I think that’s really sort of industry standard where we get a metric or a KPI, we sit on that, we manage to that. And in some ways you sort of lose like what that KPI is for. So you’re sort of like almost the purpose for your improvement of a KPI is the KPI. Instead of for what the KPI was originally for. And I think with reputation, we sort of get into that where you have so much data that you sort of lose, you lose track of what is most important. And so what we wanted to do is even going deeper than sentiment analysis. So sentiment analysis really was this natural language processing that we have been doing for quite a while where we take sentence chunks and we look at word modifiers and things like that to create positive, neutral and negative statements inside of a review and then take those down further into the various aspects of a guest stay. With this though, with generative AI, we have an opportunity to actually pull even further than that and take, it’s not just the metrics. So what you’ll find is when you look at the guest experience snapshot, there is no metric on it. It’s literally the text of the guest. It’s the experience a guest had and the text that multiple guests had. So the text that of that experience. So for example, if a bunch of guests really loved the experience at the front desk with, with the staff at the front desk, you would see most guests mention an amazing front desk experience. And then there might be a front desk clerk’s name called out inside of that sentence. And then you’ll see maybe 17 mentions. And so what that’s doing then is it’s saying, here’s sort of like, it’s accumulating all of

The Suite Spot visits the Hyde Midtown Miami in the next episode of the Spotlight series. General Manager of the hotel, Henry Martinez joins the podcast to give travelers an insightful look into the guest experience and what makes the property one-of-a-kind for travelers. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. We are not here at our Travel Media Group studio. Instead, we are live on-site for another incredible and amazing edition of our TMG Suite Spot: Spotlight series. We’ve got such an exciting property to showcase today and an amazing guest to do it with. Henry Martinez, General Manager of the Hyde Midtown Miami. Henry, thank you so much for being on the podcast with me. Henry Martinez : Well, thank you for hosting me. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re excited about it. Before we get into this incredible property that I just had the pleasure of touring all around and seeing, let’s talk about your hospitality journey. This is one of the most unique things in our industry. Everyone coming from all aspects of maybe not starting in hospitality, but ending up there. Uh, what made you fall in love with hospitality? Where’s your journey and, and led you here to the Hyde Midtown Miami? Henry Martinez : Excellent. Absolutely. Well, first I’d like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with you and your audience a bit about our hotel. So how my journey started, I went to college unsure what to study and with very limited knowledge of the English language. So I took a career exploration test. Now I think it’s called a career workshop, which is an aptitude test. And that test is designed to determine a person’s ability or propensity to succeed in a given activity. Meaning there’s really no right or wrong answer, and to no surprise hospitality came on top. So my career in hospitality truly expands over two decades, working at seven different properties and opening four hotels, beginning as a front desk agent. I quickly advanced through various roles within the rooms division, and eventually stepping into leadership positions such as director rooms and director of operations. In April of 2022, I was honored to take the role of general manager of Hyde Midtown Miami. Each step of the journey has prepared me to do what I love the most, which is interacting with people and trying to make a difference in their lives. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a common story that we hear, is a lot of hospitality leaders didn’t really think about hospitality as a career, and then once they get into it, they really find a passion for it and a love for it. So fantastic to hear. I came from very similar beginnings, front desk, work your way up. You know, that’s what the stories that we love to hear about with this. So let’s move on to this incredible property that we’re at right now. Had the amazing privilege, like I said, to tour it with you this morning to show me the grounds. But before we get into talking about specific amenities or the room types, talk to me a little bit about the history of the project and how the Hyde Midtown Miami came to be. Henry Martinez : Absolutely. Hyde Midtown Miami is a true gem. It offers an intimate, welcoming atmosphere. Our location couldn’t be better right in the heart of Byron City activity and only a 15 minute drive to the beach. Designed by the renowned architect, David Rockwell. The hotel reflects the essence of local art and culture, creating an ambience that resonates with both young professionals and leisure travelers. And it’s really the only property of its kind in the midtown area, making a tough choice for those looking to truly engage with the lively Miami community. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re gonna talk about that incredible location here in a minute, but it really is an immersive atmosphere. I mean, we walk through those lobby doors, everything that you just said about the art from the art being in the lobby, just the feel and the vibe of this hotel is fantastic and I encourage my entire audience to check it out for themselves. But let’s talk about the hide brand. You know, locations all over the world, very fast growing. Maybe share with our Suite Spot audience who’ve never stayed at Hyde before, what they can expect from this brand. Henry Martinez : Sure. At any Hyde location, the guest experience comes to life through key touch points. Guests can look forward to an experience that goes beyond the typical hotel stay, Hyde is designed for tho

The Suite Spot is spotlighting the beautiful and newly renovated Regent Santa Monica Beach with special guest and General Manager of the property, Younes Atallah! This episode covers all the exciting things travelers can look forward to from their stay at the property including dining, amenities, local attractions, and much more. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, with another amazing episode for you today. Very excited to feature this episode. We are gonna be continuing our TMG Spotlight series, and if this is your first time hearing this, it’s one of my favorite series that we do on this podcast. It’s, it’s taken us all over the world at this point, right across the country, and today we are headed to beautiful Santa Monica Beach. With me today is my guest, Younes Atallah, General Manager of the Regent Santa Monica Beach. Younes, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot. Younes Atallah : Thank you, Ryan, for having me. Good to be here. Ryan Embree: And this series, if this is your first time hearing, this is all about highlighting and showcasing some of the world’s most unique new properties that we’re gonna be talking about. Younes, your property over there, the region, Santa Monica Beach certainly fits the bill. But before we get talking about that, share with our audience a little bit about your hospitality background. We’d love to hear these stories and where we started, where we end up, and, which led you to becoming the first GM of the Regent Santa Monica Beach. Younes Atallah : Again, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here and I was born into travel and hospitality. My family owned a travel agency growing up. And, I’ve told this story a few times. It was a rite of passage for all the kids to work at the travel agency as part of our indoctrination. It was about a 50/50 success rate and the kids sticking to hospitality and travel. But I certainly did and went the hotel route, went to hotel school in Florida. My first job was, picking up the phones at what was then the Orlando Marriott downtown. I don’t even know that hotel still exists. But that was probably 30 ish years ago. I kind of jumped in with both feet and never looked back. I’ve been very fortunate. My career has taken me to some amazing places in the country in North America, actually. I’ve lived in Florida and Texas. I lived in Canada for a few years. And then more recently I was in Hawaii, in Arizona and then landed in California just about four years ago. So not terrible places to live, overall. So it’s been, it’s been a fun ride. Ryan Embree: Well, certainly. And that hospitality has taken you all over the country. We talk about all the time on this podcast how transferable, skills are, and I think that’s one of the beauties that is lost in our industry is that people serving people, you can do that in Florida, you could do that in California, Hawaii, even in different countries there. So to be able to take your talents across the country, I’m sure you have some incredible experiences in the hospitality and started your hospitality roots right here where we are just north of Orlando, Florida. So that’s, that’s incredible to hear. But before we start talking about your journey to the other side of the country, let’s talk about the Regent Hotel and Resorts brand. We got locations worldwide, but this is actually the first one in the Americas. Introduce our audience to this brand and what they can expect from it. Younes Atallah : Absolutely. This is really, an exciting time for region. Some of your listeners, Ryan, may actually be familiar with the Regent brand, especially if you’ve watched one of the most iconic movies of our time, which is Pretty Woman, which was, filmed at Reach Beil the region, Beverly Wilshire at the time. And that was the last region in the Americas. It’s really not a new brand. It’s a brand that’s being reintroduced and reinvigorated as we speak. Region has been around since the early seventies and has gone through various iterations throughout its history, but most recently in 2018, IHG Hotels and Resorts added region to its luxury and lifestyle portfolio. And we’re very much in Regent 2.0 land, if you will, in the last few years, we’ve added and opened some amazing properties in, like the region of Hong Kong, the Carlton Khan in the south of France. The region in Shanghai just opened a few months ago. And so

Check out the latest Suite Spot episode where President – Hospitality, Travel, & Wellness at Questex, Alexi Khajavi, sits down on the podcast to discuss the highly anticipated Hospitality Show 2024 in San Antonio, Texas! This special episode will cover what attendees can expect this year from the event, some urgent issues facing the hospitality industry, and how this event is bringing all the major players of hospitality together in one room. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining me today. We have another incredible episode continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series, but we have an original TMG Hospitality Trailblazers, one of the first. Joining me again for the second time. Alexi Khajavi, President, Hospitality Travel and Wellness at Questex. Alexi, thank you so much for joining me once again on the Suite Spot. Alexi Khajavi : Great to see you, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’ve got a lot to cover. Lots change since we spoke just last year. We’ve got a very fast moving industry with travel, a lot of positive changes, and we’re gonna get to some of those a little bit later. But with this being the second time, we kicked off last episode talking about your hospitality and travel journey and what led you to Questex, but I wanna talk about mentor, right? We’re still kind of combating this staffing shortage right now, and we wanna talk about maybe some of the mentors or influences in your career, and then speak to maybe the importance of mentors right now as we try to combat this staffing shortage, especially in an industry like hospitality. Alexi Khajavi : Yeah. I would love to. It’s an important topic. Ryan Embree: You wanna go ahead and share some of maybe the mentors in your hospitality career, or influences in your career? Alexi Khajavi : Yeah, you know, I’ve had a really diverse career in travel and hospitality. I mean, it started out in San Francisco in the sort of the “.com” era of 1997 to, you know, 2001, 2002. And I had the fortune of joining an early stage OTA. There was three OTAs that launched ironically in 1997. One was booking.com and one was Expedia. And I joined the third one. <laugh. But you know, it was filled with talented people from MIT and Stanford that were, and there was, I think there was about 40 of us in the beginning, and it was just explosive growth. And I at 25, 24 years old, just coming outta college was really given a seat at the table for which I was not, deserve it and was not prepared for, but it just gave me an incredible opportunity to sit amongst some of the most really intelligent, innovative and creative thinkers, that were applying that knowledge, which, you know, in our industry often, we don’t get that type of talent, particularly back then. And because it was this merging of technology with travel, one of the world’s largest in industries, it was just a really exciting time. And so there was a group of folks there that I had the pleasure of working with, and it really taught me, uh, some of the fundamentals that I, that I still carry with me today in my career. And one is just surrounding yourself with really great creative people, and there’s something special about all being tuned into and aligned around the same strategic goals and allowing for a sort of an idea meritocracy to take place. But as long as all of that energy and all of that thinking and all of that hard work is geared around the same northern star, bringing that diverse set of thinking and individuals or personalities to the table really does create magic. And it creates, I think a sense of belonging as well. So from a very young age, that was, that was really important. Since then I’ve had the pleasure of working with individuals like Paul, a lair who, you know, unfortunately has since passed away, but he was the former CEO of Xerox. He was the chairman of our board for a company I worked with down in Costa Rica, and who taught me, frankly, things that again, running a company like Xerox, a public company, which I haven’t had the pleasure of doing in my own career, was a really incredible experience for me to apply those fundamentals, understanding really the importance of being able to read, present, and understand the drivers of different financial statements, balance sheets and PnL’s, of course. But really the importance of cash. We were a travel company. It was an integrated travel company, an airline, hotel company in a

Join the Suite Spot in this quarterly series to hear from American Hotel & Lodging Association President & CEO, Kevin Carey, on the state of the hospitality industry and recent developments being made by the AHLA to move the industry forward. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. As always, thank you for listening. We’ve got a fantastic episode for you today. Another industry check-in with Kevin Carey, interim president and CEO at the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time and joining me today. Kevin Carey : Hi, Ryan. Good day. It’s good to see you as well. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re excited to have you. You know, we’re gonna jump right into it. We spoke last in the spring season, right before a busy summer travel season. Listen, the travelers have been busy traveling to hotels. Hotels have been busy hosting, but AHLA has been busy as well, advocating for hoteliers and everything that you guys do for our industry. Let’s catch up with some of those big accomplishments and some of the most pressing issues right now. We know we, there’s always those issues that rise up. What are some of those that hotels should be most aware of right now? Kevin Carey : Oh as you said, it’s been an incredibly busy period of time. Certainly first and foremost for the industry. The support and the service our member companies provide for guests and the environment they create for our associates and workers is certainly first and foremost, our team here, both in AHLA and, uh, the foundation have been incredibly busy as well. Um, over the first half of the year, it’s been, uh, a, a peak period of activity at a state and local level with state legislators and legislatures in session, uh, and certainly in Washington here, uh, as, uh, the Congress starts to look towards end of the year in the election. So, we’ve been advancing our work, uh, at a state level on short-term rental sets of issues in Washington here around the passage in the house, uh, of the Hotel Fees Transparency Act. Um, and, and also work to ensure that we defeated the, the joint employer rule as well. There’s just a number of areas that we feel proud about as a team and that are really meaningful on behalf of the industry as well. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And but there’s still with all those wins, and congratulations to your team, there’s always work to do as you know, and some of those pressing issues that are at the forefront right now for our hoteliers. What, what are some of those that, again, hoteliers, even though it might be something regional, they still should be aware of because it has, it’s gonna have an impact on the entire industry. Kevin Carey : Absolutely. And really to identify two that are certainly getting a lot of our team’s attention and the industry attention. So first and foremost, in New York City, a bill was introduced in the city council several weeks ago, approaching about a month ago at this point. And this bill, the so-called Safe Hotels Act, has been positioned by his proponents as a simple licensing bill. And the bill sponsors have represented that hotels are unregulated, and that there’s an increase in crime occurring in hotels. This bill would do grave damage, not only to the hotel industry, to travelers, to workers, who represent and are employed by the industry and the city economy and the tourism economy itself. So this is bad for everyone. And we’ve been very actively involved in New York several times, meeting with members of the city council organizing the industry to have a strong voice in pushing back, on this ill conceived and flawed legislation. So we’re still working very actively on that and trying to underscore the grave damage that this would represent for the industry. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and sometimes, you know, these to hoteliers, everyday hoteliers, this might seem like, you know, some complicated issues and things of that nature, but you’ve got some great explainer videos on your social media on AHLA.com where hoteliers can get information to be more educated about this issue because, and show some of the effects that you were talking about there, Kevin, and learn a little bit more about, what this legislation can mean for everyday hoteliers. But, another win that I saw recently trending on ALA’s website was the hospitality law database, which was launched. Could you share with our hotel audience kind of the idea behind

In the grand finale of the TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl, we visit one of the top-ranked hospitality programs in the country at UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management. The Dean of the college, Dr. Cynthia Mejia, joins the Suite Spot to discuss the hospitality school and why it is one of the most successful in the world! Check out the conversation with topics, including: 🎓How UCF Rosen Is Shaping Hospitality Leaders 🤝The Importance of Employer Partnerships 📉Navigating Current Industry Challenges And much more. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree and we are here with our TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl, and I am so excited for this episode. We are here at my alma mater, UCF, and who’s joining me today is the Dean, Dr. Cynthia Mejia, UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management, the award-winning UCF Rosen College. Thank you so much Dr. Mejia, for being with me today. Dr. Cynthia Mejia : Wonderful. Thank you for having me here. It’s a pleasure to join you. Ryan Embree: It’s so exciting because like I said, this is my alma mater. This is where hospitality was ingrained. We always talk about DNA, but since this is your first time on the Suite Spot, we would love to hear about your hospitality journey and the path that led you to UCF Rosen. Dr. Cynthia Mejia : Wonderful. So, I was recently appointed as the new dean recently in June. And prior to that, I served as the interim dean since October of 2023. But I’ve been a faculty member here since 2013. When I first joined the college, and this is actually my second career, my first career for over 20 years, I ran food and beverage, and I was an executive chef out in the industry, mainly in the lodging side. And I ran banquets, large hotel restaurants, catering and events and operations. And then slowly moved up into operations within the hotel sector, small hotels and such. And so there, there came a point as people tend to know about our industry, that it’s a lot of work. It can take a good number of hours. And after doing that for about 20 years, I took a little break. And I just, I decided to get married and start a family. And then that’s when I began my journey into, to higher ed, getting my master’s and then my PhD, and then thinking about the ways that I love this industry. I have a lot of passion for this industry, and, you know, how can I give back? How can I be part of the industry and help the future leaders of our industry thrive with what I’ve learned, good and bad things that I’ve learned along the way. And then the best practices, of course, that we teach in higher ed. So that’s how it sort of all came together and came in as a faculty teaching food and beverage operations, facilities management, supply chain management. And then I moved into administration as an interim chair of my department, and then finally as the interim dean and now the dean. Ryan Embree: And it’s quite a journey. And, it’s the same mission that we have in this series is we’re trying to get more and more people involved in this industry that you can tell by your journey you’re extremely passionate about. I’m extremely passionate about, we’re going through a staffing shortage. We’ll talk about that a little bit in our industry, but 20 years celebrating 20 years at UCF Rosen and this college of Hospitality Management. For those who aren’t aware, give us a little bit of history about this college and where it started to where it is literally one of the preeminent hospitality programs in the world right now. Dr. Cynthia Mejia : So in 2024, this whole year, we’re celebrating our 20th anniversary. And of course, I didn’t join until 2013, but I hear all the stories and know all the lore and there’s so many faculty who are here who came from way back then. We even have somebody here who’s worked 38 years in our college. So the school or the program came out of the College of Business a long, long time ago. And at the time Mr. Harris Rosen, who is our namesake and our largest donor and philanthropist, he donated 20, approximately at the time, $20 million and 20 acres in front of Rosen Shingle Creek, which is his large resort to start this college. And Dr. Abe Pza, who was our founding dean, worked on that project, you know, converted everything over from College of business to start our program. So that occurred in 2004 when this campus opened. And by the end of 2004, we had around a thousand students alrea

