Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we turn our attention to COVID-19 hotel industry recovery and what hoteliers can do to build traveler confidence. Host Ryan Embree is joined remotely by Travel Media Group’s Director of Marketing, Anne Sandoval, to share best practices for increasing guests’ comfort level. Ryan and Anne start by discussing the evolution of hotel’s messaging throughout the pandemic across their digital marketing channels like social media and vanity websites. They talk about the most effective places online to relay the changes that have been implemented at the property to ensure the safety of their guests. Finally, they identify the signals that hoteliers should keep an eye out for online which indicates that travelers are feeling more comfortable and confident in your property. If you are looking for more creative ideas on how to build traveler confidence post-COVID-19, visit Travel Media Group’s COVID-19 hotel marketing resource center online or reach out to us by phone or text at 407-984-7455. Suite Spot Podcast · 52 – Building Traveler Confidence For Recovery 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. I want to take a quick second to thank all of our listeners for all of your support out there, I can’t believe it’s been over 50 episodes that we have been providing this information. I hope you’re enjoying it out there, with me today is our Marketing Director, Anne Sandoval. Anne, I know you just joined me remotely a couple episodes ago, but here you are again. So thank you again, for being on the Suite Spot. Anne Sandoval: Thanks. It’s great to be back. Ryan Embree: Anne, you know, we’re in a completely different place when we were the last time we spoke and I believe things are moving so fast right now during this pandemic, but the good news is we’re starting to see signs of recovery. But, as we enter into the next several months, the question is still looming out there for all hoteliers, when will we get to this “new normal” everyone’s talking about. Like I said, we’re starting to see signs of recovery every single day from occupancy, demand, we see flight numbers are up. So people are starting to emerge from these stay at home orders, all that pent up demand. We’ve heard the term revenge travel, which I absolutely love. I think there is going to be a huge, huge demand here coming up in the summer. Time, will eventually and organically get us to that new normal, but what we’re going to talk about today are some ways to potentially speed up your hotel’s recovery. Everyone wants to try to get back to where they were and hopefully even further than we were, by instilling consumer confidence and comfort levels. The only way that travelers are going to feel safe is if you can instill some sort of confidence and comfort that they are going to be safe at your property, when you host them. So last time we did speak Anne, we covered the five characteristics and attributes of crisis management communication. So what messages we were sending out to our customers at a time where it was a lot of uncertainty, right? We were just getting the stay at home orders, states were starting to lock down, we didn’t know what the future holds, now that we have somewhat of a clear vision of how we’re going to recover. How should a hotel’s messaging have evolved since that time? Anne Sandoval: That’s a really great question and before I talk about the things that have changed, I just quickly would like to touch on a few important things that I think should remain the same and the first is transparency. So while it’s essential in those first moments that you’re in crisis mode, transparency is going to continue to be important for hotels throughout the pandemic and most likely following it. So today, as we’re talking about building traveler confidence, one of the best ways to do that is to be very clear when communicating about your new operations practices. Another important aspect of crisis management to continue with is consistency. So at a time when travelers are constantly checking social media for cues to learn if a business is open or not, it’s critical to have recent posts available to communicate that you’re operating smoothly. And the other important thing to carry over from early crisis communication is responsiveness. There is nothing that will kill traveler confidence in booking with your property faster than a negative review. So

In this special edition of the Suite Spot, we sit down with Senior Vice President of Lodging Insights at STR, Jan Freitag. Jan and his team at STR have been hard at work collecting and analyzing hotel data across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jan and Ryan take a look at how the COVID-19 crisis compares to past industry crises and how to look for clues in other global markets to predict what we might see moving forward in the U.S. hotel industry. Jan also shares what recovery signs hoteliers should keep an eye out for to signal the return of leisure transient travel, corporate business travel, and group travel. Jan also discusses what he calls a “high touch to high tech” evolution that will be the new normal in a post-COVID-19 hotel world. For more information and insights from the STR team, visit their COVID-19 resource center at STR.com. To submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Suite Spot Podcast · 51 – COVID Hotel Industry Trends With Jan Freitag 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 the 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: episode number 51. This is your host Ryan Embree coming to you, once again, live from my Orlando, home office. We’ve got an amazing episode for you today. I am super excited for the special guest that we have coming on the Suite Spot with us. He has been a voice that a lot of you have probably been listening to throughout this whole pandemic, COVID-19 situation. And that is Senior Vice President of Lodging Insights at STR, Jan Freitag. So I’m going to have Jan with me on today and we are going to talk data from STR, recovery, and cover all of those good topics. Alright Jan, thank you again so much for joining us. Let’s go ahead and jump right into it. Jan Freitag: Yeah, thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: You know in your position as Senior Vice President of Lodging Insights at STR your team is really uniquely positioned to identify trends in global hospitality markets. You know, I’m wondering with the data almost changing day by day, how is your team navigating the challenge of COVID-19, which again has really provided a significant disruption to original forecast for this year and beyond? Jan Freitag: So it is true the data is changing day by day, by now we can luckily say that the data is getting less bad. So we sort of peaked, if you want to use that word, or troughed out at the bottom the week of April the 11th and ever since then, our week of demand data in the United States has steadily improved bit by bit by bit specifically on the weekends. We’ve seen occupancies actually increasing week over week over week, which is a nice thing to see. We’re navigating this just like everybody else. We’re reporting the data. We ask our clients to trust the data. We are making the best of the data and trying to point out where things are really hurting and where things are getting a little bit better, you know. And STR as a company, it’s nice to see that our Beijing office is actually back in the office, but all the other offices are still working from home globally. Ryan Embree: That is awesome to hear and we are constantly looking for any of those signals of good news. So even something as small as people coming back into the office, that is a good signal for our industry. You know, in difficult times like this, we sometimes try to find comparisons from the past to help us understand where we’re going through and, you know, maybe give us that hope moving forward. Now in your webinars Jan, you mentioned prior challenging times 9/11 and the great recession 2008. Now from a data perspective, how does, if at all, does the COVID-19 pandemic compare to past crises we’ve seen in the hotel industry? Jan Freitag: It doesn’t, that’s the short answer. So we saw post 9/11 and post 2009 that, you know, RevPAR and ADR declined, you know, over 10%, well over 10%, RevPAR declined, you know, roughly 20% or so. And now RevPAR in April was down over 70% or around 70%, I should say. So we’ve never recorded data like that. The April RevPAR decline for luxury and upper upscale class hotels was over 90%. Group demand basically evaporated completely and there was really no high end transient demand to speak of. So it doesn’t compare. The thing that we look at is now what does a recovery look like? And there, I’m not sure if it compares. We don’t know that yet. What we do know is this ADR recoveries are never V-shaped and we have a sample size of two now, post 9/11 and post 2009, and we saw that it takes us twice

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we celebrate another hotel digital marketing innovation created by Travel Media Group’s product development team led by VP of Product & Technology, Jason Lee. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Jason to discuss 1st Impression Score®, a first of its kind hospitality and reputation metric. Jason shares what separates 1st Impression Score® with other reputation metrics in hospitality and why it was necessary to create it now. Jason explains the 4 factors that impact the 1st Impression Score® and gives tips on what a hotel can do to improve their score. Jason and Ryan also speak to what role traveler first impressions play in a COVID-19 travel world. The TMG 1st Impression Score® is a powerful tool that hotels can use to see how reputation influences revenue in real-time. If you are interested in learning more about unlocking your hotel’s 1st Impression Score® or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Suite Spot Podcast · 50 – 1st Impression Score™ 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 coming to you once again from my home office here in Orlando. We’ve got a great and exciting episode for you. I am joined, once again, remotely with Travel Media Group’s Vice President of Product Development and Technology. You know his voice well, that is Mr. Jason Lee. Jason, thank you again for joining me on the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Alright, thanks for having me Ryan. Ryan Embree: Absolutely and we’ve got a really exciting topic today, another innovation and digital tool for hoteliers that we’re extremely excited to talk about and share with you all on the Suite Spot. I want to start this episode by congratulating you, Jason, you and your team on creating this tool. It’s called the 1st Impression score. It’s one of a kind, but you know, don’t let me explain it. Let’s hear it from you. What is the 1st impression score for someone that’s never heard of that before? Jason Lee: So it’s a brand new metric at looking at reputation. So if you think about reputation, for those of you listening to this, if you’re using a tool that’s provided by your brand or are you using some other tool or maybe even using Travel Media Group’s tools, you’re used to seeing reputation given to you as it occurs, right? So I receive a review, the contents of that review, the score of that review, all of that kind of comes in. So I can see my last 30 days, here’s how many reviews came in, here’s some sentiment data possibly around this, and so you’re seeing reviews in time, right? But that is not how the guest experiences your reviews, the guest experiences your reviews as they display, as they show, right? So, I see your lifetime score in one phase of my research, but then I might encounter your actual reviews on that first page of the review site. So now I’m looking at the lifetime score and I’m also looking at further data on that first page, but that first page worth of reviews could have nothing to do with the last 30 days or even 60 days. And now even in this time, it could have nothing to do with the last 90 days, right? So that data that’s there is influencing guests to stay with you or not stay with you and that has nothing to do with traditional modeling of reputation. And so we developed 1st impression score, we developed it, by the way, long before COVID we’d been working on this for awhile. And this metric is brand new, so it is a completely new way of looking at it. We call it 1st impression because it truly is the guest’s impression of your reputation as they see it in real time. So the score that they see today, right? Or right now, the guests that encounters your information today, right now, in this moment, this afternoon could actually encounter a new set of information. So really, it’s understanding where you’re at in every moment. So we’re now taking this information, we’re displaying it in real time, and then we’re also recording this data. So every day we’re recording what that score was, what it looked like on that day. And so what 1st impression score is made up of is that first page worth of data, so the scores that are on that very first page. Your lifetime of data, so this would be those scores that they encounter that are really the outside score. So I go to TripAdvisor and I see that you’re a 4.5, that is a lifetime score. The next would be review respon

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we discuss the stories and sentiments that we have been hearing from our hotel partners across the country who have been impacted by COVID-19. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Client Success & Operations Manager Edwin Pomales to discuss how his team has evolved their conversations with our partners to support hotels along the path to recovery. Ryan and Edwin share the proactive steps hotels should be taking to instill traveler confidence and comfort in their property’s response to COVID-19. They know that every hotel’s situation is unique, but with strategic action planning and careful crisis communication, hotels can gain a competitive advantage on the road to industry recovery. Edwin also shares his thoughts on how his team plans to adapt to this “new normal” that hoteliers and travelers alike will begin to experience. If you are looking for help or insight with a recovery plan for your hotel call or text us at 407-984-7455. Suite Spot Podcast · 49 – Client Success During COVID – 19 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, continuing to give you some content from my home office here in Orlando, Florida. Hoping everyone out there listening is safe and healthy. We’re going to be continuing our COVID-19 podcast series. We’ve covered a lot so far during this time, we’ve covered leveraging social media and communication, we talked about the top five things to do during a crisis, and we talked about, most recently, about reputation management. So if you’ve been following along, we are going to continue our COVID-19 series and with me today, I’m going to bring in Edwin Pomales who is Travel Media Group’s Client Success and Operations Manager. At Travel Media Group, since this crisis we’ve had a lot of communication with our hoteliers at every single stage of this. So I thought it would be a really good idea to bring Edwin on and kind of discuss, you know, what we’ve been hearing from our hotel partners and what type of advice we’ve been sharing to try to generate some ideas for you, the listeners, the hoteliers, to implement at your property to get us ready for that recovery that we’ve been hearing so much about. I’m going to go ahead and welcome Edwin to the Suite Spot. Thanks Edwin everyone for being on. Edwin Pomales: Hey Ryan, thanks for having me. Definitely happy to be here today. Ryan Embree: Absolutely, Edwin. So let’s jump right into it. Your teams are in constant contact with hoteliers through this entire process from the beginning of COVID-19 to now as we start to see ease on restrictions and we start to see maybe that light at the end of the tunnel and that recovery phase. I’m wondering how has COVID-19 impacted your team’s interactions with Travel Media Group’s hotel partners? Edwin Pomales: Ryan, it’s interesting because over the years we’ve definitely worked hard to build strong relationships with all of our clients. We really do pride ourselves on being a proactive team and try to stay in tune with the goals and the challenges of our partners. You know, when I say proactive, you know a lot of customer service departments are more reactive, right? You have an issue, you reach out to them, they try to fix the issue for you. Where at here at Travel Media Group with my Client Success Team we’re actively reaching out to our clients and game planning with them, figuring out what, you know, based upon what time of year it is or what their goals are at that time. Really trying to figure out how to execute. So with COVID, one big difference is that it’s really impacted our clients in different ways, right? So most recently our has been to truly listen to our clients and try to assess the situation that they’re facing right now. So we’re asking questions with every call that are going to help us figure out how we can be most helpful to our clients during this time. And we’ve had some clients that have had to shutter, unfortunately, during these times and we’ve had other properties that are a 100% occupied. So the spectrum is pretty wide. So as a team, our focus is on each interaction with a client is really just to listen to our clients and help them be as efficient as possible during these times. Ryan Embree: Yeah, you know, one thing that we’ve learned during this crisis is this is impacting and affecting hotels completely differently, as you mentioned. You know, this wasn’t somet

In this episode of the Suite Spot, host Ryan Embree is joined by TMG’s Product Director Patrick O’Brien to discuss the role that online reputation plays during COVID-19. Ryan and Patrick break down the influential power that online reviews are playing in consumer’s booking decisions during this time and the potential negative and lasting impact a bad review today can have on your business. Patrick shares some best practices that his professional review response team has implemented during this time when travelers are paying more attention than ever to every hotel’s reviews and responses. This episode details what the evolution of online reputation looks like as hotels start to enter into the recovery phase. For help with improving your hotel’s reputation during COVID-19 or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Suite Spot Podcast · 48 – Reputation Management During COVID-19 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 edition of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, as always. Still recording live from my home studio here. With me today we have another remote guest that we’ve decided to bring in to the Suite Spot. Also a frequent guest of the Suite Spot, that is Product Director of Travel Media Group, Patrick O’Brien. So let me get started by welcoming Patrick again to the Suite Spot. Patrick O’Brien: Thanks Ryan. Ryan Embree: Patrick, up to this point, you know, as Product Director, you work with all of our solutions at Travel Media Group, but really kind of where you started was the reputation side of things. So I know we’ve talked up to this point about the COVID-19 crisis and our educational series through our blogs, our webinars, and through this podcast. But I thought a really insightful episode would be to bring you on Patrick and really drill into reputation because I think reputation sometimes gets lost on hoteliers. You know, we talk about, you know, what are we going to do about our bookings? What are we going to do about generating more business? If you could, let’s start by just saying why are reviews still important right now for hoteliers? Patrick O’Brien: Yeah, so I think that the, you know, the initial thought from hoteliers is occupancy is down. People aren’t staying at our hotel and so, you know, as you mentioned, reviews are there for, not important. But technically we’re faced right now with a unique time where hotel demand in effect, according to Smith Travel Research is at zero. We’re still booking around a million rooms a night. But, you know, it’s created a new benchmark of what demand is when there is no demand. So being faced with that as a hotelier, your options are very limited in the number of guests that are going to be in your market and looking for a hotel room. So first and foremost reviews are a fantastic way to let guests know that your hotel is still open, that it is safe, and also, you know, potentially what amenities may or may not still be available because something that you have up and running today may no longer be up and running tomorrow. This is all done through sort of a verification process of other guests. So it’s not necessarily just you saying, “Hey, this is what we’re doing.” It’s other guests going in and identifying, “Hey, this a good hotel to be able to stay at or this is not a good hotel to stay at.” We talked about in the past how reviews are vitally important to your business because it helps the guests set their expectations prior to arrival and this is even more important today. You have to think that for the most part, all of your reviews pre COVID-19 are irrelevant to today’s traveler. They don’t care how good or bad your hotel was prior to because most likely that is not the current condition of your hotel. However, if you have a low lifetime score or bad record of positive reviews, you know, you may be removed from the selection immediately. But again, the content of your reviews prior to COVID-19 are not going to be as relevant to the travelers coming today. I think the other interesting thing is that the sector of hotels who are currently experiencing the lowest percentage of drop-off in occupancy really is kind of in the economy and mid-scale sector. Many exterior corridor properties are doing better because people have less interaction with employees and other guest and less touch points. But again, these are the hotels that vary drastically typically in service and comfort levels. So by nature people are go

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we continue sharing helpful insights and tips to help hoteliers combat the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Travel Media Group’s Director of Marketing, Anne Sandoval, to discuss 5 Strategies of Crisis Response. Anne, who studied crisis management and has a graduate certificate in corporate communication, talks us through each component of crisis response. Ryan and Anne then apply these crisis response strategies to the hotel industry. They share insightful statistics surrounding these strategies and give some specific examples of how they can be implemented at a property level. These 5 crisis response components – responsiveness, transparency, accountability, consistency, and action – build the foundation of an effective game plan for managing this global emergency. If you are looking for more information on the hotel industry and coronavirus visit Travel Media Group’s COVID-19 hotel marketing resource center online or reach out to us by phone or text at 407-984-7455. 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 recording remotely again during this COVID-19 crisis. And with me today we have another frequent guest of the Suite Spot, also recording remotely for the first time, Anne Sandoval. So Anne, I know you’ve been with us a couple times, definitely a different location than when we are usually recording, but want to welcome you to the Suite Spot. Anne Sandoval: Hey Ryan, thanks for having me. I definitely prefer when we are able to record face to face, but I’m glad this is working out. It’s awesome. I’m so happy to be here, once again. Ryan Embree: Absolutely, feeling very thankful that we’re able to give all of our listeners content, insights, and education on the current ongoing COVID-19 crisis today. We’ve got a really great episode that I think is going to be very relevant to what’s going on and best practices and tips on how hoteliers can implement ways to handle this COVID -19 crisis that really we’ve never been through before. So Anne, is not only our Director of Marketing at Travel Media Group, but has studied at the University of Central Florida with a master’s in mass communication and a certificate of corporate communication and has studied crisis management. So I thought no better person to bring on with us today to talk about some of the components and strategies of crisis response than Anne. And what we’re going to do today, in this episode, is we’re actually going to go through the five components or strategies of crisis response. We’re going to go through each one, we’re going to talk to them from a high level of how these tips and strategies would work just overall, and then we’re really gonna drill down into the hotel industry and how we can apply that to the hotel that you may be managing during this crisis today. So let’s go ahead and get started with the first tip. Anne Sandoval: Of course, yeah. Thanks Ryan for that introduction. So the first component of crisis response that’s important to talk about is responsiveness. And the reason I’m going to mention it first is because it’s so time sensitive. Some industry experts say that you have just 15 minutes to respond when a crisis occurs. And you might be thinking, “Why is that, 15 minutes sounds almost unreasonably fast?” But the reason is because now information is shared 24/7/365 and consumer expectations are higher than ever. If it’s a small crisis, like a negative tweet about your business, it might seem a little more reasonable to respond quickly. But what about in a larger crisis? I think the important thing to help you tackle those 15 minutes is to really identify who should be in the room with you when you decide how you’re going to respond to this. And if you know who those people are ahead of time, that’s really helpful. So in those 15 minutes, you’re going to have a discussion and you need to answer these questions, “How is this crisis going to impact my business? What can I do to mitigate the damage? What should I say to my customers and my stakeholders? And ultimately who is going to be in charge of conveying my message to my customers?” But whatever you do, don’t stay silent, because saying no comment actually says a lot about you and your business and it leaves way too many questions in the eyes of your consumers. So the key is really to acknowledge the situation as quickl

