Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week, in hospitality Marketing , live show number two hundred and fifty-nine. With me is two cohorts in crime. Adele Guteman currently with the library collection.

[00:00:31.060] – Loren

We get to be other things in the world out, which will probably talk to as time goes on. Mr. Dean Schmit, who is the founding father of metasearch, one of the two one of the two terms research.

[00:00:42.410] – Loren

We have the base camp meta dot com and soon to be released, metasearch marketing dot com.

[00:00:48.500] – Loren

So all things Meta and Robert of Robert De delivered to this week. I was worried that Robert Cole was going to get a little too busy for us today and not give us our lists in time. But Robert, Mr. Cole with Rock Cheeta, who has been unfortunately absent from our dialogue for these past few months because JD Powers and Focus Right.

[00:01:06.680] – Loren

Has cornered his attention in time the entire month going over doing data produces us our list, which he curates every week for free anyway that we’d like to sign up for it of the can go to bit. ly forward slash rock Cheeta all lower case. And he does his weekly. Oh, Hi Tristen. How are you sir.

[00:01:26.930] – Tristen

Very good. Thank you very much, Mr. Gray. How are you. I’m doing well.

[00:01:30.470] – Loren

You’re well dressed and groomed. And what the heck’s. What, what. What.

[00:01:34.730] – Tristen

I finally relented and got rid of the COVID Haircut, whatever it was, whatever you want to call it. And I went to I went to the barber’s and I thought I put a shirt just for you that, you know, wait a minute.

[00:01:49.010] – Loren

Here’s the magic question. Did you bathe this month? That’s this month?

[00:01:52.670] – Tristen

Oh, don’t be silly. No, no, that’s not that’s not Q three. Oh, I just you know, I’ll just go for the jackpot every once.

[00:02:04.080] – Tristen

Yeah. You know, there’s not enough talcum powder in the world. So it was just I’m a Robert Coles list at the beginning. You were sent up for is up with some really fun topics to this. Of course, he was pushing his Phocusright from review for the cleanliness issue, which we can definitely hit as a strong topic for today.

[00:02:22.160] – Loren

Mr Ben. Morning team consistency of dress code from the across the pond today.

[00:02:31.130] – Ben

Yeah, we we we we don’t ever really coordinate. I think you look, one of us is being one of us is young.

[00:02:38.420] – Loren

You work out which one is you know, I’m going for the Malfoy. Look, the Draco Malfoy.

[00:02:44.060] – Ben

You know, I was thinking hopefully you won’t be slithering into anything on this show. Laura, let’s keep it pushing 30. Yeah, I’m gonna wait.

[00:02:55.950] – Loren

I’m still I’m going for the ponytail look. Which I’m just about there. Pretty soon it’s going to be back to the pony tail.

[00:03:01.460] – Loren

Literally little my teen years all over again. Stay going, man. Bone style or mullets?

[00:03:06.470]

Oh, yeah. No.

[00:03:08.090]

My dad, the business of the front party in the back notes itself. No, no, no member. That’s that’s against the law that people get shot for that. Please, Loren, please.

[00:03:18.810]

No, no. I’m not looking to see someone. A ponytail.

[00:03:21.550]

I will make a significant donation to a charity of your choice if you come on to the next call with a man.

[00:03:27.950]

But look like you can eat pineapple.

[00:03:33.680]

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:35.430]

Yeah. But yeah, you have to make sure the sides are totally sheft in the Mundulla the top and that really long beat it. You know, that’s, that’s when nobody cares. That’s all is I’ve got to say. But that would be bad.

[00:03:48.540]

I mean not the same as you love. And I could not I could not get the long hair. I mean, partially because of the baldness at the back here, which is hidden very nicely. Book.

[00:03:57.210]

All right. All right. But but what I was able to do prior to my visit to the barbers is that I could actually put a bubble in my beard. It was getting that long. Yes. Mike, my yeah. My two young children found that highly hilarious, said that that was the case. But sadly, that has gone so deep into your pocket.

[00:04:19.970]

Would you do the Dean Stewart? Oh, sorry.

[00:04:24.650]

What would you say? Oh, I’m whittling down now.

[00:04:28.470]

Oh, it’s it’s the southern time. And following up on yourself cutting thing. The reason I’m wearing a hat is because I started buzzing my hair this morning and my rate, my shave ran out. It’s rechargeable. But for some reason, it won’t run wireless charging. So. So I’ve got a half cocked head.

[00:04:49.070]

Or that’s a man that I’ve had 20/20, buddy.

[00:04:53.330]

You could really make my year by taking that how I’m going to have it, really. I don’t see the incentive for me on that one.

[00:05:02.110]

It’s just like when we remodel this model a little bit, his face, when he uses that snap, simply join enough.

[00:05:10.210]

Thank you. That you come along. Guys do come on.

[00:05:16.030]

I don’t know the way that he should be allowed to work. Yeah. Okay. With that money, with the looks that Mr. Robert did give. And there’s actually some other lists of that. Hey, Lilly, how are you? Thank God. Thank goodness.

[00:05:31.180]

Somebody pretty your organization in the last ten minutes talking about haircuts.

[00:05:37.370]

So, yes, ultimately, I pulled it off track before you started the background a couple minutes.

[00:05:44.510]

Let the children have their play. And then in the end, you come something like two, three times a tackle.

[00:05:51.980]

Mr. Roberts, first major article. I would like to stand on a soapbox briefly and talk about the fact that this is a a pass, a conversation that should have been resolved weeks ago by hotelier’s. And instead, we’re still talking about it now and which is the focus on cleanliness and the safety and security of their guests. And only now are places like Marriott and HLA saying, gee, we should enforce this with our guests.

[00:06:16.880]

That would be my stop.

[00:06:18.140]

I start the conversation. I’m gonna put the link in. And then if you guys want to add to that that particular garment you’re more than welcome to, I would say, I mean, credit where credit’s due.

[00:06:26.380]

Right. HL I have come out as the first major organization to really start pushing this. But you’re right, it should have happened months ago, literally months ago. There were task force across the globe. I was a part of one here in the in South Carolina called Accelerate Mobile Beach. And we had guidelines that we pushed out to members back in mid mid to late April. So why the big organizations didn’t take a stand on this, especially the face mask stuff.

[00:06:55.460]

I don’t understand. But, hey, it’s happening now. So we need to get behind it. Like I’ve been saying for weeks and weeks, we need to change narrative in the media and start saying responsible travel is safe. If we don’t start saying that, we’re going to lose the year completely.

[00:07:12.290]

I think it’s it’s an interesting time to mention responsible travel. Turn today in the U.K. became mandatory to wear face masks inside shops seen inside. Inside cafes, is that you can you dine in, but not those in which you go in to, then eat outside?

[00:07:31.590]

It is crystal clear this legislation is crystal clear from from my trip into into the city today. Despite being mandatory to wear masks and I mean, it’s a sort of more diluted version of travelling insensibly even if you’re just travelling into town. There was maybe a 60 percent take over it.

[00:07:48.960]

I don’t at least have already come out and said there’s no way we can enforce it. You can’t chase people around waving surgical masks to get you to do this.

[00:07:57.210]

So it really is the onus is on, I don’t know, joint collective shaming of people who don’t do this ostracising. If you’re not wearing a mask, you’re a danger to me. You’re not travelling sensibly and you are holding back the recovery of the industry.

[00:08:13.780]

But there has been a lot of criticism about it as well. Not so much in terms of people not wanting to do it more in the fact that the you know, the public public is incredulous at the fact that it’s taken so long and it has been likened, you know, the face mask went on so late in the day, you know, in this whole thing. It’s been likened to trying to wear a condom, baby shower, you know, a number which I enjoyed very much to be so true.

[00:08:44.630]

So if you do a job, particularly the baby shower dress so well, we have to start where we are and then we have something now, indeed, that is that can go on and on forever. Or we can, you know, all agree to be disciplined, united, smart and loving and wear masks and and, you know, we really need leadership to reach into the souls of the public and. Make them feel how important it is to identify yourself as someone who cares enough about your fellow man.

[00:09:30.240]

But if it helps the president, does the president I’d put you up against Kenya. Honestly, I, Larry.

[00:09:39.370]

I keep saying, if only for one little look for us right now would be it would be better to just listen to him.

[00:09:48.840]

I did worry if we did finally get over this call, it hurt a lot. And I believe we will. I genuinely believe because there’s enough sensible people out there to outweigh the less sensible people. So shall we call them on? But I do worry about our small group of what we’re going to talk about in the future.

[00:10:06.130]

This is the thing with so many movements to actually talk about. Another topic that is as important is not going to feel less important.

[00:10:15.690]

It just feel like HDFC Hospitality digital bonus for the last eight weeks.

[00:10:23.140]

I have been speaking to be I actually I have another I have another soapbox we can stand on. I mean, if you want to that we can we can merge our stuff. We can merge our show into a higher level.

[00:10:33.910]

I don’t know if that industry is stuck in one or one in first gear. There is a repetitive white noise dialogue about fun. Everybody’s got a hammer to fix a computer. Nobody has the proper tools and proper skills for advanced dialogue. They’re still talking about fundamental marketing, things that are defunct out of date, out of place and not functionally rational at this point. Nobody’s having advanced conversations on what you really need to be doing in a very granular way.

[00:11:02.420]

They’re still basically echoing each other. It’s like an echo chamber. Everybody’s walking around trying to offer solutions, are still talk about the same thing. To your point, I mean. I mean. And certainly from our show always. Yes. I mean, we’re constantly trying to. Every week is different as to what coverts impact is. We restart. We all start, you know, reopen. Preopening not opening, closing for, you know, whatever.

[00:11:23.700]

But nobody somebody advanced ways of doing this stuff. Who’s going emerge out of this is gonna be some lean, mean fighting machines. Those are the ones are going to survive out of this stuff. Not the people are going what people spend.

[00:11:37.490]

Yeah, I know why.

[00:11:38.940]

It’s because we like the easy way out. We want everybody simple to make errors. There is too much effort required, too much. As you know, we talk about this in other industries all the time, creating what we call spaciousness, walking away from the craziness and taking a moment to think with a clear head and actually move things forward. And I think that it’s a hospitality industry in general. We don’t necessarily do a great job of that, maybe partially because it’s a 24/7 industry.

[00:12:14.540]

Right. So there’s there’s not much that we can do about that. But through proper planning, you can take time to really set aside, because I think it just feels overwhelming to do next with all tactics. And so people kind of keep saying like, oh, I don’t have time, even though they could create the time because it just sounds like something impossible for them to tackle in people.

[00:12:38.480]

People say I don’t have the time to do important work because I’m lost in a flurry of Day-To-Day, you know, chaos. And the fact is that you focus on the important work, your ass will diminish and you will be free from doing the same repetitive thing over and over again. It’s like being a mouse or a hamster on a wheel. You’re just always facing new business to replace the business that you lost because you can’t move forward with holding and loyal the customers you have and just growing your business naturally.

[00:13:22.400]

For example, we’re wasting time, you know, with irate guests. Instead of solving the root cause of the problem to have, let’s say, Rick.

[00:13:36.210]

Right. We can look throughout the history of the travel industry. This is not a new thing. Let’s just take an example of Rick Perry, for example. Rick Perry has been around for 20 years. We’ve had problems with this. It used to be that, you know, look to direct versus an here or whatever. And we had channel managers out there. You see Gould, that was one of the channel managers trying to keep those rates all the same.

[00:14:00.710]

We had that challenge back in 2002 and we’re still dealing with it today. The difference is it has evolved just as soon as you figure out. Here’s how I’m gonna fix that problem. It evolves and changes. Today, we have the problem wholesalers. We can pick on a Momoko because they no longer exists. Right. So they were coming in. We couldn’t help, but they would come again and undercutting us all over the place. It keeps on changing.

[00:14:22.790]

It’s a little bit of a whack a mole game. But the problem is still the same.

[00:14:26.110]

But I think it goes wider than just the 1000. I’ll tell you who’s here. Yeah. The day to day thing that you talking about that you know, everyone that I can understand, the 24/7 hospitality industry book, the hospitality industry. Well, they are they’re always looking towards their partners for help. You know, technology companies, service providers, whatever it may be. And to Lauren’s point, I think this people fall into two camps here. There are the people the one actually don’t know.

[00:14:56.870]

What they’re doing is why they’re still pushing the same old stuff, because their business model is probably the same as the, you know, the 24/7 rat race that’s going on within the hospitality bubble. You know, losing clients out the back door. Shouldn’t you wanted to football constantly happen. And we know that was several several providers. The second one is and this is my tinfoil hat talking to you. I think there are companies out there that do know what to do in this.

[00:15:22.610]

They’re just keeping it quiet. Not shopping to buy and charging customers a tidy sum during a difficult period. I mean, I, for one, would like to see more technology funds coming out and offering things to help, even if it’s free. Free. That’s all I’m going to say. Watch this space free, Tracy, hinting at something that I don’t see.

[00:15:48.910]

Watch this space. There you go.