Check out the latest TMG Hospitality Trailblazers episode featuring the Executive Vice President of Development at Gibson Hospitality Ventures, Joseph Grieco! This episode takes a deeper look into the Gibson Hospitality Ventures brand culture, hotel portfolio, and company initiatives that are setting the stage for more organizational success. Get an inside perspective on topics such as: The Explosive Growth of Gibson Hospitality Ventures How Gibson is Combating Industry Staffing Challenges Leveraging Guest Feedback to Influence Hotel Profitability The Importance of a Strong Hotel Digital Presence Tune in now!   Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have a fantastic episode for you today continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. If this is your 1st, 5th, or 15th episode in this series, it’s all about the people and management companies that are pushing and moving our industry forward, the industry that we love so much. We’ve got a great example and guest with me to share his story and the management company that is recognized as an industry leader. We’re gonna talk a lot about that today, but let me bring him in. Without further ado, Joe Grieco, executive VP of Development at Gibson Hospitality Ventures. Joe, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot. Joseph Grieco : Thank you, Ryan. It’s a pleasure to be here. I love listening to your podcast and all the other guests you’ve had on in the past. And, quite an honor to be here with you. Thank you. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And we’re really excited to talk about Gibson Hospitality Ventures. You guys have a lot of exciting things happening right now at your organization, but before we get into that too much, we love to start these episodes with just a little bit of hospitality background, the journey that led you to Gibson Hospitality Ventures and your experience so far. Joseph Grieco : Sure, so I actually started on the food and beverage side. Grew up in a big Italian family where everything was always centered around the dining table. So the restaurant industry was always a passion of mine growing up and started as a dishwasher in the kitchen. Quickly learned that I wasn’t cut out for the back of the house, enjoyed the front of the house a lot more. So I went off and worked my way around to bartending, serving, managing various restaurants. My first kind of crossover position was doing room service for a Hilton in downtown Knoxville. And it was a lot of fun. Had a blast down there, worked with a great group of people. But from there I realized the restaurant industry was always a passion of mine. And I met a gentleman when I was at the hotel restaurant program and the two of us went and opened a restaurant in downtown Knoxville back in 2002. I was 24 years old and very young, but we went off and, and started our first venture down there. So had a great time. The restaurant was called Pasta Trio. We were there for about seven, eight years in downtown Knoxville. But I had a baby on the way and kind of realized that having a restaurant and a baby wasn’t gonna work out too well for me long term. So at the time, I was working commercial real estate and business brokerage focused on hotels and restaurants. That was in 08′ or 09′ when the market started to collapse. So I had a side job working for the Knoxville Marriott as a bartender and working in banquets as a banquet captain, and knew they were looking for a food and beverage manager. So I got back into the hotel side on, in the food and Beverage department, spent a few years working for the big box hotels around Knoxville Holiday Inn and Marriott, as a food and beverage director. And then one of my former general managers called me up and asked me to take on a general manager position for a bank foreclosed property in Sevierville, Tennessee that Gibson Hotel had been asked to manage. And knowing Mr. Gibson’s reputation and knowing the company, it was almost a no brainer for me.To come and work for an organization of this was just such a great opportunity, especially to take a GM role with just my past F&B experience, and to be able to learn more about the industry. So it was a grueling year, getting that property back on its feet. It was a bank foreclosed property that, that needed a lot of work. So I got to be very hands-on, on all aspects of the hotel. We had to rebuild its online reputation. We had deferred maintenance, we had tons of proble

TMG Hospitality Trailblazers continues with the Senior Vice President & Global Brand Leader of Hampton by Hilton, Shruti Buckley! In this celebratory episode, Shruti joins the Suite Spot to discuss the 40-year anniversary of Hampton by Hilton by taking a look back on the brand’s origins and where the franchise is headed in the near future with exciting expansion plans and technological innovations. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. We’ve got another great episode for you today continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. If this is your first time, this series is all about the people and groups that are pushing our industry, our great industry forward, and I have such a special guest here to celebrate another impressive and awesome milestone. Shruti Gandhi Buckley brand leader of Hampton by Hilton. Shruti, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot today. Shruti Buckley : Well, thank you for having me, Ryan. I’m really excited about our conversation. Ryan Embree: Yeah, it is exciting. And before we get into that, some of that exciting news and the exciting, incredible milestone that this brand has hit. Let’s talk to you, Shruti, this is your first time on the Suite Spot. We love hearing stories from hospitality professionals, the webs and weaves of how people got into hospitality, how it kind of infused into their DNA, as we have heard so much in our industry. Share with us a little bit about your experience and the journey that led you to Hampton by Hilton. Shruti Buckley : Yeah, of course. It’s really interesting. I had somewhat of a unique path into hospitality, but at the same time, I actually had some exposure at a very young age. My uncle used to own a hotel in New Jersey, and I actually used to spend my summers there helping out at the hotel, sort of understanding the guest piece of it behind the scenes, stacking the coke machine and folding towels, things like that. And that’s when I was very young in elementary school. Years went by and when I graduated from college, I actually started my career in consumer product brand management and marketing. So I led global brands and businesses in a variety of different industries. So I started my career out in the food industry with Nestle. I then moved to Luxury cosmetics and I worked for Unilever and Estee Lauder and Chanel. And then I loved to joke with my friends that I traded in my Jimmy Chews for Converse sneakers and Birkenstocks and actually made my way back to D.C. which is where I’m originally from, to work for National Geographic, believe it or not. So I went from Chanel to Nat Geo. They had a very large product division where they had branded merchandise and retail, and I had a really great opportunity to work there for many years leading many of those efforts on the product side. And being in DC as you know, it’s known as the hospitality capital of the world, actually had several friends that were in the hospitality industry and for a few years they kept saying, Shruti, come talk to us. We think you’d be a really great addition to the team. You’ve got really interesting strategic brand background. A lot of our folks are on the operations side, and it would be really interesting just to talk to you to see where this might go. And that is actually what led me into hospitality. So I actually started that part of my career with one of Hilton’s competitors just down the street, in fact, for many years running one of Hampton’s competitors. And I did that for eight years. But candidly, after chasing Hampton for that many years, I said, well, if I can’t beat Hampton, I might as well join them. And was really fortunate seven years ago when Hilton called and was able to make my way to this fantastic company and lead, what many would call is the best brand in the industry. And I’ve been doing that for seven years and recently took on oversight for the our newest brand called Spark. Ryan Embree: Well, I’m sure you learned a lot competing against the brand too, right? Like I’m sure that gave you a unique perspective to be able to come in and probably gave you some insightful knowledge being on the other side of it. But I wanna go back to where your hospitality career started, and I can’t overlook that enough. The cool part about our industry is we’re all travelers from as young as we can walk, right? And hotels are such a magical place when we’re young and we get to travel

Join the Suite Spot in this episode of TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl featuring Florida Atlantic University! FAU Professor, Dr. Peter Ricci, joins the episode to shine a light on the FAU hospitality program and tells viewers why it is one-of-a-kind and how it prepares its students for success in the hospitality industry. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, and this is the second part of our TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl series. If this is your first time listening to this brand new summer series, we just launched this, we’ve talked about it before. Right now we’re going through somewhat of a staffing shortage. We’re gonna get into that a little bit into this episode. But what we’re trying to accomplish with this particular series is talk to the people and places that are educating and preparing the next generation of hoteliers, the next generation of hospitality workforce. So, very excited to just move a little on up I 95 North to Boca Raton. Im a bring in my next Suite Spot guest, clinical professor and director Dr. Peter Ricci of FAU’s Hospitality and Tourism Management program. Dr. Ricci, thank you so much for joining the Suite Spot today. Dr. Peter Ricci : Great. Nice to be here. Thank you. So I started sitting back here so you can see my lovely FAU owl. Now I can, move in a little bit. Thanks for having me. I love to see you and I know you’re a Rosen grad. I did my doctorate there, so it’s great, great to spend some time with you. Ryan Embree: Well, you have, you’ve got such an extensive and unique journey and, and I was talking to you off camera, how about that is one of my favorite things about our industry is, you know, sometimes our hospitality journeys take us all over the world. Sometimes we fall into hospitality as a career. Typically we meet a couple mentors along the way. And for your particular journey, you’ve been kind of in and out of academia. Share with our audience a little bit about your journey and the path that led you to FAU. Dr. Peter Ricci : You know it’s interesting that I’m spending time with you today. Yesterday was 47 years since I moved to Florida. So I moved here as a little boy and tourism was a part of my life growing up. Always. because we had visited here first. My family also was in California, so we spent a lot of time traveling. And I’ve always had a love and passion for meeting people and traveling. But as a boy, you don’t realize that. You just think Florida’s cool because you can swim all the time and you can go play. And so my experience here growing up in middle and high school was fantastic. And, um, I started working as a teenager in a fine dining restaurant and happened to have an absolute amazing mentor who was a self-made millionaire and owned fine dining restaurants all over South Florida. And this was in the eighties when fine dining was all the rage with the flambe, tableside and fancy cocktails before they were called craft cocktails. And he was all about guest service. And of course I didn’t know what that meant at that time. He was just instilling me like an etiquette. I’m kind of a casual guy, but I wouldn’t say kind of, I’m a casual guy. I don’t like suits and ties, but I’m all about treating people with the utmost respect, welcoming them, feeling warmly about hospitality and inviting you into my environment. So hospitality was like a natural thing for me. Undergrad, I worked food and beverage all through college. I fell in love with what they call trip directing, where you would go on a trip as the liaison to the conference or the convention or the incentive group where they’re rewarding some travelers. And so I just had this passion for travel, thought I would go to law school, got in, didn’t like my first week. I didn’t even give it a chance. And, uh, wound up just doing my grad degree in tourism and recreation and parks and being in there ever since. I think my favorite part was the hotel side of my career, but I actually liked them all. I worked for Delta for about six months after my undergrad. That was the most rigorous, intensive, uh, interview process I’ve ever had in my life. I think I had seven or eight interviews plus an hour with a psychiatrist plus aptitude tests. I mean, it was an incredible thing to work at Delta Airlines in the eighties. And that experience to this day has helped me refine how I recruit and finding genuine hospitality people. So, you know how I

In this inaugural episode of the TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl series, the Suite Spot takes a trip down to Miami to visit the Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management at Florida International University to meet with the Dean of the School, Dr. Michael Cheng. Host Ryan Embree sits down with Dr. Cheng to discuss the high-ranking academic institution and how it is preparing the next generation of elite hospitality professionals. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello Everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. We are here in Miami, Florida, south Florida, introducing a brand new podcast series. We’re so excited. This is TMGs Hospitality Campus Crawl, and we are here at our first stop at FIU’s Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management. And with me today I have Dr. Michael Cheng, Dean of the School. Thank you Dr. Cheng, for being with me. Dr. Michael Cheng: My pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m very excited. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re very excited to be on here. This is an intro into a brand new series, a summer series that hopefully we are gonna be touring all around the state of Florida, the great state of Florida, where tourism, as we know, is very, very important to our economy. And what you and your team are doing over here, Dr. Cheng, is very important because you’re creating the next generation of hospitality workers and students out there. But before we get into that, this is your first time on the Suite Spot. So welcome. We’re gonna be talking a lot about hospitality journeys in this and the paths that are provided for hospitality students right now. But share a little bit about your story, your journey in hospitality, and what led you to FI’Us, Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism. Dr. Michael Cheng: Sure. Thank you, Ryan. Yeah, so the truth is, how I got here is spring break, literally my wife and I, came down for spring break one year same year that we ended up moving down here, which was 2014. And we go, man, this is March. And the world is beautiful. We should like relocate. We were living in the Midwest at that time. Yeah, we were living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and had been in the Midwest for oh boy like 23 years. Yeah. So it’s been quite a while. But coming down here, the weather was very nice, but really I’m an international student. I was born and raised in Malaysia and came here to the US to study and enrolled at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. And my first major was not hospitality, it was MIS And I quickly realized that I’m more of a people person and less of a computer desk person. So I changed major, followed a bunch of friends who said “Hey, let’s try business.” So I did business for another semester, didn’t like it because I couldn’t find a direction. And then my supervisor at that point because I was working in the residence of food service, say, you should look at hospitality, I think you might be good at it. So I said, what is hospitality? Right. And went over and met the professor and goes, well, you know, there’s restaurants, there’s hotels, there’s events, and you work in food service, anything you want, what you’re doing right now is hospitality. I said, okay. I tried it, I loved it. And I found, I think I found my niche, finished my bachelor’s, and she asked me to come for my masters. So I did, became a graduate assistant. And then I started working in the industry for three years as a food service manager. And really discovered, man, everything is true. This is the industry that you get to eat for free. Yeah, never had to pay for lunch, you know, not too bad, which is very nice. At that point, then I kind of got a little bored with what I was doing. So started looking around and found that a community college metropolitan community college at Mond, Nebraska had a position and they were looking for somebody to come in and basically run the kitchens. So I applied for that job, and that was my first floor in higher education. I didn’t start teaching right away because that was not the plan. The plan was to, you know, do what I love, which is hospitality. But there was one semester, like maybe two years in, and they were short, or one of the faculty members couldn’t teach a class, so they were looking for somebody last minute. So they asked me if I would be willing to teach an introduction to culinary arts class. I’m like, sure, how hard can it be? Right?. And there was only nine students in it

The Suite Spot takes a virtual visit to Turks and Caicos in the latest installment of the Spotlight series, which showcases some of the world’s most historic and iconic hotel properties. In this episode, viewers get a look at the highly anticipated property, Salterra Resort & Spa, which is set to open its doors in early 2025. The resort’s managing director, Michael Tibbetts, joins the Suite Spot to discuss what travelers can expect from the resort and how Salterra Resort & Spa is elevating the guest experience. Tune in now to hear all the details! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. We are here for another exciting episode in our Suite Spot Spotlight series. So, one of my favorite series that we’ve done so far on this podcast. It takes us literally all around the world, which I’m gonna, we’re gonna talk about today. But for those that might be, this might be your first time hearing the Spotlight series. This is where we travel and showcase and highlight some of the industry’s most unique and iconic hotels. This property that we’re gonna talk about today, as it is the most anticipated openings in 2025. And here to talk about it with me is Michael Tibbetts, Chairman, CEO of JEM Worldwide. Michael, thank you so much for being on the Suite Spot with me today. Michael Tibbetts : Thank you, Ryan. I’m really grateful to be here. Ryan Embree: We’re gonna talk a lot about Salterra in this amazing project that you and your team have going on right now. But before we jump into this, this is your first time on the Suite Spot. We always love to hear kind of hospitality journeys, right? You know, how we got into this incredible industry and ultimately led you to working on this Salterra project, but to JEM Worldwide. So tell us a little bit about your background. Michael Tibbetts : I would say I have an unusual background for hospitality and development. Really, my origin story starts way back in the 1700’s, believe it or not, my family is from the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory. Going back many generations, my great-grandfather was a ship builder, and my grandfather eventually immigrated to the United States. And through that connection in the Cayman Islands, our family started developing resorts there on the small islands of little Cayman and Cayman Brack. Although our family was in hospitality, I chose a different course earlier in my career. I actually went to medical school, studied molecular biology in college, became an eye surgeon, and wove a very strange path back to hospitality. Through some family circumstances, I decided that hospitality development and the team that we were building was just too exciting to forego. So I stepped out of my private ophthalmology practice about eight years ago and devoted myself full-time to helping to lead our resorts in the Cayman Islands, and then also in the Turks and Caicos Islands now. So an unusual path, but I’m really grateful, learned a lot of lessons as a physician that I carry forward now in team building and working together, learning to work hard and follow through. But it’s definitely an unusual path, but I’m really grateful for the journey. Ryan Embree: Well, unusual paths in our industry really aren’t too out of the ordinary, to be honest with you. I will say this was the first time that I’ve heard a hospitality journey start in the 1700’s though. So, really unique fact. But that’s awesome. And, and like I said, we’ve had a lot of industry leaders on this podcast talk about how they’ve made their way to hospitality to have that ingrained in your DNA, we’ve said that as well sometimes that just finds you and, and we’re, we’re happier here. And creating projects like what we’re gonna talk about today. Salterra Luxury Resort and Spa, very excited, like I said, one of the most anticipated openings in 2025. You know, I have found, when I talk to whether it’s an iconic hotel that’s been around a hundred plus years or a brand new development like Salterra, there is a story to every single hospitality development project. Sometimes, sometimes there’s some nightmares, and then sometimes, there’s some really great stories behind it. So, you know, share with our audience the story of Salterra and what you guys are doing over there. Michael Tibbetts : Thank you, Ryan. So Salter has been quite a journey over the last really four years. As I shared, my family

In this celebratory episode, Travel Media Group is celebrating a major milestone! TMG has officially surpassed 1,000,000 social followers created for our hotel social partners! Join Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree, and Chief Technology Officer at TMG, Jason Lee as these two social media experts discuss the incredible achievement and what it means to the organization. For our hotelier listeners out there, go to our website to learn more about how you can be apart of the next milestone and increase your hotel’s social followers by partnering with us. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, here for another incredible episode. We have a very familiar voice typically on to share a innovative, solution with us, or an upgrade to our solution. But we’re here today to celebrate an incredible milestone. Jason Lee, CTO at Travel Media Group. Jason, thank you for joining the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Thanks for having me back on, Ryan. For the first time in a while. Thought it was something personal <laugh>, but glad to be back on. Ryan Embree: No, but we have a very personal, uh, milestone to celebrate. Yes. This is a great achievement. If you saw the title of the episode, we are celebrating 1 million social media followers for our hotel partners. It’s an incredible milestone, something huge for this solution. We know the importance of social media, we’ve talked about on this podcast numerous times, but being able to pass this threshold of 1 million followers, that’s representative of 1 million travelers that are following our hotel partners social platforms, whether it’s Facebook, X, LinkedIn, or Instagram. So exciting. I’m sure you were here at the infancy of the social media solution for hotels. Specifically for hotels, mind you talk to us a little bit about that evolution of when that solution first started to, here we are here in 2024, passing this incredible milestone. Jason Lee: Yeah. When we started, it was really not on a lot of hotel’s radar. So most of the pages that we were creating, you know, this was even in a lot of cases before there was even a place page on Facebook. So we were creating the first business pages for most of our clients. So you really taking from there to now where, you know, over this amount of time, pretty much every hotel has probably made a Facebook page, whether they’re posting on it or not. Yeah. They probably have gone in after, you know, a conference or something and decided, Hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do this. But when we started, we were like really early on creating social media for hotel pages. And a lot of the kind of strategies that we started with have drastically changed based on how, how the social networks have actually changed. So they’ve actually there’s an evolution inside of that, but there’s also been an evolution in, while each platform, has its own type of audience, but then at the same time you’ve also had platforms combined. So back then it was Facebook and Instagram were two separate companies. Yeah. You know, X was called Twitter, but over time, that’s as a strategy. You know, our strategy has changed as the travelers have changed their usage pattern. Sure and as hotels have needed it, but we went from, very kind of generic posting to now where we are on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, we’re producing short form videos for hotels. We’re producing great scheduled content out weeks in advance. Our platform has become extremely advanced. Our ad strategy has become extremely advanced. So all of those things together have really kind of lent themselves to kind of where we’re at today and celebrating this really cool milestone. But, but the cool part of this milestone, I think for me is that all of this content generation that we’ve done over this time has produced, you know, actual people engaging with it and using it. Ryan Embree: Well, that’s an important note to make. And you know, because anyone 1 million followers doesn’t happen overnight, but you can’t get there in a variety of different ways. Right there were times where people were buying followers, buying likes. That is not what this is. This is curated content specifically for hotels, and you talked about the evolution of how our ad strategy, our posting strategy, and the reason that we were able to do that is because we work with so many hotels across the country, we’re able to do what we preach all the time on this