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we continue our discussion on COVID-19 and the virus’s impact on the hotel industry. Host Ryan Embree welcomes Jason Lee, Vice President of Product & Technology, back to the Suite Spot to get his perspective and insights on this unprecedented global crisis. With years of experience as a hotel owner and general manager, Jason shares the similarities and differences between this crisis and those from the past, like 9/11 or the Great Recession. Ryan and Jason give tips and ideas on how to reassure your hotel’s guests and future travelers utilizing social media, online reviews, and review responses. They provide some thoughtful advice on how to “stay in the today” and control what you can in these uncertain times. If you are looking for help with a hotel action plan during this time, reach out to us by phone or text at 407-984-7455. 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 are continuing our educational content on the current COVID-19 situation that our industry is in, our nation, and globally is in. So for this discussion today, I figured I’d pull in a little backup, a very seasoned veteran of the hospitality industry. You’ve heard his voice many times here on the Suite Spot, that is Mr. Jason Lee, he is our vice president of product development and technology who joins me remotely. So usually we’re in the office together, but Jason, I appreciate you taking the time to join me today. Jason Lee: Awesome. Thank you for having me, Ryan. Yeah, it is a departure from being able to look you in the eye, but I do appreciate you having me on. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely and we’ll kind of jump right into it. As I mentioned before, you know, we did an episode in the past about the beginning steps to this situation. It’s been a couple of weeks since, so I figured, let’s go ahead and get you in here. You’ve been on both sides of the front desk as a general manager, owner, and then on the other side working with Travel Media Group, you know, so I wanted to get your input on, because you’ve been through this, you’ve been through some sort of crisis, whether that’s something like 2001 in 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis, you know, we have those ebbs and flows in our industry and in our economy. How is this crisis, this COVID-19 crisis, in 2020 different from maybe those that you’ve experienced before? Jason Lee: Well, I mean, I think there’s the good and the bad of the situation and the bad is just how drastic the occupancy swing was. So in other areas, like even during 9/11, there was obviously a huge swing in travel in general, so people didn’t want to travel. The people didn’t have money or didn’t have as much discretionary money at the 2008 financial crisis, but in this case, it’s something where it’s a full shutdown of everything, you know, so it’s a shutdown of restaurants, its a shutdown of travel, of just movement – so that’s the bad side. The bad side is like how drastic of a cut it is. The good side, unlike the other ones, is that there is a clear end in sight. And even though it may not seem clear from maybe nightly news or from the stuff you read, there is a clear end from every country that’s experienced this, where you see the path back and this is something that is temporary. It’s something that has an end and so it’s understanding that and being able to weather this time period. So with the financial crisis, the uncertainty and like the literal like cut of discretionary money or people’s uncertainty about their financial future, stopping them from spending money. All of those things is, you know, made those times I think a lot – there wasn’t a clear end in sight and 9/11 the same thing. 9/11 lasted a very long time in terms of people’s appetite for travel or fear of travel. So I think with this, you know, we’re going to see it come back faster, I think it’s going to come back a lot better than it did in terms of time. But, you know, when you think about where we’ve been headed for the last 10 years, I mean we were just getting back to that, you know, 2006-2007 occupancy/RevPar. So we’re just barely getting back there, but we also had a ton of supply come into the market during that time as well. So I’m still very optimistic about where we’re headed and I’m very optimistic about people’s appetite for travel. Ryan Embree: I agr

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we discuss the COVID-19 crisis facing hoteliers around the globe today. Host Ryan Embree helps navigate these unprecedented times in the hospitality industry and shares words of encouragement on behalf of Travel Media Group. Ryan discusses the vital role that communication channels like social media and online review response will play in connecting to both current guests and future travelers during this time. This episode provides content ideas during the COVID-19 crisis and recommendations on how to repurpose your energy and staff if your hotel is experiencing a dip in occupancy. He also shares some quick tips on how hoteliers can begin to prepare for the eventual market recovery that will take place post-virus. If you would like to share your story through this difficult time or see if Travel Media Group can be of any type of assistance, reach out to us by phone or text at 407-984-7455. 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. So before we get started today, I want to share that all of us here at Travel Media Group understand what a difficult time this is for hoteliers. This is an unprecedented situation that we’ve never seen before. At Travel Media Group, we’ve been in the travel/hotel industry for 40 years. I’m sure a lot of our listeners and hoteliers have that much experience, sometimes even more experience than that, and we know how difficult this is. We’ve had many of our hotel partners, both that have worked with us and aren’t currently working with us, reach out because this is a time where all of us need to come together as a community to help one another out. So I just wanted to, before we get started, kind of share that message with you from Travel Media Group. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host Ryan Embree recording live from my new at home work office. I’m sure a lot of our listeners might be in different places, this past week has really been challenging and kind of turned a lot of our world’s upside down with Coronavirus, COVID-19. So today’s episode is really gonna center all around that. There are a lot of hoteliers out there, a lot of our hotel partners at Travel Media Group asking the questions of where do I start, when is this going to end, how is this going to impact the industry as a whole? Most importantly for you – how will this impact my business? And we are really at a point and a stage where every single room counts, every single percentage of occupancy – and that’s not a place that we’ve been in this industry for a very long time. Ryan Embree: We were riding record highs on ADR, REVPAR, demand. And then all of a sudden we came to this complete stop. So we put this episode together just as a way to try to start to make sense, kind of, give some tips, some best practices on how to best handle this. As you know, this is the first time that we’re going through this as a community, as an industry, as a whole. So with Travel Media Group’s expertise in the digital marketing side, you know, we thought we’d get some great information and tips out there on how you can start connecting and communicating with your guests. And that’s really where this all stems from is communication. Communication is key. You want to go ahead and create an action plan. If you could speak directly to your traveler, if you could convey a message to them or have a conversation which each one of your reservations for the next couple nights, what would you say to them? Ryan Embree: How would you assure them that your hotel is going to be safe? How are you going to assure them that if they did have a change in plans, that you’re being flexible. It’s during these times that hoteliers really need to be as honest and transparent as possible because that is going to go a long way because unlike other crisis, this is really happening to all of us all over the nation, not only the nation, globally. You know, we’ve talked about how – and we’re going to talk about this a little bit later in the episode – how resilient the hotel world and hospitality industry is. We have over the past two decades have seen some very challenging times with September 11th with the Great Recession in 2008, but we need to look at this crisis very differently. And one of the main differences that we’ve seen today in 2020, as we’ve seen of those in the past, is Social Media and reputation online. Ryan Embree: So leverage these places to communicate with your guests because y

In this episode of The Suite Spot, we discuss how embracing experiential travel helps hotels make lasting connections with their guests. Ryan welcomes President of Sightline Hospitality, Kirk Pederson to the podcast to discuss how to implement experiential travel in meaningful ways. Kirk shares his hospitality experience, complete with examples of interesting guest experiences he’s helped implement at partner hotels across the country. Ryan and Kirk discuss how special guest experiences translate to engaging social media content, and how to continue to connect with guests through review responses. They wrap up the conversation by discussing Sightline’s commitment to instilling a “Culture of Welcome” across their portfolio. This is an episode you don’t want to miss! 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 have a very special guest going to be joining me today, and we are pleased to welcome Kirk Pederson, president of Sightline Hospitality onto the Suite Spot. He’s a 30 year veteran in the industry, which has a wealth of knowledge and resume full of hospitality experience in operations, food and beverage development, acquisitions. Kirk’s diverse background, both in the public and private sectors resulted in the direct oversight of over 5 billion of independent and branded hotels and resorts. We’re very fortunate to have him today on the Suite Spot to share some insights with us. So without further ado, let me welcome you Kirk to the Suite Spot. Kirk Pederson: Thanks, Ryan. Man, you make me sound old. I don’t like hearing about all of that experience you know, when people mention it, because now I just feel like I’m getting older. Ryan Embree: No, you bring all that wisdom and experience. We love to see it. You know, especially in an industry where a lot of people’s stories start off in operations, you know, we’ve talked to a lot of hoteliers that start off at the front desk or have their first job at a hotel and they work their way up, so it’s super exciting. With that in mind, as we do with all of our new guests, we love to learn kind of your hospitality and hotel background and story. So what was the journey that led you to Sightline Hospitality? Kirk Pederson: As I mentioned it’s a long journey, right? Yeah, I’m one of the fortunate ones. I think I knew very early on that I wanted to be in the hotel business. I was staying at the Hyatt Regency in Waikiki when I was 10 years old and really saw the hotel operations from the General Manager’s perspective. And, you know, that day I said to my dad, I want that job, like that’s I want to do for a living. I want to wear khakis and an Aloha shirt and be the general manager of a five star resort in Hawaii. And you know, I didn’t really think much about that. So I found myself getting jobs in high school. You know, I worked in country clubs and restaurants, and really kind of fell in love with the entire hospitality industry. I thought for a while I was going to be a chef, I still love to cook. You know again, followed that dream of being that hotel General Manager, went to hotel school UNLV, and got out of college and decided I wanted to go into a management training program. And so I did that and I was on my way man to being my first general manager job in Key Largo, Florida. I got a call from our HR department and they said, “Hey, there’s this job in development and they’re looking for somebody who has a finance background and a hotel background.” I minored in finance in school as well and always liked that. And I said, “Nope, I’m going to be a general manager. I’m going to wear that aloha shirt and I am on my way.” And I took the interview, you know, just to take the interview and, you know, long story short, I started on the development acquisition side of the business. And didn’t go back to operations for a long time. I kind of worked my way, you know, from grunt all the way up to VP of Acquisitions and Development and, you know, did that with different groups. I worked with the old American General Hospitality guys, Ameristar guys, the Interstate team and you know, then I actually spent some time in hotel brokerage, did some residential development deals in suburban Chicago and then, you know, kind of got called back to the REIT world, in asset management. I’ve done quite a bit in the hotel business, you know, from operations to acquisitions to asset management

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we discuss how to improve your hotel’s city rank on TripAdvisor, no matter where your property currently stands. Host Ryan Embree is joined by guest Patrick O’Brien, TMG’s Product Director and reputation solutions expert. Ryan and Patrick explain how to achieve both short- and long-term reputation goals for your hotel. Patrick walks us through how to rise into the top 10, top 5, and eventually top 3 of your market on TripAdvisor. He also shares best practices on how to sustain reputation excellence once your hotel is at the top of your city rank. Ryan and Patrick also discuss redefining reputation success based on market size. To learn more about improving your hotel’s city rank on TripAdvisor or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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 and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Today, we’ve got a great episode for you today. Some of our most popular episodes and educational content really surrounds TripAdvisor. We know the importance of TripAdvisor and what type of impact that can make on revenue. Your hotel’s reputation is one of those things that can really impact a traveler’s booking decision. So I feel like the educational content we put out about TripAdvisor, that’s why it’s so well received. So in tune with that, I have invited in our product director, Patrick O’Brien, who will be joining us – you’ve been on the Suite Spot a couple times now. Patrick O’Brien: Yes I have, thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: Absolutely, so today we’re going to talk about TripAdvisor. You know, we’ve done a lot of episodes around optimizing your TripAdvisor account and really getting the most out of it. I thought a great idea for an episode today would be really how can make some movement, because that’s what we’re constantly looking to do, right? Is improve our reputation online, see that city rank go up the ladder, and get into a competitive space where you are at the forefront of a traveler’s booking decision and tip the scales in your favor. Let’s go ahead and start a hotel that’s out there. They’re just now getting into TripAdvisor. You know, they’ve listened to a couple episodes on how to optimize their TripAdvisor, but you know, they haven’t really focused on their reputation much, but in 2020 they’re looking to really improve their reputation right away. So these hotels in maybe in the bottom 25% of their city, what are a few easy steps that they can do to start seeing improvement right now? Patrick O’Brien: Well, first and foremost, I think, you know, don’t throw your hands up in the air and be like, “Okay, we’re at the bottom of the pack, there’s nothing that we can do.” It is simply just about getting more positive reviews. If you are at a 2.5 star rating, every four or five star rating that you get is going to have a significant impact and it’s going to have a significant impact fairly quickly. All of that is going to help increase your average because the average really is a kind of a compound equation. So you know the more of those four and five star reviews you can get, you’re going to lift that average up pretty quickly. In addition, part of TripAdvisor’s city rank algorithm revolves around recency of reviews. So the more recent the review is, the heavier it is weighted. The idea there really being around that this is the experience that a guest coming today would have. So, you know, you’ll start to see a faster kinda growth and impact by those more positive reviews. So it is coming up with a strategy to go out and, you know, work with your guests to get more positive reviews and you’re going to start to see an immediate lift. And especially if you haven’t been doing anything in the past, it’ll kind of be, you know, like a little kick in the butt and growth right there. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we echo that sentiment all the time to our hoteliers. This is not something that you keep your head in the sand. TripAdvisor can be easily impacted because of that new algorithm of recency. So they’re trying to get the best idea of what your hotel is today. So getting a couple, four and five stars and getting that momentum going, you know, can really push you in the right direction. Now, a lot of the hotels, you know, might be in the middle of the pack – they’re stuck right there. What are some tips to get these hotels

In this episode of the Suite Spot, host Ryan Embree is joined by Vice President of Product and Technology, Jason Lee, to walk through the emergence of content marketing and the importance of strategic social media for the hotel industry. Jason and Ryan discuss social media as “the great connector” and how hoteliers can use occupancy drivers like events in content marketing for their hotels. Jason gives his advice on how to identify these local occupancy drivers and the best way to leverage them through social media posting. They also discuss how using influencer marketing and social media advertising can strengthen your hotel’s overall marketing strategy. This episode is the perfect guide on how to evolve your hotel’s social media strategy for the new decade. To learn more about how we are helping hoteliers optimize their property’s social media strategies or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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 Ryan Embree, as always, your host. Before we get started on today’s episode, I have a very exciting announcement. Thank you all of our listeners for all of your continued support, we have just hit the 10,000 listen mark on our podcast, the Suite Spot, so thank you again for all your continued support out there. We love that you guys are listening and engaging in this type of content. It really means a lot to us. So with that being said, we have another exciting episode with a very familiar voice of the Suite Spot that is Jason Lee, he is our vice president of product development and technology. So I’ll go ahead and welcome Jason in this morning, welcome Jason, back to the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Thank you Ryan. Ryan Embree: And we are going to have a really exciting discussion today. You can call it a couple things – you can call it content marketing, you can call it the evolution of Social Media – being that it’s a new decade, I think this is a great time to kind of talk about, whether we’ve recognized it or not, Social Media has really turned a corner on what it can be and how hoteliers are leveraging Social Media. So could you just walk us through, I mean, being on the product side, developing a solution like Social Media. How has Social Media for hotels evolved over just the past maybe five years to a decade? Jason Lee: You know, I think as new generations come up – new generations of travelers, new generations of users – they’ve basically grown up with technology. If you are a person under 30 you’ve grown up with this technology, so this technology has been a part of your childhood, your teenage life, and now going into your adult life, this is no longer, so this is a utility – like Google – like other other types of utilities where I go to find information where I go to see stuff about my friends, where I go to see images, where I go to be entertained. And this is something that is different than something that says like, you know, I guess the thought of I’m wasting my time in this one area or I’m wasting my time, you know, on Facebook or on Instagram. Now it’s really more about this is where branding happens, this is where influencing happens, and this is where people are going to see, “Hey is this a credible product?” What are other people saying about this? Or I’m being introduced for the very first time to this by this medium and this medium is trusted because I’m trusting the person that is showing me this through this medium. So Social Media, I has become something that is really, you know, I would say a very viable media outlet. And so when, whenever you have something like that and it’s kind of shifted from maybe like a certain age demographic or from a certain set now something that is fully mainstream, I think you have to pay attention to it differently. Ryan Embree: Well and I think over the past couple of years we’ve seen the Social Media platforms just release so many new features, right? I mean you think about when we first started doing Social Media for hotels, what we were doing to create those pages, to optimize those pages maybe took five to seven steps to really optimize a page and then we would start engaging with content and posting. But now, there’s just so many intricate details, so many features, we talk about strategic ad spend all the time, we talk about branding – like you were talking about – adding simple things like a “book now” button instead of a ca

On this special edition of the Suite Spot, we host Travel Media Group’s Vice President and General Manager, Dana Singer. Ryan Embree and Dana share thoughts on what sets the Travel Media Group experience apart for our hotel partners. Ryan and Dana take a trip down memory lane and reflect on Travel Media Group’s successes and achievements of the last decade. Dana shares her vision for the culture at Travel Media Group and how that culture impacts our hotel partnerships. Dana also gives a sneak peek on what she is most excited about in the new decade and what to expect. To get more information about working with TMG or to submit a question or topic for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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. We got a great episode for you today. It is long overdue, we have a special new guest with us today, she is VP and General Manager at Travel Media Group and that’s Dana Singer. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Suite Spot, like I said, it’s long overdue, but we’re super happy that you decided to join us. Dana Singer: Yeah, thanks Ryan. It’s great to be here, I’ve been looking forward to it for a while now and can’t think of a better way to kick off the new year. Ryan Embree: Absolutely, new year and new decade as we talked about in the last episode. And we’re going to go right into it and with this being your first time, what we like to do with our new guests is give a little bit of background about your experience at Travel Media Group, the role that you have as Vice President and General Manager of Travel Media Group. Can you just give us a little insight on that? Dana Singer: Sure. Yeah, I joined Travel Media Group back in December of 2012 and it was at a time when the business was at a really important inflection point in terms of the emerging trends in hotel marketing and what we needed to do to ensure our longterm success. And it was at this time that we realized the need to expand our offerings and to begin to make even greater investments into product development. So after implementing a full restructuring of our sales and service teams to best meet the needs of today’s hoteliers, all across the US. I had the opportunity to move into my current role, where I head up our overall vision and implementation of strategies. Ryan Embree: And you mentioned that inflection point and especially around that 2012, we were seeing a lot of digital trends really start to emerge. Travel Media Group as a company has really evolved significantly under your leadership. Can you share with us a little bit more about that evolution and the vision for what you see as next? Dana Singer: It’s always inspiring to look back at our journey and how we got to where we are today and for over 35 years TMG has been dedicated to helping hoteliers attract more guests and this is a really important foundation for us. Today our business is all about providing our partners with a competitive edge through marketing and business insights to help them effectively manage guest feedback. And our commitment to exclusively serving the hotel industry is something that we’re very, very passionate about. Our expertise and understanding the importance of managing the hotel guest experience has resulted in the development and continuous innovation of best in class solutions. Ryan Embree: That’s one of the things that I have a lot of pride in working Travel Media Group cause I feel like obviously we’ve had that shift of solutions, but that experience has really stayed the same. That core foundation that you talk about helping hoteliers attract more guests. That is at the foundation, that’s a core of Travel Media Group. So for a hotelier who’s listening to this podcast, whether it’s a GM, a DOS, or even someone’s that just started their career in the industry who’s not really familiar with that Travel Media Group experience, what do you think differentiates us from the competition out there? Dana Singer: I think our position as a trusted hotel marketing company for over 35 years gives us a unique understanding of how hotel reputation, competitive pricing, and guest experience all work together to make a property successful. And at Travel Media Group we excel by finding innovative ways to optimize a hotel’s online presence so that travelers can connect during their booking journey. Ryan Embree: Absolutely, and I think with that experience there’s almost a parallel of culture at a company, because if

In this episode of Suite Spot, Ryan Embree reflects on the past year and past decade, focusing on trending Google searches in the hotel industry. Ryan reviews which travel-related search terms have risen in popularity in the 2010s and which search terms have all but disappeared in the modern-day traveler’s search. He shares best practices and tips on how to capitalize on these popular search terms and how you can leverage these trends to improve your business. This episode is a great way to kick off the new decade and make sure that your hotel’s sales and marketing strategies are aligned with today’s traveler. If you have any questions about 2020 travel trends or how Travel Media Group can help your hotel, reach out to us by either calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at [email protected]. Resources https://thetravelaisle.com/travel-trends-2010-to-2020/ https://www.travelmediagroup.com/what-hidden-instagram-likes-mean-for-your-hotel/ 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, this is Ryan Embree, welcome to the first episode of the Suite Spot of 2020. Thank you all for listening. Hope everyone out there had a happy new year and we are getting geared up for an incredible 2020. So this is actually, hard to believe, episode 40 of the Suite Spot. So again, thank you to all of our listeners out there and all of the support that you’ve given us. We’ve got a really great episode today to kick off not only the new year, but the new decade. We are going to be taking a look at something called travel trends of the last decade. So this was a really cool article that we found at thetravelaisle.com. You can find this article in our show notes and what this article did was looked at some hospitality and hotel unique terms starting in 2010 all the way to the end of 2019 and kind of showed the trends of where those terms were headed in the case of Google searches. So when consumers would go to Google and they would type in a specific search or query these terms, either gained in popularity towards the end of the decade or we saw them that might not be that relevant and decrease in popularity in searches throughout the 2010’s. A common theme that we’re going to talk about today in this episode is the theme of how quickly things change in this industry and how staying on top of these hot travel trends are really going to impact your business. So let’s go ahead and start with the first term. Ryan Embree: So the first term we’re going to talk about is actually the search of, “Instagram Spots.” Now Instagram became popular at the beginning of the decade around 2010 and the popularity since has peaked in July 2019, so this has been a term that has really, really taken off and increased and what travelers are searching for when they’re looking for places to potentially pick for their vacation. What are some ways that you can leverage travelers that are searching for, “Instagram spots” for your hotel? Well, one of the ways we’ve talked about in episodes past is really your hotel Instagram-able. Now I know that kind of sounds like a silly word there, but if you can find a place or create a space for your travelers that is creative, that is aesthetically pleasing, they’re going to start to take pictures in front of that place. Whether it’s a fountain, a faux wall, a nice view in your hotel lobby. Sometimes that’s enough to really get people to start taking pictures. So if you can make an Instagram-able moment or an Instagram-able space in your lobby, your hotel, your amenities, that’s going to create some popularity there on your social media platform and your social media accounts. So if we can create a unique hashtag specific to your hotel when travelers are searching for that hashtag, they’re going to find those Instagram-able spaces and Instagram-able moments at your hotel. We also, again, want to encourage travelers to post and ask for permission to repost and share those images that are representative as the top posts – and we’re going to talk about that a little bit later when we talk about influencers, which was also a really hot term of the last decade. Another great way to get engagement on Instagram, and we talked about this in a past episode, was pets. If we have a hotel pet in the lobby, even just something as small as a fish, we can name that pet, and again, we can create an Instagram-able moment there. Running social media contest on Instagram – everyone loves a good competition, especially if we have a prize at the end –