[00:15:54.130]

Once again, shameless plugs. Look, I mean, I guess, you know, I should never have to have a seamless plug back in the day. I feel like, Lily, you’ve sent us down this far. I started.

[00:16:06.840]

I was never there was never a weekly survey that came out.

[00:16:11.180]

You know, there was this list of guys who never get to the label to feel treadle Endsleigh dining room whenever anybody needs keyless entry.

[00:16:22.360]

You know who to call.

[00:16:26.260]

I mean, some of the others. I love you. I love that.

[00:16:29.260]

There’s some stuff that you pointed out about how there is going to be a change in ownership’s there’s going to be the other week will fail. The strong will survive, but the margins are gonna be less. Taxes is gonna be different. Asset values can invert and which is going to create a sell off. There’s lots of I mean, there’s articles in the paper through all the different categories related to these kind of things. But to your point, Chris, is that there is there is solution processes.

[00:16:52.000]

And that is why I’m up about this, as I just it was some clients I’ve just got onto. They’re all excited about the call we get on the call. And I felt like I went back a year. OK, we’re taking this off the shelf and what’s where we’re going to for a paid campagna is like you realize the verbiage in everything and the strategy and the targeting all is different now. There’s nothing about what you’re talking about in the terms that you’re talking about it that are relevant to what you need to be considering.

[00:17:18.040]

Right now. You’re thinking that you’re turning the lights on and putting coal back into the furnace and firing it up and, you know, the sign on and people are going to go stand back on the station that they were standing up before. And we’re getting back to business. None of that’s true in any market.

[00:17:32.440]

I mean, in the worst part of it was that this is one of the cities that was flaring up. At this point, they’re trying to get back into the business game. And literally the city is blowing up to make national news. And it’s like guys at the door who’s going to want to come and stay with you when everybody’s telling you that city is going crazy with with the with the growth of the pandemic.

[00:17:54.010]

Why do you think that is low and decent, even given bad advice? Do you think that previous agencies. Do you think that just buried their head in the sand?

[00:18:00.790]

I don’t think that initially thought they knew back then and then they’re just bringing the old information again. And then I think because they’ve been out of it, literally out of it, and they’re coming back in the door, they’re thinking, oh, well, this is what I know. This is what we do. This gets back to it. And it’s like, yeah.

[00:18:17.150]

And keep in mind to a lot, a lot of hotels don’t have agencies. So I know I know you guys are on the bandwagon of Bashan agencies, which we all do on the show. I think that there’s a lot of dishonesty out there, but I think it’s bigger than that. I think a lot of folks just don’t know where to turn. You know, and the thought exercise we’ve been telling people to really push this point home is imagine if you jumped in a rocket ship today and you were going to open a new hotel on a new planet with new people that you’re targeting in a new destination that you don’t know.

[00:18:51.370]

That’s the mindset you have to take. How would you approach that job differently? Because your consumers completely, fundamentally change to motivators, a different fears, a different their financial position, the demographics you’re going to reach. Everything is different. You’ve got a completely foreign audience now in the destination and the product you have is viewed completely differently than it was twelve months ago.

[00:19:15.380]

Nothing gets that ball will work anymore.

[00:19:18.640]

The only thing that would be the same with those two are on a different planet is it would still need face masks. But for oxygen.

[00:19:26.200]

I have no. I have a different, you know, sort of mindset test. What if your uncle died and left you a hotel and you know, you’re starting from from nothing. You’ve got a bill to pay and it’s all on you and you’ve got to make it work. Where are you going to find business? Why do you need to do to make every single penny go as far as it possibly can and bring the most rootstocks and get in?

[00:20:01.720]

I think that if more people got out of their silo mindset or into an entrepreneurial mindset, the the the I.

[00:20:13.000]

And people would throw away three.

[00:20:17.110]

I’ll add to that contribution. One thing and that is, is that we going into this had a it’s not my problem, it’s somebody else’s or I did what I could do. I’ve often mentioned that there’s two types of people. There’s the people to tell you 100 things that they tried to do that didn’t do it. And then there’s the other people that just got it done when you asked them to get it done. And if you want to know about one hundred and two things that they tried to get there, they’ll tell you if you want to know.

[00:20:37.480]

But they just got done what you asked. Done. And a lot of these people went back to their jobs with that mindset of doing what they they could do, hey, I can’t sell 50 cent pieces for a dollar, a dollar, a dollar a piece for 50 cents on the side of the street right now. Nobody’s buying. That’s not the answer. You’re not generating revenue. What can you sell? There’s hotels that are selling to these school pods.

[00:21:00.270]

Now, a little meeting spaces so that kids that are being put together in small groups have a common space to go to that they’re doing. In Europe, there was a news feed about the fact that doing hotel concerts where you go to the hotel and you’re on your own balcony and you’re looking at a concert and the concert is being presented to the hotel because the building was designed, that that’s answers.

[00:21:21.420]

That’s not what you used to do. That’s not anything you ever thought about doing. But it’s the way things are now. You know, does it last forever? You know, you need to be careful now.

[00:21:31.440]

You don’t have people on the do they have people on the balcony on top of Imperia. So you get the authentic feel of being in a car or something.

[00:21:37.110]

There is certainly some curation things going on. But that’s not to say you live in the posh this part of England. I be.

[00:21:46.890]

And if you have beer with you, how easy it is to another drink just mean to me it seems like an easy thing.

[00:21:51.180]

But I mean, can’t you do. Sorry.

[00:21:56.090]

John Stewart. Sorry, Dean, I’ll. I just want to just point there for you. I don’t want. I said to come across his agency about bashing dogs. I love a good agency. What I think what I what I talk about agency is giving them advice. I don’t mean malicious advice. I mean, a lot of people who work for agencies probably haven’t been through something like this before. They’ve not been.

[00:22:20.930]

They’ve had the good times. You know, they made hay while the sun shone on. It is sort of now exploded and there is no hair anymore. There’s just like a post apocalyptic wasteland. So I don’t mean to bash at the edges is a it’s a difficult situation they’re in because there’s no playbook for this.

[00:22:40.200]

Yeah, no, no. They’re not built to pivot quickly either. A lot of the bigger agencies, especially, they’re not you know, they’re built to scale and modularize what they offer. You know, you look at and I’m not going to name them, but you know who they are. You know, they have a here’s the packaged offering for a flat fee. And it’s about how efficiently can I produce this to maintain profitability. So you think that that kind of approach, if you’re if with that that kind of agency, you’re going to struggle because they’re not going to innovate?

[00:23:07.130]

No.

[00:23:07.560]

And Lawrence, to the point you made as well about hotels coming out and saying, oh, you know, we’re going to try the tactics you twelve try twelve months ago. I don’t think anybody can stand at the leadership in the hospitality industry. Hasn’t been screaming and shouting from the top of soapboxes and vacant hotels. This isn’t going to work. Nobody can say there hasn’t been a flurry of information coming out. Whether or not they’ve listened to it or been exposed to is a different matter.

[00:23:33.770]

But I don’t think anybody can point fingers at the industry and say, you guys never told us this was going to happen, you know?

[00:23:40.010]

And I think that exactly when you get into territory like this, where we instinctively try to do is look at what is my A or what they’re going to tell me what what worked before but didn’t work before. That’s our every gut instinct. Everybody says go to the data and look at what gets what the data sucks right now, because all that data. None of it’s right. So but that doesn’t mean the data’s not important. What it means is you’ve got to start getting new data.

[00:24:04.710]

You’ve got to start running these types of digital campaigns and see what the hell is going on out there, what is working, what’s not working. And start putting together new plans based on that.

[00:24:13.740]

And therein lies the problem, though, as well, because it’s like, you know, the full circle that the hotels don’t have the marketing budget to be able to go and do this and as much as they want. So I understand the difficulty that is going on there. But I just wanted to bring up the point Richard’s mentioned back to the hotel cleanliness in the in the chat. And he said he stayed at two major hotel brands over the past 14 days.

[00:24:37.890]

And he’s getting a lot of frustration from the lack of follow through with their cleanliness policy. And he’s talking about sanitiser, cleaning public spaces. I want to share a very brief and you’ll find to put it in that very shortly story of my exploits, I managed to leave my house with my family and I went to a larger city nearby. It’s very well know. It’s they’ve just won the the Premier League shoot. You’ll know that.

[00:25:09.610]

So it’s not so it’s it’s Liverpool of the UK and I stayed with it.

[00:25:14.970]

Yes, indeed. I didn’t want to say that. You know, I’m sorry. I’m not synergistic. I’m with you.

[00:25:23.760]

So it was to visit here. It was painful after paying painful meetings. Just go to the city, let alone say that. So staying in the hotel, beautiful hotel, very, very nice and very hick’s that huge rooms. Great. However, very shocked. The next morning when I get to go into the air, into a little shower room, it’s got a single door into a shower cubicle, open the door to put my towel on the hook.

[00:25:49.870]

What do I find that put a pair of men’s on the way now they would not mine. Now, what would you call his wife’s?

[00:25:58.110]

Yes.

[00:26:00.120]

One of two things has happened here. My wife snuck off without me knowing. And there we got. Leave that, that, and I’m pretty certain that wasn’t the case because I was with rolled up on the hook, on the hook all. And so when I get when I complained in the morning, it wasn’t much of a complaint as seriously, guys.

[00:26:20.880]

This is not small faux pas.

[00:26:22.650]

This is my guy. Pretty cool. Even pre of.

[00:26:26.400]

This isn’t small, you know. And apparently, not only do they have air that goes in, he should check it.

[00:26:34.830]

They also have another person who’s Mexico. They checked the cleaners work and the double policy. So it’s clear hotels, as they know, are still struggling to get around this. And the problem he’s got is all it takes is one case and you’re screwed. That’s it.

[00:26:50.730]

Because that gets out because I’ve got until that story several times. I’m not going to name the hotel because it’s not fair and I don’t want to do that. Besides, I don’t think was giving too many people want to stay in Liverpool at the moment. Sure. But bookseller Doug Stewart, let’s give it a go.

[00:27:06.850]

Celebrate the championship. Yeah, but I can feel Richard’s pain as he.

[00:27:11.790]

Hey, at least you got a free pair of underwear.

[00:27:17.480]

And what’s that? What happened at that one hotel? If it wasn’t brand or if it belonged to a collection, then it not only diminishes the reputation forever, but the hotel.

[00:27:31.950]

Yeah. They were saying, you know, brands are putting out. Oh, we’re all doing this and this and that. But expecting it to turn on a dime with very little enforcement. My guess is that their inspectors probably aren’t travelling right now either. And so it’s kind of an honor system. And just like any other brand issue, you’re going to have some that are doing it well and some that are not doing it well. And I think that that’s a real threat to the brands right now because they’ve made such a big deal about it.

[00:28:05.950]

They’ve taken such a significant stand on these issues. And then if you go and you say, you know, you’ve had one bad experience, if you go to another hotel, it’s in the same brand and have another bad experience and God forbid, a third that experience, that’s pretty much it. And then you assume that the brand is no longer, well, to be really pragmatic.

[00:28:26.100]

But the logistics of this, you have an exceptionally exhausted team that may have stayed in existence through this entire process.

[00:28:32.970]

They are first that they jumped out. They got dumped on five extra jobs when everybody else got furloughed. They existed under the sheer threat of, you know, you could be next. Do whatever you have to do. It doesn’t matter about title. If you’re going to clean a toilet, clean the toilet. If you’re to run the front desk from the front desk. And they were running this marathon this entire time. Now, perhaps the hotels decided to think they’re restarting a preopening or whatever it is that they’re in the process of trying to do the bringing a crew that has been on ice metaphorically for a few months now that have not been brought up to speed as to what needs to get and how house needs to get done or whatever it is had done.

[00:29:07.020]

And they get brought into a team that has no time for them. They’re like, thank God, just watch the front desk and go to sleep, whatever it is. You got two bad mixes of motivation at this point, and then you try to open the door saying, we’re going to do everything that we’re supposed to do and this and this and this. And they’re in bad underwear in the shower. And, you know, two stories breaking next spring.

[00:29:24.030]

But, you know. But the idea of it is that there’s been no uplifting. There’s been no culture to those value proposition. There has been no less rally less. This is the end of the marathon. This sprint. Let’s get to the finish line. Let’s get back to where needed. What we’re doing, this is what we’ve learned. What we’ve been running the fort. Let’s teach you the people that have been on ice, people on ice infuse us with some energy.

[00:29:47.040]

Let us get back up to speed that this is worth all the pain that we’ve been going through. It may not be happening in all these hotels and they might just be trying to go through a lot of this. And as we pointed out before, a lot of them aren’t up to speed with the reality of what their day to day is in the new way of things being handled.

[00:30:04.640]

You I’ll do it myself. Well, I was gonna argue with him and then argue with myself.

[00:30:09.610]

So I think part of the problem, Lauren, is you say it’s the final sprint of a marathon, but the end is in sight for a lot of. In in hope. There isn’t a lot of hope. There was hope coming, you know, three or four weeks ago. And then we saw this massive resurgence in I think it’s ripped the rug from under everyone. And there’s this sense of everyone I talked to, just like I don’t think I can do this for much longer.