The latest and greatest TMG Hospitality Trailblazers episode is here! 👏🔥 Join Suite Spot host Ryan Embree and the Chief Marketing Officer at Charlestowne Hotels, Michael Cady, as these two hospitality experts cover some exciting and insightful topics for viewers, including: ♻️ Sustainability in the Hotel Industry ⚡ The First 100% All-Electric Hotel in the Country: Hotel Marcel 💪 The Critical Importance of a Strong Social Media Presence 📱 Technology and the Guest Experience 🏨 What is on the Horizon for Charlestowne Hotels Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. I am here for another edition of our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. Very excited about our guest today, lot to talk about. I’m gonna bring ’em right in. Michael Cady, Chief Marketing Officer at Charlestowne Hotels. Michael, thank you so much for being on the Suite Spot. Michael Cady: Pleasure to be here. Thank You. Ryan Embree: Yeah, excited to to have you on. Obviously being a digital marketing podcast, having the CMO at Charlestowne Hotels, got a lot of talk about. But before we get into talking about that beautiful portfolio you have over there at Charlestowne, talk to me a little bit about your experience and the journey that led you to where you’re at now. Michael Cady: It’s been a long, strange trip that’s for sure. I guess I’ve been doing this for 25 years now. Time is happening fast. It’s crazy but yeah, about 25 years in branding, marketing, digital media, creative services. I’ve been with Charlestowne Hotels for eight years. Currently, I oversee an in-house marketing team that executes all our campaigns and initiatives across our portfolio, customizing each plan hotel. Before Charlestowne, I did two marketing director gigs in hospitality. One with Orient Express now called Belmont, so worldwide luxury travel train, cruise company. And then the other, which back in the day was similar boutique lifestyle hotel management company as Charlestowne. Obviously that’s changed a bit, but, uh, back in the day it was, it was a lot like us and also have some agency experience. So use a lot of my agency background into integrating our team. And I work for a company called Saachi and Saatchi, which is a global ad agency working on Walmart, Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, some of those bigger brands. Ryan Embree: Let’s lean into that spectrum there. Obviously a wide range of experience segments that you’ve been a part of. I want to get kind of your philosophy, the marketing environments that Charlestowne operates from anything from lifestyle, independent collegiate markets, brands, soft brands, really all across the gamut. Kind of like your experience there. Share with us a little bit about your philosophy with that in-house marketing team that you’re talking about when you approach each project from a marketing standpoint, we’re gearing up as marketers. This is an exciting time. We’re getting into the spring, getting into the summer, getting our summer campaigns ready for the travel season. Talk to us a little bit about how your team’s prepping for that. Michael Cady: Well, I guess I’ll cover the, the year to date so far. And then kind of go into our different environments. January and February actually, were pretty slow overall for us. Mostly on the occupancy side. I dunno, I think like January’s becoming this month of like personal focus and reflection, getting back to basics and so just didn’t have the leisure travel demand that, that we’ve had maybe in years past. March and April rebounded nicely. Um, and so now we’re at budget or trailing just a bit. And what’s been cool, even the last years group weddings and events continue to increase from the massive drop off from Covid. So it’s just cool to see those segments finally prosper. But yeah, I’m hoping for a good summer get ahead of budget or at least get on part of budget. I probably think the next couple months we’ll tell the story of our national outlook, maybe even perception as as we head into a presidential election. So we’ll see how it goes. This summer’s crucial for us. A lot of our properties are big time in the summer, but I think getting back to your question about, just how do we do it and, you know, especially in the lifestyle and soft brand world, you’re spot on. Every property we do has a different marketing, branding and creative strategy, no matter the market, the se

Chairman and CEO of Coury Hospitality, Paul Coury, is recognized as a TMG Hospitality Trailblazer! Paul joins the Suite Spot to give viewers a look at the Coury Hospitality brand and how it grew from its humble beginnings of one hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a portfolio that contains the most extensive collection of Autograph Hotels. Paul’s story is one of perseverance and triumph. Tune in to hear the whole story and be sure to subscribe! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree with another edition of our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. We’ve got a fantastic episode. First time guest, I’m gonna bring him right into the conversation. Paul Coury, chairman, CEO of Coury Hospitality. Paul, thank you so much for being with me on the Suite Spot. Paul Coury : Thank you, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re excited to have you here. We’re gonna have a great conversation today, all about Coury Hospitality. But you know, as many times as we’ve done this TMG Hospitality Trailblazers, whether this is your first or 12th, 15th time hearing, this type of series, what this all about is about the pioneers hotel management companies, brands that are pushing our industry forward towards the future. We work in such an amazing industry, and certainly Coury Hospitality. And Paul, you’ve done some, some great things we’re gonna talk about. But before, as many times as we’ve done these episodes, I can guarantee you one thing. This question is never answered the same way because no two hospitality professionals have the same upbringing or journey into hospitality. Share with us a little insight and background into your journey that ultimately led you to Coury Hospitality. Paul Coury : Well, thanks again, Ryan. I look forward to trying to enlighten your audience today. It’s a great industry. I have heard this term by a lot of hoteliers, that they are accidental hospitality individuals, and I kind of fall into that category. I’ve never worked in a hotel. I never, you know, maybe a few restaurants when I was super young as a busboy or something, but mine was a journey of starting a real estate company in the mid eighties. And we, purchased a building and next door to this building was an old historical hotel in Tulsa that had sat there an occupied for many years. And we ended up purchasing that asset as strategical consolidation with the building and some land that we were buying. And then we set out on a journey to redevelop it. And I think at the time we were gonna, we were working with Hyatt to do one of their first suite hotels. It, it happened to be a bad time, like all cycles, right? We caught ourselves in the middle of the big oil bust that hit and lasted 20 years in Oklahoma. So while we never developed that hotel, it did subsequently get developed. We owned it for 10 years and introduced me to some people in the industry through some exposure, marketing exposure. And we ended up doing some consulting for a family outta Chicago that owned many hotels and golf courses around the country. And, you know, what I would say to you is that was my first exposure to the concept of a boutique hotel, because these were really small hotels that were very, I don’t know if I would say run down, but they, they weren’t, they weren’t cared for. They weren’t a true design or boutique, but they were great locations. For example, the Royal Palms was one of them. There were others like that. There were some ground leases the Phoenician Resort, the Harbor Beach, Marriott, things like that. So I was exposed to the industry and learned a lot about, you know, small hotels and family owned operations and things of that nature. And our first actual hotel occurred in the mid nineties when we purchased another building, historical building in Tulsa and converted it to a boutique hotel. And it opened in 99. It’s the Tulsa Ambassador, and we still own it 25 years later. I’m not a very good seller. And, It’s been a magnificent asset. It’s, it’s been like the golden goose in so many respects. It’s just outperformed itself four years and still remains top in, in the market, 25 years later. Ryan Embree: How special for that property that still be one of the leading performing ones in, in the portfolio, which is really cool to see. And yeah, your story is one that we can relate to on this podcast. We’ve had many people sit in that chair, and essentially say the same thing. I fell into the industry. So for those HR p

Interim President & CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, Kevin Carey, joins the Suite Spot in the very first episode of Check-In with Kevin Carey! Get the latest news, updates, and information on the hotel industry in this series, and find out what efforts the AHLA is getting involved in to impact hoteliers and hospitality at scale. From policy legislation to industry events and the rebranding of the Hospitality Show, this episode is full of content! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, with a very special episode today. We have a first-time guest, but I’m sure, widely recognized by the entire industry, Kevin Carey, interim president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot. Kevin Carey : Good morning. Happy to be with you. Ryan Embree: We’re gonna cover a lot today, Kevin, so let’s jump into it. Speaking of being busy, we are about to enter a busy summer travel season. I’m sure all the hoteliers listening to this podcast, wherever they’re watching or listening from, are excited about that or reaching the halfway point of the year, which is crazy to say. I was there to witness live your keynote at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference back in March in Atlanta. You shared some really great accomplishments so far, year to date that AHLA has been able to achieve. Could you share with our audience a little bit about some of the efforts and wins so far in 2024? Kevin Carey : Well, I’d be happy to and, I think your assessment is, is right on the mark. Uh, it has been a busy first four months of the year. Certainly, you hear that through, uh, we’re in earning seasons now. You’re hearing a lot of our member companies report out. Uh, so you’ll hear some of the things happening across their scope of their operations in our environment representing the industry. It has been a very significant and busy first four months of the year, whether that’s here in Washington, working with the Congress and the administration in so many state capitals, with the legislatures in session, and really across the scope of our activities whether that’s, uh, the support we provide to our members through our many committees or events or, or the great work our foundation is, is doing a few key accomplishments. I point to one of real significance was the defeat of the, the joint employer rule. And that was significant, not only with action that the House took but the Senate as well as a favorable court ruling, in the Eastern District Court in Texas, blocking the implementation of that rule, because that posed some real challenges for the industry, and in particular the franchise operating model, and would’ve created complexities and uncertainty there in this environment. We also, a month ago, announced the rollout of our collaboration with the Hotel Association of Canada and our launch, uh, of the Green Key Global Initiative. And then finally, uh, we rebranded our, our very successful regional set of events as the Hospitality show supporting, uh, our trade show and conference, uh, which will take place in San Antonio this year, October 28th to the 30th. Uh, and we’ve got a number of those events planned over the coming weeks, uh, alongside the seven that we’ve held thus far this year. So it’s been busy, as you said. Ryan Embree: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Super busy. And we’re gonna talk about some of those things that you mentioned. I wanna go back to Green Key Global rather. Uh, we just celebrated Earth Day. All of these conferences, whether it be the Hospitality Show, we talk about the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference, one of those trending issues that continues to pick up steam, sustainability and green travel. It’s, it’s so critical for hoteliers. Guests are being more cognizant of it, corporations and businesses are looking more into that. Talk to us about this collaboration with Green Key Global and why it was a priority for you and AHLA. Kevin Carey : Sure. I’d be delighted to, we’ve been observing, the momentum behind sustainability, and you cited whether that’s leisure travelers who are increasingly looking and making decisions, in their journey, in their search for properties for sustainable practices. Corporations, uh, and also group travel organizations are building those requirements, including for a third party verification into their RFPs, uh, and where they have their corp

The Suite Spot takes travelers to Rhode Island in the latest Spotlight series episode – The Beatrice Hotel! As one of the most iconic and historic hotels in the nation, the general manager for the property, Jennifer Curtin, gives travelers an inside look at why this hotel should be their next destination. From the rich backstory behind the name, the local attractions in the area, and what the guest experience is all about, this episode covers it all. Tune in now! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you for joining us. We are here in the content creation studio in Maitland, Florida at our Travel Media Group headquarters, and have another fantastic edition of our Suite Spot: Spotlight series. This time with a fantastic property that we’re gonna be showcasing and in with me today to talk about this beautiful property is Jennifer Curtin, the general manager of The Beatrice. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot. Jennifer Curtin : Good morning, Ryan. Thank you so much. Really happy to be here. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re excited to have you. And you know, we’re gonna get to The Beatrice and your beautiful property here in a second. But as we do with all of our new guests, this is your first time to the Suite Spot. Talk to us a little bit about your background and hospitality journey that led you to The Beatrice. Jennifer Curtin : Yes, absolutely. Happy to and actually it’s, it’s quite a full circle story that I have. So my career actually started right here in Providence, Rhode Island. I attended Johnson Wales University, majoring in hotel management, and that’s actually located just steps from the Beatrice Hotel. And so this is where I started, I was working in multiple different operations through school. So I worked with Hilton Hotels. I worked in a luxury residential community here in Providence. And then in the summers I used to live on Cape Cod and I worked at an amazing it was a five star resort, Chatham Bars Inn down on the Cape. And so, really for me throughout school, I wanted to get exposure in multiple different operations and environments and really get a sense of what it is that I wanted to choose for a path outside of college. And so for me, it was really that luxury boutique space. That’s really where my heart lies. And so upon graduation, I started with Kimpton Hotels first in Boston, Mass, which is home for me. So that was a natural starting point. And then from there I moved with them to Aspen, Colorado and then to Seattle, Washington. And it was when I was in Washington, Seattle that I got the call and moved back to open the Beatrice again, you know, back here in Providence, Rhode Island. Ryan Embree: I’m sure that was such an exciting call to be called back to your hometown where it all started and you went to school for hospitality, which I will tell you of all the hospitality industry experts that we interview on this series in others, it’s rare, but I’m seeing more and more of it. I mean, you’re talking to another grad of a hospitality management program down here at UCF. More and more people are going to school to get into our industry, which is amazing because most of the time you’re gonna hear people say, well, I just fell into the industry, or I was doing a job in college and fell in love with the industry. So it’s so great to see and hear stories like yourself, Jennifer, where you knew you had a passion for it, but also finding and having a journey within it and finding a segment and space that you really, that you really cared about. And the fact that you got to do it in your own backyard, I’m sure also benefits you because you know a lot about the local area. Jennifer Curtin : Absolutely. No, it’s wonderful. And I will say, you know, I’m very fortunate to have Johnson Wales right in our backyard, for The Beatrice because that is where the majority of our recruiting stems from. There’s nothing better than hiring, you know, a college student who is, you know, motivated and passionate about this industry and is, coming to work and really putting what they learn in the classroom into motion and real life. It, it really makes, you know, everything kind of start to click. So we’re really fortunate in that way. Ryan Embree: Yeah. What an opportunity too for them to see and learn from you a graduate from there and can see what the possibilities are of a career in hospitality is. Which, you know, we&#8

Global Brand Head at Embassy Suites by Hilton, Bonnie Campagnuolo, is recognized as a TMG Hospitality Trailblazer as Embassy Suites celebrates its 40th anniversary! This episode gives viewers an inside look at what has made the brand successful over the last 40 years and what is on the horizon for Embassy Suites. Ryan and Bonnie go in depth to highlight key initiatives and characteristics of Embassy Suites that contribute to the brand’s hospitality dominance. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embee. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Emre, here with another edition of the TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. As we get geared up for a busy travel summer, we are here with another hospitality trailblazer, another Hilton brand leader. I am very excited to introduce our guest for today, Bonnie Campagnuolo brand leader of Embassy Suites by Hilton. Bonnie, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Bonnie Campagnuolo : It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: We got several things to celebrate today. I don’t wanna give too much away, but before we start talking about your incredible Embassy Suites by Hilton Brand, I wanna talk about your background and journey that led you into hospitality. As we know, it’s always unique to kind of see these paths, which get us to where we are. Where did you start? Was it behind the front desk? Did you just kind of fall in it? Tell us a little bit about your journey to Embassy Suites by Hilton. Bonnie Campagnuolo : So I never worked in a hotel. I started in ad agencies in Orlando, Florida and had a number of travel and tourism clients across the years and across different agencies. I moved to the client side, marketing teams first at Walt Disney World, and then with a vacation ownership company also here in Orlando. And then moved up to DC for a job with Hilton, uh, almost 14 years ago. And I was director of Resorts marketing for the Hilton Hotels and Resorts brand, which was an amazing, amazing ride. From there, I worked on all of our full service brands in marketing and then went over to the brand side and, uh, did what we called, uh, customer experience and innovation for full service brands. And then I have been in this role since July of 2020, and it’s, it’s a great job. I love my job. Ryan Embree: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting that, you know, we get a lot of, a lot of people that I interview on these hospitality trailblazers and they come up originally from operations. So I’m wondering kind of, you know, what do you think mindset, maybe lessons learned that were a little bit different being in hospitality a little bit later in your career? Bonnie Campagnuolo : So I think understanding how we get messages out to guests, how we establish who we are is part of what Embassy Suites needs right now. And I, I don’t kid myself about knowing how every little thing happens in a hotel, and I’d surround myself with people who do, and I’m not shy about asking our hotel leaders, if we were to think about doing something like this, how does that affect you? If we were to make a change like this in a guest room, how does that affect what the housekeeper’s life is like? Or did we just create something that’s really cool, but a pain in the neck to clean because it, you know, creates a little ledge or something that we’re not never gonna get, right? So I really, we have tons of folks who know more than me and I love all of them, and we make sure that we have those conversations. And I’d also say my experience on the customer experience and innovation team really taught me how to ask questions and dive into the what ifs. And, uh, that’s been, that’s been really helpful as we, as we think about where this, where this brand goes and what guests are looking for and what owners need. Ryan Embree: Yeah, it’s so critical the way that questions can be phrased to owners, guests, associates, as you mentioned before, because you’re right, something could a change that you implement or make at a property, it could ultimately be yes, that’s a good change, but are the effects of it gonna have net negative value to it? So I think it’s fascinating kind of hearing that, having that balance. We’ll talk a little bit about this episode, but we’ve got a big milestone to celebrate. If you’re watching us on our YouTube page, you could see the banner up in Bonnie’s corner there celebrating 40 years. Congratulations on that. It hits in May 2024. When something lasts for 40

Brand Leader of Home2 Suites by Hilton, Talene Staab, is named a TMG Hospitality Trailblazer and joins the Suite Spot to discuss Home2 Suites and the incredible developments taking place for the brand. From designing the hotel to finding new ways to improve the guest experience, this episode covers the key aspects that make the Home2 brand special. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. So excited to bring you another episode in another part of our Hospitality Trailblazers series. If this is your first time, we’ve been running this Hospitality Trailblazers series for almost two years now, and we are interviewing some of the best and brightest in our hospitality industry, some of those people that are trailblazing a path forward, and we certainly have a guest today that fits the bill. Talene Staab, Brand Leader of Home2 Suites by Hilton, Talene, thank you so much for being on the podcast with me today. Talene Staab: It’s great to be here with you today. Thank you so much. Ryan Embree: And we’re excited to talk about the Home2 Suites brand and all the innovative and exciting developments that are happening with that brand that you were the head of. But before that, although this is not the first time I have met you, we were just talking off camera about how we met at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference, had the pleasure to meet in person even though we’re doing this interview virtually. With this being your first time Talene, tell us a little bit about your hospitality background, the journey that led you to Hilton and ultimately the brand leader for home two suites. Talene Staab: Sure. My family, my parents had a little diner that was like a breakfast lunch diner in the Boston area, and I worked there in high school and it was one of those places that was like, cheers, where no one ordered their food. They kind of like walked in and everybody knew, oh, Ryan’s here. We might not have known your name, but we knew what you would eat for breakfast. And it was like that sense of building community around a small business really stuck with me, even though it was hard work and I just loved it. But I started working in hotels and then my family actually moved from Boston to San Diego and relocated, and they stayed at this Embassy Suites and they called and they were like, you will not believe this hotel. And this was like 30 years ago. So the brand was relatively new. They were like, you get a suite in every room, you get free breakfast and free cocktails. And I honestly didn’t believe it. They’re like, you gotta work here. So I did. I actually was a smart sales manager there, um, became a DOS and then eventually joined the corporate team. And then when the corporate office moved to McLean, I moved back east with my family, young family, and we kind of looked at it as like an adventure. Let’s just see what happens. And it ended up being a really good move because from there I took on a ton of different jobs that kind of took me out of the brand and sales world into more operations. I got to be on the Canopy team. I joined like a week before we launched the brand. So learned about new brand development, learned about owners. Development was the big learning curve for me, which was really exciting. And then that set me up to be, the VP of owner relations owner experience. And that was really cool because I got to see what Hilton looked like from the owner’s point of view, like the whole elephant, you know. Ryan Embree: Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna talk about that. Talene Staab: Yeah. And um, I learned so much from that. We set up a ton of new systems and data and experiences for owners to really like bridge any gap that we might have had ’cause we were growing so quickly. And then that led me to True, which was my first brand leader job. I joined when we only had 60 hotels, grew to 220 in three years, which was tremendously fast. And then that all set me up for Home2. I’ve been on Home2, almost for two years. Ryan Embree: Quite a journey. I, I love the beginning of it because we talk about there’s some like catchphrases, I feel like in, in hospitality when, when some people talk about like hospitality being in your DNA and that might be, I think your story is one, you were, you were kind of immersed into it at an early age, and you got that feeling of what true hospitality is also someone in hospitality. When you get that feeling, it, it’s kind of addictive. Like you want to, like, you want