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we share how to get your hotel’s TripAdvisor listing ready for the new year. Host, Ryan Embree, is joined by Respond & Resolve™ Product Manager, Kristeena Seckinger to walk through the process of claiming and optimizing your hotel’s Tripadvisor profile. Kristeena and Ryan tackle some frequently asked questions about TripAdvisor including: how to update your property’s photos, how to remove TripAdvisor reviews, and can you wipe your TripAdvisor account. This episode gives important insight into what you need to do to make sure you are getting the most out of your hotel’s TripAdvisor. If you have a question about your hotel’s TripAdvisor account or need help managing it, call or text 407-984-7455. Resources https://www.travelmediagroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/TMG-Travel-TripAdvisor-Trust.pdf 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, this is Ryan Embree, welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. Today marks our 39th episode and last of 2019, very hard to believe. Thank you all for listening today. We’ve got a great episode for you today. This topic and subject was really brought up by a white paper that was recently published on travelmediagroup.com called “Travel, TripAdvisor, and Trust: How TripAdvisor Influences Traveler Booking Decisions” and now we’ve known over the last decade that TripAdvisor is one of the most influential places where travelers are looking when making their booking decisions. And with the end of 2019, going into the new year, we thought what we would do today is really prepare your hotel – make sure that you’re getting everything out of TripAdvisor – so that when travelers are coming to your TripAdvisor account, they are seeing the most recent, up to date information. Because we know that these traveler’s sites and review sites, they’re ever-changing, they’re ever evolving, just like our industry. So we need to make sure that all the new features that are out there, we’re sharing with our hoteliers to make sure, again, you’re in the best position to capture these travelers. So I would think of no better guest to invite on the Suite Spot than our own Kristeena Seckinger, who is our Respond and Resolve Product Manager. So Kristeena, you work a lot with TripAdvisor and really all online review sites, right? Kristeena S.: Yes, every day. Ryan Embree: Awesome. So you’ve got some great knowledge on – really from the basics of claiming your TripAdvisor, which we’re going to talk about today, all the way down to making critical decisions about your account : potentially wiping your account, starting a new TripAdvisor, how you can remove reviews. These are all questions that we hear every single day about TripAdvisor that sometimes, you know, hoteliers might have a basic understanding of the site, but not those unique details. So I thought it’d be a really good episode to go ahead and get your TripAdvisor ready for the new year 2020. So let’s start off with the basics, what’s the first thing a hotelier should do if they’ve never managed their TripAdvisor before? Kristeena S.: The first step for any hotelier should be to claim their TripAdvisor page. This is a really relatively easy process that doesn’t take long at all. All you have to do is find your property page on TripAdvisor and you want to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page right before the frequently asked questions section and there’s going to be a button there that says, “Claim your listing.” From there, you’ll be prompted to sign into your TripAdvisor account or create a new one if you don’t have one, and after following that prompt, you will be required to verify your identity, either through a phone call through the property or by entering your credit card information. Ryan Embree: So that’s a really important detail – is you have to have a personal TripAdvisor account to manage your hotel’s business listing. Is that correct? Kristeena S.: Correct. Kristeena S.: Okay, so you’re going to go ahead and create that account, that TripAdvisor account. You’re going to go ahead and walk through the stages of verifying. Now, does this cost the hotelier any money to do this? Kristeena S.: No, it’s completely free. Even if you choose to do the credit card route, TripAdvisor will not charge you anything. Ryan Embree: That’s just a claim essentially that you are part of the business. So, you know, a traveler couldn’t get into your listing.

In this special edition episode of the Suite Spot, we discuss the recent 2019 Phocuswright Conference in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Host Ryan Embree is joined by VP of Product & Technology, Jason Lee, and Customer Success & Operations Manager, Edwin Pomales, to discuss key takeaways from the event. Listen as Jason and Edwin share their perspective on the conference’s theme “Are We There Yet” and the relationship between technology and the hospitality industry. They also describe some of their favorite hospitality startups which competed at the conference. This episode is a great resource for hoteliers looking to see what technological advances and innovations are on the horizon for industry in 2020 and beyond. 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. We’re here with another episode today, a very special edition. As you know, at Travel Media Group we are at the forefront of the industry and love to attend all of the conferences and events that surround the hotel and hospitality industry. We have been attending the Phocuswright conference now for many years. So we always like to do kind of a recap of some of what we learned, some of what we saw, what we think is on the horizon. So with me today is Jason Lee, our Vice president of Product Development and Technology and Edwin Pomales, who is our Client Success and Operations Manager, both who attended the Phocuswright conference in early November. So they are with me today to kind of talk about the Phocuswright conference, some of your key takeaways. Edwin, this is actually your first time going to the conference. For our listeners who might not have heard of Phocuswright before or who have never attended this conference, can you give us some of your input from a first-time attendee? Edwin Pomales: Absolutely. I think Phocuswright is a hospitality-focused technology-focused conference where every segment of travel is represented from flight to transportation to hospitality and hotels. Being a first time visitor to the conference was great insight into the consumer focus that every branch and every segment of hospitality is trying to figure out and really try to cater to. So it was a great experience. Ryan Embree: So it’s a unique intersection, like you were saying, you know, you’ve got your OTAs there, you also have your hotel brands there, even sites like TripAdvisor are all attending, so it’s very, very interesting to get everyone’s input, but it’s all kind of centered around that technology aspect of the industry, which as we know is very important and quickly changing. So Jason, that kind of swings it over to you. You know, you’re an experienced veteran, who has gone to the Phocuswright conference for many years now. Can you give us maybe the difference from this year’s Phocuswright in comparison to years past? Jason Lee: This year the theme or the kind of main title was “Are We There Yet” kind of a pun on like a kid in the back of a car asking if we’re yet. But in this case, it’s, is the hospitality technology side of things there yet, in terms of creating connected travel? And so you heard a lot of different companies talking about the connected traveler. And so basically like Edwin said, the conference represents all these various aspects of travel, but I think the infrastructure that holds all that stuff together is funky. And so sometimes the connected traveler gets, they get like maybe halfway there in terms of flight and hotel, but the rest of it is kind of funky. And so, it’s a lot of the OTAs we’re talking about this, a lot of the other technology partners going into brands all talking about pretty much the same thing is, how do you create kind of a start to finish connected trip for a traveler? And so I think there was a lot of talk about that, I think in years past there has been a lot more maybe unbridled optimism around the hospitality industry this year. A little more guarded in terms of flattened occupancy, heightened supply. Definitely a lot of talk this year over last year about Google and Google’s role in travel. I think there was way more talked about probably this year than any years past about Google specifically and Google’s impact on the traveler. Some of the other interesting things to me were short term rental – a lot of talk on short term rental. A lot of talk about the OTAs entrance to short term rental and how that is expanding. And then also maybe way more than other years in the past, Asia talking about Asian travel. Talking about these things called super apps where there are emerging

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we talk about a different type of guest at your hotel: pets. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Director of Marketing and pet lover Anne Sandoval to talk creative ways to market your pet-friendly hotel to travelers. In the What’s News segment, Ryan shares some incredible statistics from a Booking.com report about pets and the hotel industry. Ryan and Anne also look at a New York Times article sharing stories of unique ways hotels are implementing pet-friendliness in their everyday operations. They also share tips on small pet-friendly changes that can be made at your hotel. Learn how to impress pet owners and create special moments for your furry guests at your property. If you are a pet-friendly hotel and need help with your property’s digital marketing or have a question for us, call or text 407-984-7455. Resources https://travelpredictions2020.com https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/travel/rescue-dogs-hotels.html https://lodgingmagazine.com/la-quinta-helps-business-travelers-take-a-paws-with-therapy-dogs/ 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. Thank you for listening. In today’s episode we are going to be talking about a different type of guests at your property – pets. We know how important our pets are to us and to our guests. We’re going to be speaking to some statistics that say just how important they are. Being a pet friendly hotel has its own challenges but also some really great opportunities to market yourself as a pet friendly hotel. So with me today, I have our Director of Marketing, she’s been a guest on the Suite Spot many a time, also a pet owner herself, Anne Sandoval. Welcome back to the sweet spot Anne. Anne Sandoval: Thanks Ryan, I’m especially excited to be here for this episode. Our listeners can’t tell, but you can tell I’m wearing my French bulldog shirt today in honor of this topic, so very excited. Ryan Embree: I love it and you know we at the Suite Spot, we’re almost 40 episodes in and we talk about all types of different hotels. We talk about franchise, independent, bed and breakfast hotels, but one of the topics that we haven’t yet covered are pet friendly hotels and that pet friendly tag could really fall under any of those categories. So I found this specifically very interesting in our What’s News segment of today’s episode was a graphic that Booking.com had just released called, “Travel Predictions 2020” so they did a survey of future travelers and kind of looking towards the future on what might be the next big thing. That’s what we’re always looking for in this industry. And they found some pretty interesting statistics surrounding pets when it comes to lodging and the hotel industry. So I’m going to go ahead and share a couple of those: 55% of global pet owners, so more than half are saying that their pet is as important to them as their children. 42% agree that they would choose a holiday destination based on whether they could take their pet, which is incredible statistic when we’re talking about when we’re looking for travelers to come into our area or choose our location, that is incredibly important to keep that in mind, and finally when we’re talking about revenue for a hotel – 49% of guests are willing to pay more to stay at an accommodation for a pet friendly hotel, which I think that we’ve come as pet owners – I think that we’ve probably become accustomed with in the hotel industry having to pay some sort of pet deposit or fee for having our pet with us during a hotel stay, but this is an extremely important, again for hoteliers to know when it comes to how we can gain extra revenue. Anne Sandoval: That’s so true Ryan and I think what’s really interesting about that 49% of travelers who are pet owners being willing to pay more to bring their pets with them. It actually makes a lot of sense to me because the cost of boarding your dog or hiring a pet sitter is pretty significant and as someone who owns two dogs myself, it’s something that really plays a role in our vacation planning and budgeting. Coupling that with the idea that most owners think of their pet as important to them as their children. They might actually be uncomfortable in some situations leaving their pet behind in an unfamiliar location or with a stranger. So for some travelers paying our pet fee at a hotel is definitely a better option. They get to keep their best friend with them and in some cases it’s even more cost effective than boarding. Ryan Embree: I agree and

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we dedicate our time to helping hoteliers navigate through major changes and transitions that happen at their properties. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Client Success & Operations Manager Edwin Pomales to discuss overcoming 5 major challenges that most hotels face at one time or another. From planned changes like renovations and flag transitions to unexpected changes like employee turnover and natural disasters, Ryan and Edwin cover it all. They share several examples of how Edwin’s client success team at Travel Media Group supports our hotel partners through these challenging times and they give tips on how to minimize disruption for your hotel business. If you are experiencing any one of these significant changes at your hotel and have a question about how to best handle it, call or text us at 407-984-7455. 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’m your host, Ryan Embree. Today we have a great episode for you, could be a little bit stressful on some of the stuff that we’re talking about, but ultimately it’s gonna help you in challenging times at your hotel. So with me today, I brought in Edwin Pomales, who is our client success and operations manager. Edwin, you’ve been on the Suite Spot now several different times for several different subjects, but wanted to welcome you in again for today’s episode. Edwin Pomales: Yeah, glad to be back, Ryan. Thank you for the invite and I’m really excited to talk about these things. And I think you’re right, sometimes it can be stressful at the property level. So I think it’s some really good information we’re going to go over today. Ryan Embree: Absolutely, so let’s go ahead and just start with your client success team. Where do you see their role when it comes to helping our partners with their hotel marketing? Edwin Pomales: First and most importantly it’s going to be there for support, during the different things that are happening on the property level. It is important that we’re able to be there for GMs and owners to help them through situations that may be unique to their property, but we may be more accustomed to being that we work with so many properties. And on the flip side really integration, just making sure that any processes that they have in place at the property level, the full staff knows about it, everybody is familiar with the goals of it, and with that comes follow up on a regular basis. So support and integration of ideas are two major goals for our client success team. Ryan Embree: And that’s what we’re going to talk about today because hotels are 365 days a year, 24/7. When you have a business like that, things can change in a moment’s notice. So that’s where your team comes in. Kinda helps ease that tension, that seamless transition. And when those major changes do happen, we have processes in place to make sure that it doesn’t get too overwhelming because we know the day to day life of a hotelier is overwhelming as it is, now you add all of these changes to it, it can really have an impact. We want to make sure that impact is as small as possible. So what we’re going to do today, just to set the agenda, not to put you on the spot Edwin, but we’re going to go through five major changes that happen in the hotel industry. Some of these changes are planned and some of them are unplanned. So we’re going to walk through each one of those and we’re going to talk about tips and best practices that your team uses from Travel Media Group’s end on how we deal with this for our partners and along way we’re going to give some good advice, if something like this is happening at your property. Maybe some ways, again, to just make that impact as small as possible so that you can run your hotel successfully. And the first one we’re going to talk about is a planned – most of the time – is going to be a planned major change and that’s a flag change or a brand change. So talk to us about kind of what the first steps are with your team when a hotelier tells you that they’re switching flags. Edwin Pomales: Yeah, I think for us the first step is being proactive as possible. So the better the advanced notice we have, the more setup we can be for that change. For the first step for us is really figuring out when the official switch date is and and starting to map out what the changes need to look like as far as different directories, websites, social media. An

In this episode of Suite Spot, Ryan Embree discusses the importance of user-generated content in the hotel industry. Ryan shares where to locate user-generated content about your hotel online and how to leverage that information to better your business. He provides best practices on how to find issues shared in user-generated content like reviews and social media posts, and tips on how to fix the issues. Ryan also demonstrates how TMG OneView can help hoteliers easily consolidate all the user-generated content online about their hotels. If you have any questions about user-generated content or how Travel Media Group can help your hotel, reach out to us by either calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at [email protected]. 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. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot I am your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you for listening today, we’ve got a great episode. Today we’re going to talk about something that is very prevalent in the hotel industry. I know that we talk about it all the time to our hotel partners and that is user generated content or UGC. User generated content is defined as any form of content such as images, videos, text, and audio that has been posted by users. So in the hotel industry that would be our guests, our travelers – platforms like review sites, social media platforms, this is where our guests are posting that sort of content. And in the hotel industry we’re really starting to see the evolution of user generated content and where it fits into the decision making process when travelers are doing their research. We’re starting to see a blend of both social media and review sites. Ryan Embree: So today you can leave reviews on social media sites like Facebook and do those recommendations, but you could also create a personal profile on review sites like TripAdvisor. So again, this user generated content is starting to blend more and more. And the good news is that there’s more content than ever before out there about your hotel online, but it’s bad news if you don’t know what to do with that. So in this episode, what we’re going to look at is really how you can leverage that user generated content to navigate any sort of potential pitfalls or problems that you can uncover at your property and really capitalize on any opportunities that you can really mine from this data out there. So where can you find the data you need to identify potential pitfalls or even take advantage of those revenue opportunities? And that’s everywhere. Reviews, social media, all of that user generated content. Ryan Embree: Now you would think with guest reviews, it’s easy to identify those pitfalls and problems, right? Because that’s exactly what a review is. It’s telling you what you’re doing right and what is wrong with your hotel. Now that’s true in some ways, but let’s walk through this story. A traveler checks into your hotel. They’re extremely tired from a long drive and just want to to sleep, right? We’ve come across those guests all the time. They just want a place to rest their head after a long day. At home this guest prefers a harder than normal mattress to support their back, especially after being in a car all day driving. Now this guest happens unfortunately to be next to some very loud neighbors, but instead of calling the front desk, they stay in their room getting more and more upset with each hour that passes. The next day after checkout, this guest leaves a one star review about your property, complaining about the softness of the mattress and the noise that kept them up all night. Ryan Embree: Now ask yourself this, “How much of that falls on the hotelier?” “Is that review a true indictment of what is really wrong or a problem at your hotel?” Just because one guest doesn’t prefer the softness of your hotel’s mattress and this guest just happened to get stuck next to a family that was really loud and they didn’t contact you at the front desk to solve that issue. So yes, we can find maybe potential pitfalls or problems in reviews, but it sometimes can be difficult to decipher the true problems that exist. So how do you do that, right? The key is to look for patterns and trends, which can be extremely difficult to do if you’re simply responding once a week or you’re responding to dozen reviews at one sitting. Guests are not afraid to speak their minds, we know this and sometimes they have a lot on their mind. We’

In this episode of the Suite Spot, we help hoteliers prepare their properties for the slow season by discussing the best ways to optimize their hotel’s social media profiles. Kelly Albritton, Senior Product Analyst, joins host Ryan Embree to share insights from her experience working in Travel Media Group’s social media department. Ryan and Kelly cover important topics in this episode, from setting up automated messages on your social media accounts to leveraging social media ads to target new guests. Kelly suggests ideas on posting and how to measure the success of the social media campaigns your hotel runs. This is episode is a great guide on how to get more likes, engagement, and followers to your hotel’s social media profiles. If you are looking to learn more information about our social media solution or want to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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, hello everyone this is your host, Ryan Embree and welcome to the Suite Spot. In today’s episode we are going to talk about the up and coming slow season that is approaching, historically when we get in the winter, we know in the hotel and hospitality industry seems to – the wheels start turning a little bit slower. So we’re going to try today to give you some tips and best practices on how to use social media during the slow season to help with occupancy, help with ADR, help with social media growth. So in saying that, I’ve got an expert special guest with us today, senior product analyst, Kelly Albritton who works at Travel Media Group’s social media department. She has been with the company now for almost five years. So we’re really excited to have her on. So thank you Kelly for joining me today. Kelly Albritton: Thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: So let’s jump right in and talk about social media during your slow season, what would be kind of the first tip or best practice that you would tell a hotelier to get ready for the slow season? Kelly Albritton: Well the first thing I would tell them is to optimize your accounts and make sure everything is looking right. Making sure that your Facebook and your social media accounts have a fresh look and their a fresh destination every time that your potential guests might come visit your page. So you need fresh pictures. Think about the last time that you took property photos. Do they need to be updated? Then you can also use the images to transform your cover images, so you have the ability to create a slideshow or add videos to your cover image. So the first thing they’re seeing is always different. Ryan Embree: We talk about expectation when it comes to travelers and when they’re researching your property, whether it be on OTA sites, Facebook, other social media platforms. You want to make sure that those pictures that you’re presenting them are the best representation of your property. One, but also sets the right expectation. So it’s absolutely vital to make sure that those pictures are being refreshed. Now there’s a couple of things that you guys do with adding some of Facebook’s features for hotels. What are some of those things that you can add to a Facebook page for example, for a hotel? Kelly Albritton: Well probably the most important is adding a book now button on the top right corner of your page just so that it’s easily available and you want to make sure during the slow season that this is leading to the correct website. So make sure you check your book now button and the about information to make sure all the information is correct. Ryan Embree: And you can actually track some of those analytics with Facebook data, correct? Kelly Albritton: Yeah, it tracks the amount of times someone clicks on your links in the post and on the about section. Ryan Embree: And that’s a great way to kind of look at maybe when you need to tweak things is based on that conversion over the course of time. So one of the really important things we talk about when it comes to social media is using it as a form of communication for our travelers and for our guests. Some travelers might be reaching out for questions about the property, some guests might be requesting some inquiries or just giving feedback during stay, so what do you suggest to hoteliers when it comes to social media messaging? How should they prepare for that? Kelly Albritton: So as hoteliers, you guys are always busy and we want to make sure that you are ready to have the answers for the guests when they come up. So you can add an automated messaging system