[00:30:34.790]

Right. So I think we’re dealing with that. And, you know, so it’s easy to say we need a rally. But but it’s it’s really difficult. And that’s what I argue with myself, because I feel like although it’s difficult, we’ve got to do better. We’ve got to expect that a something like that is inexcusable in hospitality, especially now, you know. It’s not like it was bottled up and hidden somewhere in a nook that someone wouldn’t like.

[00:30:58.800]

Look at. Right. Maybe if they were doing a quick inspection, but hanging up on the back of a bathroom door is a commonplace that. Police stuff. It’s a fundamental check in every housekeeping playbook I’ve ever seen. Right. So you’ve got a you’ve got the highest hold yourself to higher standards. And we, as consumers and hospitality professionals should expect and demand better than that.

[00:31:20.880]

I think the housekeepers should could have been rushed. And sometimes, you know, when you’re rushing, you don’t look up. You know, the million rebate going to happen.

[00:31:31.270]

It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen, right? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not unsympathetic to it. Not unsympathetic to it. Simply because I knew that they were quite high occupancy.

[00:31:41.330]

Mean, I wish they could ask them, but I can see that they short-staffed, right? Yes. Yes.

[00:31:47.280]

That would definitely be the young lady that I spoke to in the in the morning. It was the GSA manager came on and I said, look, listen, you know, this is what I found. She looked stressed before I even dropped that on a table. So then she just left what it was like, gosh, you know, hey, wait.

[00:32:03.180]

Did you literally drop it on her toe, metaphorically speaking?

[00:32:08.640]

That was just as soon as I’m getting into this house, this pair of underpants wasn’t you know, this is that there is human error because of all of the staff members are people. And and and we we we make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. But the process is there to double check on the list. Yeah.

[00:32:35.130]

So there was a mistake in not following process. And this is this is an example of someone not going through a checklist and that that’s something we have to hold to the highest standard in hospitality, because if we start cutting corners on the basic fundamentals of process, we’re not going to recover nearly as quickly. And this is going to be a lot more painful than it needs to be.

[00:32:56.760]

Oh, I wish I wish it was here because I’d actually argue with him. I’d say I’m used to making the show. Months ago, a year ago, maybe even that our industry needed the infusion of outside resources to give us a better perspective of what we should be doing. And I would contend that right now, as you mentioned, Stuart, there is no end in sight. But what people love about the love of this industry is the satisfaction the industry gives us.

[00:33:19.970]

When I say a sprint and meeting that we can collaborate and create a culture and create motivation between ourselves, it’s to bring life back into the purpose of what we’re doing. Not that there’s an end to the process, but a resurgence of why we’re doing this. That’s why we’re losing some people out of the industry right now. And some of the people that didn’t deserve to be in the industry aren’t staying in the industry because they got partly because the technical expertise or their marketing expertise and operational expertise.

[00:33:42.660]

But they weren’t hoteliers. They weren’t hospitality spirit out of the seven people. And that’s the core of the people that need to bring back our our destroyed industry. I mean, our industry is destroyed right now. It has been purposely dismantled. And we keep trying to do these things that we keep trying to do. But we’re fighting an unknown embassy. You know, we do a city flares up or now a market that we’re trying to kind of get people to come traveled from.

[00:34:05.810]

We don’t want them because they’re coming from a high risk area. It’s constantly shifting every day as to what we’re doing. But the idea of it is to not just point out the fundamentals have to be there.

[00:34:16.190]

And that comes from the fact that somebody truly thrives on what they do in satisfaction of a guest when they get satisfaction is going to be more important than ever because it leads to the user generated content reviews, which Del, I’m sure can speak to. Largely been, if you think about consumer behavior right now. Know it wasn’t uncommon. There was walking business to most hotels. People would just walk in the door and say, you got a room. Would you do that today?

[00:34:40.130]

Probably not. Yeah, I’m going to read some reviews first, because even as think especially within brands. Right. Brand over here and bring a over there may not have the same standards. There could be very different quality standards that go with that. So, yeah, you’re user generated content. You better be pay attention to these days because it’s going to carry more weight than ever.

[00:35:02.200]

And thanks for pointing out the fact.

[00:35:04.520]

But I mean, I’ve actually heard from some of our research that Watkins’ are actually up in severely, which was shocking to me because I would have assumed the same as you. And so I guess it depends a little bit on the type of market. But some people, maybe they just don’t know what to expect. And so they just go ahead and walk in and see what’s going on.

[00:35:26.940]

But I bet they looked at Google before they write an exam as a possibility.

[00:35:31.710]

Yeah. Yeah, well, that’s the thing. Everyone’s got one of these now. So it. Very easy to quickly check on the fly once you’re outside.

[00:35:39.440]

Something about redoing the house near me radically its location.

[00:35:45.240]

Yeah. I put a post about that and maintained that that’s, you know, the name me and keywords are actually on the on the increase. They said, sorry, you think about reviews is that it’s very tidy. No matter your two star hotel, three star hotel, you’ve got a budget, you’ve got zero budget, but you can drive traffic to your hotel just based on being the top rated hotel in your better market. I would actually go smiling is free.

[00:36:22.760]

Happiness is free. This is free. It’s about loving the guest and writing them up. That’s free. It just takes work.

[00:36:36.920]

We always come to you. Thank you for coming up. I know that we sound like a broken record or two because every week we are addressing this. But in fairness to Richard statement, if we stop talking about this, while it’s still an important topic for those who haven’t heard us talk about it before, they might not think it would be one of them inside. We actually are constantly harping on the fact that people need to understand these aspects of our industry.

[00:37:01.760]

So in a way, as much as we may think we’re going over a broken record, there’s a lot of people who may not be exposed to our conversation at any particular given week in the hearing for the first time sometimes. So.

[00:37:11.150]

Plus, there’s talk cells that are still open yet, you know. So we’ve still got at least, you know, not everybody’s at the same stage that there are hotels that still, you know, operate in a reduced capacity or completely closed. Some hotels may never open reopen again, which is truly sad. So, you know, the people at different stages of they cycle in different countries, in different areas as well. So the message that that’s a good thing with this is we can go over this.

[00:37:39.370]

We. We can talk about the things that have been, you know, perhaps not so good. And hopefully, even if it’s just one person or one hotel or whatever it will be, pixelate and take something away from this and actually makes a slight change to their policy. I’ll triple check something instead of double check. Say all you know has it back on underwear of all underwear in that hotel, whatever it may be, you know, and I’ll be a happy man.

[00:38:03.010]

I think that’s the answer to this. Bonnie, do I know it’s out now?

[00:38:06.310]

Increase some random random on hotel underwear hangings? Yeah. Yeah. We’re not. Sorry.

[00:38:10.660]

What happened to you? No, that would be a law that would be coming out. Project, Project Fruit of the Loom. Hey. Was asking a question that probably is right up your alley. And that is getting collaboration with the other departments to be as invested in to the satisfaction of a guest as they invited. She is for what she’s doing. She means she seems to be a person, says, hey, I’m doing all that I can, cleaning all I can.

[00:38:34.170]

How do I put a fire under the department?

[00:38:38.250]

Well, you know what? I think that at some point the team has to come together under the leadership of that hotel where he says or she says, you know, you guys are the best. I see you put your heart and soul into everything you do. I just want every single guest who comes into this hotel to appreciate how great you guys are. I want every single one of you to make sure to work together, to touch. Not physically, but to touch every guest journey along the way, to sparkle a little sunshine of every guest as you as you prepare the room for them, as there as you make the reservation, double check their reservation for them as you choose the room for them, as you prepare the breakfast for the guests.

[00:39:36.510]

Every single thing you do. Let’s put a little extra love in it. Let plaiting in a way that is going to make them their eyes sparkle. Let’s welcome them like every single guest is beyond say or whoever you think is the coolest person around. Let’s treat everybody as movie star special because, you know, just imagine where they’re coming from, the stressful life that they’re leading, the terrible trauma that they may have had with their family or their business so far.

[00:40:11.010]

And now they’re taking the time and they’re spending a little time to have some good relaxation and bonding with their with their family in a beautiful setting where they can finally relax left really. But our whole Hocutt into giving them a wonderful experience, a wonderful memory, and let them feel cared for and worry free for just a little while. And let’s all do it together and let’s try. I mean, if you see something that we should be doing better, somebody told you that something happened wrong.

[00:40:45.390]

Don’t just say, oh, I’m sorry that happened. There’s a fruit plate. Talk about it. Level up that that said escalate that. That comment so that the people who are making the decisions or who are doing the communication, almost most complaints have some aspect of a failure to communicate. Buried in them. Let us change those things. We value your input. We value every every smile, give to every guest every time you go the extra out for someone.

[00:41:22.810]

And we value your vocalised what you see happening. And how can we. And let’s work together as a team and how to fix this. Develop that kind of culture and that kind of excitement. If we have a goal, we want to be you know, we want to have a 90 or more percent guest satisfaction rating. And we’re not going to settle for less. You know, there’s a very common expression that DAP. Perfection is the enemy of good or something like that.

[00:41:54.890]

Well, David Foster, the great musical genius that is, says that good is the enemy of excellence, the greatness. Let’s just be great. Why not try to be great? You don’t come to work every morning saying let’s be average. Let’s get a, you know, four point one, you know, average guest satisfaction score, which is the typical triplet Baxter Rhythm TripAdvisor. That’s the average. Let’s do we can do better. We have great way better than we thought.

[00:42:35.810]

Trust me. Demandware. Yeah.

[00:42:39.200]

Expecting a dollar halfway through that, I was expecting the background of you to open up an acquired to start singing.

[00:42:45.770]

Pretty good. Really fantastic. I’d really say. Right. You genuinely right. It has to come from the top down. It has to come from the the management of whatever you’re doing, you know, whether it’s running a hotel or running a ice cream parlor. It really doesn’t make any difference to go for the top. But again, it also needs to be communicated from the bottom upwards. I don’t know. You know, there’s obviously issue with keeping people at Tyra’s mentioning that that’s going to make it more difficult for them.

[00:43:17.090]

That, to me, suggests that this is sort of the problem. There’s a deeper problem that than. You know, I’m also manages clean and there’s there’s a problem there with the people that you’re hiring and what’s that? Why are they leaving so, so quickly and so easily? I don’t know what it is and I don’t know whether there is there is a deeper issue there.

[00:43:35.270]

But, you know, that that would be one of the things that’s well, that’s one of the things I would look at. But I I mean, I have to get in trouble. Whenever I’ve been working in organizations, I get a job because I make sure that my my my voice and my opinion is most definitely hurt in whether it’s upwards stand what’s left or right. You know, if there is something that I perceived to be wrong, I’ll be seeing it then.

[00:43:56.900]

Can be a testament that he’s been a little end of it, quite roots.

[00:44:00.530]

But I just like you stomp your feet. So tomorrow is followed up by thanking Adele and then saying this EFCA issue. Troops have been on our own for a bit due to leaders being out.

[00:44:12.950]

I mean, in my opinion, the moment a leader steps out, he is a time leader steps up.

[00:44:20.560]

If the who is above you and guiding you and has responsibility for that, when they step out, you step up. And that’s a chance for you to lead without being a leader.

[00:44:30.080]

If not, makes sense that leadership isn’t about titles. It’s not about fancy laminate business cards. It’s not about having a desk in first class flights across the Atlantic.

[00:44:40.750]

The one who invigorates and drives that team to a common goal in my in my opinion.

[00:44:46.210]

I actually get my own place.

[00:44:47.950]

Actually. Right. You’re a leader. If your leader has stepped out, that means you’re the leader actually delivered instead by a manager, stepped out.

[00:44:57.140]

And it’s time for a leader to step up because managers. Yeah. Yes.

[00:45:02.030]

And that’s for sure. I think the one thing I would add to the guy from the Ritz Carlton distinguishes managers are trying to control things with their leaders, are trying to empower and inspire people with a good leader.

[00:45:20.900]

It’s almost like to be seen and never heard. So, you know, but not quite the same. You know, a good leader is saying, what can I do to support you? I suppose there was I say, you know that slightly different. And the only time you need a leader is when you know, when you actually need them and you have a problem. If if you’ve got things in there in place, but processes in place, you actually promote an environment where people will solve their own problems.

[00:45:44.390]

And probably just you for a little bit, if I may. All right. Doing this, you know, then Ben and I will say, what’s that? And then better like we’ve done this repeatedly with it seems that we feel we’ve been saying if you’ve got an idea. Yeah. Go ahead. A rumor that a more often than not people point was with the Nigeria team. Wait on us. Just go do it. We’ll back in about.

[00:46:03.950]

You know, as long as as long as nobody died at the end of it.