The Suite Spot takes a trip to Atlanta to visit the Reverb Downtown Atlanta by Hard Rock and uncovers how the unique property is one-of-a-kind and gives travelers a rocking guest experience during their hotel stays. From modern amenities like a reverberation room to a rooftop bar that sets your sights on the breathtaking ATL skyline, this episode covers all the exciting developments and why this destination should be your next booking. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello Everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. If you’re watching us on YouTube, as you can tell, we are not in the content creation studio. So that must mean we are here on site, part of our Suite Spot Spotlight series. I’m here with Derek at the Reverb by Hard Rock Atlanta. Derek, thank you so much for inviting us here. Derek Sumpter : It’s absolutely my pleasure. Happy to have you here. Thanks for coming. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And let me tell you, there’s just an energy walking into this place. We’re gonna talk a lot about this because this, this is really fits the bill with this series. And if you’re listening or watching us for the first time, our Suite Spot Spotlight series is all about highlighting those unique and historic hotels in our industry across the country. This property certainly fits the bill, but this is your first time on the Suite Spot. Yes, it does. We like to talk to hospitality professionals and hear their stories. We know it’s such a sometimes career paths. Take us all over the place where we start. Tell us a little bit about your journey to the Reverb. Derek Sumpter : Alright, sounds great. Well, I’ve been in the hospitality business since I was roughly 10 years old. Growing up my family had restaurants. So from the time I was seven, eight years old, I was washing dishes in my family’s restaurants. With that being said, went to college, was not planning on being in the hotel business. I happened to get a job as a room service waiter at a hotel, and kind of fell in love with it, fell in love with the day to day, fell in love with something different. I liked the energy of it all. And no two days were ever the same. So with that being said, just really kind of worked my way up the ranks and wound up here in downtown Atlanta at the beautiful Reverb by Hard Rock. So, you know, it’s been a long, it’s been a long journey. You know, Florida, uh, New York City, Little Rock, Arkansas, and I worked, did 20 years with Marriott. So this is kind of my first stint with Hard Rock, and with this brand, but definitely happy that I found them. They found me, I should say. Ryan Embree: So, yeah. Well, it certainly matches the energy. Let me tell you that the property does, and, you know, a couple couple things we always hear, right. Not expecting to be in the industry. Fell in love with the industry. Those are two common threads that we hear all the time from people that we interview. That’s true. Just like your yourself. And it’s just all about people serving people. And we need more of these stories. I talk to industry leaders all the time. We need more of these stories so we can share what a career in hospitality looks like. Because there are a lot of people out there that might not be thinking about a hospitality. They fall into it and all of a sudden you’re here at the reverb. Derek Sumpter : I would say most of the people that I know that are in the hospitality industry, were not planning to be in the hospitality industry before they started into it, you know, so it, it’s amazing how everybody, it just kind of draws you in, kind of sucks you in a little little bit, per se. Ryan Embree: Makes it so unique. Yeah, absolutely. And a unique experience and story. So let’s, let’s turn our attention to this property, right? Now very unique property, very unique. So much so. It’s the only one in the world. So tell us a little bit about the story of the brand and literally travelers are experiencing this for the first time ever. So tell us a little bit about that. Derek Sumpter : Well, the Reverb brand, as you just said, we are the only one currently in the world. Hard Rock was looking to get out of the, not really get out, but try something different. They’re known for their resorts and for their casinos right now. So they’re looking for a lifestyle branded hotel that really brought music, the music fan, local culture, local food, local wine, local drinks, everything all coming together in one gathering spot. Where

Managing Director at the Caribe Royale Orlando, Amaury Piedra, checks in to the Suite Spot in our latest Spotlight series episodes to give viewers the 4-1-1 on the $140+ million dollar re-imagination of the resort and what guests can expect from the remarkable expansion and transformation. This episode covers some key digital marketing topics like social media for hoteliers and gives insight into the traveler’s journey through the Caribe Royale Orlando property experience. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you for joining us wherever you’re listening or watching us on your YouTube. Hopefully you are watching this episode because we are live on site for our Suite Spot: Spotlight series at another amazing, incredible hotel. But before that, I’m gonna bring in our guest Amuary Piedra, Managing Director of the Caribe Royale Orlando. Amaury, thank you so much for being on the Suite Spot. Amaury Piedra: No, thanks for taking the time to be here. Happy to have you here. Ryan Embree: You know, I had the pleasure of walking the grounds and having a tour of this amazing resort. I feel like hopefully in that app that you provide, you got a map in there because there is so much to do. But before we get talking about this hotel, which, which we’re certainly gonna do today, tell us a little bit about your hospitality background. One of my favorite questions to ask because in this hospitality world we’re in, you can start any which way as a bellman you can be born into the industry. Tell us a little bit about your background. Amaury Piedra: Sure. I grew up in south Florida and I actually got my first hotel job at the age of 15. So I’m not gonna give my age away, but let’s just say it was over 40 years ago. And, uh, it was valet parking, and that’s where I started in the industry parking cars and I’ve done a multitude of positions and up to, and I wanted to get to my goal of being a general manager, managing director. And that happened around the time I was 30, but it was fantastic. It’s, it’s what I’ve done my whole life. Ryan Embree: You know it’s funny, I started as a bellman valet over here on the other, the side of me. I feel like if we wanna get a good gauge of maybe the hoteliers of the future, go to our front desk or go to maybe those frontline and there’s gonna be a story there. But I think it’s so important and critical that you have that background too, because when you do get in this, this managing, you know, GM, you know, we have front desk managers, now you’ve got an idea of what the job is and the day ins and day outs and, and that really is gonna serve you in your hospitality career. Amaury Piedra: Well, you know, I always tell our associates when we’re doing new hire orientation that you can go as far as you want to go. And I use myself as an example. So it doesn’t matter what position you’re in now, if you apply yourself, you can go to whatever you wanna get to. You can achieve whatever you want. And, I enjoy speaking with our hourly associates because they’re really the ones on the ground, you know, taking care of our guests and whatnot. So yeah, it’s a great industry that’s provided, you know, great opportunities for myself, my family, and many others. Ryan Embree: Those frontline employees definitely have their ears to the floor. We’ll talk about the guest experience here and how you prioritize that at the Caribe Royale, let’s get into this property, right? So the reason we’re here, this is the Suite Spot: Spotlight series. So for those that are listening or watching this, that really don’t know what this series is about – we’re traveling all over the country to highlight some of the most unique and historical properties that we’ve run into. Here at the Caribe Royale, you just went through this incredible $140 million, re-imagining. Talk to us a little bit about the history of the property. It’s not like this was built to overnight, obviously, it’s got a long historic history. And then what led to this, to this re-imagining of the property. Amaury Piedra: So, our owners, Sierra Land Group group based in California started building the hotel. Well, the first tower opened in 1994, and then the rest was built in phases. So it had a, it had a solid history here in Orlando, but they really central Florida, but they really wanted to elevate what Caribe was. So about

Check out the top 5 takeaways from the 2024 Hunter Hotel Investment Conference and what they mean for hoteliers. Host Ryan Embree gives insight into key topics and conversations from the event for listeners so don’t worry if you weren’t able to attend or mis. All the must-know details are right at your fingertips. Tune in! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. We are back here in our content creation studio in our Travel Media headquarters in Maitland, Florida after a busy week at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in Atlanta. If you’re watching us on our YouTube page, you could see I don’t have my normal attire because that is how quickly I wasn’t even able to do laundry before I got back to the office to record this episode as this was just such an insightful, jam packed event. I wanted to make sure to get these key takeaways to you as quickly as possible. What such a great event. We’re gonna talk about that later in this episode, but wanted to spend some time just giving some key takeaways from the event, what we were hearing from our panelists, some of the interviews that we’re gonna be putting out there on our social content over the next couple weeks. So make sure if you’re not following Travel Media Group to do so, to get some exclusive insights and interviews and everyone we talk to at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference. But let’s jump right into it because we’ve got five key takeaways to review. The first one is obviously the name of this is the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference, right? So everyone wants to kind of know what is the state of investment right now. There was a lot of cautious optimism, I would say, from this event and some of the panelists that were speaking so much so that, you know, when asked straight out, you know, whether they would invest right now, a lot of the panelists, majority of them would say yes and answer different types of markets. But it is interesting to see with all these kind of looming factors, whether it’s geopolitical inflation, interest rates, this is an election year, still this type of optimism. And I think what this comes from and stems from is right now to invest in hotels or in properties. If you wait until interest rates are going to fall, everyone’s gonna kind of jump into the ring. So people are trying to be the first one to jump into the pool, get an advantage right now, because again, if interest rates do fall in the second half of 2024, like their expected do, and our panelists are expert panelists had said, you might be late to the party or in a very crowded party and might not have the leverage right now. So I was really surprised with all the optimism, but great to see in a conference like that, the energy strategic partnerships announced, Hotel Equities with trust hospitality have made a big announcement. We actually have an interview with a key stakeholder from Hotel Equities kind of talking about that strategic partnership. So keep an eye out on that. But it was fascinating to hear the opinions on which markets to get into. And I do think that is an interesting trend that we’re seeing right now because some markets, like, Miami and Nashville, we actually spoke to an asset management company that has a couple assets in Nashville saying that they were running so hot that the growth is just not there like it used to be. And it’s interesting because everyone at you know, since the pandemic has been on this steady rate of recovery, but markets like Miami, Nashville, maybe they didn’t dip as low as some of these other populous cities, New York City, San Francisco, dc they are seeing large gains. So it’s interesting to see that kind of normalization come out between markets. It’ll be interesting to see where the investments go. We got to hear from the new AHLA and interim president/CEO, Kevin Carey, who gave us a great update on wins and the advocacy that AHLA continues to do. All the great work that the AHLA foundation is doing to try to get to combat the staffing shortages. Right now, we’re gonna talk about, that was certainly a topic that was talked about at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference and just felt and resonated. And there’s a couple, we’ve been going through this staffing shortage for so long. There’s, there’s actually some things in our designs with new prototypes and announcements at Hunter that correlate with the staffing shortages and trying to

Former CEO and President of the AHLA, Chip Rogers, joins the Suite Spot to discuss the state of the industry and how hoteliers can make 2024 a successful year. This episode is filled with expert advice, industry insights, and trending topics so tune in to get the 411 on what developments are going to impact your hotel business! Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree, welcome and we’ve got a great guest, a guest that needs little to no introduction. He’s checked in with us several times on the Suite Spot. Chip Rogers, President & CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Chip, thank you so much for being on Suite Spot. Chip Rogers: Yeah, always glad to be with you, Ryan. Thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and last time we were together Chip, was before the new year, so Happy New Year by the way. Very, very busy time for hoteliers. They’re getting their budgets together, they’re looking at data projections, all that good stuff. I wanna give a little bit of insight to our audience on maybe the planning process from the AHLA team. You guys have, have started off just really, really quickly. Lots of events. Obviously, every issue is important, but how do you kind of prioritize that, put your calendar in place, you know, around this time of year? Chip Rogers: Yeah, the biggest priority for us is always advocacy. I mean that’s the core of what we do at AHLA is we’re the voice of the hotel industry to make sure that policymakers are doing things that help the hotel industry not hurt the industry. And so this is a critical time of year for us because while we do a lot in Washington D.C., that just kind of keeps churning at a, at a steady pace again and again and again. It’s the state and local level that is hyperactive at this very moment because most state legislatures go into session at the beginning of the year, and then most of them are done with session by early spring. And so this is really prime time for us when working on state and local legislation. And again, this year we’ve got a whole host of issues that we’re dealing with at the state level. I’m in Atlanta, Georgia right now, probably two blocks from the capitol. We had a really big event here yesterday, about 300 hotels for our Georgia Hotel conference that we share with the Georgia Hotel Lodging Association. We had the Attorney General, we had one of the key members of the Georgia Senate join us. And we talked a lot about the policies that are impacting people. And we do these type of events really all around the country. We have 20 of these on the road events this year. And so yesterday was the second one we had. The first one was in Honolulu last week, which was wonderful, but we’ve got 18 more to go. And then of course we have our really big show, the Hospitality Show, which will be happening October 28th through the 30th in San Antonio, Texas. Ryan Embree: I’m sure it’s so important, Chip to kind of hear, you know, get feet on the ground and talk to hoteliers face-to-face about some of these pressing issues in our industry. You get a unique perspective there. One of the things that AHLA just released recently, which should be good and and exciting news for everyone, is 72% of American travelers are likely to increase or at least maintain their level of hotel stays in 2024. So excellent news there, right? But there’s always those looming, some inflation, economic uncertainty, obviously we got an election year. What can hoteliers do to make sure when they look back at the end of this year that it’s a successful and profitable one, especially with these factors looming? Chip Rogers: You know, Ryan, you really hit it on the good news, which is that people are back out traveling again. Business travel will be back close to where it was in 2019, and we’re able to maintain a lot of this leisure travel. And of course now you have bleisure travel where you mix the two. I’ll be doing that later today as we head into a holiday weekend. But the big part is, is that people are spending money on hotels. And so this year, hotel revenue will be at an all time high. Now, the other side of the ledger shows that inflation is clearly having an impact. You have major labor inflation. The hotel wages have gone up faster than wages for the rest of the US economy. And so you’ve got problems with getting goods and services. There’s, there’s a lot of challenges that hotels are facing. Insur

The 35th Hunter Hotel Investment Conference is only weeks away, taking place on March 19-21 in Atlanta, Georgia! Join Suite Spot host and TMG Director of Marketing Ryan Embree as he sits down with the Chief of Staff at Hunter Hotel Advisors, Sarah Moss, to discuss the upcoming event and what attendees can look forward to from one of the biggest conferences in the hotel industry. This episode has something for every hotelier, from best digital marketing practices to everything related to the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you for joining us, wherever you are listening or watching us on our YouTube channel from. I’ve got a great guest with me today that I’m gonna introduce in just a second, but this is a part of our Hospitality Trailblazers series. If this is your first one, or your fifth one or your 12th one. This series is all about highlighting and showcasing some of the individuals or companies that are pushing our industry forward into the future. So without further ado, it’s my pleasure to bring in Sarah Moss, Chief of Staff at the Hunter Hotel Advisors. Sarah, thank you so much for being with me today. Sarah Moss: Thank you so much, Ryan, for having us. We’re so excited to chat about the conference today. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes being a Hospitality Trailblazer means that you’re actually putting a lot of the people in the same room together to help move our industry forward and Hunter Hotel Conference does such a fabulous job of doing that. But before we jump into all the exciting things about the conference, since this is your first time on the Suite Spot, it is always a little ritual to ask, you know, kind of about your background in the hospitality journey that led you to Hunter Hotel Advisors. Sarah Moss: Sure. So my journey in hospitality started when I was really young. My first job was in a restaurant in my hometown. Then going into college, I worked at a hotel property, really fell in love with hotels and the operations of them and was so fortunate that Georgia State is a partner of Hunter Hotel Advisors in the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference or our co-founder of the conference. And we place an intern every year with the company to give the students a really immersive experience to teach them what goes on through a conference and here at the advisory firm as well. And I was lucky enough to be one of the students that they placed here at Hunter. And so that’s really how I got my journey here to Hunter today. But it’s really unique and I love it. But I’ve been here for almost five years now and did my internship for two years before that, so seven total. Ryan Embree: That’s such a cool story to hear that background that you were just an intern starting at the Hunter Hotel Conference and now you’re already Chief of Staff here just several years later. It’s super exciting and you know, your start is very much like a lot of these Hospitality Trailblazers that I interview, you know, started somewhere line level with myself. I started as a bellman at a hotel. But I think that’s one of the unique things about our industry is that we just, we start in these places, all of us are travelers at heart, right? I haven’t run into one person in hospitality that doesn’t like to travel. So we’re travelers at heart. But when we start our journey in hospitality, typically it starts, you know, just serving people and you know, you get to see that evolution, which is so cool. So speaking of the evolution of things, this is the 35th anniversary of the Hunter Hotel Conference. It’s grown to be one of the biggest and most anticipated events of the year. I know you’ve said you’ve only been with this conference for about five years, but can you talk about kind of the evolution of, of this event and maybe where it started to where it is today? Sarah Moss: Absolutely. So like you mentioned, we’re celebrating our 35th year, which is super exciting for the conference and just for the company in general. Our first conference was in 1989 with 92 attendees. So we have grown quite, quite a few between now and then. But our, I think our, you know, biggest milestones for the conference was when we moved into the Marriott Marquee downtown, one of our amazing partners that we have to help us produce the event. It’s a lot of space, it’s a lot of exciting things that we get to activate and to,

In this episode, Suite Spot host Ryan Embree sits down with TMG Director of Product – Respond & Resolve™, Jackie Avery, to discuss the top 5 guest sentiment trends of 2023. It has become an annual tradition to take a look back each year and analyze which guest sentiment tags were mentioned the most and what aspects of the hotel guest experience resonated with travelers. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, here for the first episode of 2024 and one of my favorite annual traditions. We’ve got the same episode, but a new face and voice that’s gonna be joining me today. Jackie Avery, Director of Product for our Respond and Resolve™, which is our review response solution for hotels. Jackie, not the first time on The Suite Spot, but this is the first time we’re going through this list together. Jackie Avery: Yeah, I’m so excited. I can’t wait to kind of talk through everything with you. We had a really busy year, so in slower seasons last year, I’d say our team was responding to and analyzing anywhere between 18,000 and 20,000 reviews a month. And then, yeah, once we got into the busy season, we were hitting, you know, over 26,000 reviews. So it was a great year, and I can’t wait to share some of the exciting things that we saw. I think everyone’s gonna be happy to hear that. Last year after looking at the sentiment, not only were more people traveling, but they were happy. They left positive sentiments. You know, everyone just kind of takes a sigh of relief when they hear that, and it’s really fun to think about. They were making informed decisions and then they were pleased with those. So I think we all just kinda take a second to celebrate that there was lower dissatisfaction and an increase in satisfaction among travelers all over. Ryan Embree: That’s amazing. And it’s a lot more fun, I would imagine, to respond to someone that’s had a really great experience at your hotel. It’s at your hotel than someone that may have not had that great experience. So we respond to both either way, but I’m always amazed, Jackie, by the sheer numbers when we talk through this episode, because it’s really incredible. You know, we talk to hoteliers that ask us, you know, are reviews becoming less relevant? Our sites like TripAdvisor, you know, really fading from the public eye and really the opposite’s true. You think about how reviews have really incorporated into our life from movies to Amazon products everywhere is a review or a rating, right? And hotels have been one of the longest industries where reviews have been relevant and people are making informed decisions, as you mentioned, based on that feedback. And that’s what this episode’s about. So if this is your first time listening to this annual episode, like I said, it’s, it’s a tradition. Now, our first time with you here, Jackie, but we review the top five sentiments in 2024. So what do I mean by that? Each review is compiled. Each review includes subjects and topics that the guest leaves either positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. So we go into those reviews and we actually tag that, that type of sentiment and organize that information and data. We share a lot of that through our industry reporting that we, that you can find on LinkedIn or our website, travelmediagroup.com. But this is just really an all, all-encompassing episode that counts down the top five. I can’t wait to hear it and I’m sure you’re ready as well, Jackie. Jackie Avery: Yeah, I can’t wait to share what we uncovered. So in 2023, travelers positively tagged amenities over a million times. So hoteliers know what they have to offer and they love to boast about it, right? That’s how they secure more guests. They love to talk about it, but I often hear it means they struggle with how to respond to reviews that mention that because you have what you have and it’s kind of difficult to change what you’re offering. Um, so of course the specific compliments or complaints will determine your exact approach when responding to reviews like these. But what doesn’t change is that this is your last opportunity to acknowledge what the guest has said, right? So their review is completed, their trip is over, and you know, they mentioned something about their visit that was memorable. Was it hanging out at the pool? Was it having a couple drinks at the bar? It could be good or it could be bad