In this special edition of the Suite Spot, we take a look at the Top 5 trending tags in online reviews today. Host, Ryan Embree is joined by the leader of the Travel Media Group review response team, Patrick O’Brien. Patrick and Ryan countdown each review sentiment tag, explaining what Patrick’s team looks for in the review and how they approach their response. They also give valuable tips on how to market the tags that are trending positively for your hotel and fix the tags that are trending negatively. If you are interested in joining Travel Media Group as an online review response partner, you can reach us by calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at [email protected]. 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. Welcome to another edition of the Suite Spot, today we have a very special edition which is focused all around review response and with me today I have a very special guest, Mr. Patrick O’Brien, aka Mr. Review Response, he’s our product development manager at Travel Media Group and he runs our respond and resolve department. Patrick want to welcome you to the Suite Spot. Patrick O’Brien: Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: Today, we’re going to do something I’m really excited about because Patrick, you and your team have been very hard at work, we’re going to get to some numbers here in a second, but we’re going to go through the top five sentiment tags that we find in reviews. So just to give our listeners a little bit of a background on the respond and resolve solution, how many reviews does your team respond to a month, right now? Patrick O’Brien: Right now we’re probably averaging around 22,000 – 24,000 reviews for hotels each month. They vary from positive to negative across the board. Ryan Embree: 22,000 – 24,000 that isn’t an incredible number. So you and your team are extremely busy. You also shared with me before this episode, year to date. So in 2019 we’re over 135,000 reviews that your team has responded to. So you guys really are the experts in hotel review response. Now when we talk about tags, can you kind of explain what I mean by a sentiment tags within a review? Patrick O’Brien: When most people look at review response, the idea is I’ve gotta, you know, follow up with this customer who left me some type of feedback. But I think when you actually look at reviews, they’re probably some of the best business intelligence that you can get cause these are people letting you know in high volume what’s working at your hotel and what’s not working at your hotel, and ideally for what’s working at your hotel, what people who are coming to your market and specifically coming to your property are really excited about, what’s adding the value to that stay. So we’ve identified about 45 to 50 different elements and so we look for those in every review. That allows you to take really what is very subjective with a, you know, a review that’s been left and quantify it and break it down into what was that review really about? Were they talking positively about the cleanliness of the property, about the sleep quality at the property? Some of the amenities that I offer, did they like them, do they not like them? For me, the sentiment tags and the reporting also can help a hotel really dive into when they are looking to either justify or to make capital investment decisions. You can use that analysis and that data that’s collected in all of those reviews to let you know, if I’m going to spend $500,000 to make improvements at my property out of these options, what is it going to give me the best bang for my buck? It’s using the information like that and really being able to, when you have these reviews in mass, to be able to look at them in a very quantifiable, analytic way. And so that’s what we try to do with the sentiment analysis. Ryan Embree: Awesome. So essentially to give a real life example, some of these guests will leave almost like a novel of a review and within that review they could be talking about maybe 10 to 15 different subjects about your hotel. Now if you’re just responding, a lot of those subjects could just get blended into that and you’re kind of just moving through it, you’re maybe not addressing every single subject that’s within that response while your team, what they do is they go in, they find those subjects, they tag them, and then they assign whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral. And then can roll all that up into some really coo

In this episode of Suite Spot, we discuss a research study recently conducted by Booking.com regarding Generation Z and travel. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Director of Marketing, Anne Sandoval, to explore the different traits of this maturing generation and their travel preferences. Ryan and Anne breakdown the data by identifying six distinct travel trends concerning Generation Z’s travel habits. Next, they share ideas on how to use digital marketing to attract and gain more share of Generation Z travelers. They also discuss social media influencers, adventure travel, and more ways to inspire this young generation to travel. To get more information about reaching Generation Z online or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Resources: https://destinationgenz.com/ 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 and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot, I am your host Ryan Embree, and if you’re a frequent listener of the Suite Spot, you’ll know that the first ever episode that we did here was about reaching millennials on Social Media. Now today we’re going to take this a step further and talk about another demographic and that’s Generation Z. Now, Booking.com recently released a comprehensive research study called Gen Z Unpacked where they surveyed Generation Z , which they consider between the ages of 16 and 24. They asked them about what was important to them when they travel and were able to get some really cool analytics about this up and coming generation. If you’re looking for the study itself, you can reference the link in our show notes. I’m joined by Anne Sandoval, our Director of Marketing, and we are going to be discussing six trends and traits that we’ve found in these statistics. We’re going to break those down and then we’re going to talk from a digital marketing standpoint, how you can leverage these statistics to make sure you are prepared to market and advertise your hotel to Generation Z as they mature and as they start traveling more and more. So without further ado, I’ll go ahead and welcome Anne to another episode of the Suite Spot. It’s great to have you on again Anne. Anne Sandoval: Thanks for having me again, Ryan. I’m happy to be here. Ryan Embree: So let’s go ahead and get started with the first trend that we uncovered in these statistics, which is Generation Z’s relationship with solo travel. One of the statistics that Booking.com revealed to us was that 34% of Generation Z planned to travel on their own at least once within the next decade. So a huge difference from, you know, maybe the other generations and hotels are really going to have to start accommodating for solo travelers. So Anne, how can hotels maybe just some tips and best practices on how they can do that. Anne Sandoval: Well, the first thing that comes to mind for me with solo travel is safety. You already have some great features at your property that are intended to help travelers feel like they and their belongings are safe and secure. So you can share with travelers amenities that you have, including an in-room safe. You can highlight other features like your well lit hallways, indoor corridors, and digital key cards to imply that you have traveler’s safety as a priority. The other really interesting stat that Booking shared is that 33% of Gen Z travelers prefer to be on their own in general when they travel. So this really implies that they’re not necessarily looking for a lot of human interaction, which is a little counterintuitive sometimes in hospitality. So you may want to consider incorporating technology that reduces that need for interaction. This could be something like an in-room voice assistant or a concierge text messaging system. So those are kind of the first ideas that come to mind. What do you think, Ryan? Ryan Embree: So when we talk about the digital marketing aspect of maybe how to attract or market to solo travelers, social media is a great way, obviously to reach travelers and to market your hotel. But when we’re talking about a solo traveler, they’re obviously looking for a completely different experience than maybe a family or even a business traveler would look for. So I think social media imaging and posts, they should appeal to solo travelers with almost a third of Gen Z saying that they are willing to travel alone within the next decade. You know, you can post about best tips and practices on solo travel and maybe gear your images a little bit more towards a solo traveler than the historical families or b

On this episode of Suite Spot, we have the distinct pleasure of welcoming special guest Mike Parent, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Coakley & Williams Hotel Management Company, to the podcast. Host Ryan Embree interviews Mike on the subject of multi-property hotel marketing as he shares a wealth of hospitality experience and knowledge. Mike speaks to Coakley Williams’ philosophy of curating a unique and targeted marketing strategy for each property within their portfolio. Mike also shares his approach to implementing effective marketing campaigns for new acquisitions and new-build properties. We discuss the balance of traditional and digital marketing technologies in today’s hotel landscape. This episode is a must-listen for anyone in the industry looking to learn more about building a successful hotel marketing campaign. To get more information about becoming a special guest on the Suite Spot or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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 and welcome, this is Ryan Embree your host of the Suite Spot. Another episode we have in a very special episode with a, another very special guest, Mr Mike Parent who is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Coakley and Williams Hotel Management Company, have the pleasure of introducing him for the first time to the Suite Spot. Mike is an innovator whose creative ideas has developed new revenue streams for hotel properties that he works with. And I want to go ahead and welcome Mike to the Suite Spot today, so thank you for joining me, Mike. Mike Parent: Thank you, Ryan, great to be with you. I appreciate you, including me. Ryan Embree: Absolutely, absolutely, and what we do with a lot of our guests on the Suite Spot, just to get a little background of how you started in the industry, the hotel industry itself. I think one of the things that makes it so unique is that everyone can come from really any place in hospitality. So I always find it absolutely fascinating to ask our guests, “Tell us a little bit about your background, how you got started in the industry and maybe the journey that led you to Coakley Williams.” Mike Parent: Sure. Well, I’ve been in the industry for many years. I started as a desk clerk at a hotel in Washington DC. I took a summer job while I was in college pursuing my degree in radio/TV broadcasting. For the first five years of my hotel career I worked mostly in operations. I was a desk clerk, I was a night auditor, I did maintenance during the winter, I was assistant manager of a hotel, but I was eventually exposed to hotel sales when I worked for a larger hotel and I saw what they were doing in sales and that really got my interest. So my first sales gig was for a new hotel that was opening near the Watergate in Washington DC called Guest Quarters. That brand is now evolved into the Doubletree brand, which is part of the Hilton family. But since Guest Quarters my hotel sales journey as you call it, has taken me through many major branded and independent hotels, several management companies and two senior level positions at major brands. I was Director of Sales and Marketing for Taj Hotels of India when they had six hotels in Washington DC and I was also Vice President of new hotels sales support at Choice Hotels International. Ryan Embree: That’s awesome. So again, quite the plethora of knowledge and experience there. I find it such a common trend that a lot of people in the industry, you know, just got started as a, you know, front desk clerk, you know, you made your way up the ranks there. I have to ask, especially, you know, starting from front end positions, how has that in your experience served you in your position? Mike Parent: Yeah, I mean, I think working in operations positions helps a salesperson to understand what happens throughout the hotel. It’s one thing to go out and sell a hotel and its features and benefits and services, but you have to know what the delivery is like and you have to be sensitive to operations as well. So definitely that experience helped me understand that better and put me in a better position for sales and marketing. Ryan Embree: You know you talked about your first sales being for a new hotel in DC we know how difficult that is for a sales job, for one, you have to manage marketing for multiple hotels. So talk to us a little bit about that, what are your biggest challenges when it comes to managing marketing for multiple hotels? Mike Parent: Sure, at Coakley & Williams, first of all, we’re a third party management company

On this special edition of Suite Spot, we welcome hotel owner, entrepreneur, consultant, and social media influencer, Rupesh Patel to the studio. Ryan and Rupesh trade thoughts on the correlation between a hotel’s online reputation and revenue success. Rupesh shares his secrets on how to increase feedback from guests and grow the number of online reviews for your hotel. They also talk about the importance of responding to reviews and the rising expectations of guests and brands when it comes to online review response. Rupesh also explains how social media can also be leveraged for success. As a TMG client and brand advocate, Rupesh explains how using TMG solutions and prioritizing guest experience can have a positive influence on a hotel’s bottom line. To get more information about becoming a special guest on the Suite Spot or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone and welcome to another exciting episode of the Suite Spot. I am your host, Ryan Embree, super special edition. We are very, very excited for this episode because not only is this a special edition, but we have a special guest in house with us and that is Mr Rupesh Patel. So I’d like to welcome him to the Suite Spot for the first and hopefully not the last time. He is a hotel owner, manager, entrepreneur, consultant, social media influencer, I’m sure there’s about five or six more titles that I’m missing there, Rupesh but thank you for coming on the Suite Spot with us. Rupesh Patel: Hey, you missed pizza guy. Ryan Embree: Pizza guy, pizza guy, absolutely. So I want to get started, obviously a lot of people are familiar with you. They might follow you on Linkedin or Instagram and kind of know your story. So instead of asking, you know, your background in the industry, it felt like I could switch it up a little bit and just ask kind of what your earliest memory of being in a hotel and how that might’ve influenced you later in life. Rupesh Patel: Absolutely. So I grew up in the business, like a lot of people or a lot of people that I know. Fifth grade, summer of fifth grade, my dad says we’re moving to Florida. And I grew up in Houston, Texas, right? Was raised there, I was born in England, moved to Texas when I was six months old, and one day my dad says “I’m leaving for like five months and I’ll be back.” And the next thing you know, fifth grade ends and my dad’s like, we’re moving to Florida. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to miss out on my neighbors that I was best friends with and everybody I knew in Texas,” right? We moved and he said, “We bought a motel in South Florida”. And I said, “okay, we know nothing about motels,” Right? And so we, made the journey. We drove, I think it was like 20 hours from Texas to South Florida and we moved into this motel. It was a 52 room motel and it was a motel, motel built in like the forties. And we lived on property and we did that for a long time. My parents just sold it a year and a half ago now. Oh yes, so they had it for a long time. And so I grew up doing everything like front desk, housekeeping, laundry, sweeping, actually sweeping. There was no blowers back in the day that we could afford sweeping the parking lot, cigarette buds, all of that stuff, right? And so it was a great experience, learned a lot and saw a lot of crazy things like most people do in the hotel business Ryan Embree: And in Florida as well. So, but I’m sure that experience of doing everything in the hotel, doing almost every single task, I think it’s served you probably a lot in where you are today with, with having your own hotel and maybe, you know, empathizing with, with some of your other employees and that’s created a good relationship between you and your employees. Rupesh Patel: Yeah. I can actually feel exactly how they’re feeling when somebody is yelling at you or if a guest is complaining about something or cleaning rooms, cause I clean rooms and this was out in a motel, right? So you’re sweating, you’re not in a cooled corridor, right? You’re sweating out there in the Florida, 100 degree heat, right, with the humidity. So, but yeah, you know, actually I hated it. I really hated it. I don’t, I don’t think my parents made it fun for us, right? But the way I kind of teach my kids, and maybe some kids our friends do these days, right. They just said, go do it, right? We had no choice, right? And maybe that’s

In this episode of Suite Spot, we celebrate the one year anniversary of Travel Media Group’s user-generated content management system: TMG OneView®. Host Ryan Embree is joined by the architect of OneView and VP of Product Development & Technology Jason Lee. Jason shares the inspiration behind OneView and how it is unlike any other reputation or social media tool in the hotel industry today. Ryan and Jason discuss OneView’s versatility as a multi-user collaboration tool and scalability in a multi-property environment. They also share expert tips on how users can most of their OneView feed and give a sneak peek for what could be next for this amazing tool. If you are interested in learning more about accessing your hotel’s TMG OneView® feed or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Please Note: OneView free trial offer expires 12/31/2019 Related Links: www.tmgoneview.com/onboard 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 and welcome. Everyone knew another exciting episode of the Suite Spot. I am very excited about this episode today we are going to be talking about Travel Media Group’s, OneView feed with the architect and vice president of product and development and technology, Jason Lee himself. So he joins us again on another episode of the Suite Spot. So welcome in Jason. Jason Lee: Thank you very much Ryan. Glad to be here. Ryan Embree: And this episode has been long overdue. You know obviously such an innovation, OneView is as a tool for current customers and for hoteliers themselves. I think it’s taken us so long to get you on here to talk about this tool is because it’s been just constantly innovated. So we’re really, really excited to kind of share what OneView is all about the features and benefits that it brings the hoteliers every day when it comes to user generated content. So I figured we’d start there. Just give us a brief description of maybe how you would describe it to a hotelier. Jason Lee: So OneView is sort of like its namesake, right? It’s a single view of a bunch of information. So like other business intelligence platforms you might, you might have at your hotel where you’re seeing rate information, you’re seeing, occupancy and ADR. This is a place that is a centralized hub where you can see not only reputation, which, which other platforms have as well. But also specifically social media, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter. So you can actually see and interact with all of those pieces of data. So OneView would be really, a centralized view and platform for action on reputation in social media. So where guests are trying to communicate with you externally, this is the place where you can pick up that information and then you can actually communicate back. Ryan Embree: So it’s a consolidated place where all forms of communication digitally, where travelers are reaching out to a hotelier, pulled into one place where you can not only view that information but also interact with them. Jason Lee: Right. So you get a TripAdvisor review and you go in and you can click on respond and I can respond to that TripAdvisor review. Right underneath that TripAdvisor review, it could be a Facebook comment and you could like that comment. You could comment back to that comment. If that person comments on your comment, you can make another comment or like that comment. So you have all these additional layers of, of um, communication. But it also becomes a hub of communication beyond the guest. And that is where all of these, pieces of information that are coming externally into your hotel. Some of them have real valuable information and actionable information. Jason Lee: Like, “Hey, I was in my room last night and the faucet leaked all night.” Um, I could take that and I could assign that tile, maybe to my front desk manager research and find out who this guest was. And see if you can find out who that was and what room they’re in and make a maintenance ticket. Or I could send it straight to my maintenance engineer and just say, “Hey, I know that this, this person was in room 118, can you please go and handle this and let me know when it’s done?” So you can send that one piece of reputation out and then have them action it back to you. In the same way, you can also spread good news, right? So somebody could have said, “hey, I really loved the way that Mary treated me at the front desk. She was amazing. It really made all the difference in my stay.” And I could take that and I could share that piece of reputation with Mary an

In this special edition episode of Suite Spot, Host Ryan Embree is joined by the head of Travel Media Group’s product and development team, Jason Lee, to share his key takeaways from the recent HITEC 2019 conference in Minneapolis. Ryan and Jason talk about all the hospitality tech innovations that were shared at the conference including Alexa for Hospitality and different AI systems. Jason also shares his ideas for what’s next for technology in the hotel industry and what that means for hoteliers moving 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 a special edition of the Suite Spot. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. And today’s episode we are going to be doing a recap of HITEC 2019 Minneapolis, which I had the pleasure to attend with our Vice President of Product Development Jason Lee who’s here to share some notes and thoughts with us about the conference itself. Now, Jason, you are the veteran of these types of conferences you’ve been multiple times, so just want to get some maybe initial thoughts on this year’s conference and comparison to years past. Jason Lee: Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of these conferences have themes, you know, and our theme for sure this year I think even from the keynote on was making things easier on the guest and booking, and research in-stay, post-stay. Um, but frictionless technology in the travel space where that always hasn’t been the case in terms of the kind of technology the hotels deliver or hotel companies deliver to guests. So I think that that definitely was the theme this year in my opinion. Or maybe that’s just what I came away with in years past. I think there had been other types of AI or machine learning or these kinds of themes where we are now, that might be a little more commonplace. And, and you know, it’s really more about how do you apply these technologies to help guests have a better experience or an experience that they’re not feeling like, I’m, I’m using tech. They’re just, it’s frictionless, you know, it’s easy. So, um, and I think that is the next step. That’s the, that’s the evolution that the hotel industry has to take, especially as we’re, you know, starting to sunset legacy technology and booking and legacy GDS tech that is probably, you know, the, I think you’re starting to see a lot more, uh, advanced technology happening, uh, at the ground level work guests interact with hotel availability. Ryan Embree: Customers are looking for that frictionless experience because they’re seeing that and experiencing that, um, in every other aspect of their life. So, you know, the hotel industry as a whole has the reputation for kind of lagging behind on some of these technologies. So when a customer walks in and still has to fill out maybe a breakfast form hanging on the outside of their door, you know, that’s not the same sort of frictionless technology that they’re experiencing on a daily basis and every other aspect of their lives. So the, the customer’s expectations are starting to rise. Do you, do you think the hotel industry can keep up? Why do you think they lag so far behind? Jason Lee: It’s always about moving parts. I think that’s all technology. It’s about how do you, how do you satisfy the demands of privacy, the demands of security, to the maybe the expectations of revenue from a hotel. I want this kind of revenue, or I want this, I want guests to interact with me this way. And before you got into, or we’ve gotten into the mobile when where people are doing so much more. And I think even in the last couple of years, the statistics in terms of bookings continue to rise. But I’m always shocked when I see the number, you know, at around 50% or less in mobile bookings because you’re like, man, you do everything on a phone. Who’s going to their desktop to do that? But they still do. So. So to answer your question, I think there, it’s all of these, these technologies that are in, everybody has their own, Marriott has theirs, Hilton has theirs the GDS is another one, you know, Expedia and booking and what they’re doing in their various sites. All of those things have to come together at some point. And if you’re gonna, if you’re like, I’m going to call, I’m going to create a frictionless experience from somebody that can access me from all of these different points. I think it’s challenging, you know, where you look at an Airbnb or you or some of these other industries wher