[00:46:07.080]

There’s a part of leadership that’s important, though. Right. And then is setting the direction and setting the vision, giving them the scorecard or whatever it is. And I think that’s the thing I would add to what Adel said, her inspirational speech. I felt like I was at the end of a Disney movie when the team lost all season was about the win. I’m ready to serve. But I think big beyond the emotional connection which Adele clearly made.

[00:46:28.970]

I think you’ve got to tap into one of my favorite phrases, which is where focus goes, energy flows, which basically means unless you’re talking about something, people are going to put their energy in towards it. Right. So the best properties that I see and the ones that are being successful now have historically been successful, the ones that ultimately will survive. Share a common trait. And that is they have a central scorecard. The kepi eyes that determine their success are the same KPI that they talk about in every department.

[00:46:58.040]

So if which it should be, it’s got guest satisfaction is one of your key performance indicators of success. Then in every management meeting, every team meeting, you should be talking about how you’re doing directionally on that metric and what you can be doing to positively impact that. And if you do that, the culture shifts or the culture shift to focus on the things that make the biggest impact for your business based on your definition of success. That’s what leadership has to define.

[00:47:28.790]

But then they need to empower people and get out of their way and let them make individual decisions to be able to execute on that vision. But I find that the best, at least for now, the best thing to track is where you ring on, get satisfaction in your market and on trip advisor, not the value ranking, but against rating ranking and that you know. I’ll tell you what, being in the in the top 10 is amazing, but being number eight is the best.

[00:48:09.010]

We will do so much a drive traffic to your website. It does.

[00:48:13.220]

And it’s really hard to maintain. It just elevates your your determination because once you get to number one, there’s an expectation shift. You know, if you’re if you’re a seventh, eighth or ninth, people have a great expectation. But it’s not the expectation of perfection when you get to number one. Everyone coming into that property expects nothing less than perfection. And you have to continue that to maintain getting to number one. It’s really hard playing. No one is really, really hard.

[00:48:42.410]

There was always a caution if that’s been in terms of opulence. It’s that it’s of a sudden get they get satisfaction with this. What isn’t TripAdvisor is really fair about. It’s different down the travel and leisure list, for example, reading two star hotels, number one, and destinations.

[00:49:00.830]

It doesn’t matter what your service level is, it’s about you get satisfaction out of the library.

[00:49:07.130]

You’re not number one.

[00:49:09.090]

You look at temporary hotels, winning powers riding in there. You know, I think that they may be rated it as a luxury brand, but it is really it’s not about opulence with that. It’s about happiness. It’s about it’s about taking care of people. And you and I and I really pride and congratulate them. And it makes me so happy to see a hotel in that class at the top with it. Well done. Well done in Britain.

[00:49:44.180]

So can I.

[00:49:44.690]

Can I just ask. And then you where you went and got a book and you were going to. You’re going to mention something about. I did. I think it was going to be something about leadership. And obviously it must be having a conversation. So it was I’m intrigued to hear it.

[00:50:01.160]

It’s a book called 21 Letters on Life Its Challenges by Charles Handy, a well-known academic, economist, manager. And there’s only one thing I’ve highlighted the first half of the book.

[00:50:14.900]

And he’s talking about human resources. He’s basically letters to his grandchildren. He wrote to his grandchildren so they could read him and hear his opinions on things as they grew up. The one the one quote I think is really relevant here is work needs to be organized. Things should be managed, but people can only be encouraged, inspired and led. I think it’s such a distinction to make in that he sees the leading and the inspiration of people. That’s important.

[00:50:41.000]

And getting younger. You mentioned yourself just the way we approach things. Getting people to go and be free is the inspiration. If your if your line manager isn’t that inspire you not get that inspiration can be to do the day to day mundane things that just need to be done as well as creating new and exciting things. If no one’s there to inspire you to do that. That’s when people step up and take the mantle for themselves. A great experience, low risk as well.

[00:51:08.060]

So we can look at points in history where people look at what was inspirational. You look at like something like John F. Kennedy and said, no, we’re not going to just put a man in space to match what was at the time of crisis. We put a man on the moon. And they’d like to keep you know, we don’t even know how to bottle rocket without blowing up right now. You’re talking about us getting to the moon when we’ve already got our asses worked by some other country that already put a satellite into orbit.

[00:51:33.650]

That aspirational we’re not just going to put a car back on the racetrack to run around in circles. And we’re not planning on winning the race. We’re going to win the race with this hunger junk that we’re gonna make everybody else’s.

[00:51:42.770]

But with the idea of saying we want to be the best at it, not just be good enough. As you pointed out, Adele is really what is that? That rally point? And I’ll add to the Caveh what you said, A, that the leadership aspect isn’t about getting out of the way and giving the resources to the people, but reminding them that you did that. It is the selfless act of truly stepping out and making the people feel like they were the ones that created their success.

[00:52:08.210]

And they not until years later, they go back and go, oh, my God, you made that happen. You got that out of my way, you know? But during that whole time, they never knew it. They just felt that. Yeah. You know what? You’re right. I made that happen. And you are you just smile and know that I cleared a few shop, was out of your way and meticulously.

[00:52:25.400]

And every team member has a million dollar idea in their head. And as a leader, you’ve just got to get out of them.

[00:52:33.650]

Devon, you need to make people feel. Powerful. And, you know, one time there was a situation in the hotel and I was trying to figure out what is the morale problem here? It is what is the issue. And so I went to sit in that office for a few weeks that that property. And I kept hearing that all the meetings from the best people on the team. But I would hear them say, oh, don’t feel like you need to answer questions like that.

[00:53:06.720]

Just pass them off to me. Just pass that off to me. If anybody ask you anything about this, don’t worry about it. Just pass them off to me. Well, the desk part that’s so often that they started to feel like they must be fools who are not intellectually capable of making good decisions, being helpful in these areas. And I just sat down with that gig with the best card and smart people. And but they were just doing the wrong thing unintentionally and said, you know, you have great people.

[00:53:40.690]

They can be future general managers, they can be future directors of sales and marketing. You know, half of them like you are training them for the next step of their career. And let them help you because that I letting them help you by empowering them, aided and use their full mind and full passion for hospitality to take care of, that gets as quickly as possible. We’re giving a better experience for everybody. And then you’ll have more time to do what you really need.

[00:54:14.560]

And it worked like magic. And it was not a mental obstacle that was in people’s ways. But when the desk started feeling, I’m respected, my opinion matters. My contribution and my you know, the trust that my company has in me for being able to make good decisions based on. An understanding of our bills and the way our business works, etc., you know, I feel great about going the extra mile and taking care of customers, but for a while there, it was like, I’m free to do anything because they get in trouble.

[00:54:56.970]

That is a disaster for your.

[00:54:59.930]

If you really want to frighten the person who’s to say, no, I’ll take care of that and all the rest of it. You know, what are you talking about? Treating these people as being future leaders to manage manages future, whatever it will be.

[00:55:11.750]

They could also be your future boss in that we can never know what you know. You know what you’re getting. What goes around comes around, especially in the hospitality industry as much as, you know, talk. It’s global, 10 percent of global GDP. It’s a really small industry to really small industry.

[00:55:29.540]

There’s a piece of Tamara’s comment that we haven’t quite touched on, though, in that she’s talking about other managers. Right. They have a relationship like this. She doesn’t report to them. They don’t report to her. So how does she inspire essentially her similarly leveled managers who definitely managers should be focused on all of these things already in order to be in this position? Right. So I think that here you can also employ some of the same inspirational techniques sideways.

[00:56:03.320]

But look at how many potential department managers are out without a job right now and want to come in and do an excellent job. So just reminding even your co-workers and saying, wow, we are so lucky that we have these positions right now. I know that it’s stressful. I know there’s a lot to cover. But, you know, how can I support you guys in your departments? You know, from my perspective, one of the things I’m doing is I’m cleaning X, Y and Z because that’s so critical.

[00:56:38.120]

Everything I’ve been researching says cleanliness is the number one thing. How can I support you guys so that you can achieve that in your departments as well? And it’s kind of a hint to them saying, hey, you need to be achieving this in your department. But it’s a nice approach as well. That reminds them that there are probably 50 people who would love to have their job right now. And so it’s not that difficult. Line level staff is really problematic right now.

[00:57:06.740]

And depending what happens with the unemployment that may shift things gotten, we may see more people willing to return to work. But at the managerial level, there are so many available people because of the cuts that have been made to staffing across the industry. So it’s important that we’re all putting our best foot forward and really being grateful for the positions that we have and saying, OK, how can I turn this to my employer in the form of excellence in everything that I’m doing?

[00:57:35.000]

And how is it going to look in someone’s resume if if you’re part of the hotel that knows took a nosedive because of cleanliness, because of it is going to be you’re not going be terribly employable back and get back in the game simply because. What’s up? Go back to the process. Have you got phone? Simple process. You know, it’s and you can’t get a team, you know, your team that you’re directly responsible to follow simple process.

[00:57:58.970]

I mean, and then willingly made up you. It’ll be fantastic. But at least do something simple not to terribly employable at the back end of it. And if that doesn’t work, then I always suggest my folks, you know, not by our side.

[00:58:11.660]

You know, I think what my colleagues try to do is they manage this go away and one comes out. There are different ways to solve this problem. We should do it. They can play and not stab our colleagues. Yeah. I, I like I like that suggestion. Is it Lily. Because it’s it’s a little bit. It’s, it’s, it’s nice but it’s a little bit is what’s not being said. How can I support you in doing this.

[00:58:36.050]

Suggests that she’s being nice.

[00:58:41.230]

He’s telling you. Well I’m going to remind you how many people are unemployed.

[00:58:45.170]

How can I support you to keep your job? When there’s thousands of people that would love your job. I’m just I am a humble servant. I’m all about you.

[00:58:56.240]

I was noticing it is. I asked you.

[00:59:02.630]

Well, and sometimes the opposite approach can be effective. To that, there’s a lot of psychology studies that show that if you if you ask someone for a favor, then it tightens the bond between you and they are more likely to open up to you and trust you in the future. So sometimes you can flip it rawling going to them and offering them something. Maybe you start the relationship the other way and build the relationship by saying, I really need your help.

[00:59:31.730]

And I know you’re busy, but could you lend me your knowledge or your expertise or give me your opinion on this? Because that that creates a. And then they’re going to trust you more and that you can build upon that to get a deeper relationship. Don’t abuse it and don’t do something that doesn’t make sense, but genuinely look for their help, then they’re going to feel like they can trust you to do the same. Modeling that behavior can help.

[00:59:54.830]

Sometimes the difficulty with that is that you end up getting a job back yourself when you try to get the other person to be. And that could be a trick. Yeah, I think with the way Lily mentioned it and what Ben was talking about, it’s mostly about books. It’s the how can you how how can I expect it or how can you know, how can we do this together by asking a question you actually get and the other person to come up with the answer for the solution.

[01:00:25.310]

And if it’s it’s it’s the phrasing of the question and how you actually ask that question. That puts the emphasis on the other person.

[01:00:32.710]

See, I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m in the Arnold Schwarzenegger Konan mode, which is despoil your enemies and hear the lament of the women.

[01:00:39.630]

You know, this is just a good job. I get my listeners over the fire. Right.

[01:00:48.140]

Any of your following counts? I like that’s not a role I would take on for this group of people on your own.

[01:00:58.030]

To me, it’s been my legal counsel for about 40 years.

[01:01:01.940]

I advise you not to make a note to enter one leave. You know, guess what? Do not ask. Keeping director its emergency departments is what it is.

[01:01:10.880]

You know, it’s equal to the time the Dan goes back.

[01:01:14.590]

There’s one person. It’s like Thunderdome. One person is still there. Everybody else is gone. Place is clean as a whistle.

[01:01:21.410]

Couldn’t you just meet our payroll payroll significantly change.

[01:01:31.400]

It’s a market with a marketing twist of things in the money and all the rest. The airports and all of the airlines where some airlines have decided, like American Airlines says, look, this this middle seat thing is just PR. It has nothing to do with it. And then other airlines have said, no, we’re going to keep this simple, the middle seat empty and we’re not going to be jacking our rates and so forth and so on. And boom, look, we’ve got the business.

[01:01:54.140]

You know, it’s this perspective shift of like you may think it’s this, but wrong answer. We are doing better business. We are keeping the middle seat empty and we are going back now. That being said, airlines doing business now are never going to do better now than never.

[01:02:09.800]

Excuse me. It’s gonna be a while before they get back to a business level prior to what this has happened, especially from the corporate travel perspective, because it’s scuppered.

[01:02:19.160]

Yes. Yeah, well, that’s a good word.

[01:02:25.250]

Yeah. I got a couple of years where I just I’d throw that in there because it does relate to a little bit of what we just said, so. When he grabbed those articles. But you’re right. There’s no way on Earth I would want to fly in a middle seat these days. I didn’t like it before and sure as hell I’m going to do it now. Yes. And I wouldn’t fly if I didn’t know that the middle seat was empty.

[01:02:45.020]

Exactly.

[01:02:47.370]

It all depends on any side, either side of me. You know, if I’m honest. If if it if it’s my kids know it happening now. You know what, strange, Jack. No problem.