The next episode of TMG Hospitality Trailblazers sees Charles Oswald, President and CEO of Aperture Hotels, taking center stage on the Suite Spot podcast. In this installment, viewers will get a clear breakdown of what makes Aperture Hotels so unique and a one-of-a-kind hotel brand, along with a plethora of information covering some of the most pressing topics in hospitality and hotel digital marketing. Tune in now!   Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. This is our first episode in 2024, recording in 2023, but really excited nonetheless. Got a great guest with me. I’m gonna introduce in a second, but this is a part of our Hospitality Trailblazers series. And if this is the first time you’re doing this, we’ve done this over a year now we are talking about the future of our industry and those individuals, hotel management companies that are really driving our industry forward. And, no better guest than I have. Charles Oswald, president, CEO of Aperture Hotels. Charles, this is your first time to the Suite Spot. Welcome in. Charles Oswald: Hi, it’s good to see you. Thank you. Ryan Embree: We’re excited to be here, Charles, we’re gonna cover a lot past, present, and future today, but let’s start in the past. You know, this is a new guest. You’re the first of the year. We work in this industry where this is, people come from all walks of life and how, and how we get into hospitality. We’re gonna talk about one of those tracks with hospitality schools a little bit later. But tell us a little bit about your background, Charles, and the journey that led you to Aperture Hotels. Charles Oswald: It’s been a long, it’s been a long story for sure, but, you know, I began in hospitality when I was in high school. I was a cook in freestanding restaurants, and I did that on through, uh, through college. Then moved into, uh, you know, in convention services at Hyatt. And that began my food and beverage career at some award-winning Hyatt Hotels. You know, they transferred me from, from Tampa then to Dallas, where we grew with a lot of responsibilities. And, uh, that was in the early nineties to mid nineties. Uh, and then I went on to become an, an a, uh, assistant general manager and general manager of some award-winning full service Holiday Inns, Marriots some Hilton Properties through the late nineties and early s before ultimately becoming a vice president of operations, uh, with an up and coming sophisticated private equity firm, noble Investment Group. And I would say really learned a lot there about the PE side, the investment side, uh, proper asset management and so on. And that’s really what groomed me for, uh, for my next role when, um, when Noble Investment Group sold their management company into interstate hotels and resorts. Uh, at that time, you know, the predecessor to Abridge that we know today was the largest, uh, hotel management company. That was an opportunity through that transition to step out and become a partner and CEO in my own company, uh, with HP Hotels. So I ran, uh, HP Hotels for eight years through 2019. Grew that portfolio to just shy of 50 properties. Then I transitioned into an investor role through the pandemic period planned to invest in hotels, but we know how hotels were through the Pandemic. So I had to pivot, stepped into some other industries, including managing investments for, uh, you know, some retail office development, had a charter yacht business, and several other interesting deals associated with commercial real estate. Uh, but then last year I was like, I just wanna get back to my passion. I wanna get back to hotels. This is really what I love. And so that’s when I joined Banyan Tree Management, which was a captive management company to Banyan Investment Group, which we then relaunched as Aperture Hotels to take on third party management company assignments here in, we just relaunched, in March of this year, 2023. It’s been a fast and furious ride, but operations at my roots, from the beginning and developing from Cook to CEO. Ryan Embree: That is certainly fast and furious, but it’s always interesting to hear these stories. It, it’s, there’s always that theme of adaptability, versatility, changing roles from departments to different states. I’d never get tired of hearing these stories, Charles, because there’s always either, you know, one mentor or you know, one group. You know, like as you were speaking about that rea

In this year-in-review episode, podcast host Ryan Embree has a meaningful conversation with Travel Media Group President, Dana Singer, to go over some of the most significant innovations and milestones that took place in 2023 for TMG and what exciting developments hoteliers can look forward to from TMG in the new year. With hotels and hotel management companies trying to grow their digital marketing efforts and reach more travelers, you will find out how Travel Media Group plans to help them achieve their hotel digital marketing strategy resolutions. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, as always, one of my favorite episodes of the year. It’s an annual tradition. Dana Singer, President of Travel Media Group joins me today. Morning, good morning Dana. And, we’re wrapping up another year and I love this episode ’cause it takes the time to reflect on everything that we’ve accomplished as a company, Travel Media Group, but also the industry. You know, as we get into another year, we’ve sat here in years past before and, you know, maybe that that outlook hasn’t been as bright as it looks in 2024. And maybe finding those bright spots have been a little bit harder to do. But before we get into talking about Travel Media Group, which we’re certainly gonna talk a lot about today, this is the year in review episode. I wanna talk a little bit more about the hotel industry as a whole and how it compares to those last couple years that I just talked about. Dana Singer: Sure, yeah. You know, the industry continues to demonstrate resilience, travel demand remains strong. however, it’s not without its headwinds and, and challenges. And this year at Travel Media Group, we conducted several industry surveys of our database, over 40,000 hotels. And we found that staffing is still a significant challenge. It’s important to mention that the industry forecasts are positive and it’s exciting to see the number of new entrants into the market, and that really speaks to the evolving needs and expectations of travelers. Ryan Embree: Yeah, so certainly a brighter outlook than, like I said, maybe years past that we’ve seen. But, you know, some of the challenges that we’ve seen in this industry, we talked about it on this podcast just a few episodes ago with Chip Rogers when he came on, you know, still seeing those challenges when it comes to staffing and for hotel owners and management companies to find that time. But they’re getting it much more effective and efficient at combating these staffing challenges. This hasn’t been something that’s happened in the last six months, is actually something that’s happened over the last couple years. So that’s why actually we’re at Travel Media Group seeing a lot more demand for things like crafting social media for a hotel or management portfolio, responding to reviews, giving back time to their employees, taking task off their plate so that they can be more efficient. So there’s also this kind of evolution and trend towards outsourcing some of that stuff that’s a lot more welcome. So in that same vein, I wanna talk about Travel Media Group and, you know, some of the latest innovations and developments. We’ve had Jason Lee on here, chief Technology Officer. I feel like he’s on here almost every other episode talking about some sort of new development or launch. Let’s talk about some of those developments in 2023 and the impact that it’s had on our hotel partners. Dana Singer: Sure. You know, if I look back, I would say, one of our most notable innovations, for TMG this year would be the launch of our enhanced social media solution. Adding Instagram reels and social video content, to our existing offering really presents transformative opportunities for our clients to engage with guests and travelers. And like our other solutions and services, our social media management offers truly differentiated levels of support and content expertise, and that enables consistency and messaging and certainly a significant time savings. Ryan Embree: Yeah. So important to be consistent there. Dana Singer: Yeah. And then we also launched the inclusion of Medallia as part of our respond and resolve solution. So now we have full capabilities to respond to both public facing and internal reviews, which adds additional efficiencies and time savings for our hotel partners. And it’s something that they’ve asked for. So w

The Suite Spot: Spotlight series is back with another one-of-a-kind episode that welcomes special guest, Christopher Calabrese, General Manager & VP of the Marriott Cancun Collection! Podcast host and TMG Marketing Director, Ryan Embree sits down with Christopher to showcase the newly renovated Marriott: Cancun, an All-Inclusive Resort, and what exciting new amenities, views, dining options, and activities hotel guests can look forward to from the astounding 450-room property. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining me. We are continuing our Suite Spot: Spotlight series. This is quickly becoming one of my favorite series podcast series that we’ve done on The Suite Spot. Because of all the places we’ve traveled, we’ve gone up to New York, down to Miami Beach, and now we are going to beautiful sunny Mexico with a great guest, Christopher Calabrese, general manager and vice president of the Marriott Cancun Collection. Christopher, welcome to the Suite Spot. Christopher Calabrese: Thank you, Ryan. Good to be with you. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and we talked off screen how very jealous of where you’re at. You’ve got a wonderful property over there, which we’re gonna talk all about. But before we do that, I always love, we live and work in such a wonderful industry, Christopher, with tons of backgrounds and stories. Tell us a little bit about your journey, your hospitality journey, and what led you to the Marriott Cancun Collection. Christopher Calabrese: Well, I’ve been with Marriott for 52 years now, which a lot of people don’t believe, but it’s actually the truth. I’ve had the pleasure to work with all three of the generations of the Marriott family, starting with JW Marriott Sr., Bill Marriott, of course, who was our ex-chairman of the board, and now our David Marriott, who of course is the grandson of the founder and he is now our chairman, executive chairman, as they call it these days. So it’s been an honor to work with all three generations. I started with the hot shops, which was our sort of founding company of restaurants. That’s how Marriott got started in the business. And most of my background, or let’s say half of my background to date so far has been food and beverage. I then became a regional director of operations in Mid-Atlantic. And I wanted to explore the world. I wanted to see international, I wanted to be a general manager. And so at that time I expressed an interest in Latin America and they said, well, you don’t really speak Spanish, so we don’t, we can’t really put you there at this time. So I said, okay, well what might you have? They said, well, we have a job for you in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia as general manager. I said, I don’t speak Arabic. And they said, yeah, but you know, your type of personality will fit in nicely in in that area, in that part of the world. So if you’d like it, let’s do it. We can fly you in if you want to have a look. I said, no, that’s okay. Let’s just go do a one-way ticket and I’ll work out there for a couple of years and hopefully one day get back to this part of the world. And, and sure enough, that’s what happened. And so that’s kind of my journey International. And then I moved to Puerto Vallarta as general manager of the Marriott there. And then I’ve been in Cancun the rest of my career, but I’ve moved 26 times with this company. So, um, I know what it’s like to see different parts of the world or at least parts of the US for the short time that I was there, half of my career. And it’s been a great journey. Ryan Embree: That is absolutely fantastic Christopher and such an inspiration to maybe some of our younger hoteliers that might be looking for a long-term career in this wonderful industry that we share in the possibilities of, you know, if you’re open to the opportunity, you know, I had Chip Rogers from the American Hotel Lodging Association last episode on, and we were talking about one of the things that makes our industry so special and unique is skills are transferrable. So you can travel to the Middle East, back to the United States and to Mexico and end up where you’re at. It’s really just an ease of transition as far as the job’s concerned, you know, obviously culture and things of that, which I’m sure you’ll be able to speak to a little bit more. There’s migh

It’s time to catch up on the state of the hotel industry with special guest Chip Rogers, President and CEO of the AHLA! Ryan and Chip have important conversations around some of the most pressing and relevant current events happening in hospitality and give hoteliers key insights into how staying in touch with these developments directly affects your businesses and travelers. Tune in now to discover how staffing, work flexibility, new trends, and hotel technology keep evolving and how you can stay one step ahead of the curve. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining, watching us. If you’re watching us from our YouTube channel or joining us from any of the streaming platforms that you’re listening to, if you did find us, you know, we’ve got a great guest today, someone that really doesn’t need any introduction. Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Chip, thank you so much for, being on the Suite Spot with me today. Chip Rogers: Hey, Ryan, it’s so good to be with you. Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: Really technically not your first time on the Suite Spot. Last time we were together, Chip, we were in Las Vegas on a busy trade show floor after a very successful hospitality show. About six months removed from that now, what type of feedback are you getting about that event and maybe give us some insights into what you’re looking for from the next one in October in San Antonio? Chip Rogers: Well, first feedback was the opening party, seems to have taken on historic status. As folks who have been, at that property know that the nightclub TAO and we packed it out, there was a line that lasted, some estimates over two hours long to get into it. And so you, you almost created that, fear of missing out. But people absolutely loved the opening party. And from there it went to, an incredible lineup of keynote speakers. And what we tried to do is make sure that we are entertaining you, informing you yes, hitting on those things that are unique to the hotel industry, but also remembering that everyone’s a person, they have outside interests too, and, and could we get speakers that are funny, inspiring, educational. And I, and I think we hit all that. In fact, the most popular speaker that we had, Admiral McCraven, it was interesting. I was at an event literally last night and it was a political event and people were talking about, oh, you know, these two candidates that this seemed to be the two candidates running for president. And someone said, if there’s a third party candidate, why don’t we just get Admiral McCraven? And I’m like, that would be great, because now I know the guy and if he became president, that would be kind of cool. But it’s that type of level of speaker that we had that I think really set us apart from many of the other shows that you go to. And so from the trade show floor, that was just amazing. We sold it out in year one to the speakers. And again, starting with that incredible opening party, it, it was quite an event. And, you know, Las Vegas always has something special for everybody. We’re gonna try to redo that again in San Antonio. San Antonio, a very unique place. One of the most visited cities in the United States for people that are going on a leisure trip. And so we wanna make sure we’re capturing that, that you’re coming to the event, you’re going to have fun, you’re going to be entertained, you’re gonna learn something, you’re going to network with the entire industry. Again, in Vegas, we had, about 3,700 attendees. We wanna get to 5,000 for this event in San Antonio. So we’re super excited. It’s a little bit later in the year. The weather will be good. It’ll be in October. And make sure that everybody listening and watching right now shows up in San Antonio. Ryan Embree: Yeah, well, guilty as charges being one of those individuals in, in that long line. And, and certainly can attest to that, that opening party Chip and like you said, you know, the entire event from inspiring to informative, and so you really hit all the check marks on there. Really excited to see you in, in San Antonio, and I love the parallels that you brought there between Las Vegas and San Antonio. You know, Las Vegas obviously a very unique place for, for hotel and travel. San Antonio, very different with the leisure market over there as well. So I think they’re wond

Join Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree as he welcomes TMG Hospitality Traiblazer, Oliver Winter, to the podcast. Oliver is the founder and CEO of a&o Hostels which is the largest independent hostel chain in Europe! These two discuss the hostel experience, a&o’s commitment to green initiatives and sustainability, and the resurgence of the solo traveler. Tune in now to see how Oliver and a&o are making a big difference in hospitality across the globe.   Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. All right. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, thank you so much for joining us, for listening to us, to watching us wherever you are, finding us here. We are here at the Content Creation Studio for another episode of TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. I am so excited to bring in my next guest, certainly a trailblazer, and what Oliver and his group are doing right now. Certainly, fantastic. We’re gonna get a lot to it. So, let me go ahead and bring him in. Oliver Winter, founder and CEO of a&o Hostels. Oliver, thank you so much for jumping on the Suite Spot with me. Oliver Winter: Yeah, thanks Ryan, for having me here. Thank you very much. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And we’re gonna have some fun today. We’re gonna talk about a&o all the initiatives that you guys are doing and this incredible growth that you’re seeing. I think you bring a really unique perspective, but for those that have not listened to this series before, this is our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers, where we spotlight those individuals and management companies, uh, groups like a&o that are really trailblazing the path forward. So we have the pleasure of speaking with Oliver today, but Oliver, before we get into everything that we’re doing right now, or even what’s in the future, I wanna start with the past because this is one of my favorite questions we’ve been doing this series, which is almost a year old now, is tell us a little bit about your hospitality background, because we have such unique stories in our industry that I feel like rarely get told. We all talk about the, the exciting things that are happening right now, and maybe in the future, but a lot of us in hospitality, you had some very unique backgrounds before we got to the place that we were. So tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to ultimately founding a&o. Oliver Winter: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, happy to do this. Uh, so yeah, as a, as a young man between school and university, I, I had time to travel around the world and, um, came in touch with this hostel concept in many different countries. And what I saw, I liked really much so affordable stay, uh, you have with a warm shower, safe bed, a kitchen to share, a place to hang around and, and, uh, a place even very easy to come in touch with other travelers. So back to Berlin. Then, in these days, I started to study to become a teacher so far away from hospitality background parallel. During my studies, I investigated the Berlin Hostel market, and there’ve been in this time just non-commercial providers, like Y-M-C-A-Y-J, et cetera. So no private independent hostel. So with, with a lot of patients. And, and little luck of course, as well. So, 23 years ago, then I founded, um, AO in Berlin, opened a a 164 beds hostel. That was the very beginning, 164 beds. And it was, uh, it was from the first moment, it was great success. And, um, so then I stopped my studies and, and focused to grow this company and, and adding more bets first in Berlin later than in other cities in Germany, and then in other European countries. So today we are running 28,000, uh, bets in nine European countries. Ryan Embree: That’s absolutely incredible. And your story resonates with a lot of the trailblazers that I’ve had on this series where, you know, they’re in school or in college university, and all of a sudden they find this passion in hospitality and, and customer service and hosting people. And that certainly resonates with your story and, and that incredible growth, which we’re gonna talk about here. But love to hear that background. I’m gonna stay kind of in the past before we look more towards the future, because up to this point, you know, one of my favorite questions on this series has been about the lessons learned over the past couple years, right? I think it’s important to talk about what happened, even though sometimes we shy away from it, because it is something so unique that hasn’t happened in our lifetime very often, and t

The Suite Spot visits Miami Beach in this episode to talk with Simon Sorpresi of the SLS South Beach Hotel to discuss its addition to the Suite Spot: Spotlight series and how the iconic property stands out from the competition with a unique guest experience, art style, and digital marketing strategy. Tune in to discover why the SLS South Beach is a one-of-a-kind hospitality experience that every type of traveler should mark as their next destination. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. I am so excited for this episode. If you are watching us on Travel Media Group’s, YouTube channel, you know that we are here live on location. This is the first time ever we’ve been live on location. We’re very excited. We’ve got this brand new Suite Spot: Spotlight series. We just had our first episode, but the first time that we’re doing it live on location, and we have such a great guest and property that we’re gonna be showcasing on this Spotlight series. Without further ado, let me bring him in. Simon Sopresi of the SLS South Beach, Vice President of Ennismore – Miami, Mexico, and South America. Simon, welcome to the Suite Spot for the first time. Simon Sorpresi : Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure and it’s great to host you and your team here at SLS South Beach. Ryan Embree: My breath was taken away when we came in through these doors. You have a beautiful property here at the SLS South Beach. It really truly embodies the spirit of this series. We are going around the country trying to find and showcase the hotel’s most unique and historic in the nation. Yeah, and I think that SLS certainly fits the bill, but before we start talking about the property, it’s always interesting to talk to another person in hospitality because, we know everyone’s story’s different, right? You could start as a Bellman at a hotel like myself. Some people are literally born into the industry. Some people just fall into it just by choice. So tell us a little bit about your story, and what led you to Ennismore? Simon Sorpresi : Whoa. Okay. Uh, let me try to keep it short. So first of all, it’s a pleasure to have you here. As you can hear, I’m not originally from the States. I still have a very thick accent. I tried to get rid of it, which I’m clearly not mastering it, but was very interesting. I studied national construction architecture back in Europe and fell through an excursion from that architectural school in hotels, fell kind of in love with hotels. And I was like, oh my God, that’s really kind of unique. There was a gentleman called Uli Prager. He was the founder of Mervin Pick, the brand. And he did the tour and he was very charismatic. He could speak about the thread counts of the linen to how to wash pots and pans. I mean, he knew it all. And as a young person, young professional, I was really, really, I think wowed by him. And said, I wanna become him. And so that’s where, how it came about. Did the hotel management school in Switzerland, worked all different disciplines of the hotel. Worked very heavy in food and beverage, specialized myself in food and beverage, had my own company in Europe and said, I wanna learn English and ultimately move to New York City after a saltic business. Moved to New York City, had my own business in New York, mostly in nightlife and art galleries. And then did that for seven years and went back to the roots of hospitality in luxury segmentation in Los Angeles. And I came here at SLS South Beach is the reason why it was such a tempting thing for me, because I have the discipline. I worked in the rooms, I worked in the food and beverage, I had nightlife. The SLS South Beach has all those verticals and Ennismore with the SLS brand, we pride ourself to have those stiffened verticals. So we say we not only hoteliers, but we’re also restauranteurs and so forth. So that’s really what enticed me to come to this property. Ryan Embree: You have certainly spanned the entire gamut of, of hospitality, and major markets, not only across the nation, across the world. So it’s, such a luxury to be sitting here with you. And I’m sure, you know, as someone who really started in the architecture and construction, a property like the SLS South Beach, has such a rich history. So we’ve learned a little bit about yourself. You know, this series is all about showcasing the property. Tell us a little bit about its rich history, because that’s something that when