In this episode of Suite Spot, we focus our attention on the bed and breakfast segment of the hospitality industry. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Director of Marketing Anne Sandoval to talk about how your bed and breakfast property can stay competitive with the rising threats of Airbnb and vacation rentals. Ryan and Anne give tips on how to modernize your B&B’s marketing strategy and optimize your property’s presence online. They share several examples of how to leverage websites, social media, and online reputation in order to gain market share and grow online revenue. They also speak to the importance of responding to reviews for bed and breakfast property owners and how critical it is to maintain positive reviews online. If you are interested in receiving a consultation for your bed & breakfast property or to submit a topic request for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455.   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. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the Suite Spot. I am your host, Ryan Embree. Got another great episode for you today, and one of the best things about working at Travel Media Group is the type and scales of hotels that we get to interact with on a daily basis. From those 500+ room resorts to those smaller hotels, maybe mid-sized hotels all the way down to properties that might be less than 10 rooms a bed and breakfast for example, which is a great transition into what our episode today is going to lead us and we felt like this was important to focus on, the bed and breakfast market, because they are in a situation that’s competition with Airbnb and vacation rentals that are coming up along with the local hotels that are also pushing for market share. So in a competitive landscape like we are in 2019, we thought it fitting to talk about your bed and breakfast property and what you can do to market and grow your revenue. Ryan Embree: So who better to speak with us about marketing for a property than our Director of Marketing Miss Ann Sandoval. Welcome to the show Anne. Anne Sandoval: Thanks so much for having me again, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. I wanted to talk to you. Um, you know, right off the bat about kind of where a good starting point is, uh, for these bed and breakfasts owners, um, that might’ve had this property for years. They haven’t had to deal with, again, the competitive landscape of, you know, vacation rentals, airbnb’s maybe they condos close to them now are selling for Airbnb’s. Where do they start when it comes to creating a marketing strategy? Anne Sandoval: Yeah. So when we talk about a marketing strategy, a lot of these initial tips are going to be really just the foundation of understanding your property and your local area and really taking a look at what your current situation is so that you can then figure out what new strategies you can implement. So you may already be familiar with the answers to these questions about your property, but I think it’s important to ask them and revisit them. First, taking a look at what the advantages and disadvantages are about your property and figuring out what guests love and how you can leverage those things. Next, analyzing the competition in your local area. As Ryan was just talking about, there are more and more lodging opportunities for travelers coming to your location, and so it’s important to know if you want to get more market share, where is the market share going right now and what properties out there, maybe on Airbnb or maybe more traditional hotels are your biggest competition, and paying attention to what they’re doing to market to guests. Next is to really figure out who your typical guest is. So you’re already attracting guests to your property and as a, B&B, you get to know those guests really well. So it should be pretty easy for you to identify trends among those guests. What are the reasons why they’re coming to your local area? What type of experience are they looking to get out of a stay with you? And then, how are those guests finding you? When your guests book with you now, do they book over the phone? Do they book online? How are they finding you? And what is it that they found along the way that made them choose to book with you? Ryan Embree: And I think another great point to add to that is also knowing your inventory. When we talk about B&B’s, you know, you could look at a hotel that has a hundred rooms and they could be at 50% occupancy. They’re still going to have 50 rooms that are being stayed in for that night, and they’re

In this episode of Suite Spot, we discuss reports that Google Reviews surpassed Booking.com as the number one review distribution site. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Jason Lee to explore how Google is positioning itself in the hotel industry and what it means for individual properties moving forward. Ryan and Jason also give insight about a recent review response study conducted by Revinate. Jason gives his thoughts on why more budget and midscale properties are responding to reviews than luxury properties, and why year over year 5-star response rates are trending down. We also discuss the impact that responding to Google reviews has on SEO. In the Q&A segment, we put Jason back in the chair of a hotel general manager and ask his thoughts on how he would approach Google reviews for his individual property. To submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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. Ryan Embree: Hey, hello and, welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. As always, I am your host, Ryan Embree. Today we’ve got a great episode, and I am joined by one of our more frequented guests on the show, Mr. Jason Lee, who is the vice president of product development and technology at Travel Media Group, so I’ll go ahead and welcome you in. Once again, Jason, thanks for being on the show today. Jason Lee: Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: We’re going to get into a lot of topics today and the episode itself is called Google reviews and we’re going to talk about the big news coming out about Google reviews, but I wanted to first kind of start talking just about review generation as a whole because Revinate came out with a report here on some really cool analytics when it comes to online reviews, review response, review generation and wanting to get kind of your opinion and your thoughts on some of the information that was found. Jason Lee: Yeah. Ryan Embree: Before we get into Google reviews, let’s talk about online review generation as a whole and when we still see year over year growth, but we saw the rate of review growth has slowed. Uh, any idea you think, why this is happening? Jason Lee: Well, I think it’s interesting because I think the percentage of year over year has slowed it just because we’re maybe starting to see critical mass in response. So you see new travelers coming up that might be more apt to leave reviews or you see a generation of more tech savvy travelers that rely on reviews and are also leaving reviews and getting reviews. You’re kind of reaching for a technology crowd that is going to eventually reach critical mass in terms of like, you’re not going to see those big giant numbers, um, that you use to see where, you know, I, I remember like in the early days of reputation, it was like every year TripAdvisor was doubling the number from the previous years. Right? Ryan Embree: Right. Jason Lee: So it was like this crazy jump and now there’s more places to leave reviews. But you’ve also reached this place where there’s, there are more reviews coming in now than ever before. I can tell you that right now, but I can, but also at the same time you’re not, you may not see those giant gains like we had before. Ryan Embree: Right, and that sort of growth is, it’s just not sustainable as far as, I mean it gets to a point, like you said, the critical mass. So do you kind of predict the trend of review growth is going to continue year over year? Jason Lee: I think so. Um, you take a site like Google where Google was really inconsequential in hospitality, uh, in inside of especially hotel reviews. So you were looking at, they were the smallest. Um, in a lot of cases, almost completely inconsequential to the hotel. That’s how low the numbers where we’re talking like five or 10 a year. Ryan Embree: Right. Jason Lee: And then you’ve seen this, this shift. So it’s definitely a shift in a site like Google where they’re making it easier. They’re making the technology more accessible. I think that you’re going to see those types of things continue to happen up-and-coming sites like Agoda. While we saw like a little bit of a review fluctuation year over year. I do feel like OTAs like that have a lot of, there’s space there. There’s space to move. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t want to get too far into it because I know we’re going to talk about a little bit later in the episode, but why do you think it did take Google that long to get, I mean everyone searches on Google for hotels

In this episode of Suite Spot, we tackle the trending topic of vanity websites in the hotel industry. TMG Website Analyst Stephanie Courtois joins Host Ryan Embree to share best practices on how to create and optimize the perfect hotel vanity website for your property. Stephanie and Ryan cover important steps for building a hotel vanity website, from picking a URL to ensuring the site is responsive and ADA compliant. Stephanie also discusses why it is critical for hoteliers to have vanity websites for their properties. Stephanie concludes the interview by offering tips to hoteliers on how to leverage website analytics and how she shows ROI to her customers. To learn more information about creating a hotel vanity website for your property or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455.   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. Ryan Embree: Okay. Hello, and welcome everyone to another exciting episode of the Suite Spot. I am your host, Ryan Embree and today we have a very special edition of the Suite Spot and personally very excited to welcome in our guest today. Now if you’re a current website customer of Travel Media Group and are partnering with us, then her voice will sound very familiar to you and that is Ms. Stephanie Courtois and she is our Webmaster. Is that correct? Stephanie C.: Yeah, I’d say so. I’ve heard that term used. I don’t mind it. Ryan Embree: So Stephanie, you pretty much handle everything that has to do with our hotel partners’ websites, and we’ve been wanting to get you on the Suite Spot to really kind of talk through your process with hoteliers when they start creating a website, you know, maybe some dos and don’ts, best practices and kind of your process when it comes to just vanity websites overall and what you do to optimize them. Now for those listeners that don’t know, Stephanie, I thought what we could do off the beginning, uh, to welcome you to the show is kind of get a better sense of your background at Travel Media Group and really just the history of your professional experience. Stephanie C.:Yeah, absolutely. So I actually started on the advertising side in content creation and branding. So that’s really kind of where I got an interest in just communications and just digital marketing in general. So with my bachelor’s I got in advertising. I kind of use that mindset to go start at Travel Media Group on our product team, and I was a product administrator. So essentially I had hands on with all of our digital products, social media, respond and resolve, all of that wonderful stuff, and I was able to be hands on. So I managed account creation and just making sure that everything was done to deadline and helping out where any departments were kind of struggling a little bit. So with that said, I also included websites and I felt a very natural gravitation toward websites. It really spoke to me because I was able to do content, and editing, and design, and just really know good photography and really, um, marinating all of the elements into a position. And I eventually moved into that role. So now I am a Webmaster, as Ryan likes to say. And I manage all of our Travel Media Group websites and really get to dive into each property and I get to learn more about each hotel. Ryan Embree: Awesome. So I thought again, what would be valuable for our listeners to hear is maybe kind of the process, uh, the first maybe couple things that happen when it comes to creating websites. So let’s say I’m a hotelier, I’ve signed up with Travel Media Group to build my perfect vanity website, and I give you and your team a call. And I know one of the first things that you do when creating website is picking a URL. So what advice, can you give me a hotelier or listener about picking out the right URL for your hotel website? Stephanie C.:Yeah. So like you said, the domain is kind of the first step in starting that process. So a good thing to keep in mind when selecting a domain, so just make it easy to type and remember. So if you’re telling a guest what your URL is that they can remember easily and that it’s something that’s quick to fit on business cards or any kind of marketing collateral that you have and just something that really just represents your property well. Um, with that said, also target your area. So using your city in the actual domain name can really help localize it. Also try to avoid hyphens and numbers in most cases. Of course there’s exceptions for certain franchises that have numbers in the name where that’s

In this episode of Suite Spot, we discuss the growing trend of going green in the hotel industry. Priscilla Osorio, Marketing Content Manager at Travel Media Group, joins host Ryan Embree to give advice to hoteliers on how to implement sustainable initiatives at your property without breaking the bank.   A recent Lodging Survey conducted by the AHLA, American Hotel and Lodging Association, in partnership with STR reports indicated that one of the most popular trends among travelers were green initiatives at hotels. In this Suite Spot episode, Ryan and Priscilla brainstorm several ideas for hoteliers looking to get started with green initiatives at their hotels, but might not have the budget to invest in major renovations. From starting a recycling program to selling reusable water bottles and straws to guests, this episode serves as a great beginner’s guide to going green. If you have some innovative ways that your hotel is going green we would love to hear from you. You can also submit a question by calling or texting 407-984-7455.   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. Ryan Embree: All right. Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embry. We’ve got a great episode for you today and in today we’re going to start with the, What’s News. Before I kind of introduced the topic, we’re going to talk about a AHLA survey that was recently conducted partnering with STR, which the, the content and data and analytics was just released in March of 2019. And in the survey, just really gathered some analytics and data in the hospitality sector and was talking about how hotels are advancing guest experiences and some of the top hotel industry trends. And as you can imagine, one of the hot topics was trying to focus efforts on getting millennials. Oh, I’m sure we’ve all heard that from time to time how important that segment is and trying to convert them. Ryan Embree: But today we’re actually going to talk about another topic that was brought up and that is going green. And it’s an incredibly popular trend. In fact, it was pretty astonishing stat here as of 2018 25% of all U.S. Properties, so a quarter of all U.S. properties had received green certification, which is the gold standard of hotel sustainability. Now to put that in perspective, in 2016 this percentage was only at 16% almost 10% higher and just a span of two years. So hoteliers are starting to understand the importance, brands are starting to understand the importance of this going-green trend and customers are starting to appreciate that. And from this data we’re going to look at some more statistics within the Suite Spot here, but we’re really going to focus on maybe not so much for the hotelier that has enough capital to go ahead and redo their entire hotel and is sustainable or greenway or if you’re familiar with lead certification, this is maybe for the hotelier that’s just looking to put some new initiatives, almost like a beginner’s guide to going green tips and best practices for hoteliers. Ryan Embree: With me today, I thought we would bring in Priscilla Osorio who recently wrote a blog article in the Travel Media Group blog, which is titled Promoting Healthy Lifestyles at Your Hotel. And I thought this would be a perfect transition into this kind of going green, a topic that we have for today. So first and foremost, I want to welcome Priscilla to the podcast once again. Priscilla Osorio: Thanks, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Tell me a little bit about this blog article, some of the ideas, and maybe we can go back and forth on some best practices for this kind of going green and getting started with going green. Priscilla Osorio: Yeah. So the idea of the article was to promote a healthy lifestyle at your hotel. And I think a common misconception is that in order to provide sustainable practices and eco-friendly solutions it is really costly. However, in the article we kind of touch upon smaller ways that you can, you can be a bit more sustainable and eco friendly. And one of those was providing like a local level of food products at your hotel. You could just provide fruits and vegetables from, let’s say like you can buy them at a local farmer’s market or just locally sourced products. And the chances are that these locally sourced products are more likely to be produced in sustainable practices when it comes to their cultivation. And ultimately you’d be helping locals and the environment in doing so. Ryan Embree: And I think travelers appreciate that too. I mean, we&#8

In this episode of Suite Spot, we speak to the unbelievable prosperity that the hotel industry is currently experiencing while preparing hoteliers for a time where revenue growth might slow. Host Ryan Embree teams up with Director of Marketing Anne Sandoval to brainstorm ideas and ways to reach new guest segments to insulate your revenue from an economic slowdown. Ryan and Anne share advice on how to identify the best opportunities within your guest/audience portfolio and how you can capitalize on those opportunities by leveraging your property’s amenities, features, and location. They also look at cost-effective ways to use digital platforms like social media and review sites to target the ideal market segment for your hotel. If you are interested in receiving a digital consultation for your hotel or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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. Ryan Embree: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Suite Spot. I’m very excited about this episode today. I think it comes at just the right time when we’re talking about diversifying the type of guests that your hotel is attracting. And we’re going to start in the, What’s News from a recently released CBRE report talking about the industry and how it’s going to be performing within the next couple of years. Now of course this is just a forecast, but like we’ve been hearing over the past couple of years, life is good right now in the hotel industry. rev par is up, you know, we had that uh, amazing streak of rev par growth and CBRE is kind of echoing that in this report stating that they found in 2019 they’re predicting a 2.5% increase in rev par with an additional 2% increase in 2020. Now, however, in 2021 they’re actually projecting a slight decline to rev par of 0.6%. So you know what I wanted to really get through and, and this is kind of what we’ve been hearing, we’ve been kind of hearing this trend of cautious optimism for hoteliers. Ryan Embree: We’re in a, we’re in a time period right now of extreme growth of rev par growth, you know, revenues and all time high for most hoteliers, but they keep having that cautious optimism idea in our head of, you know, “this is great, but there’s going to be a point where this, this train kind of stops” and what we’re going to discuss today is really setting you up for that, right? We’re in this time period right now of a lot of revenue growth. But what happens if all of a sudden we do hit that blip, you know, whether it be in 2021 whether it be next year, this year, are you prepared for it? So we felt that it was necessary to do a episode like this. You know, right in the heart of this rev-par growth to really prepare yourself for when that, that rev par decrease might happen. Ryan Embree: So in saying that with me, who better to talk about how to market to new guests than our own, uh, Director of Marketing at Travel Media Group Anne Sandoval. So welcome in Anne. Anne Sandoval: Thanks for having me Ryan. Ryan Embree: Like I said at the very beginning of this episode, very excited to kind of talk about this topic because you know, when, when I was in my past role as a digital specialist, you know, I would talk to a lot of hoteliers, you know, they would have a really great sense of where their occupancy was coming from. A majority of their occupancy. You know, I’d talked to a hotelier and they say, “listen, I’ve got about 80 to 90% of my occupancy coming from oil and gas workers” and I would always present to them that idea of, “okay, well what happens if that occupancy all of a sudden diminished or disappeared?” Ryan Embree: You know, where, what are you doing to make sure that you’re, essentially just like your business portfolio, how are you expanding your guests portfolio and making sure you’re not depending too much on one market segment or type of guests, you know, and some of you might be out there and have leisure travelers, right? Family travelers in the summer. Well, what happens when that one summer comes and it just is raining the entire summer and that occupancy is not there? What can you do to really insulate yourself to make sure that if one of your market segments drops off, it’s really not going to completely derail your revenue and your goals for the year. So I want to go ahead and get kind of your maybe tips and or maybe a starting point for some hoteliers when it, when it comes to, “I think I have a good idea of where my guests are

In this episode of Suite Spot, we discuss one of the fastest growing and most popular social media platforms in 2019, Instagram. On the heels of another exciting innovation from Travel Media Group’s product development team, we introduce the addition of Instagram for hoteliers as a part of our social media solution. Host, Ryan Embree, is joined by Jason Lee to talk about how hoteliers can leverage and implement Instagram into their digital marketing strategy. Jason shares what type of content should be shared by hoteliers on their business accounts and how to use the Instagram analytics to sharpen their efforts. Ryan and Jason also share their thoughts on influencer marketing and whether it is a good fit for hotels. If you are looking to learn more information about creating an Instagram for your hotel or want to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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. Ryan Embree: Okay, hello and welcome to another addition and episode of the Suite Spot. And today we are going to be diving into Instagram. You’ve heard us talk on this podcast a lot about tons of social media solutions for hoteliers, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, but we really haven’t explored in that much depth about Instagram. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to really talk about this because it’s one of the fastest growing social media platforms out there and businesses are starting to leverage that they’re, they’re figuring out how to leverage that. And today I am joined by Jason Lee who is a huge proponent of Instagram for hoteliers. And uh, most recently we have actually launched, Instagram for hoteliers as a part of our social media solutions. Is that correct? Jason Lee: That is correct. Yeah. We, um, now have the ability to post directly to Instagram through our console as well as pickup all of the properties, Instagram posts that they’re posting on their own that other people are posting on their page or, or mentioning them. And then also all of the analytics that go along with that, putting comments that come in from that. And actually recently as today, we were actually pulling video, so video actually into the console as well. So really exciting. Ryan Embree: That’s awesome. Congratulations to you and your team. You guys have really been busy with, you know, the new launch of custom social and then adding this to kind of that social media arsenal for hoteliers is really going to take it to the next level. So that kind of transitions me into my first question. Why Instagram? Why did you feel like Instagram was necessary? Jason Lee: I mean it’s really an obvious next step in the evolution of our platform because it is influencing travelers. And so that’s really what we look at. What’s influencing travelers? What’s influencing people to, to take trips? What’s influencing people while they’re on a trip? And when you look at Instagram and it hits all of those things straight on, including, um, a little bit of a younger set as well. I think the social media platforms are constantly evolving. And you look at Facebook now, and I think I’ve said this before, maybe even on this show, but I feel like Facebook has almost a utility, you know, it’s like a place where there’s news and there’s a place where their people are posting. There’s still a massive amount of people on it. But in terms of personal engagement or entertainment inspiration, I think Instagram is coming out up front. What’s interesting too also I think is that Facebook maybe has a little bit of a black eye because of some of the things that have happened from privacy issues and the Cambridge Analytica stuff from last year. And so you see people leaving Facebook. I mean, I don’t think there’s any thing to worry about in terms of numbers are still like the majority of numbers that are on there. But, but Instagram really I think has, has taken a dominant place in travel inspiration and, and um, and I think entertainment. Ryan Embree: It’s so unique how everyone uses kind of their social media. Cause I, I completely agree with you. You know, Facebook I feel like has evolved as well as like Twitter, you know, I think a lot of travelers or even just consumers in general might look at Twitter not as inspiration, but they might look at it as a tool to communicate with businesses. Um, you know, we see examples all the time of people tweeting at businesses if, if the customer service isn’t there or just trying to communicate with them. So I think it&#8