[01:03:01.930]

But again, again, this also goes to the leverage of opportunity, because now they’re saying that if you do make the effort to go face to face, you are really amping up the importance of that corporate dialogue. Because you are putting yourself through that process to get to the person to be in front of them, not on a zoom, not on a Brady Bunch style. But I’m going to go and come and talk to you because it’s that important to me.

[01:03:28.660]

So it’s actually elevated that business travel thing eventually. So I’m sure they’ll be leveraging of that as time goes forward. That says, no, I’ll come to you and talk to you. I mean, Lily, you went and actually traveled because it was business. Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure that added to the amplification of of of them saying, wow, you made the trip, you’re here. You know, it’s important that you’re here. There’s very cool.

[01:03:49.810]

And there’s certain types of business that are just better conducted in person. We all know that. And this is coming from somebody who makes their living on a remote business. Right. But there’s still a need for that human touch from time to time. And honestly, it was also huge for me. I probably could have done it remotely, but I knew that for myself, I needed to step out of my environment a little bit, even if there was some risk to it and get myself in a different frame of mind in order to keep being a creative and effective leader for my own company.

[01:04:26.590]

Which is quite interesting because we had the conversation last week, if I remember correctly, then why you said that face to face was going to die out completely sculptress, as it were.

[01:04:38.270]

And and I said, we’ve got to I’ve actually forgot to tell you, I’ve got a meeting this week where I was met face to face and we went that business.

[01:04:47.490]

Oh, oh, oh. Just putting out your website and you’re already divided.

[01:04:54.820]

That broke room beard versus the Yang Black T-shirt hadn’t bathed in months. Oh.

[01:05:02.230]

Oh I think I think this and this isn’t necessarily something for a public forum. This could have been dealt with the call afterwards.

[01:05:15.490]

I would suggest that you might not have needed to do that.

[01:05:19.750]

I mean, I, like anybody, would love for eight hours away from my family. I’m sorry. I’m I’m kidding. I love you all. I mean, yeah, obviously, it’s good at the moment is going to be easier for people to do business face to face.

[01:05:33.880]

There’s something very different about being able to pick up on nonverbal communication and the feel of the tone of the way the conversation is going. By heart, back to the last five years, I think, look, all the other clients we’ve signed that we’ve never met. And we are never going to meet.

[01:05:50.210]

I want you guys to face if you want to do face to face. I agree. I would love to be face to face with people. But is that creating an inconvenience for them? Because keep in mind, they might be working from home themselves. So where exactly you’re going to meet maybe go to Starbucks. You’re not in the office. Is let’s assume you do get them in the office. Now, everybody is concerned about. OK. Do we weren’t bassmaster.

[01:06:12.740]

We are. How do we keep everything clean? All the things that have to be kept taking into consideration along with that. Is it more convenient for them to meet you? By no means. Hypothetical question.

[01:06:23.350]

If you were forced like as. I’m not even gonna consider doing business with you unless you show up on my doorstep like. Does that change your opinion of it massively depends on the value of the client. Yeah. I mean, no, I’m I’m I’m I’m absolutely things. Go go find somebody else. Sorry. I mean, I don’t think you’re how big it is. You can make my day. You could make me a millionaire. But that means I can kiss the ring.

[01:06:45.190]

I don’t kiss rings. Yeah, but to be fair, Lauren, you are the most stubborn person on the planet.

[01:06:52.480]

I think what you’re getting at speed the approach. Right. Like, hey, I really it’s one thing to say, like, hey, we’re very family oriented. For example, we did some work in Portugal. They flew us to Portugal first class to close the business on their own dime because it was so important to them that there was that face to face connection as part of their culture. However, the way you’re describing it, Lauren, is more like a threat.

[01:07:21.490]

Right. Like, if somebody is threatening you, like you’re not gonna get the business if you’re not coming to visit me, I think that has less to do with the travel and more to do with this this kind of attitude that I want to deal with right now.

[01:07:34.090]

I can’t look at it. That force that forced I don’t care about you. It’s only about me perspective. I want. I don’t want you in business with those people. I’m a person. I also. I was going to rule that you do better to be you know, you have to contract. You signed with somebody when you do sober than when you’re drunk. Always do both.

[01:07:50.080]

It’s kind of people according to fuel travels. Last study released today plan.

[01:07:56.360]

It sounds really with people who say I don’t want to be forced to wear masks, but you best keep everybody else away from me because I’m scared.

[01:08:06.820]

Yeah, it’s just encouraged me to.

[01:08:09.590]

The people who also wanted the wall between you and Mexico. You know, they were completely different. Remember when that was a topic of discussion. That seems such a long time ago. Yeah. I mean, Brexit. Nothing. Brexit. Brit, that the comments you made last week.

[01:08:25.390]

I actually wrote down ozen them and us versus them.

[01:08:29.360]

The tribal need for masks. I thought it was a it was piercing is why I thought that was piercing. It got to the heart of the issue. It was very much. I want to be safe, but I don’t wanna do anything to be safe. I just want to know what else to make me safe. Exactly.

[01:08:43.690]

But the people who live in the peanut gallery, she shared her service. She did. About the middle seat dialogue. A little bit as to would you think about better to raise the price and keep the seat empty and so forth. And survey says 52 percent higher price, less people. Well, there’s still time travel. I don’t really care if the price remains the same. I might be a little annoyed if the price is higher than usual, but I don’t see the discount.

[01:09:16.020]

I do like that there’s less people. When I flew through L.A. X, I saw the people from my flight and about 30 others made the entire journey to say to elevate our game and conversation.

[01:09:25.590]

Like I mentioned earlier in the show, here’s an advance dialogue that’s been beneficial to the people of Indianapolis, because Indianapolis, ironically, is a hub of small airports, executive airports.

[01:09:37.230]

We do this business travel as in sales, people going to visit clients or corporate travelers having to go to corporate mothership or we relate to it from the up from the downward to the opposition. We don’t look at the top to the down positions. I own a big company. I got to go see my businesses. I own a private plane. I want to go see stuff. We’ve had some decent success in targeting private flight charters. We’ve had decent success in people that have said, I don’t wanna get on the big planes, I’ll pay the extra, get on the small planes, and I can financially handle that.

[01:10:10.950]

I can pay the double amount, which ironically, there’s not a big gap between trying to upscale your big plane ride to just going on a private charter plane. And there’s a really intricate network of private charters that people use that, you know, they own a plane, but they lease it out all the time.

[01:10:26.160]

And it’s a part of networks of people flying all over the place.

[01:10:28.950]

There’s enough people like that that we can see some business that don’t aren’t having to stay at the Ritz. They need function. It’s by the airport. It’s to my business. I’m back on the plane, not gone. I don’t need the paper spot. I don’t need this and this. I you know, I’m still running the financial business. I just need to a hotel that does commentating clean.

[01:10:46.020]

That’s it. That’s what people don’t think about things like that. Then you did these are those little grains of rice that build up a bowl of rice. It’s just you know, this is a piece of business you can get.

[01:10:54.570]

It’s a dozen, half dozen, whatever, but it’s somebody that you didn’t have before. So just that kind of thought process that you’d gonna have to flip it over sometimes. Look at it from a couple of different ways.

[01:11:03.540]

But that’s business. And then there’s more of those chat flights going around at the moment as well. I’ve seen quite a few. And looking for a digital marketing agencies to actually advertise. They chat flight themselves. So, you know, there’s clearly, clearly more that they’re trying to do or at least try to capitalize on this this industry such as you. You’re right. Keep your eyes open.

[01:11:26.760]

Look at what’s going wrong and see if you can then have the kind of knock on effect of what that tech support companies right now are wicked solid with, that they need to send crews because they actually have to go down to the denizens of the the servers and they got to go to the room itself and they going to be jacking cables and cable monkeying it and everything else to do the stuff.

[01:11:46.490]

They can’t do that remote. It’s not about telling somebody, unplug this, unplug this here. They have to go and handle the hardware issues. They have to go. And they usually go in teams because one person usually doesn’t solve that stuff. Usually appears in twos and fours. And those people go on these planes because it’s static. Important for them to get there to do the solutions.

[01:12:04.500]

Yeah, you can’t do that often. No. No. No one. No, no. No. Oh, God.

[01:12:13.450]

So you strangler’s luck anyway.

[01:12:18.960]

So thank you, Holly, for bringing that back to our attention about the middle seat. Thank you. You should join us, Lewis. Right. Should pop in sitting in the peanut gallery like that. So open it up for an Emmy. Like to sit there and don’t cancel.

[01:12:31.330]

Yes. Good at judging us, isn’t she? I think she said and judging this. So I don’t want to screw the Google stuff.

[01:12:39.020]

I have I have an article separate from the article that that Robert gave us as to Google my business. I have a I’m a bit of an ax to grind. Something new has to ask, like using Google my business.

[01:12:53.450]

It’s one of the most fundamental tools that Google is truly leading into. And there’s a lot of stuff they’re dumping into this that nobody’s really utilizing.

[01:13:02.270]

It’s stuff that they’re you know, they’re they’ve they’ve they’ve added a lot of covert aspects to it. They’ve a lot of you know, I’m not a big fan of their certification thing. Fifty bucks a month thing. I don’t think that’s really into our market yet. It’s more for retail, I think. Service industries.

[01:13:16.010]

But it’s been tested in certain markets for. For services like repair services, things like that. It’s not available for.

[01:13:25.370]

But it is for restaurants. Yes.

[01:13:29.120]

Right. Restaurants probably could be helpful for that. Yes.

[01:13:31.760]

And especially ones that do delivery during coffee. So I put it host on this as well myself around that that testing. It’s almost like a metasearch book, you know, for not a hotel industry. The app advertised within and Google my business. And one of the areas that they were talking about was being a potential issue is restaurants, where you’ve got an auto style system, where you’ve got, you know, a bigger app delivery services advertising on the Google my business listing of a restaurant.

[01:14:05.180]

All right. Or a takeaway or whatever it would be. And given the fact that Kovik, 19, is now opened up the eyes to a lot of restaurants, that there is a takeout market, that there is the potential that could continue long after coalface, you know, your favorite restaurant that was, you know, always difficult to get, a CTA could now have a very lucrative takeaway menu that it would they would be crazy if they were to stop that.

[01:14:34.520]

You know, they get they get the is coming back in, but obviously not go out and say it opens up. An interesting an interesting conundrum on almost a hotel OCA like conundrum with that Google playing around with this, but they don’t care as long as they get paid.

[01:14:49.910]

Well, the same, though, is it? I’m saying it isn’t the same take out. It’s just not the same basic charge less for that. Know what it is is speaking of which, you know, I think that people have made quite a good campaign to contact restaurants directly for takeout rather than go through one of the delivery services that I think 30 percent of the restaurant. And and I wonder why why I don’t think that we’ve made a similar campaign is hotels.

[01:15:32.110]

Right?

[01:15:33.200]

I think he takes Hilton back, did write the book, direct campaign and direct that. But I think that people have made it big.

[01:15:42.620]

I think the differences here is that the last book, Uncommon Expedia came to they were one of the earliest adopters of Internet advertising and the business model that they created, that they almost educated an entire world to a certain degree, that that’s how you book a hotel room. That’s how you can book hotel room. Where is the restaurants? And they and at the delivery service is actually coming through right now. Still, it’s still very new. It’s still it’s not.

[01:16:16.860]

It hasn’t been around for 20 years. It’s not it’s not as well established. They’re still fighting for market share between themselves at the moment here. So there is the extra education that the people are picking up and saying, hey, wait a second, we’re not going to we’re not going to go the way the hotels are going.

[01:16:32.340]

Let’s get some technology base. So we did a study. This is two or three years ago now. And one of the questions was, do you visit the hotel Web site prior to making a booking, regardless of how you book with your book on a.D.A or Direct or over the phone or whatever, do you visit the hotel Web site before you book in? 87 percent of people said, yeah, they do. So it’s not that people don’t know they can go to the hotel website and book direct.

[01:16:54.930]

It’s that it’s easier or there’s more convenience or they trust an Expedia more than they do booking direct. So I think we’d need to continue to educate, but we’d need to invest in better infrastructure. We need better booking engine technology that works on mobile. You know, we need to better copywriting. We we need. There’s a lot of optimization that I’d say you can give me any hotel, Web site, even even our own. And there’s opportunity to drive up incremental conversion rate on everybody.

[01:17:24.550]

So there’s some opportunity in there to going back to the restaurants part, taking up the chains and the franchises that I’ll have to wash and sell the technology but have better technology. Look at your independent restaurant, family owned restaurant in whatever town that you’re in. Go to their website. Can you order and pay for food online? And it has astonished me how many of them don’t have the restaurant equivalent of a booking engine. Right. And it’s within my where I live.

[01:17:49.530]

I had one place. They said, nope, you got to call us. We couldn’t call them because they had limited staff. Nobody was answering the phone. You can even get through other bone. You have to actually go physically to place your order in the first place and then wait 30 minutes to get done. Now, that doesn’t make it is fine.