Travel Media Group just launched its latest product innovation to its social media digital solution, Social Video for Hotels: TikTok & Instagram Reels! Tune in to this Suite Spot podcast episode to join TMG Marketing Director & Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree, and Social Media Product Manager, Brian Ross as these two digital marketing specialists share the capabilities of this exciting addition to the social media solution and the best video-making insights that will optimize your hotel’s unique social media strategy. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you for joining, thank you for listening. If you’re hearing us on any of the podcast streaming platforms that you can find the Suite Spot on, or thank you for seeing us on Travel Media Group’s YouTube page where you can find all of our Suite Spot episodes, and we have a fantastic episode today. A first timer, a newbie to the podcast of the Suite Spot, Brian Ross, our Social Media Product Manager at Travel Media Group. Brian, welcome to the Suite Spot. Brian Ross: Thank you so much for having me. Ryan Embree: Yes, and we’re, super excited today. We’ve got a great episode and we’re here for another launch. I feel like we do these episodes, every other episode, Travel Media Group, continuing to innovate. We have launched an exciting social media innovation and addition to our already incredible solution, due in part to you and what your team has been doing over there on the social media side. But we are launching social video for hotels, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. I’m excited. How are you feeling? Brian Ross: It’s been fantastic. It really is the next natural step to what we’ve been doing with custom posts for hoteliers. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And I wanna talk about that because I feel like I know, I joked about it, you know, this being, an episode we do all the time with the, all these innovations. But we were a couple months ago, a couple episodes ago, talking about video content creation, TMG giving you the ability to build social videos via OneView®. So, what’s the difference between that announcement and what we’re talking about today? Brian Ross: So internally, what we refer to the other launch as is our DIY product. And that is essentially a product where you can go in and use our system to create content that goes out across all of your platforms, and you can track your insights and the performance of all those posts. But what this is, is this is a product that we offer where we create the custom posts for you. When we onboard somebody, we get some property notes and even in the individual posts, they can give us some notes on what they like and, you know, they know their occupancy drivers and things like that. So if they just give us a little note, then we go in and we actually create the content. Ryan Embree: So this is now us doing that with the video which is just so powerful and it’s the natural evolution. We were talking off screen, off mic about this, but you know, one of the things that I’m gonna continue to reference during this episode is the social hotel social media survey that we just conducted, went out to our entire database of over 40,000 hoteliers. And one of the questions we asked them, what was your biggest challenge? And we saw 62% of the time, not enough time. That is a hotelier’s life, 365, 24/7. We wish there were more hours in the day, but even if there were, we’d be open for them, right? Because we’re hoteliers, not enough time, unsure of what to post 60% and staffing someone to do it 50%. So this is that natural evolution because you’re right, so many hoteliers understand the importance of social media, but it’s sitting down and the ability to strategize and actually produce a video. It’s a little bit more complicated than just clicking a button or two. Brian Ross: And what’s important is that things are consistent. A lot of times a challenge for hoteliers is that they’ll have the bandwidth for a little while to get something done and it will get started. It will feel good, but inevitably things come up and it drops off. And That will happen with even just trying to do regular social media posts. When you start to try to integrate video, it can be gung-ho when you first launched that kind of idea, but can easily fall off. And it’s so important with social media to be consistent because when people are checking out your social media And there hasn’t

Join Suite Spot host and TMG Director of Marketing, Ryan Embree as he talks with the Senior Vice President, Luxury Division, The Unbound Collection by Hyatt, Ashish Verma in our new TMG Spotlight series to give listeners a lavish perspective on hospitality and how the rich history of The Chatwal, New York sets the gold standard for luxury in the hospitality industry. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, my name is Ryan Embree, host of The Suite Spot. Thank you so much for joining us. We are having a brand new series here. I am so excited about this. So if you’ve been following the Suite Spot before, we’ve been doing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series, that’s all about the people and hospitality management companies that are pushing our industry forward into the future, 2024 and beyond. But I am very excited about our new series that we just launched, and I think we have just the perfect guest and hotel part of this Suite Spot: Spotlight series. So to give you a little bit of background, this Suite Spot: Spotlight series are showcasing and highlight some of our industry’s most unique and iconic hotels across the nation, across the globe. And I think we have such a fitting guest for our first ever edition of the Suite Spot: Spotlight series. Ashish Verma, Senior Vice President of the Luxury Division, Unbound Collection. Ashish, welcome to the Suite Spot. Ashish Verma: Thank you so much, Ryan. What an exciting introduction and, to be the first guest for the Suite Spot, which definitely hits a Sweet spot with me. Ryan Embree: Excellent. Yeah, we might steal that catch phrase, from you there, Ashish, but tell us where you’re coming from because we know that the people make this industry, but this Suite Spot Spotlight series is all about, again, the most iconic hotels that we have. Where are you joining us from? Ashish Verma: I’m based in New York. It’s my hometown and I’m in the heart of Manhattan. I was born and raised in India, so a great culture of hospitality. I drove my career with hotels, one of the finest in luxury hospitality. And then I moved to Hyatt International the very best, and I worked with them in India, in France, where I did my highest studies, my MBA in Paris and I worked with Hyatt again there and I moved to Phai, the original UN Plaza here in New York. Went on to work with a great hotel company Orient Express, as a GM down in New Orleans through hurricane Katrina and beyond. Returned to New York, my hometown, and it was a GM at the Luell and I’ve been in charge of the Chatwel, New York Luxury Division for a little over eight years. Ryan Embree: Your story is the true embodiment of hospitality is worldwide, right? And I’m sure you’ve seen just some incredible places, incredible hotels. So tell us a little bit about this iconic and historic hotel, The Chatwal. This fits the bill of being just a timeless property. Can you give us, you know, we shared your, hospitality experience, share a little bit of history of, of this specific property. Ashish Verma: Yes. global hospitality, hospitality being global goes hand in hand. There are some great hotels around the world and we all have a bucket list to experience and travel around the world. And the world has become a little microcosm of our own aspirations and luxury at the very finest embodies that, expresses that, offers that. And I’m fortunate between Asia, Europe and the US here in New York, having experienced some of the best. Where we are now in the heart of Manhattan, there’s a lot of history where the Chatwal New York is, first this was called the Great White Way. Electricity first came to New York here, Great White Way near the Broadway, near the theaters. It was also called the Club Row. This is where the most iconic clubs are. Our building is an iconic building built by Stanford White, one of the most famous American architects. He built it in 1905, found by Mr. Charles Lamb, a British gentleman who had a club for the thespians in London, and he wanted to found one here in New York. So this is actually the first test in Club of America, found as Lambs Club named after Charles Lamb and the iconic Stanford White, who’s in Madison Square Garden, some of the most well-recognized landmark buildings across the US. The club room element is so amazing because we have the most iconic clubs here on the street on 44th. Yale Club, Princeton Club, Harvard Club, Cornell Club. So all the Ivy Clubs are here. The Lance Club is here. So between the White Way, the club row, the historic stand fight, the

Join Suite Spot Host, Ryan Embree, as he and Chief Technology Officer,Jason Lee, break down the insights and data collected in the 2nd edition of our TMG Summer Guest Sentiment Report on the podcast. This episode contains valuable information for hoteliers looking to make better operational and strategic decisions for their hotels as the end of the year approaches while closing out the year strong. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: This is your host, Ryan Embree here, coming from the content creation studio in Maitland, Florida at the headquarters of Travel Media Group. Got another great episode for you today with a very special guest, but a guest that has been with us a lot of times on these episode. Jason Lee, Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group. Jason, thanks again for joining the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: All right, thanks for having me, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and this has become a little bit of a tradition here with these episodes that we’re doing. We’re gonna talk about summer guest sentiment. Now, for those listeners or viewers, if you’re watching us on YouTube here, give us a little background about guest sentiment, how we’re pulling it and what the trends and insights we’re gonna be talking about today. Jason Lee: Okay, so here at Travel Media Group, we process all reviews received by hotels in the United States. So meaning we, we bring them into our system. We use natural language processing to kind of pull out specific keywords, and then we use that same kind of processing in an AI that actually decides whether this is positive or negative. So taking all of that information and sort of splicing it and dicing it. But then we call it sentence chunks, but it’s looking at little chunks of sentences that basically would determine whether or not those key words are positive or negative. So that’s where all of this comes from. So it, so you could have, in one single review, you could have five or six sentiment points, and you know, that review could be rated positively, but the actual language could have positive and negative pieces to it. So we do not take rating into account. It is all based on the actual language in the review. Ryan Embree: Well, that’s important because we’ve talked about before a four or five star rating could still have some negative elements to it. Right? Absolutely. You know, everything was great in my stay, but you know, I felt like the parking was a little expensive, or there might be some positive sentiment with the negative reviews where, you know, everything seemed to go wrong, except the staff was just super nice and friendly the entire time. So that’s why it’s so important to kind of break down these patterns and trends. And when he says every single review, we’re talking big numbers, 1.6 million reviews, that is 100,000 more than we got when we did this in the spring, which is expected. Summer still continues to be our busiest travel season, but within that 1.6 million reviews, over 7 million pieces of guest sentiment. So subjects, topics, elements of a review that people are talking about having sentiment towards, that’s all broken down in these insights and data. Jason Lee: Yeah, we use the kind of bigger categories. So the main categories we have are the room, the service experience, and the facility experience. So we use those sort of as the bigger category, and then we have a bunch of tags and aspects inside of each one of those categories. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And what we’re gonna do today on this episode, Jason, is we’re gonna give some of our key takeaways and insights to all of this data, right? Me and you, we absolutely love this data. We could probably spend hours talking about it, dissecting it and putting it, you know, into categories. But we’re just gonna have five key takeaways today. We’re gonna express, you know, maybe why that is. Seasonality has a lot to do with it, right? I mean, again, busy season. This is when our hotels get the most stressed, as far as, you know, occupancy coming in and could uncover, we’ve talked about it before, could uncover some patterns and trends that might have been issues in the slower season, but now have become bigger problems in the summer. So we’re gonna go ahead and start here. We’re gonna start talking about staff, and we actually talked about this in the spring, and we did, this is our second edition of the T M G Guest Summer Sentiment Report, and last summer staff was mentioned negatively. 33% of the time, that is actually down to 15%. Which I thought was fascinating because I’m still hearing, you know, at the hospitality show that we attended hoteliers, that we talked to, staf

Our latest and greatest TMG Hospitality Trailblazers episode features the President and CEO of AD1 Global, Daniel Berman! Join Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree, as he and Daniel discuss some very eye-opening hospitality subjects prevailing in the industry and give insights into how hoteliers can effectively navigate the landscape. And so much more! Suite Spot Podcast · 117 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Daniel Berman Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree, thank you for joining me. It’s been a minute. We are going to be continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. I am so excited for the next guest that we have today in our trailblazers series. If this is the first time you’re hearing this, we’ve been doing this series almost for a year now. We’ve had almost a dozen hospitality leaders and trailblazers in our industry, and this series is all about the people and the groups that are pushing our industry forward. So very excited with that set up to invite our next Hospitality Trailblazers, Daniel Berman, president and CEO of AD1 Global. Daniel, thank you so much, for joining the Suite Spot today. Daniel Berman: Thank you for having me here. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and this is your first time here. So what we do with all of our first time guests is we live in an industry or work in an industry rather, where we’ve got all types of stories of how people end up where they are. So, give us a little bit of background on your hospitality journey and what led you to AD1 Global. Daniel Berman: Yes, perfect. So thank you again for having me here. I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, move to United States in 2001. And while deciding what to do here and, I learned how to do invest in real estate. Started in 2008, and then I got into the hospitality by mistake. We bought, we bought, and my partners and me, Ari and Alex and me, we bought, almost 500 room hotel, thinking there was a real estate investment. Didn’t understood there was a business within the real estate and we almost lost everything. It took us about two years, almost three years to get that project, on a positive numbers, decided that we love the business. It was very hard, but we learned the hard way and thank God, that’s how AD1 was born. Ryan Embree: Wow. You didn’t really start off small huh? When it was straight for the 500 Room hotel. That’s pretty amazing. And you know what, I was talking to Daniel before this episode started because the VP of HR over there in AD1 Global Bertha Cordovis actually gave me my first job in hospitality, which was a bellman, at a resort here in Orlando. So, it’s funny how, you know, we talk about these journeys and hospitality and you, I’ve heard the mistake one before. I’ve heard, you know, the journey of, of saying, Hey, I’m just going to school. This was a side gig. That might be a first for me of hearing, you know, purchasing a 500 room hotel and kind of falling into the industry. But we’re so happy that we found this, you know, and we’ll kind of talk about this love for our industry and transition. Ryan Embree: You know, before we start really talking about where we are today, where we’ve kind of gone with this series has kind of started with this rocky road that we’ve been on the past couple years, right. Obviously the pandemic in 2020. We’ve now had some time to kind of time to reflect on that recovery which is nice, but still, you know, battling some headwinds with staffing shortages here and there. Tell me a little bit about, kind of reflecting back on maybe some lessons that you learned from this, the pandemic that our industry as a whole has learned and how you’ve maybe applied that to AD1 global today. Daniel Berman: Yes, it’s been a very, very tough years because not only the pandemic, but the aftermath, you know, the inflation, the war, the rates going up and all as a result of the pandemic. But, what we realized is what hit us the most was not the, the pandemic of the raise of the interest. It was the lack of preparation for this type of situation. Nobody knew about the pandemic, nobody expected, but as a business owners, we need to be prepared for the worst case scenario. And I think that was the, the big, big lesson in all aspects. We need to prepare for the wars and hope for the best, but we need, we need to anticipate. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. I mean, a again, nobody kind of, as you said, nobody kind of predicted what happened, but

Podcast host Ryan Embree welcomes the newest addition to the TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series, Mauri Berry, Vice President of Marketing & Digital Strategy at Remington Hospitality! During this episode, listeners can expect to learn a plethora of valuable and exciting insights and takeaways that encompass current trends in the hotel industry, such as technology advancement, effective digital touchpoints for guests, and hotel rebranding. Suite Spot Podcast · 116 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Mauri Berry Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is Travel Media Group Marketing Director and host of the Suite Spot, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer series. We’re heating up a very, very busy summer season, but I am very excited about our guest because she’s got some exciting news about a chapter for definitely a hospitality trailblazer management company out there, Remington Hospitality. So, without further ado, I will go ahead and bring in Mauri Berry, Vice President of Marketing and Digital Strategy at Remington Hospitality. Welcome to the Suite Spot, Mauri, this is your first time. Mauri Berry: Yeah, thanks Ryan. So happy to be here. I’m honored to have been invited and talk a little bit more about what we’ve got going on. Ryan Embree: Yeah, certainly have a lot going on, but we always like to start these episodes, just because our industry is so unique in the sense of, you know, some people find hospitality just through maybe a side job or gig here and there. Some people were born into it, some people went to school for it now, we’re seeing that more and more often. So with every new guest we kind of like to ask your hospitality journey and tell us a little bit about your background. What led your hospitality path to Remington. Mauri Berry: Yeah, sure. So I’ve been around longer than I care to admit, primarily in our industry from even before I graduated from college. You know, I’ve been around for a while. My background, I started in PR as a PR major straight out of college and worked for a major attraction in Atlanta. And then sort of over the course of the years evolved and adapt my career all within the hospitality space. You know, I’ve worked in agency environments in PR and integrated marketing for hospitality and tourism companies. I’ve worked at Lakeside Resorts, I worked for Marriott where I spent most of my career is in field marketing at Marriott International for about 14 years. So, have really, like I said, been around longer than I care to admit. I did leave Marriott after almost 14 years and went to a hotel management company. I knew that in order to really grow and expand my career, I needed to maybe step outside of the Marriott bubble, expand my horizons a bit into other brands, other hotel types, other ways of doing business. So jumped into hotel management space and have never looked back. I’ve been, as you mentioned, with Remington Hospitality for about two years and you know, it’s been nonstop adventure from day one with a number of different updates and corporate and company pivots and new exciting updates. So, you know, I don’t see myself going anywhere for a while, if the excitement continues the way it has since I’ve been here. Ryan Embree: Yeah, certainly a lot of exciting things to share, some of which we’re gonna talk about on this episode a little bit later, but it’s just so fascinating to hear. I love in this Hospitality Trailblazer series kind of hearing where people jump from, you know, you got people on the brand side that have jumped to the management company side and vice versa but it all kind of makes up that, that DNA and having that kind of PR background, I’m sure is super unique to the industry because we’re always looking for ways to promote our property, but it’s different doing it from the brand level and sometimes from the management company level, even though they have to align. So we’ll talk about a little bit more about that being that, that this is a digital marketing podcast. But before we talk about all the exciting stuff moving forward, I wanna take a step back because we’ve really explored in this series unique perspective of digital marketing and strategy during the pandemic and how the guest experiences really changed over these past couple years. How critical was it during that time or is it now to really pre-stay set guest expectations? Cau