On this special edition of Suite Spot, we host our first remote guest Pat Kobela, Regional Director of Sales at Chartwell Hotels. Ryan Embree interviews Pat as she shares some insights and best practices from her years of experience in the hotel industry. Ryan and Pat trade thoughts on what makes a successful sales and marketing strategy in 2019 and Pat gives advice on what has made her so successful in her role at Chartwell Hotels. This episode covers everything from renovations to social media and serves as a great marketing guide for hoteliers. To get more information about becoming a special guest on the Suite Spot or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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. Thank you everyone for listening to the Suite Spot. Today we have a very special episode on the Suite Spot. We’re actually going to be joined by a special guest Pat Kobela who is the regional director of sales at Chartwell Hotels and she is one of our very first guests that’s not with us in studio. So we’re super excited to be doing this with her and want to thank you, Pat for joining us today. Pat Kobela: Thank you Ryan. I’m excited about this also. Ryan Embree: Great. So, um, just for a little bit of background. Let’s start by letting our listeners to know kind of what your experiences in the hotel industry. Pat Kobela: Okay, sure. So, um, I have been in various facets of the overall tourism industry for the past probably 30 years. Even during college I was a flight attendant for a private company, then went on to travel agency work and went into hotels. Both, some back of the house operations, front line sales, front office management, that kind of stuff. And (I) really expanded there with my connections and ended up doing some tourism publishing, advertising, again also in the tourism end of the industry, and then ultimately owning my own business for advertising, AD agency type of work and, ultimately becoming a consultant in, um, for hotels and the tourism industry. So, and now I’m currently with Chartwell Hotels and the regional director is a fairly new position, um, for the nine hotels. So that’s growing and we’re expanding from there. Ryan Embree: That’s awesome Pat. And I’m sure a lot of that experience has served you well in the position, you know at every facet and kind of a corner of the travel industry, you know, from your early stages of starting as a travel agent to, you know, the advertising and marketing side. And with that, you’ve brought a lot of fresh perspective and ideas that you’ve shared actually with myself and our director of marketing without kind of giving away, uh, you know, all your secrets. You know, I would know we’ve talked about some unique and creative ideas you’ve worked with even with the CVBs (Convention and Visitors Bureau). Um, could you share some of those ideas? Pat Kobela: Sure. So, um, I have always been a really big proponent of CVBs, or DMOs (Destination Marketing Organizations), TPAs (Tourism Promotion Agencies) sometimes they’re called just different variations of CVB in different areas because they really are the force behind bringing awareness to a local region. And what’s all in that region, and how they want to bring that to the general public, and maybe even some specific market segments. And they’re very key. And that, and, and unfortunately, there are many communities that don’t even understand what a CVB does unless maybe you’re in a metropolitan area where they’re constantly bringing in, you know, huge conferences, and big events, and tournaments and such. But, you know, even working with the CVB in your local community and partnering and networking with the other members, you know, brings great opportunities. Um, items that you may not have thought of or partnerships that, you know, everyone’s kind of doing their own thing. And then you realize if we put all of our thoughts together, you know, we can create a greater good with that. So, and with that, you know, a lot of the agencies are always looking for help. You know, they’re looking for help from their, from their members. You know, because they’re out in the trenches as well too. And um, so, you know, if you’re CVB is looking for some assistance or ideas, give it to them, you know, work with them. Um, whether it’s, general leisure market, whether it’s motor coach, whether it’s corporate, whether it’s sports oriented, you know, they really do want to hear back from yo

In this episode of Suite Spot, we explore the exciting, recent announcement of Travel Media Group’s newest solution: Custom Social. Joey Schuster, Product Development Manager, joins host Ryan Embree to share all the exciting features and benefits of this new solution. Ryan and Joey discuss the benefits of having a social media strategy in 2019 and how publishing unique, creative posts specific to your hotel helps drive community growth and traveler engagement. Joey shares the recent successes of Custom Social and what separates Travel Media Group’s custom social solution from others. Travel Media Group is the best fit for hoteliers looking to run successful, revenue generating social media campaigns. If you are looking to learn more information about our new custom social solution or want to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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, Ryan Embree: If you can believe it, we are already at episode number 20 of the Suite Spot, and I want to first thank everyone for taking the time to listen. We’ve got a great episode for you today. Um, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about social media, but it’s one of the things here at Travel Media Group that we are digital experts in and we love to talk about with our hoteliers because we know the importance of it. With that being said, we’ve got a really special guest with us. He is our product development manager at Travel Media Group for both social media and websites solutions for our hotel partners. And that is Mr. Joey Schuster. Joey Schuster: Thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: Well I wanted to first get started Joey, uh, by asking, you know, from a product development manager having something like social media for hotels. I’m sure you get asked all the time cause I know I do one more out and about at conferences and tech shows. Social media has been constantly changing with new apps coming on Facebook, new analytics, Um, and then we’re even talking about, things in the news with privacy. So why is it important for hoteliers in 2019 to keep providing unique and creative posts and utilizing social media? Joey Schuster: Um, I mean I think it’s really because, you know, you have to be, you have to be unique because of the unique audience of people that are visiting your site. So, um, you know, you just have so many, so many different people from different walks of life that have different sense of humors or different backgrounds. And being able to kind of, you know, hopefully tap into all of those different groups, that’s, that’s what makes, um, social media I think so powerful is just that it is, it’s such a massive amount of people that are using it. It’s such a diverse group of people using it. Um, and then the creative side, you know, to be unique and creative. The creative side is, is just because is probably the other side of it is because so many people are using it. I mean, people are so desensitized to something that’s creative and unique at this point. Joey Schuster: I mean, you think about the people that are coming up with, with, um, with unique ideas, it becomes more and more difficult because of so many people doing such a great job. You look at somebody like Wendy’s and Wendy’s does a phenomenal job with their social media, um, because they really did come up with a unique kind of creative way of engaging with their customers. Um, and then you can, you can see the impact that that has on their business. It’s, it’s phenomenal. You know, the upside to the creative side, I think of it is that, um, you know, you get a lot of chances. You know, I think that’s because there’s so many people out there who are, you know, watching and consuming all the content that’s out there. You know, you get, you get lots of chances. That’s the beautiful thing about, uh, about social media is so inexpensive to push something out there. And if it doesn’t, if it doesn’t work, then you try something new. And that’s that kind of cycle that you just, you just kind of keep going. And then she didn’t take advantage of this massive, just massive crowd of people out there that, that loves social media and in so many different ways. I mean Twitter, you know, the short, the short and sweet Facebook, you know, the long and probably more personal. And then you have like Instagram, which is straight image heavy. I mean, you just have all these different types of experiences and ways to consume content. Ryan Embree: Yeah, it’s crazy. Y

In this episode of Suite Spot, we go behind the scenes with the client support department at Travel Media Group. Host Ryan Embree visits with Aislynn Roberts, Client Support Team Lead, to discuss all the vital work that she and the client support team do to help enhance the digital programs of our hotel partners. Ryan interviews Aislynn about the team’s role in onboarding, engagement, and facilitating Travel Media Group partners to ensure optimization of their solutions. Aislynn also offers several best practices and tips on how to get the most out of your digital marketing solutions and even shares some of her favorite success stories throughout the years. To get in touch with your hotel’s client support specialist or to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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. Ryan Embree: All right. Hello, and welcome everyone. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is Episode 19, and we have a very unique special edition episode of Suite Spot today. As you know, at Travel Media Group, we are at the forefront of all things digital marketing for hotels. We attend the leading hotel industry conferences across the nation and we also provide Digital Marketing Solutions. And one of the unique aspects of the solutions that we provide is actually our Client Support Team, and today we’re going to get a behind the scenes look at that Client Support service and team, and with that being said, I will welcome in the Client Support Team Lead Ms. Aislynn Roberts. Good morning, Aislynn. How are you? Aislynn Roberts: Good Morning Ryan. I’m good. I’m glad to be here. Ryan Embree: Oh, happy to have you. Like I said, it’s a super exciting episode to kind of see the back end of what we do for our hotel partners out there and we have a lot of listeners that are currently partnering with us with our hotel marketing solutions. Uh, let’s just start kind of by talking about your professional experience and journey within Travel Media Group. Aislynn Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been with Travel Media Group for over five years now, and I actually was one of the first specialists, um, to start the Client Support Team. I’ve had the pleasure of being part of the company and this incredible team as we continue to lead the industry in marketing solutions for hotels. Through this time I’ve had the honor of working with over 400 hotels utilizing our services and been a part of over five launches as we expand our digital solutions. Because of my hand on experience with many hotels, I moved into a lead role where I continue to work closely with hoteliers and their services and programs with us. But I also work very closely with a team of specialists as we continue to support hoteliers. Ryan Embree: That’s amazing. So you’ve really been here through a lot of evolutions of our solutions as well as kind of the way that we interact with our hoteliers, the way that we interact with our partners. Just so our listeners can kind of get to know you a little bit better. What, what would you say the favorite part of your current position is? Aislynn Roberts: Honestly, my favorite thing about being part of the Client Support Team are the daily conversations with hotels and hoteliers in the management team. Um, there’s really nothing better about a conversation with a hotelier than when they actually reach out to you, whether it’s via call or email and they’re just thanking you for assisting them and really helping them to understand this digital world. It’s still very unknown to a lot of consumers and business owners, so we have the opportunity and the expertise to kind of really help them, coach them along and get them to understand where they fit into the digital space. Ryan Embree: Gotcha. And you mentioned when you were kind of talking about your journey through Travel Media Group, 400 hotels. That is amazing. Um, I’m wondering, you know, you’ve probably had some clients and partners that you’ve worked with for years and probably have some close relationships there and maybe some, some partners that you’ve just started working with, uh, over the past couple months and I’m wondering kind of how those two conversations are different. Aislynn Roberts: Yeah, so really the conversation with us, it doesn’t change too drastically. For every hotelier and every customer with us, we have the same objective is to support them with their programs and services with us. The approach, as you mentioned is probably the main dif

In this episode of Suite Spot, we combat one of the biggest problems facing hoteliers in 2019: recruiting and hiring quality hotel employees. In the What’s News segment, host Ryan Embree, shares some recent unemployment statistics as well as a survey of what experts in the hospitality industry feel the hotel industry needs to do to attract future employees. With historically low unemployment and an industry known for high turnover, hoteliers need to be more innovative than ever in their recruiting and hiring efforts. In the Suite Spot, Ryan shares some creative, cost-effective solutions to finding and retaining top hotel talent. If you have any feedback or tips on successful hiring practices at your hotel we would love to hear from you. You can reach us by either calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at [email protected]. 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. Ryan Embree: Hello, and welcome to all of our listeners out there. This is Ryan Embree the host of Suite Spot. Got another great and exciting episode of Suite Spot coming to you live from our Travel Media Group headquarters in Maitland, Florida. And, I am especially excited to be talking about this topic today because as hospitality experts, we travel nationwide to all of the top conferences to really dissect and examine, you know, “what are the hot topics going on in the hotel industry right now?” What’s, what are going to be those trends that are going to be at the top of mind of hoteliers, so that we can do our best to facilitate you and helping you out with some of these topics. So the one topic that kept coming up, every single conference that we would attend is that of employment. So this episode today is going to be focused all around employment. Ryan Embree: How do we attract hospitality and hotel talent and not only attract them to our hotel, but how do we keep them. As we know the hotel industry is notorious for very low retention, lot of fast changing movements within, within our employees, jumping from hotel to hotel. So how do we right now in a time where unemployment is, is at a historical low, how can we keep that talent and how can we keep attracting to our talent pool to help better our business? So speaking of the employment rate, as of December 2018, the unemployment rate is down to 3.9 percent, so under 4 percent. So what is that telling employees of your hotel? Well, it’s saying that there are probably a lot of employers out there that are looking for hospitality talent. So if they’re not happy in their current position, they can easily switch to the next. Ryan Embree: So in our What’s News today we’re going to look at a survey that was done by the International Society of Hospitality Consultants and they asked more than 200 experienced hospitality professional worldwide asking what businesses in the industry need to do to attract future employees. Ryan Embree: Now, the first as you would have expected is compensation, and that was that was the top answer from those surveyed. Just under 45 percent compensation came in as the number one thing that businesses have to do in the industry to attract future employees, but they also had some other answers here within that survey that were a little surprising. Ryan Embree: Number two, not too far down at 30 percent was career advancement, benefits, flexibility, training, recruitment. These were the other answers that those that being surveyed were saying that attracts future employees. So what we’re going to focus on today is for those hoteliers who might not have the wiggle room to give more compensation and they have to get creative with the way that they’re attracting talent and retaining talent. Ryan Embree: When you’re profit margins are so tight, what can you do to retain those employees that are asking for more compensation? In our Suite Spot today, we’re going to have a top five list of ways to get creative to attract and retain great hospitality and hotel talent. Ryan Embree: So let’s go ahead and just jump right in and start with reason number one. And that is make your hotel a place where employees would actually want to work. A study from the Society for Human Resource Management, stated the top three most important job satisfaction factors are one, respectful treatment of all employees, two trust between employees and senior management, and three was compensation and pay. So you’re probably wondering to yourself, “how can I show potential applicants that I treat my current employees respectfully?” Or how can I prove that trust b

In this episode of Suite Spot, we welcome in 2019 with several new year reputation resolutions for hoteliers. Ryan counts down the top 5 ways to make sure that your reputation strategy is off to a fast start and sets you up for success throughout the rest of the year. From top to bottom, these resolutions cover all things reputation, from recognizing which online reviews sites are at risk, to responding to every review. This list is a great way to kick off the new year for your hotel. We would love to hear your feedback on our list and what your 2019 reputation resolutions are. You can reach us by either calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at [email protected]. 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. Ryan Embree: Okay. Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for listening, wherever you are out there. My name is Ryan Embree, and I am the host of Suite Spot. We kicked off 2019 with our last episode, but we are still here at the beginning of the year, and today we are going to be talking about new year reputation resolutions, so we recognize right now this is the time of the year where hoteliers are gearing up for a full fiscal year. They’re setting some goals in place. They’ve got some ADR goals that they’re looking to hit for maybe this year. They’re trying to set themselves up for success around the spring and summer times when they get a little bit busier. So we want to make sure you’re getting off on the right foot out there by given a list of the top five new year reputation resolutions, and we start our list at number one. Ryan Embree: We would challenge you to really find and recognize your high-risk areas online that have lower review scores than you’re wanting. And, the first way that you can really go about doing this is googling your property in several different ways. Using your city name, using your state, leaving your state out, those are all going to procure very different, uh, Google searches and results. This is what your travelers are doing on an everyday basis when they’re trying to find out more information about your property. Once you do that, you can create a list of review sites that you’re seeing right there on the first page or even the second page that might be high-risk areas. These are sites that might have a little bit lower review scores, than you necessarily want and could be impacting traveler conversion rate. Ryan Embree: From there, we’re going to move on to number two in our lists, which is set smart goals when it comes to those high-risk online reputation sites and attribute them with ratings and numbers of reviews. So when we talk about smart goals, we talk about, again, specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic timely goals for individual review sites. So as you start googling your property, you see where travelers might be being drawn or attracted to a competitor. Start to come up with some realistic goals for where you want to end 2019. I would encourage you go even back as far as all of 2018 and start counting the amount of reviews that you get. Quantity as we know we talked about is one of the things that TripAdvisor uses an algorithm for ranking. We also want to set expectations as far as the scores that you want to be receiving. Ryan Embree: I would also encourage you as a best practice is share those with guests. When you’re talking to your guests that check out, instead of just hearing someone say, “you know, I had a really great time at your property” and your staff just kind of responding in that, “Oh, if you did, please leave us a review.” How about targeting and directing those reviews to a place where you really need those positive scores? You know, say something like, “I’m so happy to hear that you enjoyed your stay. As a team, we have a goal to be a four-star-rated property on Google+ by the end of 2019. It would really help us out if you would leave us a review on Google.” Travelers that are willing to leave feedback and really enjoy their stay, they’re going to be more open to hearing that and especially if they’re going to be helping out your business. Ryan Embree: Now, number three is about asking for feedback and implementing new and innovative ways to get feedback from your guests. Get everyone on your staff involved with these team goals, right? If you have a goal to be a 3.5 star on TripAdvisor, let everyone on your staff know, not just your front desk agents, your housekeeping staff. These are opportunities and touch points throughout the customer journey that your staff&

In this episode of Suite Spot, we pick the brain of a true hotel review response expert. Kristeena Seckinger, who has responded to over 100,000 hotel reviews in her career, joins host Ryan Embree to talk about what it takes to be a successful hotel review response writer and shares some best practices for online review response. From the proper length of a review response to which sites are the most important to respond to, Kristeena covers it all regarding review response. Ryan and Kristeena also talk about how to manage brand expectations and standards when it comes to review response and the emotional toll responding to reviews can have on a hotelier. In the Q&A segment, Kristeena delivers some insightful do and don’ts to a hotelier who is looking to make review response a priority in 2019. To submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. 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. Ryan Embree: Hello and thanks for listening. This is Ryan Embree, your host of the Suite Spot. Happy 2019 to all of our listeners. It’s a new year, and we’ve got a new episode here of Suite Spot. Very excited about the episode we have today. It is going to be circled all around responding to reviews. So today in our What’s News, we’re going to be looking at a white paper on travelmediagroup.com, which is what makes a good review response writer. And in this white paper you’re going to get some best practices, some tools and resources on how to respond to reviews. If you’re delegating that to someone at your property, how to make sure that you’re getting the most out of them. Or, if you’re responding to reviews yourself, making sure you are doing everything you need to do in order to get those great responses out there. We know how the brains have really raised their expectations of hoteliers when it comes to review response. We know how important this is and the standards are getting stricter and stricter when it comes to review response. So with that being said, we’ve got a really special guest with us. She has actually been with us since the conception of our solution Respond & Resolve where we actually partner with hotels to respond to reviews, our Senior Reputation Analyst Kristeena Seckinger. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and welcome in Kristeena. Good Morning Kristeena. How are you? Kristeena S.: Good morning, Ryan. I’m doing great. How are you doing? Ryan Embree: I’m excellent. I’m super excited that you had the opportunity to be with us live here on the Suite Spot, and I want to first start off with with kind of an easy question. You, you have, like I mentioned before, you were here at the very beginning of this solution, Respond & Resolve. So since that time, how many reviews have you personally responded to? Kristeena S.: Well, I have been here over three years now and so within that time I’ve probably responded to about 117,000 reviews. Ryan Embree: Wow. That is, that is an incredible number. I have to ask, you know, with so many review sites online today, and you know you being a expert in review response, what would you say your personal opinion is of which is the most important site to make sure your reviews are responded to? Kristeena S.: Well, there are a lot of factors to look at when thinking about the answer to that question. Previously, I would have said with confidence that maybe TripAdvisor might have been the most important just because they have that brand recognition and travelers are always going to TripAdvisor to look for reviews about the hotel. More and more now, we are seeing more content in Google. Especially with mobile devices and searching for a hotel, Google reviews are the first thing that could pop up. But again, the most important thing would be always to respond to as many review sites as possible. And that would of course ensure that you’re reaching as many guests as possible. Ryan Embree: Yeah. No matter where potential travelers are looking, because we know with, there’s so many OTAs out there, there’s so many of these online listings which are adding the ability to leave reviews and feedback with customer engagement. No matter where your travelers are coming from, you are assured that there’s a response there by the hotel. As I talked about at the intro, you know, we’re starting to see a trend of brands getting stricter and stricter when it comes to their standards for responding to reviews. How long do you, should you wait before responding to a review? Kristeena S.: Well, you always want yo

In this episode of Suite Spot, we prepare hoteliers for the upcoming holiday season, which is historically slower for hotels. Ryan counts down the top 5 ways to market your hotel during this year’s winter months. We tackle everything from traditional advertising avenues to best practices on setting your hotel up for future success. This list will help you build a strategy to make sure that you are getting the most revenue out of your business in a time of low occupancy and ADR. We would love to hear your feedback to our list. What are you doing to optimize your hotel’s revenue during the “off-season”? You can reach us by either calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at [email protected]. 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 and hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone and thank you for listening. Happy holidays. This is your host, Ryan Ryan Embree, and you are listening to the Suite Spot. This is episode 15. We’ve got a great episode for you today, very excited about it. We felt that, uh, during this holiday season, unless you are in a winter destination, we know that this is typically considered in the industry a off season or slower period. You’re starting to see occupancy maybe dipped down a little bit, causing her to come down as well. And hoteliers are constantly looking for ways to put heads in beds and fill their rooms during this slower winter season. And the spirit of that, we are going to have a top five list today of the ways that you can market your hotel during the slow off season. So let’s go ahead and jump right in. Ryan Embree: We’re going to start with number five and number five is for hoteliers to start thinking about traditional advertising avenues, some more out of the box, ways to market your hotel. For example, coupons or billboards, you know, 60 percent of travelers during the holiday seasons are searching for hotels and making booking decisions during the holiday season. These could be a travelers that are going on road trips across the country so they might not have a particular plan or do the research that they would for maybe a summer vacation they’re making on the spot decisions and for those travelers we know best that places like coupon guides or billboards could really sway a last minute traveler to make that booking decision at your particular property. In saying that, if this is your first time implementing some of these traditional avenues of advertising, I would caution you to really have a system in place to be able to track your ROI. So if you’re a have coupons out there, you know, track the number of calls that you’re getting from the coupon. Collect those coupons at the front desk. Put in a rate code in your pms to make sure that you’re getting a solid ROI. So you can know moving forward, whether that is a channel to market your hotel moving forward. Ryan Embree: So number four on our list of top ways to market your hotel in the slow season is to grow your guest database and the point of this would be to grow the information about your guests through email marketing so that you can really connect with those guests in the future. So if you haven’t already, start collecting emails from your guests when they first arrive at your property. You can. You can use this information for feedback for their stay, but also in the future, in the slower times, like the winter months. You can reach out to them for holiday events or stay again and save packages. We know that a majority of of bookings are now coming from Ota or third party sites. Ryan Embree: Now that you’ve had the opportunity to host these guests, turn them into your customers, get their information so that you can reach out and give them portals and channels for them to book directly with you in the future. So saving you on commissions, but also maybe sparking some interest during that slower season. For another stay at your hotel. Ryan Embree: So number three is using local personalization. And what I mean by that is you’re the experts of your market when travelers are coming, typically they’re coming from out of town, you’ve been in that market for a while, you know the events that are happening, on a seasonal basis. Use those events, leverage them to invite guests to stay at your property, create local packages you know, about the best restaurant in town. Be able to share that with them, get local partnerships involved. This isn’t just a slow time for the hotel industry typically. Ryan Embree: This is a slow time also in all the hospitality. So restaurants, maybe event centers. So look