[01:18:03.480]

Even if you could write, even if you could. You start to put in your credit card details and it’s a drop off. All right. And if there’s friction there that if I go to Aruba, eat, I don’t have that friction because they already have that payment. And I click, click, click, say so. So that Frick’s the friction of transaction. Humans are lazy. All of us. We’re all lazy. We’re gonna do the path of least resistance every time.

[01:18:23.070]

And not moral. It might say we should book direct or we should do this. But if it’s easier not to. We’re probably going to do was easy.

[01:18:30.910]

You know what? We we work with Sabor. We work with Haggis’s. We work with Travaglio in these companies. Why? If someone has booked before someplace else through the system, why can it be that easy for that person’s profile? Also with that, with those services, retain it so that it is put push of a button for both the right thing to do and the payment processor is not Pegasus or save it or the payment processor is going to be the individual hotel.

[01:19:04.710]

So you get into a whole bunch of security situations and challenges when you’re not doing the payment. I think that’s why you’re seeing a trend towards things like Google Pay and Google Wallet and Apple Pay and Amazon cart. And I think that’ll be the way that we we trend as an industry. But I see the hold up right now on that front in hotels is the PMI assistance. The PMI systems will not let you use a lot of these payment opportunities right now.

[01:19:35.370]

That’s a major problem.

[01:19:36.890]

You know that us to what we’re going to see. Do you talk about everything being easier? But we have been dropping about five minutes. So just real quickly, you know, we we have the the direct booking movement, if you will, that started particular with some of the brands butting heads with the hotels and so on. We go through this this this skogen crisis and we think about how do we come back out of it? And as much as I can sit here and tell you the direct bookings are more important than ever because they are, as you want to be able to control that narrative on the guest and so on.

[01:20:03.840]

The reality of the matter is that we are all going to look for buy. We all I mean, the industry look for what is the easiest way for me to start getting business back. And the answer will be the OCA, Expedia, hotwire looking dot com. They’ll all stop and say we’ll sell your rooms for. Why do I say this? Because we did it before. Right after 9/11. Look, we all did. We sold our soul to the UTX saying, please put Hetson best for me.

[01:20:25.940]

We spent ten years trying to get that business back again. I never did it again. The same thing again.

[01:20:32.010]

So, yeah, we’re looking at hotels. Hotel Stockholm is offering they’re offering a buy back on we bookings where these not drop the commission and give you a 50 percent discount as a guest to put the money back in your wallet with them. They hang on the money and you can rebook with the same hotels. Always do. By the end of this year, for the years before April next year, they’re already coming into ways of trying to. How to figure to over keep your business without losing it by going method.

[01:20:53.160]

Simple, elegant. I just came over and took a look at the flip side. What Expedia is doing with their Sell Your Soul to the Devil kind of deal, which might well make sense for some people, but for a lot it’s given away the one advantage you have. You know, in the short term, you might gain a little bit in the long term, that’s going to bite you in the butt if you want to. Right. What else also is that?

[01:21:13.710]

Unfortunately, all of these entities, the nexuses the embassies that you travel, click, all these other ones, nobody’s home right now. They’ve left so many people go that their status is the same as it was before it all happened. And nothing’s being improved or fixed on or put together based on the new demands. So if even if it was like a brilliant idea that you have, which is true, why can’t we do this? There’s nobody building it.

[01:21:38.790]

And the brands are just as bad. Nobody in the brand is at home right now to even do this fundamental stuff. So everything is just sitting as it on a shelf the way it was from before. And these other little new industries, you know, like fuel travel were, you know, dominate in the world, are coming with solutions on how to do some things that aren’t being done by the other providers because it’s a necessary demand right now.

[01:21:59.910]

This is your touchless keyless entry, touchless payments you’ll touch you’ll be able to go make reservations at restaurants without having to deal with somebody goes. Yeah, which one? How many people, you know, be able to do it online and say, boom, I got to go there and I want something, you know?

[01:22:13.120]

You know what I what I find really interesting, though, is, is the mindset of the hotel industry with the LCAC then and I had this conversation so many times that, you know, because when where went digital marketing specialist would know what the Internet can do. We’ve done it in so many other industry sectors before we joined this industry. We know what’s capable. We know what’s possible and what’s other. We’ve sat there and said before, you don’t need to automate as much as you think you did.

[01:22:39.210]

Even right now, even in this crisis and we’ve just signed a brand new hotel to us. It’s an amazing hotel. I would look really looking forward to working with them. It happened to be one of what was it, face to face. It’s a different story.

[01:22:52.550]

But the racial health has actually turned round and said, we’re not using Otey eyes. And for the month of July, since we’ve opened a paper in the U.K. there, occupancy level is higher this this July than it was the same period last year when they were using boats. Is there anybody out? Is higher the let the stage up now. Yeah, fair enough. That a lot of that is going to be part of fellow the whole Kobrick 19 situation.

[01:23:18.660]

But I went to another hotel literally within a mile of this, this hotel to talk about the same things. They’re not even open yet. And that August, when they were opening up, it looks terrible. It looks absolutely terrible. And they’re trying that that that their strategy was to just go to the Eighty-eight, just to put it all through the agency.

[01:23:38.670]

But every month, everyone’s shouting. And it was try to compete for the space on the altar. Yes. So someone who’s done something different, going direct, getting the message out there, because no hotels are actually advertising on the on the Direk platforms like Google, the metasearch, whatever it will be, the cost, the clicks are cheaper and there’s less competition right now. This is not rocket science. This is very simple. Lots of people go to one place fighting for her and their heads in bed tonight, all attention.

[01:24:07.500]

Not very many people going over here. And it’s cheaper, you know, a but it’s again, it’s it’s trying to convince somebody to open up their wallet and and actually take that gamble and take that risk. And it’s easy for me to say because we’ve done it. We see it, I bet.

[01:24:24.030]

And I said, well, we’re definitely going to win. We don’t know what the results are going to be. But I know what with this chap. He’s got another hotel. The only two independents got another hotel. We were going to stop traveling at metasearch with him. And he and I said, you know, I hate using Holtz’s yet they said yes. He said, You want me to stop? Well, OK. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:24:45.350]

OK, let’s try. So he’s going to stop using metasearch and we know that the case study for that is going to be upset for now, which, you know, it’s in the latest. Fantastic.

[01:24:55.330]

Speaking of metasearch thing, before we lose you, since you are the founding fellow of the two organizations right now. Where’s that? They can find you more. No more.

[01:25:03.450]

But you sure you can reach out to me? Dena Bass, Ken Mediacom, also Dena metasearch marketing dot com. Difference between those two based cabman dot com is really designed for training purposes, particularly from somebody who’s metasearch based on our medicines. Marketing dot com. Yes. Designed for helping, which used to actually run their metasearch programs and get you connected with the right vendors such as and bend over here and people that can actually help you run those programs and get into the right technology so that every weekend everybody will see you next week.

[01:25:35.400]

Thank you. But I also don’t wanna lose a tooth before I don’t lose a little bit.

[01:25:39.900]

Before this was two articles that I wanted to ask you to talk about a little bit was the length of state strategy article and the hotel pricing article. And the reason I brought this up, I think I think I sent it to everybody from a corn team. I was on with BSE Bridge, Columbia, Somalia Chapter Amadeus was very nice and of Anthony Woo! Great guy. You know, I complain about the fact that so many people were laid off and so forth.

[01:26:01.590]

He’s one people have been retained and he’s really trying to rethink. Data usage, data functionality and so forth, and with Canada being locked down and domestic travel only, he’s been showing a lot of really cool data. And I sent that over to everybody, I think, from from our group here.

[01:26:16.270]

And one of the things was talking about how the pricing strategy is, you know, everyone’s maintaining pricing. And now she’s going down like they’re trying to do this, the stoop. Now, what seems to be the not so brilliant thing of reducing prices to try to inspire demand cycle. And I know that, you know, Lily, you’ve been an advocate of do not touch your rate or don’t try to think you have to dig discounts. Right. Should say to could compensate for the demand shift.

[01:26:42.730]

So between those two conversations a week before I lost one week. Sure. You were able to hit both of those inside. Doesn’t the state play into this? And how does rate variations play into this? Yeah, for sure, so length of stay in particular. We’re finding a couple different kind of incongruent response thus depending on your market. Right. Some are keeping a pretty similar length of stay. And it’s really focused around weekends. Others are starting to see more of a pattern of a three or four night we can stay.

[01:27:15.690]

And others are successfully capturing the office away from home, a group who is tired of being in their home office but also needs privacy. And, you know, obviously the the reworks of the world are kind of too high touch for most people right now, unless you’ve already gotten a private office. So those who really want to get out and office separately are coming in for five nights, stays midweek. So really, my best advice around that is to watch your own trends for the past couple of months, because when you look at using length of stay restrictions as a tool.

[01:27:53.670]

Number one, you never restrict unless you expect to sell up. So the only time to use a restriction is when you have more demand than your capacity can handle. But if you are in that scenario, and I know a lot of luxury resorts right now are actually in that scenario, they’re raising rates even well over last year rates and they can’t slow down demand because people are desperate to get out to these activity. Luxury spread out kind of destinations.

[01:28:22.380]

But if you see that you have enough capacity to be to be at 150 percent, for example, based on the demand that’s coming in the then how many of those are two nights days versus three makes days or four nights days and use that data to set the right strategy for your stay? And to your point on rate, it’s I know you didn’t mean it that way, but I wouldn’t say it’s a don’t touch your rate. It’s more that you have to be on top of those rates to adjust to the changing market conditions.

[01:28:57.180]

But don’t suddenly be at the lowest rate and maintain your positioning in the market and know that if your comps set drops to eighty nine. Ninety nine. Doesn’t necessarily put you out of the running. If you have a proper marketing behind it, that allows you to set yourself apart from a value proposition. Now if they’re at ninety nine and you’re up one oh four. Oddly enough, psychology being what it is that can put you out of the running.

[01:29:24.390]

So understand where those thresholds are and make sure that you’re pricing appropriately to your market as you would have previously based on your value proposition.

[01:29:38.130]

Well, so to focus on adding value before you look at dropping rate. If you have the choice, you know, always look at what can I add? What what what incentives can I give to people that might be, you know, food and beverage credit or, you know, there’s a lot of things you could add depending on your situation. But we’re seeing that at that, along with reassurance of the safety protocols, seems to be able to gain a higher rate right now if you add someone versus slashing rates.

[01:30:10.860]

But it’s funny, back on EPSO one 49 of the fuel podcast Lily was on and we’re talking about rate and the number one rule. She did the five tips, which are still very relevant. And the number one tip was don’t lower your rate. And then we talked about that for a while. And then her number two was no one’s a myth. So ignore what we just said, because sometimes you do have to lower your rate. And it really is about your your unique situation, your concept, your market, your audience on this thing.

[01:30:42.180]

Let me ask a question.

[01:30:44.010]

That podcast is still relevant because that’s hard to make it through.

[01:30:49.770]

So let me let me ask you there. There’s been some pushback from the properties that they are being challenged on their rates because their service profiles of change. There is no buffet breakfast anymore. There is not the daily clemins of rooms. And people see that as a cost savings to the hotel. We tried to counter that by saying yes, but the PPE requirements and the other things that we’ve had to adopt and so forth, the packaging and so forth compensate for some of that stuff.

[01:31:17.010]

Howard, how does that discussion roll out for everyone in the sense of, OK, so we’re not giving a buffet, but we’re giving you a grab and go?

[01:31:23.970]

We don’t you know, whenever we’ve done that, we’ve tried to encourage folks to replace value, you know, and it’s not apples to apples. And sometimes it can be perceived different differently, but sometimes opportunity arises from that. And I think I mentioned this on the show before. We’ve had a handful of properties that are seeing massive increases in SMB sales because they’ve gone from a buffet to a grab and go or some kind of boxed breakfast that they supply to either to the door or you can come pick up from the front desk.

[01:31:55.140]

But it’s included in the rate. So the guest is saying, okay, well, breakfast is still included, but they’re not stuffing their face on like 500 rashers of bacon like they do in the buffet. And they’re not eating skipping lunch and just going out to a seafood buffet for dinner. So they’re seeing that lunch sales are up through the roof and even dinner sales is it’s a knock on as well. So, you know, I think you’ve got to look at the big picture of what is my my share of wallet of the guests, not just from the room, but from my ancillary services as well.

[01:32:26.780]

And look at it from that perspective. But maybe there is an argument, a lower rate if you feel like you’re going to get it back up from the second wallet.

[01:32:32.920]

But you’ve also got a mindset thing as well, haven’t you? If you’ve got a lot of leisure travel coming to you or your property right now, we’ll go through it. We’ll go back to some of the things we’ll talk about then with course at the talks about the club. If I’m staying in a hotel, I’ve obviously got through the whole decision making process that they say hotels could be right for me. I’m your what’s that would feel safe that the cleanliness levels added to the standard that I want.