Join Suite Spot Host, Ryan Embree, as he covers the top 5 takeaways from the inaugural event of The Hospitality Show presented by Questex and the AHLA. Suite Spot Podcast · 115 – The Hospitality Show: 5 Key Takeaways Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embry for a special edition of the Suite Spot. We teased it on social media. Hopefully you are tuning in. But we are here for our five key takeaways from the Hospitality Show, which just happened here at the end of June, 2023 at the Beautiful Venetian. This was an inaugural event. We had been talking about this for a while. We had the opportunity to show up to the hospitality show as press and media interview some of the industry’s top influencers. So if you get the opportunity, head to our YouTube page, follow us on social media. We’re gonna be posting all of those great interviews, insights, and data. Everyone we talk to at the Hospitality Show over in Vegas to our YouTube page. So check that out. But today we are going to be talking about the top five takeaways from the event. This was filled with some incredible panelists and guest speakers at this event. That’s why I love these industry events so much. And I was interviewing someone at the hospitality show, and I know we always talk about this pent up demand for travel, but it certainly feels like there’s been some pent up demand for these industry events. It’s so industry to get these blend of industry leaders cuz you get just such different perspectives that sometimes we get siloed in, uh, for a brand show or other industry events. So this hospitality show was certainly special because it had a lot of point of views, but even though there were some competitors at this show, there was a lot that we agreed on here. And one of the biggest things, and my first key takeaway is staffing continues to plague our industry right now. A H l A did that study recently that found 82% of hotels are still struggling with staffing shortage. That’s just an absolutely crazy number to think of where we started and during the pandemic, we were furloughing so many and that’s, that’s really where the panelists kind of started. And, and it’s such a u unique perspective cuz we talked about the millions that went into furlough during the pandemic and how there could be some that have left our industry for good. We’ve never had and experienced a wave of hospitality professionals leave our industry and choose not to come back. So what’s happening now is this, uh, very unique opportunity for people that have never been in our industry before. Right? If I’m switching from one hotel to another, I’m familiar with the whole check-in checkout process. Property management systems might be different here and there, but I understand all the complexities of working in a hotel as a hospitality professional. Now, the people that are coming into our industry, they might not understand those at first. So we’ve gotta do a better job of kind of simplifying these processes for people new to our industry. And that’s a big challenge that they talked about at the Hospitality show, is figuring out ways that we can make our processes more efficient. So someone that might have not worked in the hotel industry but before can come in and seamlessly really get into a groove into their role because that first 90 days is absolutely critical to retention for our employees. That’s why things like TMGs respond and resolve and responding to reviews and taking that off the plate of our employees is so important because that could be something that someone new to the hotel industry, that’s a skill they might not understand the nuances right away of how to respond and show service over a review response. So outsourcing to a company like Travel Media Group to help respond to those reviews, uh, certainly could be a way to make those, uh, those processes more efficient and simple. Like we were talking about today, you know, this panel was talking about how we need to be the aggressors when it comes to recruiting and not just looking through the hospitality school lens, right? How many times have we run into other professionals in other areas and said, you know, I went to school for hospitality, but now I’m doing something different. We need to go after the marketing degrees, the business degrees and show that there is a real clear cut career path. Someone used this phrase I absolutely love, come for a job, leave with a caree

Guest sentiment data continues to provide hoteliers with insightful and valuable information that they can harness to position their hotel properties better. By learning what travelers say and feel about their hotel stays during spring, hotels and hotel management companies can better align their digital strategies for the busy summer season. Through analyzing over 1.7 million reviews and over 7.5 million guest sentiment tags, Suite Spot host Ryan Embree and TMG Chief Technology Officer Jason Lee break down the top 5 takeaways from the 2nd edition of our annual Spring Guest Sentiment Report. This is an episode hoteliers can not afford to miss. Tune in now! Suite Spot Podcast · 114 – TMG’s Spring Guest Sentiment Report: Key Takeaways Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining us today, wherever you’re listening from or viewing us from on our YouTube page. We are here in our content creation studio at Travel Media Group headquarters just north of Orlando. And I am here with a very familiar guest and voice, Mr. Jason Lee, our Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group. Jason, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: We got a very exciting episode for you today. Memorial Day just passed. We saw the record breaking numbers, pre pandemic levels of travel. I’m sure a lot of hotel listeners are very excited to hear that. It’s looking like it’s gonna be an even bigger summer, which we’re gonna talk about. But today what we’re gonna be doing is we’re gonna be looking at all of that feedback that guests left us over this spring, and hopefully what this is gonna do is give us some insights, and some takeaways that we can use in these summer months to potentially leverage our marketing and increase our chance of conversion, which is what every hotelier should be doing. Since this is a sales and marketing podcast, we love to do that for you. But Jason, take us through first, what is this data that we’re seeing and why is it more accurate than, let’s say, a survey of just like a thousand travelers? Jason Lee: So what we do is we use natural language processing to pull out like key pieces of information. So it’s traveler sentiment, so how they’re feeling about these various items. So you could have people that are both happy and upset in the same review, based on categories. So we start this, we start this whole thing with category. So we look at a bunch of different tags inside of room category, inside of a facilities category, inside of a service category. And then further past that we look at the various aspects of those tags. So I’ll just give you an example. So an example would be a room, it would be bed, right? So room would be the category. The tag would be bed. The aspects of that tag would be sheets, pillows, sleep quality. It could be all of these other pieces that, so many factors, Yeah. That make up this stuff. And so, so we extract that data from each, review that comes in regardless of so completely agnostic of the rating of the review, just looking at the actual information that comes from the text. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and that’s something that, that we preach to our hotel partners is just because you have a five star review or a one star review on the other side, doesn’t mean there’s both positive, neutral and negative elements to that review. Absolutely. And what this is doing, and this is pulling out all of that sentiment, it’s over a lot of data, which we’re gonna share in a second, these incredible numbers. And then what we’re doing here is trying to extrapolate that data, trying to find some trends, patterns and insights, that you, the hotel listener can potentially use. So give us some of those numbers. I mean, again, we’re not just talking about a thousand travelers. We’re talking about every public review online. Correct. And the feedback within that, that’s gotta be, yeah, that’s gotta be a huge amount. Jason Lee: Yeah. So, so you’re talking about a little over 60,000 hotels and all of their reviews. So in, in those last three months we’re just a little over 3 million reviews that came in from that, and then from those about 7.5 million individual pieces of sentiment Ryan Embree: Just in the spring, which is yes, is absolutely, incredible to think about and very curious to see what those numbers might look like as we get into the

Join Suite Spot podcast host, Ryan Embree as he welcomes the President of Questex, Alexi Khajavi, as an official TMG Hospitality Trailblazer! These two hospitality-focused individuals discuss some incredible travel and tourism subjects in this episode, giving viewers great insight into the industry’s current state. This episode is full of content from conversations regarding trends like staffing shortages, event & group travel, and an inside look at the inaugural launch of The Hospitality Show. Suite Spot Podcast · 113 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Alexi Khajavi Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. We are gonna be continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. We are having such fun with this series. Again, if this is the first time you’re hearing this. This series is all about those people and groups that are pushing our hospitality industry forward. We’ve had a lot of hotel management companies, some brands on this. We’re gonna take a little bit wider lens today. This is called TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. We’re gonna look at the travel industry as a whole, and I think that’s a perfect segue into an introduction to our guest, Alexi Khajavi, president Questex, hospitality, travel and wellness. Alexi, welcome to the Suite Spot. Alexi Khajavi: Thanks, Ryan. It’s good to be here. Ryan Embree: Awesome. Well, this is your first time on the Suite Spot. We always love to essentially start our episodes the exact same way because as we know in hospitality, some people are born into it. Some people just find it, you know, some people, a lot of people say, “Hey, I want to be the guy at the hotel”, or “I want to be the guy that’s making all these memories within the travel industry”. Where did your journey start and what led you to Questex? Alexi Khajavi: Well, you know, both my parents were big travelers, you know, so we, we were always, you know, trying to plan the next trip. So, travel’s been a part of my life, you know, since being a little child. You know, ultimately, even professionally, however, I graduated from the UC of California. I came outta that and joined, you know, a tour operator that was doing some early educational trips to Cuba. Traveled around, you know, and was, and was paid to do. So, I then got into the early tech scene in, you know, the early .com, 1997 to 2001, a tech startup called unexplored.com. And really since then, I’ve, I’ve been in travel and I’ve been in on the marketing and sales side of travel and hospitality, lived overseas multiple times, running hotels, running airlines, and then ran an, an advertising agency based off of the travel and hotel space. So we were working with destinations, we were working with hotel companies, and then was introduced to Questex back in 2014. And the event space was something I didn’t have a lot of direct experience in, but the ability to connect buyers and sellers, particularly in travel and hospitality, where face-to-face is so critical, was really the pinnacle moment for me to see that as being just an incredible culmination of my prior experiences, my love of travel, my love of hospitality, and the opportunity to bring both buyers and sellers together. And that’s really been the beauty of Questex is, is that we inform, we connect, and we’re able to do that both on the digital platform side as well as in the live engagement side. So it’s a really nice, opportunity. I’ve been doing it, you know, for the last eight years now. Ryan Embree: Yeah. You know, and it’s not cliche to say that, that our industry, we’ve had several of these, you know, TMG Hospitality Trailblazers that have had these mentors that have had connections that, you know, whether it’s one brand or one company and another and so forth. So you’re right, it, it’s a tight-knit community, this hospitality industry, because at the end of the day, we all have an innate love for travel, whether you’re in our industry or not. Right. People love to travel, people love that experience of traveling. And I think that brings us all close together and we’re gonna dive into that a little bit into this episode about that balance between tech and that kind of face-to-face parallels to what you’re talking about of having those events that are face-to-face, but also that digital side of things is so, so important right now. So, but before we get into kind of that

In this episode of the Suite Spot Podcast, host and TMG Marketing Director, Ryan Embree and Chief Technology Officer, Jason Lee, tackle how guest satisfaction surveys impact a hotel’s operations and influence overall bookings. From topics such as what questions to ask in a guest satisfaction survey to how they shape your hotel’s bottom line, listeners will gain unique insights on implementing a system at their properties that extract more guest feedback. Suite Spot Podcast · 112 – Responding to Guest Satisfaction Surveys Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you all for listening or watching us today. Remember, we are in the content creation studio, AKA the digital den, here at Travel Media Group’s headquarters just north of Orlando. We’re super excited to be on YouTube now, and we’ve got a frequent guest. This is your second time on video, but you’ve been on the Suite Spot quite a number of times. Jason, Chief Technology Officer here at Travel Media Group. Jason, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Yeah, thanks for having me again in the digital den. Ryan Embree: The digital den. Yes, we love to call it that. We’ve already talked about some exciting topics here in 2023. This one is a little polarizing, I’m sure for some of our listeners. If you, if you caught the title, so it’s talking about responding to guest satisfaction surveys. We probably have heard that a lot from our brands, from our management companies, from a lot of people, from our guests. You’ve heard me talk a lot about responding to reviews. Obviously that’s something at Travel Media Group we take a lot of pride in. We reached the incredible feat of responding to 1 million plus guest reviews last summer. Very exciting achievement. We had you on for an episode to talk about that. I’m curious, it’s a different animal with these guest satisfaction surveys. Let’s kind of talk about the differences between responding to guest reviews online and maybe guest satisfaction surveys. Jason Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest difference is that you’ve solicited this feedback. Online, what you’re getting is someone has chosen to give you a public review and they’re motivated by anger or motivated by happiness or whatever that motivation is. But in this case, you may have caught them in a space where they could give you objective information. So you’ve solicited that information and now they’re filling that out. And so depending on your brand, it could be a lengthy survey, but typically it’s done in stages so you can get some of that information out. But going back to your original question, I think the biggest difference in terms of tone is that you’ve solicited this feedback, now they’ve given you this feedback. Now what do you say back to them? And this isn’t public. This is you with this guest, and you might know everything about this guest. You know who they are, you know what room they stayed in. You, you might have further, insight from your front desk or from other staff members who’ve maybe encountered this guest. So you have way more information than a public review where you might not know what room they were in. You might not know the guest, you might not know the situation. So now your response could be extremely specific. Ryan Embree: And you have to be careful with that response. I mean, some of the, the tips and best practices that we share for online reviews might not translate very well to an internal guest satisfaction survey. You know, where you’re coming off as inauthentic. I would challenge maybe the listeners to think about maybe when you’re responding to a guest in a lobby full of people versus maybe a one-on-one conversation where you can just be a little bit more interactive and not so much worry about your surroundings there. Can you kind of give us an example maybe of a guest satisfaction survey and some of the feedback that you would receive there and how you would handle that differently than maybe a public forum online like TripAdvisor, Google or OTA’s? Jason Lee: Yeah, so if we’re looking at negative information, so somebody had a bad experience at your property, your ability to reach this, this guest directly, now you, you have that ability. You can email them, you could maybe even call them. But seeking service recovery in a space like this is really what you should be doing. This is really the, that that shou

Join Suite Spot podcast host and TMG Marketing Director Ryan Embree as he sits down and welcomes a very special guest, the EVP & Chief Commercial Officer of Sage Hospitality Group, Patrick Pahlke, in the latest episode of the TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series! This episode has something for everyone in the hospitality industry, so tune in now! Suite Spot Podcast · 111 – Hospitality Trailblazers: Patrick Pahlke Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hotiers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for listening. Today we have another episode of our exciting series, TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. If you’re just joining us for the first time, we are absolutely loving this series. We are bringing the brightest and best in our industry, those people and groups that are pushing our industry forward into 2023 and beyond. We’ve got a great guest with me today, before I introduce him. As always, you can always find our episodes anywhere you’re finding our podcast, but also on YouTube. So check that out and let’s go ahead and get rolling with the episode. So I will introduce our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer of the day. That is Patrick Pahlke, Chief Commercial Officer at Sage Hospitality. Patrick, welcome into the Suite Spot. Patrick Pahlke : Hello, I’m super delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: We’re excited to have you, you’re the guest of honor today, so let’s go ahead and open it up with a question for all of our first timers on the Suite Spot. We know we work in an industry where people can come from anywhere and they have some, sometimes some strange journeys in order to get to where they are today. So tell us a little bit about your journey to Sage Hospitality Group. Was it more the traditional way of maybe starting at the front desk and working up or completely outta left field? Cause we’ve heard those stories on this series as well. Patrick Pahlke : Yeah, no, mine is a long one. I would say so. First of all, as you can hear from my pungent accent, I’m from Germany originally, and, I had, I had the opportunity of living in different countries as a child with my parents. And, at one point, when I was six years old, we stayed, we lived in a hotel for, for three months, and that hotel was my playground and the general manager of that hotel was like a god for me. It was in Jakarta and it was the Hilton International in 1981. Still remember very well. And I said to my parents, I want to be that guy one day, Mr. Schutz Sandorf was his name. And yeah, just kind of stuck to my childhood dream, you know, did an apprenticeship, entered the industry in Germany in the mid nineties. Worked in different places in Europe. At one point I studied, in Lozan in Switzerland, hotel management. Then, ventured out to Asia, stayed in Asia for 16 years, worked all over the place, mostly in the, in the five star field with Hyatt International. Worked with Mandarin Oriental as well. And then, in 2015, I ventured into the lifestyle space, you know, coming from the bigger brands, moving to a smaller company, commune hotels at that time, they don’t exist anymore. They became two roads after a while and then two roads got acquired by Hyatt. Yeah. And, and once you make that move to the independent lifestyle space, you know, and, and you realize, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit that they, that they have, you know, from having a great idea to implementation when there’s not much red tape in between. Once you get used to that, it’s pretty addictive, you know. So since then I’ve never looked back, kind of stayed in the lifestyle space, moved to the United States four years ago to join a company called Proper Hospitality, very innovative in the luxury lifestyle space, helped to build up that brand and, joined Sage one and a half years ago, in summer 2021 to basically rebuild their commercial team from scratch and, you know, build it out in a way that is in line with the company’s growth, which is really to focus in on the lifestyle space as well. Ryan Embree: Well, your story certainly hits a lot of marks when it comes to hospitality, first, a global story, right? You know, we always hear about that about our industry and two, you know, you lived the hospitality life, right? It’s like, you know, sometimes we hear that in, in our industry of, you know, it’s just not a life or a lifestyle or a job. You have to actually live it. So hearing somebody’s story that actually is living in a hotel f

This episode features the one and only President of Atrium Hospitality, Rob Mangiarelli, as he sits down and talks with Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree on all things hospitality. These two experts share incredible knowledge and insights on various topics that give hoteliers valuable information on how to make their mark in the industry. If you’ve been following the series thus far, you should know that these industry leaders provide listeners with knowledge and insights you can only get on the Suite Spot podcast. Suite Spot Podcast · 110 – Hospitality Trailblazers: Rob Mangiarelli Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check-out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining me. I am coming to you again from the Content Creation Studio here at Travel Media Group Headquarters, and we are continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. We are very excited, about our next guest who I’ll introduce just in a second, but for those that might be listening to this for the first time, this series we started back at the end of 2022. It is all about the people and groups in our industry that are pushing us forward. We know over the past couple years, and we’ll even get into it with our guests, how much our industry has changed and what to look forward to towards the future in those trailblazers that are pushing us there. So with that being said, I am very excited to bring in a first time guest to the Suite Spot, Rob Mangiarelli, President at Atrium Hospitality. Rob, welcome to the Suite Spot. Rob Mangiarelli : Ryan, thanks for having me. It’s great to be on with you. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. We’re gonna have a little bit of fun today talking about, Atrium Hospitality. We’ll talk a little bit about the industry, get some predictions out of you. We won’t hold you to them, but as I like to do with all of our first timers on the Suite Spot, we work in an industry where people really can come from all places, degrees, backgrounds and end up to where they are. So I love starting with this, especially in this Trailblazer series. Tell us a little bit about your background and the journey that led you to Atrium Hospitality. Rob Mangiarelli : Yeah, this is a great question and it’s something I talk about, every week when I’m traveling and I’m talking to our teams. I fell into this industry, by accident like a lot of people who have come into it. I never thought that you could have a career in the hotel business. I was an economics major at Stanford and my goal coming out of college was either to go to law school or to become a math teacher. And I didn’t wanna work in a big city. And I went back home to Colorado Springs where I grew up and while I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, I started working night audit at a Holiday Inn and I was working night audit because I loved playing golf in the morning after I got off work. And I thought, how cool I’ll do this. And, you know, every morning the general manager would come down and he’d read the PNL cause I do the daily report overnight. He’d ask how business was, and we started talking about this as a business and I thought, wow, this is pretty cool. And six months after that I got promoted and six months after that I got promoted again. And then I started, I saw this job opportunity for Hyatt Hotels pop up, up in Denver. I drove up there and I had six interviews in back to back to back. They just said, wait here, let me talk to somebody else. And, they offered me the job and, you know, 25 years with Hyatt Hotels. And I moved around a lot, in the first few years I was in Denver, in Atlanta, in Charlotte and Greenwich. And then ended up at the corporate office in Chicago, where I spent 21 years in various roles. I built our planning and analysis function. I ran hotel accounting for North America. There was a scary six month period of time where I was in charge of IT. While we were hiring a chief technology officer, I worked in our global operations center where I really got to travel the world. And then I finished up my career leading our asset management function where I was responsible for all of the owned and joint venture properties that we had around the world. And then I hit 50 and like most people, right, instead of buying a Corvette, I thought this was a good opportunity to reevaluate my life and what I wanted to do for the last 10 years, 12 years, whatever, many years of my career there are left. And I thought, you know, I’ve spent so much time at Hyatt, b