In this special edition episode of Suite Spot, we discuss the recent 2018 Phocuswright conference in Los Angeles. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Patrick O’Brien, product manager and Phocuswright attendee veteran, who gives his take on the innovative technology conference. Hear from Patrick as he talks about the theme of this year’s conference and how it sets the stage for the future of the hotel industry. Learn what industry leaders from companies like Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and Expedia are saying about what they have in store for the future of their companies. This episode is an excellent glimpse of where the hotel industry is headed in 2019 and beyond. 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. Ryan Embree: Today we have a very special edition of the Suite Spot. As digital marketing leaders in the industry, it is always our job to make sure that we are at the forefront of all innovations and conferences that are going on around the industry and we have been busy over the past couple of months to give you that insight. Today our episode is going to be focused around Phocuswright Conference, which was in Los Angeles, California at the end of November. I’m here with a guest, Patrick O’Brien. He is our digital product manager. He’s been on Suite Spot before, but he is back to give us his insights on the conference, which we both attended. So let me go ahead and first off, welcome Patrick to the show. Welcome. Patrick O’Brien: Thank you very much. Ryan Embree: So I want to first start off uh Phocuswright – this is not your first time going and attending. Um, and really this is a hospitality tech conference, correct? Patrick O’Brien: Yes. Ryan Embree: Like all conferences, every single year they have sort of a common theme that you would find for each year. And I’m curious what you felt was the theme of this year, 2018’s, Phocuswright Conference. Patrick O’Brien: Yeah. So I think this is the fifth or sixth year that I have, I’ve gone to Phocuswright. And there always seems to be some type of new theme in the years past, uh, you know, it’s been kind of around mobile and mobile booking and mobile technology around disruption in the sharing economy and what that’s going to do to the travel industry. This year, I kind of felt like you had a collective cooling from the travel industry where it’s like we’ve had all this disruption, all of this growth and everything’s maturing a little bit more. And you know, you’ve had the consolidation of all of these OTA sites and the OTA is gobbling up other, other companies and kind of creating this bigger platform. You know, Airbnb is kind of starting to see their growth level out a little bit more. And so it’s, it’s obviously now, you know, one of the big players in the industry and so now I feel like you had everybody kind of sitting back and looking out and saying, okay, now we have these big companies out there. Um, travel, I think on the whole is, is increasing. What can we do now to continue to build wealth and sort of get a bigger share of the pie. One of the most interesting statistics that I saw year over year and I may get the year wrong, but I think since like 2014 that founding has gone down and funding has gone up. So what that means is that there are less and less startups coming into the industry. But there’s more and more money being pumped into the industry. And I think that is kind of a direct result of what we were seeing is: So now you’ve had all these startups and all of this money go into the industry. They’ve sort of proven out the ideas that are going to work. Now they’re pumping more money into trying to figure out how to expand the share of the market they already have. Overall though, I think that the theme this year, how do you build trust within your audience and and how do you deliver sort of a more personalized experience. That sort of seemed to be the goal of, of all the companies, let’s personalize the experience for the traveler so that they will convert, you know, on our site more frequently and continue to come back and use, you know, whatever channel we are to make those bookings and to be their trusted resource when traveling. Ryan Embree: Completely agree with you. Personalization and curating personal content for the travelers to essentially streamline their journey into making them a purchaser. Kind of smoothing out that funnel all the way from the top down. It is interesting to hear you talk about the funding versus the founding. They pretty much dedicate an entire day

In this special edition of Suite Spot, we discuss a hospitality keynote presented at the 2018 Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco. The keynote, “The Future of Travel and Hospitality,” was a fireside chat with Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson. In this podcast episode, host Ryan Embree is joined by Anne Sandoval, Travel Media Group’s Marketing Director who attended the keynote. We discuss the key takeaways from Arne’s insights on Marriott’s relationship with technology. Resources Watch the full Dreamforce keynote, The Future of Travel & Hospitality: https://youtu.be/EgDD5hBrkNU 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. Ryan Embree: Hello and welcome everyone. This is episode 13 and today we are going to have another special edition of Suite Spot. We do this from time to time being leaders and experts in the hospitality field. We travel across the nation to conferences, trade shows that have to pertain with the hospitality industry. And today we are going to be talking about an annual conference of Dreamforce which is hosted by Salesforce in San Francisco. Now, Salesforce isn’t necessarily a hospitality-only vertical. Uh, they work across verticals, but there were some really great insights when it came to the hospitality industry. Just to give you a little background on this conference, this year’s conference drew over 170,000 attendees. So it’s a very popular conference, people traveling from all over the world to experience this week. And today we’ll be talking about the hospitality keynote by Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson. The title of this keynote was the Future of Travel and Hospitality and obviously being in the digital marketing space, we have to be at the forefront of knowing the new technology and future of travel. Ryan Embree: So we’re always interested in talking about that. I have the pleasure to be joined today by our director of marketing, Anne Sandoval, and she had the opportunity to attend this keynote and she is here with me today to share some insights with us. So first and foremost, let me go ahead and welcome you to the Suite Spot, Anne. Anne Sandoval: Hey Ryan, it’s great to be here. Ryan Embree: So this was a, obviously very popular conference that you attended and you know, as I mentioned, it’s not all about the hospitality vertical, but this particular keynote was. It’s super interesting, especially when you get to hear firsthand from executives of such a large worldwide global brand like Marriott. And I wondered to first start out, this was kind of something fun that they did. Uh, Arme had mentioned that he traveled anywhere from 200 to 225 nights of the year and they first started off the uh speech by giving his three travel tips. I wanted to kind of get your thoughts on those tips. Anne Sandoval: Yeah, it was really interesting to hear from someone who spends just so much time in hotels and across time zones and all of his tips really had one thing in common, which I know is a theme that’s familiar to the Suite Spot, which is to go local. So his first tip was to get on local time and exercise to help keep your routine. Second, to eat the local food and go sightseeing and third was don’t let yourself live as if you’re still at home. And I think these are really great takeaways for travelers, but I think it’s also helpful for hoteliers to know these tips. Ryan Embree: Yeah. You know, it’s it – at the end of the day, we’re all travelers, right? And when we talk to hoteliers, it’s almost putting themselves in the shoes of your guest and I think that was such an interesting perspective that he took and to get insight from that, because this is the guy that manages hundreds of thousands of hotels across the globe and these were his, these were his takeaways and these were his tips. Ryan Embree: So I think, you know, for our listeners who are hoteliers out there who either own or manage hotels, think about the way that you travel and what tips would you give your guests coming in. And I think you can get, gain a lot of insight from kind of taking that perspective. Anne Sandoval: Being in the traveler mindset and knowing, you know, they’re gonna be maybe struggling with jet lag or having dealt with some heavy traffic on their way to see you. Knowing exactly what’s gonna make them feel comfortable being able to provide those tips on how to get a good and exciting local experience would be great. Ryan Embree: To my next question, the, you know, what the title, like The Future of Travel and Hospitality, you know,

In this episode of Suite Spot, we focus on marketing branded and franchised hotels. Host Ryan Embree teams up with the leaders of Travel Media Group’s sales team, Diane Elderkin and Edwin Pomales, to discuss. In the What’s News segment, Ryan shares an article that highlights the 7 latest ways big brands are using content today. The article breaks down the different strategies and methods the brands are using to capitalize on content online. In The Suite Spot, Ryan, Diane, and Edwin share their thoughts on how branded hotels can provide customers with a unique and local experience. Diane and Edwin share what advantages and disadvantages franchised hoteliers and branded hotels face in comparison to independent hotels and home rentals. Resources: https://www.todayshotelier.com/2016/08/01/7-of-the-latest-ways-big-brands-are-using-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 and hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello and thank you all for listening. This is Ryan Embree, host of the Suite Spot. This is episode 12 and I’m very excited for this episode today. We are going to be actually piggybacking on an episode that we did earlier this year, episode five, which was a marketing tips for independent hotels. So we got a lot of great feedback from that episode and we wanted to kind of follow up and get the same sort of resources and additional education for maybe those hoteliers out there that have a brand, you know, they also need some help with marketing and give them some kind of tips and best practices on how to best market their branded hotels. So that’s going to be our episode today. As we jump into the What’s News we’re going to be looking at an article from Today’s Hotelier. This article, which you can find in our show notes, is, uh, titled the seven of the latest ways big brands are using content. Ryan Embree: And I found this article absolutely fascinating. What it did is actually seven of the major brands: IHG, Best Western, Motel 6, Choice – even Marriott, and it looked at different ways that they were using content, uh, to really market their hotels. I’ll go ahead and give a few examples – I won’t give them all. Again, this article is in our show notes today, but the first one I wanted to bring up was a hashtag contest that IHG did. Where they use the #joyoftravel and they use it on all their social media platforms to promote both their own content and posts. But more importantly it was to capture traveler content engagement. Using hashtags for these campaigns can really draw a lot of engagement and can draw a lot of people together for a common purpose. So that is one of the ways that IHG or Holiday Inn was uh using content to market their brands across the board. Ryan Embree: Another one which I found absolutely interesting was Marriott and Under Armour teaming up and they teamed up to provide running routes for guests that were staying at its Residence Inn properties. So this is two major corporations and businesses teaming up again to draw awareness to the brands and to market. So again, those were just a few examples. It’s a really great example of how brands are perceiving content though – they’re seeing the value in this content that’s out there and noting that if they utilize it in the right way, it can help promote their brand. That’s more of a high level, um, you know, bird’s eye view when it comes to marketing for a brand. But as we know, we know that there are tons of individual properties and franchisees within that brand. So today’s Suite Spot, we’re going to bring in two of our experts to talk to us about how you can utilize your brand, but you can also market your property on an individual basis and where that balance is and some best practices on how to really get your biggest market share possible. Ryan Embree: So with that being said, let’s go ahead and welcome in Diane Elderkin and Edwin Pomales. They are team leaders of our digital sales team and help consult with hoteliers across the nation on some best practices on how to market their hotels so they’ve got some great insight on day to day talking with hotels. Alright. Welcome in Edwin and Diane. How are you? Diane Elderkin: We’re good! Edwin Pomales: Doing good, thanks for having us. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. It’s a pleasure. And last time you were here with me, we were talking about the rise of independent hotels and giving them some best practices and tips. We thought it would be best to bring you in for the branded side of things. Since we know so many hoteliers out there are aff

In this special edition episode of Suite Spot, we recap the recent 2018 Lodging Conference. It took place at the beautiful Arizona Biltmore resort in Phoenix, AZ. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Travel Media Group’s Senior Director of Product, Jason Lee as they discuss the current state and future of the hotel industry. Listen and learn, as they analyze the opportunities and threats to the current prosperous era for hoteliers. This episode is a great way to get insight into what the power players and brand leaders are saying about the hotel business today. 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 the Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending and hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello and welcome everyone. You are listening to the Suite Spot. This is Ryan Embree, your host. Thank you for listening today. We’ve got a very special and exciting episode of Suite Spot where we are going to be reflecting on the most recent 2018 Lodging Conference which happened here at the end of September of 2018. I had the pleasure and was fortunate enough to attend the conference myself as well as our guest that we’re going to be having on today and we’re going to give you a couple of takeaways and get a good grasp on some of the key points. So today let’s go ahead and welcome Jason Lee. He’s our senior director of product and technology. I was fortunate enough to travel with Jason to the Lodging Conference. He has been to the conference multiple times, so he’s going to have a some different insight on what the differences might have been in the past versus this year. So let’s go ahead and welcome Jason in. Jason, welcome back to the show. Jason Lee: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me back. After my last performance, I was hoping that you would invite me back. I didn’t know for sure. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. So today, as mentioned, we’re gonna be talking about the Lodging Conference and this isn’t the first time you’ve been, you’ve been a number of years now. I wanted to get your impression of, you know, this year’s overall sentiment and how maybe this year’s Lodging Conference has been different than years past. Jason Lee: Yeah I think like in terms of different from years past, you know, I remember going to the Lodging Conference right after the recession, you know, the 2010 / 2011 times and, and I think there was a lot of like, hey, you know, or we do see some trends going the right way, but are we ever going to get back to 2007 / 2006 levels of occupancy and revenue? Um, and I think, you know, over the last few years we’ve seen a lot of optimism and a lot of like, hey, the state of the industry. It looks really great and it’s really awesome and I think this year you’re seeing the same numbers as the previous probably five years of like, Hey, this is good, good growth. Um, but now it’s a little more like, how long is this growth gonna go? Can we keep this going? Um, some people, they’re feeling very optimistic and thinking that we’re, we’re, you know, the, that the, uh, the hotel supply line is correct. We’re not overbuilding. The influx of travel seems to be going well. Millennial travelers and baby boomer travel seems to be, you know, on the rise. So you’re looking at good segmentation and solid revenue projections. Um, but then at the same time it’s like, or there could be some sort of economic collapse or there could be some kind of other thing that could happen that could cause a derailment that everything right now looks very, very positive. Ryan Embree: Right. And we heard “cautious optimism” a lot throughout the conference and you’re right, you know, we’ve been hearing it from brands, we heard it from management groups that, you know, big management groups that were there with large portfolios that this has been record breaking and record setting years for them. I wanted to first go into, you know, why that is right. You know, we’ve, we’ve heard of the hundred plus months of rev par growth, which has been awesome. What other things are contributing to the success right now in the hotel industry? Jason Lee: I think very low unemployment for record, low unemployment. So you have a lot of people employed and traveling, you know, they’ve got a little bit of money, there’s more discretionary money. Um, so you’re seeing more travel. I think technology does play a part of, I think the ease of travel has gotten a lot better. So I think overall the path to travel is fairly clear and smooth for consumers and consumers want to travel and are looking to tr

In this episode of Suite Spot, we take a look at the state of the hotel industry. With an incredible streak of 100+ months of RevPAR growth, it’s a great time to reinvest in your hotel. In the What’s News segment, Ryan analyzes some telling statistics from a recent STR report concerning the current state and future of the business. In The Suite Spot, Ryan counts down the top 5 ways to reinvest in your hotel during this extended period of RevPAR growth. We discuss everything from PPC advertising to property improvements to ensure that you are leveraging your profits in the best way possible in this time of RevPAR prosperity. We would love to hear your feedback to our list. What areas are you investing in at your property? You can reach us by either calling or texting us at 407-984-7455 or email us at [email protected]. Resources: http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Articles/287387/STR-US-hotel-RevPAR-growth-reaches-100-straight-months 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. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone. This is Ryan Embree, the host of Suite Spot, a hotel marketing podcast. Today is our 10th episode and we’ve got a great exciting episode for you all. I wanna first off, thank you for all the support and engagement that we’ve been receiving since launching this podcast. We’re super excited about doing this and we love to hear that there is an appetite out there for this sort of information, so feel free to share this with hoteliers that are looking for that inspiration or just looking for some good information on hotel marketing. Today in our what’s news, we’re going to be talking about a different streak and that is a data report that was done by STR which just announced in July 2018 that the US hotel RevPAR growth has now reached over 100 straight months. So this is awesome to hear. Obviously we love streaks like this, a time of prosperity for the hotel industry and saying that this report went a little bit more depth on some specific numbers. Ryan Embree: I won’t dive too deep into them, but since March of 2010 when this streak first started, we’ve seen an average monthly ADR growth of 3.4 percent and an average monthly rev par growth of 5.8 percent. With all things being said, we’ve got a really healthy industry on our hands right now. They did do some forecasting STR did in regards to what the future holds for rev par growth. They see a 2.9 percent for 2018 as a whole and in 2019 a 2.4 percent RevPAR growth. Love to hear that we’ve got a healthy hotel industry on our hands, but this also means that some of you in this time of prosperity might have some extra revenue and if you’re looking to maybe reinvest that extra revenue to grow your business even more, that’s what this episode’s about. Ryan Embree: We are going to be looking at the top five ways that you can reinvest that extra revenue to your property, so as we transition into our Suite Spot today, again, we’re going to be looking at the top five ways to reinvest that extra revenue that we have at the property and we’re going to kind of work our way up. So number five is upgrading the customer experience using technology, so from HITECH with the upcoming PhoCusWright conference as well. All of these new technologies are out there about AI and machine learning. In 2018, it’s more accessible ever to start implementing this in the customer experience, which really would take your property to the next level. We’ve seen it where brands are now starting to implement Alexa’s or those smart home devices in the room. This is a great way, again, to separate yourself from the competition because this is something we’re projected to really start implementing throughout the customer experience. Ryan Embree: The only thing I would caution you with this is – I talked to a lot of hoteliers about this – is make sure that when you implement something, you’re doing it for the right reasons. It might look super cool to have something that has an app that automatically opens your blinds or shades, but what does that really bring to a customer’s experience? Right? Maybe talking to an Alexa for extra towels that really takes it to the next level and helps with customer service at your hotel. So if you are going to be implementing some customer technology, 1. make sure that it’s something that adds to the customer experience 2. make sure it’s simple. No one likes to get handed a long list of directions on how to use something. It becomes frustrating that actually can negatively impac

In this episode of Suite Spot, we take a look at what it takes to manage and run a successful social media marketing strategy in today’s hotel industry. Priscilla Osorio, Social Media Analyst at Travel Media Group, joins host Ryan Embree to give advice to hoteliers on how to tailor social media content to create an engaging and effective social media campaign. In the What’s News segment, Ryan references several articles from Travel Media Group’s blog that explore creative content ideas for different property types. These articles share some great examples of social media posts for every type of hotel, from economy hotels to extended stay hotels. In The Suite Spot, Ryan and Priscilla discuss what it takes to produce engaging content that travelers will notice and interact with. Next, Priscilla mentions tools available for hoteliers to track success and ROI during their social media campaigns. Finally, Priscilla and Ryan put together a game plan for hoteliers attempting to launch a new social media strategy for their property. In the Q&A segment, we answer a question from a hotelier who is not the most tech-savvy but is looking to get involved in an effective social media strategy at their hotel. To hear your question answered on our podcast, submit a question by calling or texting us at 407-984-7455. Resources: http://www.travelmediagroup.com/social-media-ideas-economy-hotels/ http://www.travelmediagroup.com/social-media-ideas-highway-hotels/ http://www.travelmediagroup.com/content-ideas-for-beach-hotels/ http://www.travelmediagroup.com/content-ideas-for-extended-stay-hotels/http://www.travelmediagroup.com/infographic-10-engaging-social-media-topics-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 the Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what’s trending and hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone and thank you for listening today. I am your host, Ryan Embree. Today we’re going to be talking about tailoring your message for social media. We have been hearing how important social media is for hotels. I’m sure you’re hearing it at conferences, you’re hearing it through your brands really through all channels in 2018, we know how important it is, but I think where sometimes hoteliers miss the mark is figuring out, not just content to put on your social media, but engaging content. This episode is going to be all about tailoring your message on your social media accounts to make sure that you’re in the best position to grow your audience and ultimately convert them. In our What’s News segment, we typically go over an article that’s trending. We’re going to be switching things up just a little bit and our What’s News segment. Ryan Embree: We’ve actually provided our listeners some really, really insightful content when it comes to tailoring your message for social media and one of the articles really is just kind of more of a broad, high level article on topics, social media topics and ideas for you to post on your social media accounts to again, grow and engage with that audience. We’ve also posted some blog articles, that really dive in deeper and get more specific into some of these ideas, like some ideas for your beach hotels. So we’ve got all these different ideas and best practices to share with you and you can find the links to these articles just within the episode description. And today we are going to be joined by someone from our social media team who partners with hotels and helps with thousands of posts a week to get out to our partners engaging content and she is going to help us walk through what goes into not just a content out there but engaging content. Ryan Embree: And I’m really, really excited about this conversation. So without any further ado, I’m going to go ahead and bring in Priscilla Osorio. She is our social media analyst here at Travel Media Group and we are very excited to have her. So a good morning. Priscilla, how are you doing today? Priscilla Osorio: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. Today is kind of about all tailoring your message on social media and as you probably know, working with the hundreds and thousands of hotels that we work with, every single hotel is different. And every single GM owner, front office manager who we’re working with are at different stages of their knowledge, um, when it comes to social media. So let’s kind of start off basic and maybe work our way up a little bit for those who are still trying to figure out what social media is all about, what really is the point of having social media and posting on social media? Priscilla Osorio: Yeah.