[01:32:58.470]

But perhaps you’re not going to know what that would be like outside the restaurant somewhere else.

[01:33:03.280]

So there is the opportunity there where if there is to be onsite, there is a restaurant onsite that there is yourself because you’ve got a captive audience that’s perhaps a little bit more tepid about going up than they once were, you know, four months ago. So it doesn’t surprise me that effort attendees go, no, that’s a fact. You know, should really be pushing trying to trying to get more more out of that wherever you can do with whatever opportunity which is which is what our value proposition can come in.

[01:33:30.600]

You know, we’ve seen it, you know, it’s different than couponing, but it’s similar in a way in that if you give some kind of credit towards on property everybody, it gets more participation. So I think that that’s the kind of thing you should be playing at playing with right now before you drop. Right.

[01:33:50.070]

Some of the listing to restaurants, one of see other drawbacks, not just with cleanliness, but accuracy of information, because I feel like, you know, your individual restaurants are necessarily doing as good of a job with their Google my business listings and things like that. I’ve seen it both sides of things, either restaurant saying they’re not open for dining, but they actually are, or that they are open for dining and they’re not specifically. Okay, we’re open for dining, but we’re not open for this.

[01:34:21.840]

And so it’s frustrating to feel like you could show up at a restaurant that’s maybe you selected it for something specific that you’re craving. It’s gone a little out of your way to get there and you can’t even really eat there. So we call ahead for everything. Whereas otherwise, the information’s right there at your fingertips. And again, it comes down to not just making it clean and safe, but making it easy for the guests to make a decision where they don’t.

[01:34:50.270]

You’re not adding stress. Nobody wants to go on a vacation and be more stressed than they were when they were clean, safe and accurate.

[01:34:58.770]

Yeah.

[01:35:00.380]

Yeah. That’s that’s been pretty much progressed with the progress of communication that we’ve been trying to lean on. Now, tell me a little bit of advanced dialogue. And it kind of funny because, you know, Robert sent this article out, which was the extra places, Netflix, tourism sites, the one that he talks about where people are grabbing these unique places to go peek and poke at because they’re a fan of a particular show or something like this.

[01:35:24.290]

It’s ironic that it came up when you put it sarco goods. When I was first having discussed with the sales team, with a client, you know, they approached a very traditionally like, OK, well, these groups aren’t traveling and I can’t get this. They’re everything was why can’t why can’t they won’t they aren’t. They’re not doing. And then we start talking about, well, what do you do around there? What still if somebody just want to go drive around?

[01:35:43.520]

If you talk to a lot of people right now like it, give me in the car driving around. Just, you know what? I just got to get out of the house or something. I will go drive around at least a brown herehere. And that’s something I could from them, Nelvis. And they start thinking about the winery’s the farmer farmer’s markets, the little parks to go to the places that are low density places. And then they just started writing stuff, more and more stuff and more that like when you did that TV show, do such and such.

[01:36:06.410]

Next door in Alverson, they start with these crazy things of like if I if I’m here at the hotel because we’d be just predicate this way a little bit of a. conversation. First thing is talking about what you’re doing for Clamantis. The second thing is what is available for you, for your basic needs. Like what? Restaurants are open meal periods is over. Third is what’s available for you to do if you’re in the market. Like if you’re want to go the museum, you have to make a reservation perhaps, or something, that kind of information.

[01:36:30.590]

And then the fourth is, if you’re in the market, what is it you might want to do other than what is available? What might you want to do? And that’s where this conversation came out of was okay, I’m I’m here. There for whatever reasons, I have to travel for desire to travel. What do I want to do?

[01:36:44.350]

And there’s like these great driving around things or, you know, see this or CNNSI. I only get out of the car. Or if you do, it’s a low density, good distance mass concluded. Whatever it is, it just started creating this list of stuff. And that interesting article was they are about, hey, some people want to go see where certain shows were made. I mean, my wife is still spend a bloodline, which is we’ve lived down in the Florida Keys.

[01:37:06.020]

And she was going on to see all the places that did the video shooting. Even though we lived there, we know where they were to ask to see him again, you know? OK, so we’ll go down and drive and see what it looks like, you know, but those are all different little reasons why people might want to stay with you.

[01:37:20.950]

You know what, one of the biggest untapped resources in hotel marketing is your consumer database. You have that or you should have the email address from almost everyone that’s ever stay with you in the last, say, 10 years. Right. You should have that if you if you don’t. You should be working towards that. They are willing, especially right now, to offer their opinions on things. And one of the easiest questions to ask them, if you want to go that route, is what are the things you do while you’re in town and you can have a list, but you can also have an open ended question and let them fill it in as well.

[01:37:55.680]

And then you can find out, OK. These are the things that drive people to our destination. These are the things that I need to be talking about in my marketing. To drive more people to this hotel is real easy. I don’t understand why people don’t talk to their guests more about what they think and feel and hear and their rationale for why they chose your property. It’s a wealth of information that you can leverage.

[01:38:18.420]

You have to have seen, you know, all the time and double whatever that would be within six minds.

[01:38:26.080]

It’s like, you know. I mean, that’s that’s the excuse people get. But I mean, the reality is, if you if you do it properly and you provide value with with with the engagements that you’re creating with the guests, it’s not it’s not tough. I mean, double opt in isn’t something that’s required. It’s something that’s recommended. But, you know, as long as long as you’re respecting privacy and not selling data and not sharing data in, you know, sending people what you say you’re going to send them when they opt in.

[01:38:57.180]

I mean, it’s not that tough. Strangely enough, I mean, what we want to give you responses.

[01:39:02.700]

We’ve been trying to convert more more people to my estimates messaging via using more of the messenger. Bonning offering them to send a message is very effective.

[01:39:10.620]

But but it’s going to get. It’s going to get overused in. We’re going to market. It’s going to ruin estimates.

[01:39:16.410]

When they did email, when they were we were weren’t everything because we are overbearing to your point, we abuse it over time. But the neat part of it is, is that we’re getting we’ve we’ve had our first big successes with it just recently where we first we we’ve accumulated enough audience and then we started offering after we give them the incentive to sign up, we give them an incentive to use that and we get some good wins with it. We’re like, wow, this is awesome.

[01:39:41.010]

And the first thing we did credit these group is like, stop, let’s not burn this. Let’s. We did what we did. We got we got pots. Let’s give us some time. Nobody’s one do the next best deal. Let’s just chill right now. And then when the next opportunity comes up, we’ll offer something else with it. But it was very productive. I mean, for our first effort forward, it did really, really well.

[01:40:03.030]

And it wasn’t a big audience. We only had a Jaci three other people that had signed up over the course of the past 45, 60 days, which we thought we were pretty proud of.

[01:40:11.850]

And then we went over and sold some pretty decent chunks of business, just like you did, offering the last minute. This is what we’re doing for certain pivotal times in the future. We did the what we talk about, hey, it’s going to still be well, this is Canada, Vios, Boxer Day and so forth and so on. Make your plans now.

[01:40:28.000]

Say Boxer Day. You mean Boxing Day, Boxing, Muxtape, Fox.

[01:40:34.050]

We. That’s that’s like your Independence Day, isn’t it. Yeah.

[01:40:41.990]

We, we, we forego that when we didn’t have that this year, we had to sit at home and do fireworks day and traumatize you stay.

[01:40:51.140]

Yeah. Traumatize your pets.

[01:40:52.050]

They go that’s they’re just stuff that we just offer them too, that this is the chance we’re having. The best deal we have now will guarantee the rate anyway. Even if we do end up lowering it, you’ll still get the better rate. And people decided this was worth buying at this time.

[01:41:04.770]

So unless unless so unless Boxing Day is the day that you leave your underwear at the hotel. And that’s what that’s what each day I think, or as we like to call tidy whiteys are covering.

[01:41:20.470]

I don’t get them. I don’t get in them. And people join you in talking about topknots.

[01:41:27.750]

Yes, I. I teach it right now.

[01:41:31.980]

It’s in our heads. I can’t unsee that now.

[01:41:35.060]

This is the ideal number of e-mails a hotel can seem without being beanery as many as they possibly can.

[01:41:45.130]

No, I just I don’t tell what time period.

[01:41:49.020]

Once once a month. Three times a month. What do you what do you know?

[01:41:56.310]

So one at one of my teachers offended me the most ever in college because he always corrected my questions and what he would always say and it would piss me off. But now I started doing it to other people. I’m going to do it to you. So don’t mean to piss you off. I mean, essentially, when I say you’re asking the wrong question, cause it’s really not about the number of emails. It’s about the. Value that the email represents to the guests in whether or not it’s something they want to receive.

[01:42:24.350]

And the reason I say that is if you look at the guest journey. Right. So the guest is someone there shopping for a hotel. Then the frequency that you hit them matters, because if I’m hitting them every 20 minutes or every day, it’s going to get overwhelming and annoying. All right. But what if they booked and they’re waiting for this day? I have permission at that point. Inferred. And, you know, in terms of the social contract between them to send more frequently if I’m providing value.

[01:42:57.070]

But if I say this, they’re coming in two weeks time and I send them five emails in that two week period. But every single one of them gives them valuable information. It’s going to improve their experience. They’re going to say, I love every one of those e-mails and send me more of that stuff. But if I only send them three and every one of them is just trying to hit them on the head with up cells and cross cells, and it’s self-centered for me as a property.

[01:43:20.740]

They’re going to say, don’t send me that much. Right. So it’s not about how many years. It’s about the quality of the content that you send in. Is it something you’re sending that benefits the guest instead of benefiting? The hotel can benefit the hotel, but as a byproduct of benefiting the guests, there’s a timing issue.

[01:43:39.570]

So certainly you are. You’re a citizen. You said that this was a timing issue.

[01:43:45.340]

Partly that. And also, you know, there is every sort. I was working and so I was automatically on their e-mail distribution after having made some test reservations. And so I asked them because I would hear from them maybe every two or three weeks. Right. Which is fine. But every time I would get two or three emails within 30 minutes that were different. And so I asked them about it. I was like, you know, what’s going on?

[01:44:16.050]

It looks like these campaigns are maybe being pushed out more than once at a time. And they said, oh, no, no, we have different target lists. So there is, you know, our lead guest list at our meeting planner list and blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay, but I’m on all three and you’re pushing them all out simultaneously. Maybe I could be targeted with more than one, but they shouldn’t all then go out on the same day if they’re already going every two or three weeks, maybe have one leisure focus this week in one meeting, focus the next week, because otherwise I’m like I just feel like there is an error and I’m getting spam.

[01:44:50.810]

Yeah, that’s just lazy and batmen marketing and bad marketers ruin it for the rest of us.

[01:44:56.780]

Yeah. And I think similarly to that, to the point a little earlier was mentioned about the time and it’s like all depends on what the what the intent of the amylase is. Stuart, same here. If it’s an informative email. Yeah, great. You know, that’s fine that you know, that you can probably get away with that a little bit more often in terms of frequency, in terms of timing, of when you send it. That is just as important as it is, is the frequency of the of the email.

[01:45:23.000]

Beilenson Catapano, for example. You know, if you get through to the booking engine and you put in your email just but then you don’t actually make a booking. We know that there’s the there’s a level of intent. And even with GDP, ah, you can use that email because there is a legitimate interest and you’ve you’ve sort of shown a genuine interest and you’ve got the almost to the perfect point of booking but stops. You’ve got intent if you hit somebody with an email.

[01:45:52.930]

So it’s really if you if you send an email out to somebody, they’re giving them a, you know, as an additional value why they should come back, whether it’s a discount, whether it’s a valued at whatever it may be, they may have got to that point because they’re, you know, the booking engine. Maybe you’re not terribly optimized, shall we say you. And you’re only giving them a price right at the very end. So I’d go through all of that because I’m trying to find a price in your hotel.

[01:46:19.450]

This is a price of three others in the area. Now, if you if you get an email out of the email sent to them within 24 hours of your test, the times, it could be within an hour. It could be within 24 hours. It could be within for you, whatever it may be. But if you actually send the email out with the value that you’re then tuck in that person who’s kind of sat on a fence and still making that decision about which in the concept am I going to stay in?

[01:46:44.830]

And that’s that concept, I suppose, maybe not necessarily yours.

[01:46:48.640]

You give them that extra value to kill the system. Simple remarked in one to one. The chances are they’re going to look at a book by that email. Are they going to come back because you’ve given them the action center to come back? That’s why, you know, better night low and anyone else who does this, you should feel your head. So I remarked in works, but it’s all about the timing of that message. But if you keep hitting them with constant messages for the next three weeks after it, well, chances are they probably booked.

[01:47:14.800]

And all you’re doing is annoying somebody. And it’s probably not. Interest anymore. You shouldn’t really be hitting that person on as many times. It’s about time. A young frequency. Yeah. One of the things we always look at is, is this is a relationship, right? Between you is the business and the guest in every interaction you have with them in person and digitally has an opportunity to improve that relationship and tighten it or to weaken the relationship.