Join Suite Spot Host and Marketing Director Ryan Embree as he sits down with TMG Chief Technology Officer, Jason Lee, to discuss the new integration of Instagram Reels into the OneView platform. This episode details how hoteliers can use the OneView platform to easily create Instagram Reels and upload them directly to their social media sites with just one click for their followers to interact, engage with, and reach new travelers. Suite Spot Podcast · 109 – TMG Announces Instagram Reels & Video Content Creation For Hotels Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check-out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Okay, hello everyone and welcome to the Suite Spot. My name is Ryan Embree, the host of The Suite Spot. Thank you for joining us today. We’ve got a very special episode. I feel like I say that all the time, but there’s a couple unique things about this episode. One, we are in our brand new content creation studio, AKA the Digital Marketing Den. We spent the last couple months revamping our entire studio, podcast studio for you, the listener, to make sure we had better audio quality for you, but also visuals. So if you were to go to YouTube right now, go to Travel Media Group’s YouTube page, you would actually see and hear us. This is the first time we are doing video. We are so excited. We have a very familiar guest. Jason, this is the first time, if you can believe it, that we’ve been face-to-face doing an episode of the Suite Spot with as many as we’ve done since 2020. It’s crazy. But welcome back to the Suite Spot, audibly and visually. Jason Lee: Yeah, this is awesome. It’s, it’s really awesome in here. You guys did a great job. Ryan Embree: Thank you so much. But we also have some awesome stuff to talk about. What you have been doing, Jason. So I’m gonna give the floor to you and talk about, you know, an amazing announcement. One of our most popular, episodes was the Instagram reels episode. I think year to date is our most popular episode. There are a lot of hoteliers that are interested in it, but it’s not just Instagram reels. We’re talking about video content today. That’s right. So, let’s jump in. I always love to kind of think, you know, take a couple steps back to get to where we are today. Why did you and your team decide to make this upgrade and, and create video content for hotels? Jason Lee: Well, I mean, obviously it’s a must in the toolkit of any hotel marketer, you gonna have to have video and then looking at reels, looking at TikTok. Video content is extremely popular and extremely viral. So the things that are produced are seen, and it’s not just seen by your audience. They’re seen all over the place. So, last July, I think is when Meta made the decision to open up reels into their API. So making it available for developers like us to be able to offer it. And at the time we were really excited and I think it was probably an answer to what was happening on TikTok. They were like, we’re gonna open this up and let it happen, but it, it made it available. So you have reels for Instagram obviously, but then there were also reels on Facebook. And so, making that all kind of come together and that’s why our team did this. And so we had the capability of putting reels out a while ago. So, but we also wanted a way for you to do that. And I think what a lot of marketers have trouble with is what do I put out? How do I create a video? Do I need like an editing studio? You know, what do I need to do to create a video? And we’ve simplified it and we’ve made it a really cool part of our platform where you can just make a video from your media gallery. Ryan Embree: You’ve made it so simple. We’re actually gonna create a video for a hotel today on this episode. So as long as it takes us to do this podcast, we’re gonna have a high quality, video for a hotel made, which is so cool to see. Yes. But you’re right. I mean, any hotel you’re listening to this, I would just challenge you to look at your Instagram feed or Facebook feed or whatever social media tool you use. What are you seeing more and more of, those still images? It’s almost like we have the copy version of social media where it was just all text and then all of a sudden we elevated that to image and now we’re going even further and going into video. So a lot of the content that creators are leaning into is this video content. And you’re right, hoteliers sometimes hear that word video content, they get overwhelmed. They don’t know. They think, okay, well maybe I need

Tune in to this insightful episode and join host Ryan Embree as he and Linda give you the 411 on everything OCI Hospitality. This podcast episode includes amazing information and expertise for hoteliers looking to connect with their travelers, increase bookings, and increase revenue. Suite Spot Podcast · 108 – Hospitality Trailblazers: Linda Saron Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. I mentioned it before in past episodes, but we are getting rolling right along with our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. This is the first time you’re hearing this. This is something we started right at the end of 2022, where we’re interviewing and bringing on the Suite Spot some of those individuals and groups that are pushing our industry forward as we go into 2023. Beyond such an exciting chapter for our industry, I’ve got an amazing guest, another first-timer here with me, Linda Saron, President and COO of OCI Hospitality. Linda, welcome to the Suite Spot. Linda Saron: Thanks, Ryan. I appreciate it. Ryan Embree: And I hear you are right up the road from our, Travel Media Group headquarters in Tampa. You have some exciting things in the works over there in Tampa? Linda Saron: Yeah, we’re so excited. Yesterday we officially closed on a new OCI Hospitality property, the Double Tree, Rocky Point Waterfront. It is a beautiful location and an awesome team, and we’re so excited to welcome them into our portfolio. Ryan Embree: Well, that is absolutely exciting news and we’re certainly gonna talk about all the things that you’ve got rollin’ here with OCI Hospitality in 2023, but off to a very, very, hot start. And next time we’ll have to have you in our podcast studio over here. You just right up the road in Tampa. So. Awesome. Well, before we get talking about OCI Hospitality, I wanna talk about your journey. You know, every single guest that I have here on the Suite Spot, we always like to say, you know, what led you to hospitality? Sometimes it’s starting in the industry, sometimes it’s just by fate. So, tell us a little bit about your background. What led you to OCI Hospitality? Linda Saron: Absolutely. You know, Ryan, I think for me it was fate. It was meant to be. I started out not to age myself, but I started working in the hospitality industry about 24 years ago. I popped into a hotel thinking, gosh, maybe I could work the front desk and help in housekeeping and do my homework while I was in college. I started working for a small owner operator, a gentleman named John Willie, who still remains close to my heart. He was an engineer by trade and decided to use his money, because he was tired of some of the bureaucracy in General Electric. So he took his money and he bought a hotel and he was truly an engineer. So I joined him and he was the owner and operator. So, I was in college and had a very interesting experience with him. He didn’t necessarily interact with guests the best. After working with him for a little bit, he really gave me the opportunity to take on some of the guest challenges we were experiencing and housekeeping challenges. And before I knew it, he was asking me to pay the real estate taxes and come up with a sales and marketing plan. So I worked with him all through college and had a great experience with John. He actually spoke to me and convinced me that I needed to stay in hospitality. I had intended to go on and pursue law school, and he had created a chart. I’ll never forget, I went into the back office of the hotel and he had created a chart that showed in the state of Iowa, which is where I grew up, what a female attorney would make the first five years, and what my debt was gonna be getting out of college and how that would work out for me. And he even had the president of the brand that we worked for at that time have a personal phone call with me to talk to me about hospitality as a career path. So I think it was fate that I walked into that hotel and got to meet John Willie and I was a great compliment to his strengths and decided to pursue my career in hospitality. So I worked with John all through college and then after college I took on a job in sales with a small Iowa ownership and management group that was independent. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Heartland Hotels, they no longer exists, but I work with them in sales. And then after a couple of years, took on an opportunity as a general manager for them, and when they decided to get rid

Join TMG Marketing Director Ryan Embree and Vice President of Product and Technology Patrick O’Brien on this episode as they analyze and give insight into the top 5 guest sentiment trends of 2022. You will learn about the most talked about topics and how travelers felt towards them so you can adjust your hotel operations for the new year. Suite Spot Podcast · 107 – Top 5 Guest Sentiment Trends of 2022 Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. We have made it 2023, but today we are going to talk all about 2022. Yes, this is one of our annual episodes. We’ve done it, I think now for two or three years. Want to welcome Patrick O’Brien, Vice President of Product and Development and Technology. Back to the Suite Spot. Patrick, welcome back. Patrick O’Brien: Thank you so much for having me. Ryan Embree: Yes, and we’ve got a great episode for you today. If you’ve listened to the Suite Spot before, you’ve heard this around this time of year, as you know, we are the premier solution provider for the hospitality industry and reputation and review response. And with that comes a lot of data. If you’ve listened to me and you listened to a lot of episodes, you know, I love data, give so many analytics, insights, blueprints into what we as hoteliers can do to improve our guest experience on property. And this episode is all about that data. We are gonna be looking at the top five sentiment trends in 2022. But first, Patrick, this is always a question that literally makes my jaw drop every time I ask it. I know we hit a incredible milestone. We had a whole episode dedicated to it. The 1 million guest review mark that we at Travel Media Group and your respond & resolve team has responded to. Congratulations on that feat. But how many reviews do your respondent resolve team respond to each month for hotels? Patrick O’Brien: Well, first off, thank you very much. That was an exciting, you know, milestone to hit. And you know, I think the crazy thing with that, you look at that number and then you look at where we were last year and where we’re moving to, just the kind of the snowball effect of those amount of reviews and all that our team is getting accomplished is, is really significant. And the number of reviews month to month obviously varies. It really based on kind of trends that you’d expect to see where the review flow will increase fairly dramatically around spring break and summer travel and around holiday travel in 2022, our team responded to just under 220,000 reviews. Or, you know, if you average that out, it’d be around 18,000 a month with our highest level occurring in July at 23,800 reviews. And I think while that number is really impressive, and when you look at it in regards to our million reviews, it’s very impressive. Our team treats every response good or bad, really like a mini PR opportunity for our customers. So not only are we ingesting and understanding the customer review, we are also identifying all the qualifiable sentiment areas in that review, we’re crafting a response, providing an opportunity for the customer to approve that response and give feedback. So really be part of that conversation. And then our team has a separate analyst review, the combination of written response and custom feedback, really again for grammar clarity and consistency before they post that response to our clients guest and their potential guest to see. So that number actually really represents 220,000 written responses, 220,000 customer approvals, 220,000 grammar edits, and 220,000 responses posted to review sites. And all of that is happening seven days a week and typically occurs within 36 to 48 hours from when the guests originally posted their response. You know, there are some variables in there, but the turnaround on that whole process is pretty quick. And it’s just, for me, it’s exciting to think that before any response is posted online that you know, you’ve had three or four people review that response to make sure that it is of the best quality that it can be. Ryan Embree: That’s a science, right? It’s a process. I mean, we have we have workshops, we have educational courses for hotels teaching them how to properly respond to a review. Because we’ve all been there, we’re all travelers. We’ve seen a review before and we’ve seen a response that just kind of makes you cringe and say, man, they really left that opportunity, that many PR opportunity that you were talking a

The final Suite Spot episode of 2022 is here! Sit down with host Ryan Embree and Travel Media Group President Dana Singer as they reflect on the progress TMG has made over the past year and relish the amazing achievements it brought with it. From exciting innovations like Social 2.0 and TMG Translations, to the 1 million reviews responded to milestone, these two aficionados cover all the highlights of 2022. Listen now to bring in the new year with Ryan, Dana, and all of TMG. Suite Spot Podcast · 106 – 2022 Year in Review with Dana Singer Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. I am super excited for this episode, our last episode of 2022, but this is an annual episode. This is kind of a Suite Spot tradition now. We’ve done this for about three years. We’re taking a break. If you’ve been following with our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer series, we’re taking a slight break, but we’re gonna be back in 2023 with some great guests lined up. If you’re just hearing about this for the first time, this is all about those hoteliers and hotel groups that are pushing our industry forward as we go into this new chapter. But I would almost consider today’s episode somewhat of a trailblazer’s topic. We’ve got Dana Singer with us. She is the President of Travel Media Group. Dana, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Dana Singer: Yeah, thank you Ryan. Good morning. Pleasure to be here. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and we’re super excited to have you. And with Dana’s voice, that can only mean one thing. We are here for our TMGs year in review, and as I mentioned at the top of this episode, this is one of my favorite episodes of the year. We do this once a year because it’s, we are in an industry and we work in digital marketing, which is constantly evolving in 2020, 2021, 2022. Obviously our main topic of conversation, Dana, was all about the pandemic COVID 19 and moving through that, there was a lot of uncertainty. It feels like as we move into 2023, we finally have maybe a path, right? And, and things are getting back, I’m afraid to say it, but things are getting back to that new normal, and we’re moving into this new chapter for our industry and TMG as a business. So reflecting back on 2022, I’d like to start with just talking about maybe some of the most significant technology development and maybe share the impact that they’ve had on our hotel partners. Dana Singer: It was definitely an exciting year, for the industry and for TMG overall. And we made important strides with our tech innovation. All of our new developments are focused on how we can provide our partners with tools and solutions that enable important competitive advantages. As I look back, the launch of Social 2.0, which is a part of our OneView platform, has been very well received. This update enables our partners to build their social media profiles more effectively through connected accounts, post scheduling, approval processes, and re-engineered media galleries, just to name a few. It’s just so important to enhance our social solution because our hotel partners are connecting with their guests through these digital channels more than ever. And so with new digital platforms emerging and entering the space more frequently than ever, we’re committed to staying ahead of that curve. Another exciting and significant innovation that came to fruition this year was TMG translations, and this is a part of our review response, respond and resolve solution. As we think about international travel being forecasted to continue to grow, we wanted to ensure that all reviews are consistently responded to with the depth of quality that we’re already known for. And so with this addition, our partners can now connect with their international travelers like never before. By interpreting and responding to so many reviews, written in numerous languages, hoteliers can better understand this demographic and have more meaningful conversations with international guests in their native language. Ryan Embree: Yeah, that’s so important. We talked about that on most recently on our TMG Trailblazers series about the importance of international travel. We really felt that sting when it disappeared in 2020. So as we see them come back, we wanna make sure that we’re responding in their native language to make sure we’re giving ourselves, the hoteliers the best opportunity to connect and hopefully capture their busines

Join host Ryan Embree as he sits down with Hospitality Trailblazer Richard Alberigo, President & CEO of Alberigo Hotel Management. These two hospitality experts outline 2023 travel trends and traveler behavior, the true meaning of hospitality, exciting developments at Alberigo Hotel Management, and so much more. Suite Spot Podcast · 105 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Richard Alberigo Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, continuing our fantastic TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. Got a great guest with us, another first timer to the podcast. So very excited to welcome him on. Richard Alberigo of Alberigo Hotel Management, Richard, President and CEO. Welcome to the Suite Spot. Richard Alberigo: Hey, Ryan, thanks a lot. I’m glad to be here. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we’re really excited to have you, Richard. Again, my first question, I always start out, especially with the first timers, just hearing about experience, right? This is one of those industries where if you had a hundred bucks, you could never guess. Nobody’s taken the same path twice when it comes to this industry. So tell me a little bit about your hospitality experience and what ultimately that journey that led you ultimately to founding Alberigo Hotel Management. Richard Alberigo: Well, sure, Ryan. So, it was not planned at all back in the, I guess, 80’s, somewhere in the mid 80’s. I took a job as a bellman in a hotel, at a full service Hilton Hotel. And the industry was really not even in my mind, right? You know, I did it for money. Somebody told me, you make good money as a bellman. I did that for like two years, and they learned a lot about life as a bellman, and everybody loved Richard, you know, because, and they gave me money. They threw cash at me every night. So I came up with a big wad of cash and I’m like, this is great. Yeah, nothing better. And somebody told me, well, you know, if you wanna make this a career, Richard, you may have to work at the front desk. So I looked up at the front desk and I said, you know, well, you know, it looks like a glamor job up there. You know, I’m kind of slaving with luggage and taking people to the airport, you know. Up there, I’m kind of, I’m all that. So I took the front desk job, and then after about three months, I’m like, maybe this isn’t for me, because now everybody hated Richard and nobody threw cash at me. So, you know, I, I basically took a cut and pay. So I, I hung in there, hung in there. I always like to talk to people. So I guess that was, you know, I love to talk. So I guess, that was a good thing for the front desk. So then I just worked my way up through the ranks, took a job as a, general manager about three years after that. And then, took a job with, IHG, which is the Holiday Inn Corporate Office, and did that for seven years as a, regional support person. And following that, started my own company nine years ago. I was gonna be a broadcaster, actually, that was what my job was gonna be, sports broadcasting, which I did a little bit on the, that on the side. But hey, you know, weird things happen. And now I’m a hotelier after 35 years. Ryan Embree: This is, you know, some broadcasting here, you know, on the Suite Spot podcast. But yes, bellman to former bellman. I think that’s so interesting. I, I started the same way in the hospitality industry, and you do learn a lot. Front desk, you could be doing some things, you could be helping housekeeping, delivering things. But you’re really talking to the guests most of the time. So you get a lot of insights there on, you know, what’s bringing them into town, why they’re visiting and stuff like that. I absolutely love to hear so many of the leaders that we’ve had on this series, you know, have had some very humble beginnings when it comes to our industry, and love to hear that career path kind of evolve in advance. So, well, let’s jump a little bit further into the future, right? You know, we’re now a couple years removed, Richard, from the start of the pandemic, which was absolutely devastating to our industry. You know, I’ve interviewed a couple leaders in this series, reflecting back on some of the, the lessons learned from not only their group, but the industry as a whole. Let’s start with Alberigo Hotel Management. What lessons did you take for the group moving forward? And then maybe let’s widen and broaden that up to look at the industry as a whole, lessons

*DISCLAIMER* Thank you for listening to the Suite Spot. During episode 104, you will hear slight audio distortion due to a disrupted signal connection at the time of recording. We apologize in advance and hope you enjoy the episode. Host and Marketing Director Ryan Embree and Tom Magnuson of Magnuson Hotels take time to reflect on and analyze the past of the hospitality industry while providing hopeful foresight for the future. They discuss many relevant topics for hoteliers, which means there is no shortage of content and information from this episode. Suite Spot Podcast · 104 – Hospitality Trailblazers: Thomas Magnuson Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Okay. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, and we are today continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. Very excited about the special guests that we have on today. For those that might be just listening for the first time. This is our second series 2021. We really highlighted hospitality heroes, those individual workers that were going above and beyond during the pandemic and sharing their stories on this podcast. In 2022, we’re looking towards the future and we’re talking with some of the best and brightest in our industry, the people that are paving the way forward and really trailblazing our industry as a whole. And with me today, I think I have a great guest that can speak to that because, he’s got a global foot mark on his brand, Mr. Tom Magnuson, the co-founder and CEO of Magnuson Hotels Worldwide. Tom, welcome to the Suite Spot. Thomas Magnuson: Thank you, Ryan. It’s great to be here and to, visit with all of our friends out there who are in the hotel industry. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And one of the questions that I love to ask, because we have such different answers, is everyone’s journey through the hospitality industry. Now, it’s not every day that I get to interview someone who founded a brand like Magnuson Hotels. So walk me through that journey, you know, where you started in the hotel industry and ultimately how you founded Magnuson Hotels Worldwide. Thomas Magnuson: Well, I’m gonna compress about 55 years into about, into about 30 seconds, Ryan. I have a very interesting background. I started working for my father and my grandfather in a small motel, in a little mining town, Wallace, Idaho, up on the Montana border when I was eight years old, I think I just said. So I got a really unique insight, hands on into running and living and breathing, small business ownership of an independent hotel. I spent many years, you know, in the family company, like many people do, you know, working every single job there is. You, do what has to be done, did every job in the house, you know, waited tables, cleaned rooms, front desk, grinded keys in the basement when you had actually actual keys in the old days. But quickly through that path, as the years went on, when I was in actually, in my forties, I came back to help my father retire and he had a handful of hotels still and asked me to kind of package these up for the next phase. And part of that was becoming a Best Western franchisee, a great global company, but it really articulated the struggle of a small, unique hotel to be heard in today’s world. And what we found being a franchisee, a unique minded hotel, and a unique market being a franchisee is the struggle of maintaining your identity versus the weight of sameness. That’s been perpetuated for, you know, 50 years since, you know, the big brand started coming out with Hilton in the 1950s. And it’s also the difficulty of being heard and being seen and accessing the proper market segments when the traditional marketing environment of the late 20th century and early 21st century was franchise standardization driven. Through that, my wife Melissa and I partnered and we thought, there’s gotta be a better way, Ryan. There’s gotta be a better way for hotels. And we ended up starting Magnuson Hotels in 2003. We were the first company to bring complete global GDS, OTA, global distribution, central reservation services on a wide scale, two small independence. That struggle was the impetus for us starting up that company. And at that time we just made a promise. We had 12 clients that we started with and were friends and family. Wow. And we just made a promise to them that we would always be there for you and we will do what we say we are going to do and just try to increase their revenue with, you know, fairness and kindness. And so because we were small, because we were no