In this episode of Suite Spot, we discuss guest feedback and the ways today’s hoteliers are leveraging this information to better their businesses. Senior Digital Marketing Specialist Brittany Hill joins Ryan Embree to share best practices on how to obtain feedback from guests and how to leverage it. In the What’s News segment, Ryan summarizes the findings in the annual Guest Satisfaction Study done by J.D. Power. He reviews the takeaways on what guests expect from hotels and the trends in guest satisfaction in different market segments. In The Suite Spot, Ryan and Brittany talk about when is the best time to ask for feedback from your guests and how technology has changed the way hoteliers can receive feedback. They also analyze the impact that guest feedback can have on your employees and potential hires. In the Q&A segment, Ryan and Brittany give some advice to a hotelier who is looking for creative ways to receive more feedback from their guests. As a reminder, to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Resources: http://www.travelmediagroup.com/why-tripadvisor-isnt-enough/ http://lodgingmagazine.com/what-hoteliers-should-takeaway-jd-powers-guest-satisfaction-study/ http://lodgingmagazine.com/j-d-power-study-reports-improved-guest-satisfaction-across-hotel-segments/ 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 and hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Okay. Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for listening today. My name is Ryan Embree. I am your host of Suite Spot, a hotel marketing podcast. We’ve got a very exciting episode for you. Episode Eight about guests feedback, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Whether it is wanted or not, we are constantly receiving feedback from travelers. That is the nature of our industry and it feels like every day a new reputation or review site is popping up and more channels and forums for travelers to get feedback to hoteliers. So today we’re going to be looking at a couple things in the Suite Spot. We’re going to be reviewing how to leverage and utilize that feedback to better your business. Really show you how feedback can give you a blueprint and a roadmap to reputation success. We’re also going to be joined by Brittany Hill, who is our senior digital marketing specialist. She consults with hotels. We’re going to get some tips and tricks from her on how to get feedback from travelers. Ryan Embree: In our What’s News segment today we’re looking at an article from lodging magazine which dissects a pretty extensive report that JD Power does the guest satisfaction report that is released annually. We’re going to get some key metrics and statistics out of that report and again, going to translate that into how we can use that to better your business. So thanks for joining and let’s go ahead and jump into the What’s News segment. So the first takeaway that we can get from this report and article is that overall satisfaction is up in the industry, which is great to hear. It is up increased eight points to 825 out of a thousand point scale. So the biggest movement we saw a was in the upper midscale segment, which was up 12 points, extended stay in economy segments, posted a six point improvement. So half of that. Still good to see, but obviously a lot slower climb than that upper midscale. Ryan Embree: Another interesting but obvious correlation here was the correlation between technology and higher guest satisfaction. I think a really good point that this article made was actually in regards to something that we kind of take for granted now in 2018, which is flat screen TVs, large flat screen TVs, and sometimes even smart TVs and these hotels maybe a decade ago, a couple of decades ago, this was a added amenity. It was an upgrade anB now this has really turned into a norm for a traveler and this something that they expect. But diving even deeper into technology, you think about the things that hoteliers are now able to implement in the guest experience, like mobile keys, right? Being able to open your doors straight from your phone, mobile applications, Alexa’s in the rooms. Ryan Embree: We’re hearing a lot about that. Even some brand partnerships that have to do with that. So again, this is the type of experience that customers are coming to expect from hotels. So the last interesting point that I wanted to kind of pull from this article and share was the talk of local experiences. And again, correlation with guest satisfaction. We’ve talked many times on this podcast, whether it be about the rise of Airbnb or maybe the advantage that independence migh

In this episode of Suite Spot, we uncover which processes hoteliers can put in place to impact their reputation. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Jason Lee to discuss how at the heart of the matter, it’s still all about service. Jason was a hotel GM for a number of years before joining Travel Media Group, where he now serves as the senior director of online product and technology. In the What’s News segment, Ryan shares some insightful new research from TripAdvisor that found that 98% of hoteliers say that reputation management is important to their business. He’s joined in the Suite Spot by Jason, who discusses what this means in the day-to-day operations of a hotel. He shares key insights that he has uncovered from analyzing data from thousands of hotels to pinpoint which reputation processes will make the biggest impact on a hotel’s online reputation. In the Q&A segment, we answer questions about the future of reputation management, how to effectively collect feedback from guests, and what review website metrics are most important to pay attention to. To submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Resources: https://tripadvisor.mediaroom.com/2018-07-26-Online-Reputation-Management-Mobile-Experience-and-Driving-Direct-Bookings-Critical-Areas-of-Focus-for-U-S-Travel-Businesses-According-to-New-TripAdvisor-Ipsos-MORI-Study https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/97-hotels-say-online-reputaion-important-thier-business-jason-lee/ 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. Ryan Embree: Thank you for joining me today. My name is Ryan Embree. I am the host of Suite Spot. Today we are going to be talking about reputation and the importance that it has on hoteliers and their revenue and we’re going to actually be joined by someone with quite a bit of experience in the operation side of hotels. We’re going to share some best practices on the growing influence of reputation and how to get some more positive reviews. So let’s go ahead and jump into our What’s News segment today, where we are looking at an article on the 2018 Hospitality Sector Report, which was produced by TripAdvisor. And in this report it has some pretty staggering statistics on hoteliers’ thoughts about online presence and reputation. Really what we want to focus on today is a reputation management part of this article and these statistics and metrics that it gave for reputation, I think really gives a good baseline of where the hospitality industry is today. Ryan Embree: In this article, 97 percent of those surveyed say online reputation management is important to their business and these are hotels speaking. Ninety eight percent say online reviews are important to their business and 92 percent say social presence is important to their business. So I think what we can take away from this article is we’ve heard over the past decade the growing influence that these reviews and social media can have for a business are going to have for business and we kept hearing that in future tense, but through this article and statistics, we can say that this stuff is already here. Almost 100 percent of hoteliers know the value that reputation management plays in their business and what and how it can translate to revenue and what social presence means for a hotelier, because they know this is the way that travelers are now searching for hotels and basing their decisions. Ryan Embree: So in saying that today, we thought it would be insightful to bring somebody that’s been on both sides of the front desk. Jason Lee, who’s our director of product and technology. He’s been on the podcast before. He was in operations for a long time before he came to us, so he’s got a really great perspective on reputation management and how hoteliers can really manage all of this user generated content out there. Jason in fact wrote an article on LinkedIn that got a lot of traction speaking directly to these statistics. So today we’re going to give him an interview and you know, he’s going to share some insight with us from both sides of the lobby. Thank you for taking the time, Jason. I really wanted to bring you in here and interview today about that amazing article you wrote on Linkedin, [that] like I said, got a lot of traction. I wanted to first start by, We obviously know what you do here at Travel Media Group, but I would like to ask about your background on the operations side of the hospitality industry, before you started here. Jason Lee: Yeah, I think like a lot of people in hospitality, I started in an entry level position. Started

In this episode of Suite Spot, we concentrate on the rise of voice search in the hotel industry. Amber Wojcek, content manager at Travel Media Group, joins host Ryan Embree to study the impact of voice search in the industry and where it might be heading. In the What’s News segment, Ryan speaks to several reports with some powerful statistics on the growing trend of voice search. The report shows the increase over time of voice and its projections for the future. In The Suite Spot, Ryan and Amber start by defining the difference between voice and traditional search. Next, Amber gives hoteliers tips on what they can do to optimize their websites for voice search and shares best practices on voice search traffic conversion. Ryan and Amber also predict what hoteliers can expect in the future of voice search in regards to reservations and guest experience. In the Q&A segment, we answer a hotelier who questions if he should shift the majority of their focus and time from traditional desktop bookings to mobile bookings. As a reminder, to submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Resources: http://www.digitalhotelier.com/blog/everything-need-know-voice-search-hotel-bookings/ http://www.travelmediagroup.com/optimize-voice-search/ https://www.phocuswright.com/Travel-Research/Research-Updates/2018/Voice-Still-Unskilled-for-Travel-Planning/ https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3482117/ 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 and hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone and welcome to another exciting episode of the Suite Spot. I am your host, Ryan Embree, and today we are going to be talking about voice search, a very popular subject and trend in the hospitality industry. And we’re going to be reviewing some statistics. We’re going to be reviewing, how travelers are using voice search and we’re actually gonna go into the future of voice search. So let’s go ahead and jump right in. We’re going to go into our What’s News segment and for today’s What’s News segment. We’re going to be looking at two different reports that were published on think with Google. And in these reports they gave some pretty powerful statistics as far as what’s happening right now with voice search and the trends year over year. Ryan Embree: So the first statistic that that is mentioned in this report has to do with the percentage of searches that are now done by voice and this report published that according to Google, 20 percent of all searches are now done by voice in 2018. That’s a pretty incredible stat. That’s one out of every five times that someone goes on Google, they’re actually searching via voice rather than typing. And this trend is gonna continue to grow according to these statistics. Another interesting fact that Google published was the popular phrase in “near me,” right? We’ve seen that very, very popular in the hospitality industry, the hotel industry when travelers are searching for “hotels near me,” near attractions. Ryan Embree: But that phrase “near me” grew more than a hundred and 30 percent year over year. So travelers are now asking for more information about their location and what’s around them. Uh, so that is ultra critical for hotels to know when they’re looking to attract these travelers that are doing these searches. So not only are we going to be looking at the stats and voice search as it is today, but also we want to prepare our hoteliers for what voice search holds in the future. So in saying that, another article that we wanted to bring to your attention was actually an article published by Gartner Inc, which predicts that in 2020, 30 percent of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen, which is a pretty incredible stat when you think about that. So this is a fast growing technological trend that hoteliers need to be prepared for. So what better way to prepare for this then bring in our very own Amber Wojcek who has done some extensive research on voice search, she’s written some blog articles about the subject and in today’s Suite Spot we’re going to be interviewing her and talking about what this is all about and what the future holds for this growing trend. Hello Amber, thanks for joining me. Amber Wojcek: Thanks for having me back. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. Um, so let’s go ahead and get [started]. Just start off pretty simply. You know, what’s the difference when we talk about voice search and traditional search? Amber Wojcek: Yeah. So if we’re going back to basics searches generally when y

In this episode of Suite Spot, we focus in on the independent hotel segment of the hospitality industry. Host Ryan Embree teams up with the leaders of Travel Media Group’s sales team, Diane Elderkin and Edwin Pomales. In the What’s News segment, Ryan reacts to an article displaying the recent growth in the independent hotel segment. The article breaks down independent hotels’ performance in relation to market size and which markets investors are targeting for future growth. In The Suite Spot, Ryan, Diane, and Edwin share their thoughts on the cause for this performance boom for independent hotels. Diane and Edwin share, from a marketing perspective, what advantages and disadvantages independent hoteliers face in comparison to a branded property. They give different recommendations on how an independent hotel can best share its story to travelers. In the Q&A segment, we give a hotelier advice on what to do first as they make the switch from a branded hotel to an independent. To submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Resources: http://lodgingmagazine.com/independent-hotels-see-higher-adrs-and-faster-growth/ http://lodgingmagazine.com/marcus-millichaps-q2-2018-national-hospitality-research-report/ 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: Hello and good morning everyone. Happy Friday. This is your host, Ryan Embree, as always here on the Suite Spot. Got another exciting episode for you this morning. Today we are going to be focusing on independent hotels. So let’s go ahead and get started and we’ll jump into the What’s News? So today in our What’s News segment, we’re going to be looking at uh two articles done by Lodging Magazine recently that had to do with the trends that have to do with independent hotels versus branded hotels. In this article, this is a trend that’s actually been happening since 2014. We’re seeing the rise of these independent hotels and how they’re outperforming as far as ADR in comparison to branded hotels. They look into a report that Expedia did in Q1 of 2017, which shows the independent hotels ADR growth has increased at twice the rate of ADR growth for branded properties. Ryan Embree: Dives a little bit deeper into theories of why this is and the study also looked at how customers and travelers were booking with these independents and actually had found a very interesting point in that mobile-savvy customers are increasingly booking independent hotels and overall mobile demand growth for independents outpaced branded properties and four of the five largest markets. Another thing that this report is going to look into is the market segments in which this has been happening because it actually looks both into small markets in large markets with the larger markets Las Vegas, Manhattan, Miami, Orlando in Los Angeles, these independents have been growing at a substantial amount and these are actually the most popular large markets that independent bookings are being seen. But recently this trend is actually been overflowing and spilling into the smaller markets as well. In one case study, the article actually dives into a city Central Valley North. In California, where independent hotels have increased nearly 110 percent year over year. Ryan Embree: So we also looked at another article that had to do with the investing side of hotels and again speaking to independent hotels, private investors are now targeting more and more independent hotels, especially in smaller markets. We know that our hoteliers are always looking for that competitive edge and I’m sure this article you know and seeing this ADR growth and independent hotels have a lot of people’s heads turned and trying to figure out, you know, how they can grow their own ADR. So that being said, let’s go ahead and transition into our Suite Spot where we’re going to bring in a couple of our experts here at Travel Media Group to kind of show off the advantages and disadvantages to marketing for independent hotels. So let’s go ahead and bring in our guests for our Suite Spot today. Ryan Embree: That is going to be Diane Elderkin, who is our digital sales manager and Edwin Pomales, who is our assistant sales manager. Good Morning Diane and Edwin. How are you doing? Diane Elderkin: Good. Doing real good. Edwin Pomales: Doing Great. Glad to be here. Thanks for the invite. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. So today we are going to be talking as you know, about independent hotels and kind of what that approach looks like. All right, so Diane, I’m going to go ahead and start with you and point this question towards you as, as we just heard in our. What’s new segment, you know, the rise of independent hotels is a fast grow

In this episode of Suite Spot, we reflect on the recent changes to the TripAdvisor algorithm. Host Ryan Embree is joined by guest Patrick O‰’Brien, Digital Product Manager and head of the reputation solutions at Travel Media Group. In the What’s News segment, Ryan discusses the changes to the ranking factors for the TripAdvisor algorithm. InThe Suite Spot, Ryan and Patrick break down the timeline of the TripAdvisor algorithm change and how Patrick and his team are communicating the changes to hoteliers. Patrick walks us through the known factors of the TripAdvisor algorithm and the newest factor released in the change. He also shares his analysis of the impact that the change is having on a hotel‰’s overall city ranking. In the Q&Asegment, we give tips on the best ways to take on this algorithm change in stride and also weigh the decision of wiping your TripAdvisor page. To submit a question for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Resources: http://www.travelmediagroup.com/tripadvisor-algorithm-updates-impact-city-rank/ http://www.travelmediagroup.com/delete-tripadvisor-business-account/ TripAdvisor Hotel Marketing Overview 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 and hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Okay. Hello, and good morning everyone. Welcome to another episode of Suite Spot. I am your host, Ryan Embree, as always. In case you missed last week’s episode, we actually had a special edition where we recapped the 2018 HITEC conference in Houston and had a couple of our colleagues here at Travel Media Group from our product and development team give their key takeaways from that conference. So please check that out if you haven’t yet. So in today’s episode, we are going to be talking about the recent TripAdvisor algorithm change. We’re gonna be looking at the news coverage surrounding that. I know a lot of hoteliers out there, have a lot of questions concerning the change. They’ve seen some changes in their ranking and just wondering kind of what we know so far about this change. We’re going to be looking and talking to Patrick O’Brien who’s our product development manager for our reputation programs here at Travel Media Group. Ryan Embree: He’s going to give us some insight on what he has found about this TripAdvisor algorithm change and how it has affected some of our current partners reputation-wise. And then lastly, we’re going to be actually answering some questions regarding the TripAdvisor algorithm change that hoteliers might have. So in the, What’s News segment today, there was plenty of news coverage about this TripAdvisor Algorithm, algorithm change when it first was released. Hoteliers were talking about it, owners, everyone really in the industry, but specifically we’re going to hone in on our blog post on Travel Media Group site after the statement was released from TripAdvisor that there was a change. We wrote this blog as a guide and a blueprint for hoteliers on kind of what to expect. So in the past, the way that TripAdvisor had ranked it’s hotels was really based on three main factors that was review Quality. Ryan Embree: So the star rating of the review. Quantity, which is the number of reviews and Recency. So with those three factors, TripAdvisor had used this to rank it’s hotels historically. Now with this change, they actually introduced a fourth factor and that’s Performance Over Time. So is this factor that a lot of hoteliers are pointing to as they’re seeing substantial moves in their city rank. Now, although TripAdvisor is not going to share, you know, its formula or algorithm publicly, it has gone out and made a statement that these four factors do determine really a foundation of how it ranks its hotels. So it reputation experts in the industry. We felt, you know, it was our obligation, our duty, you know, to really kind of help hoteliers make sense of this new change and maybe put a strategy together to kind of help them. We know how critical it is being, you know, in the top five of your market versus the bottom five of your market. Ryan Embree: So a change like this could obviously have a huge, huge impact on revenue. But with that being said, we’re going to bring in our own reputation expert at Travel Media Group, Patrick O’Brien. You might remember him from the HITEC episode recently and he’s going to help us kind of make sense of this. And we’re going to hopefully kind of guide you through this change. Ryan Embree: Hey, good morning, Patrick. Patrick O’Brien: Good morning. Ryan Embree: Thanks for coming on

In this special edition episode of Suite Spot, we discuss the recent 2018 HITEC conference in Houston, TX. Host Ryan Embree is joined by several members of Travel Media Group‰’s product and development team and attendees of this year‰’s HITEC conference, as they give their key takeaways from the innovative technology conference. Hear from Patrick O‰’Brien, Joey Schuster and Jason Lee as they discuss the future of technology in the hospitality industry. Learn about the rising use of AI and what that means for the customer experience. Plus, dive into blockchain and the potential for hotel data integration. This episode serves as a great technology blueprint for the modern-day hotelier. 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 and hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. This is your host. Ryan Embree. Again, welcome to Suite Spot. Thank you for listening. Today’s Suite Spot episode. We have a very special edition. We are going to be diving into and dissecting the most recent HITEC conference that happened in Houston, Texas, and we’re going to be talking with some of my peers here at Travel Media Group who had the chance to actually go out to Houston and we’re going to get some of their key takeaways and see what they got out of this conference and how this can be useful to listeners like you. So before we get started, HITEC is one of the world’s largest hospitality technology expositions. So this conference is all about hospitality industry technology or HITEC. Ryan Embree: At the conference. There are many educational programs with some of the industry experts and [they] even have a global showcase of different hospitality technologies. So again, what we decided to do today for this episode is to talk with some of our team members that attended the conference and share some of the cutting edge new innovations that are coming up in the hospitality industry. Okay. So we have with us today, Patrick O’Brien, one of our digital product managers here at Travel Media Group. A Good Morning Patrick. How are you today? Patrick O’Brien: I’m doing well. How are you doing? Ryan Embree: I’m doing great. Thank you for being on the show with me today. I wanted to get started. You know, we had talked off air about this HITEC conference and sort of shift that you saw from years past to this year and I wanted you to kind of let our listeners know what you meant by that. Patrick O’Brien: Sure. So I think probably for the last five or six years at least the conversations have always been geared around mobile, millennials, and big data. Those were the buzzwords that you heard at all the conferences and people trying to figure out how to, you know, obviously to capture the millennial audience and how to be more integrated in mobile. And use the opportunities in technology that’s available with mobile and then ultimately, you know, big data and there was this idea that I’ve got all this data and now I should be able to make everything happen and curate content for everybody automatically and create this great experience. Um, that shift, you know, you, you still heard some people talking about, but really the big focuses, now we’re on blockchain and artificial intelligence and AI and how those concepts really will be changing, you know, the way that hospitality industry does business. Patrick O’Brien: Um, I did think it was kind of funny as well that there was one speaker talking about if you are, um, as a company looking to innovate on millennials and their needs, um, you’ve missed the boat. You’re too late and you really need to be looking at eight-year-old kids because they were, they are the first generation of users that have had all the content for them curated through Pandora, through Netflix. And um, you know, my kids don’t understand when they go to their grandparents’ house that they can’t get any song or any TV show or anything that they want on demand. And so it really is a shift in what people are looking at. And this was really the first year that you’re starting to see people move away from those traditional themes. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And hoteliers – you know, we’ve talked about this before – need to be more intuitive to guests needs and the guest’s expectations are going to start rising and rising and hoteliers need to be ready for that. So from a revenue management standpoint, those trigger words that you mentioned, blockchain and AI, you know, how, how does that implement into revenue management? Patrick O’Brien: Sure. So I think, um, both of the