[01:47:43.630]

And so every email you send, you need to think. What is this doing to the relationship? Just like if they were standing at my front desk. How would I talk to them? What would be appropriate to talk to them about right now? You know, if they’re standing here and I start preaching to them about buying a timeshare while I’m in front of me and it’s going to negatively impact their relationship, then I probably shouldn’t be doing that and selling something else to them on email.

[01:48:06.340]

So think of it as a one to one relationship. I think a lot of people look at a database of email addresses and say, I’ve got ten thousand emails and let me figure out if I can get a 20 percent open rate and a four percent click the rate. And this is going to make me this much money. Well, that ten thousand people were all individual human beings. And you’re having an impact on every single one of them with every message you sent.

[01:48:29.290]

You need to be really thoughtful and mindful about what you send, why you’re sending. And to Lilly’s point. You know, if someone is on multiple segments within your database, think that through. Think about the fringe cases. What will what does this look like? But someone that’s just on one segment versus on three segments. And one of the things we really found is lifted engagement rate tremendously. Talking about timing is AB ab. We we partnered to produce a CRM platform with a company called Blue Shift.

[01:48:58.060]

And one of the things it does is it optimizes the delivery time for each individual based on their history. So if I’ve sent out to 10000 people five times, it starts to pick up patterns of when Trece opens his email or reads the email versus Ben does. And then it’s going to stagger the delivery. So not everyone gets it at the same time. It’s going to stagger. So Trisk gets the email. Maybe an hour before he typically looks at his e-mail.

[01:49:26.330]

So it’s not floating to the top of his inbox at the time that he typically takes his e-mail. So timing is important. Frequency is important. But the most important thing is the content and the value.

[01:49:37.420]

Yeah. I’ve yet to figure out a perfect build yet. And I’ve been trying to do it in my entire time. And when the reasons evil plan we have for the estimates messaging is staging dead that broadcasting that people tend to do with e-mails like here’s my newsletter, go figure out what’s interesting. Instead, we’re trying to offer content on our social platforms by soliciting people to join our social platform and where we geo target our paid campaigns or demographically targeted people that we think the offer is more valid for.

[01:50:03.880]

And then we offer the conversion value through the email directed just to those people because we’re segmenting out who we’re sending these e-mails to based on the same criteria. So we’re talking about the Švanda. We’re talking about a reason to travel with us, and then we go to an offer via the email that is an incentive to maybe I’ll admit what they saw as his content in the next days that we’re trying to get to is beyond the workflow of the email, like did the open and not open it?

[01:50:27.760]

Did they re trigger a recession? How many days after? That’s on its own is the estimates of the extra enhanced value that you’re willing for us to actually communicate on another channel that says you saw our content, you saw the email offer, but you were so special. We’re sending something uniquely to you on this one platform. We’re trying to get to that point. I still am.

[01:50:48.080]

You know, I mean, our largest maybe call out for this. I got you covered. We’ve got.

[01:50:55.630]

I mean, that’s what we want to try to do.

[01:50:56.980]

That’s what we’re trying to get to, is that that’s the evolution of the conversation.

[01:51:00.340]

There’s some really good platforms out there that are doing that right now. No, I know what you’re talking about. This is a better network. We’re talking with a company about exactly the same thing. And what they’re doing is they’re not looking at S.A.S.. An email is two separate things. You know, we go, right? Yeah. So it may well be, you know, using the same intelligence that it’s talking about there, about when to send the email.

[01:51:23.650]

It’s also what happens if you don’t open the email or don’t gauge. Do we have another source? We can try and catch it. It may well be that the email may work for you, but it may not. Was somebody else. Yeah, yeah.

[01:51:35.030]

That’s the other level of optimization we’re experimenting with and using a IDE to kind of figure that out. Is is the channel. And right now we’ve got email and a mess, but we’re also rolling in. Push notifications through the app as well. That’s that’s kind of the next phase. But we’ve got that cracked, Lauren.

[01:51:52.850]

So opposition I’ve seen, though, in this just came up recently in the last couple of days in my Outlook app on my phone. It now pops up a little bit at the end, says, get caught up, slane your emails.

[01:52:13.080]

Really, Weismuller, why? Well, my first question is why in the world are you still lives in Outlook? No. I love Outlook. What do you like better?

[01:52:25.080]

I am with you on that. You know, I’m female, always female.

[01:52:29.250]

Drives me in the Apple. Microsoft. Do you like Jim Miller Outlook? Yeah.

[01:52:36.300]

Our backs are back in my windows days after my piece was the firing of the well after.

[01:52:42.510]

After the after the outlook files got too big, an outlook would crash and there was no way to recover it. Other than truncating a bunch of e-mails for the third time, I swore off of never going to.

[01:52:54.540]

Haven’t had this problem in the areas where you redeem a good point in the chatroom. I’m going to just do a good job of this. Just they are they are looking multi-level platform dedication’s and so forth. And here, just as a natural, go back to almost the next. So the beginning of the conversation. This is the advance dialogue you don’t see in the chatter that’s out there right now. And they’re not trying to tout our show. But this is not it’s dialogue, security.

[01:53:15.960]

It’s awesome. We’re not tannish. Nobody’s awesome.

[01:53:20.160]

Your listeners, this is the nuance of not just sending e-mails like what people out there are saying, oh, you should send emails to your database. That’s the one or one stuff that’s still floating out there. And white noise. It’s the. Yeah, that’s nice, but that’s not what fixed. Now, this is that’s the genesis of all this conversation. This is why you do that and this. And this and this. And these are the variations to it.

[01:53:38.910]

That’s the dialogue that needs to giving infused in more dialogue out there, I think.

[01:53:43.590]

Hey, guys, I got to jump. We’ve got a wicked thunderstorm just came through and this hail coming in through one of my windows. So I got to go investigate the field travel where to find you all that stuff, your travel dot com. Yeah. If you want to take our CRM mobile app booking engine, that’s the place to go if you travel a century in a essentially difficult time.

[01:54:04.910]

What do you think is the is the buzz word there one’s using and searching for contactless at. That’s all we got. We got to cover your travel dot com and listen to the podcast. Well, he’s been on it. We’re recording one with Tim Peter. He’s not good enough to show up for this show anymore. But he is going to be on.

[01:54:23.000]

It’s good to march up the hill. Does it? Yeah. See, I.

[01:54:27.240]

But there is one more thing I wanted to quickly mention about the email side of things, and that is we seem to get it is you know, we’ve got an e-mail list. Here you go. And that list remains forever and a day, and then we’ll just keep adding more to it. Well, actually, sometimes you need to it’s it’s a living, breathing thing. You have to call it.

[01:54:49.400]

You have to know if they if you not get an engagement from somebody and you know that you’ve spent X amount of emails out there that’ll be different for different hotels, different reasons why you said about it.

[01:55:00.990]

And if he just could not get any opens, you don’t get in any engagement with it. Don’t send him another, you know, because again, you just one you wasting you waste in an email. And we know on the volume you pay by volume with these things.

[01:55:14.160]

But, you know, you just potentially annoying somebody, you know, they may well come back to your property, that they will come back and use your service, but they might not want to do it via e-mail. So then with them, I don’t think of it as a static e-mail list. That list. Well, they’re free by the week, by the e-mail. It’s been sent out by the frequency and the amount of it used to.

[01:55:34.480]

I mean, and it also recommended add to that is that I call those Zombi list is that I would try to do another channel to them to communicate with. I would try to do it as a retargeted on Facebook and then not respond to the emails with the response via the, you know, the channel. And even then I wouldn’t throw them away. I put them on a shelf saying, why did I get that list? Was because they stayed with me during a certain time of year.

[01:55:52.830]

Well, obviously, if they’re not listening to me for anything else, maybe I try one more time that time of year next year and see if they want to come back to hearing me. If after that I think I got him and I can’t do anything more with them. I’ve tried every other channel. Maybe that’s time to retire them permanently at that point.

[01:56:09.120]

Yeah, you can upload those less sad. And so digital market platforms like Google. Yeah.

[01:56:14.130]

Looking like audiences and audiences. Absolutely. So that should also show you can target people based on the remote because Google and Facebook being the sneaky devils that they are. Whenever you log into Google now, you use an email address to log in. Very rarely does it lock you out when googly when you got a Google search and showing you the results for whatever you’ve typed in there. It may not necessarily be targeting you based on the keywords that you’ve got in, because you know what you will, because the data search is right for you.

[01:56:48.540]

It may well be that this happened to you on a thousand won demographics, including your email being on a list of someone who’s actually wanting to get because the message that I display to you can be different. Ben was really good with this, with it. So it’s called in this search. That’s a message. Yeah.

[01:57:05.010]

The message that you put out there can be different based on the circumstances that, you know, that that person’s only been back to your Web site. Well, I do want to story from if you want to give it away. If I had one dollar to spend on search marketing, if I had a cent to spend on search marketing, it would be branded.

[01:57:23.760]

I want to says we talk about the message and how important the messages we we two and a half, three years ago got this right completely by accident. We ended up getting 40, 50, 60. It was accident. Dude, I wrote with. Great minds think. Hey, buddy, come on.

[01:57:41.800]

Sorry. Yeah. As part of the just the wonder that we are being a blind pig in the corner, Podesta’s man.

[01:57:49.770]

We were not talking about like oh ideas that we ended up getting like 30, 40, 50 to one on top of funnel keywords like hotels in NYC, which you all know, like it’s very expensive to get. And at the top of the funnel here, what we ended up doing and I can name the hotel because it’s not independent anymore.

[01:58:09.460]

It was. Timeshare, health and golf, vacations, prophecy. Which is not West at all. It’s a lovely, lovely place. I invite you two blocks down from two blocks down from Central Park. And what we did was to messaging the original vanilla ACM, if you will, was a five style piston’s lecture, etc cetera. We when you went to the Web site, you were at it but didn’t convert. You were added to our REMOXY audience as part of the Our Air campaign if you searched the name of the hotel.

[01:58:45.780]

Any of that comps at all went back to top of funnel you were presented with. Still interested in the Quinn. How about 25 percent or 20 percent or 50 percent off your stay? And it was like fish in a barrel. Message spoke to that person. Imagine if I was if I was OK. I don’t work in the hotels in NYC, but still it. Well, I guess I am sort of interested.

[01:59:09.470]

I, I spend the time looking for the website, so I still I still need to go to New York, say 25 percent don’t sell, but we ended up getting insane.

[01:59:18.250]

Ah.

[01:59:18.470]

Why is it was it was brilliant and it was a genuine smart and I do like I said to everybody, listen, if you have a dollar I want to say is four for your own brand and Edwins Edwards responses well walshaw. Why should I be, I will say, my old brunch. If you have somebody, if you have it one dollar. And so he’s been to your website and then gone back to Google and then typed in your brand name again.

[01:59:44.710]

They’re still invested in your Web site. They’ve had to look your hotel. Are they still interested? God knows why they’re not typed. Just typed to you. I read into the browser, but they’ve searched again. They see you are the last bastion against the 40 years. That is the very last chance you could get a grubby stick into hands of a hotel is by personalised messaging on ledwith audiences for people who are searching for your brand. That’s what I do with two dollars.

[02:00:12.370]

And I’ll tell you another story.

[02:00:17.230]

Three’s Company. We didn’t have to hit the Amsterdam brothel hotel thing because we’ve been in trist chequered history. We hear more stories that we want to know about their interest in Amsterdam.

[02:00:30.510]

And what my colleague is trying to say is that she’s a, well, troubled and experienced, many of us also with great delights of Amsterdam lifting the limits to suit.

[02:00:45.590]

I think you have to say, though, I’m a little surprised she’s my wife. So my wife has doubts in my family. Her family is over there. We can visit the whole thing in the article that said that they were stopping tourist from taking pictures. That’s been in existence for a really long time because when I was over there, my brother in law quickly, I’m around there like a tourist, you know, he’s like, no, the guys will come on and kick your ass.

[02:01:05.700]

But if they see you’re taking pictures of them, it’s like, what do you know? So, yeah, that’s been around for a while.

[02:01:12.590]

Oh, boy, that that’s a solid. No, negative. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:01:15.450]

But they’re going to revamp the neighborhood I guess. But we’ll see. But. And the book was pretty good too. So thanks to Robert for his list, I think we covered a good portion of them, found the dialogue and so forth.

[02:01:25.530]

And thank you all for the additional content this guy incumbencies are worth as a possibility, because with Robert being as busy as is and has ladies of the list, I was wondering whether we wanted to try to shift things up in the future or send us an e-mail to everybody whether we want to bring a topic of interest ourselves that we want to bring to the conversation just as a hey, you know what?

[02:01:46.340]

All of us have one in the holster for this is what I want to talk about. You know, not nothing against Robert’s list. He does a wonderful listen. It’s great information. I just don’t know if I want to shoot just from the hip that we’re looking at it within minutes of talking about it, when there’s sometimes some really good stuff in those that we don’t go and go, oh, I wish I talked about that instead. So I wonder whether we would just want to shift it up a little bit as we you know, we have good diversity of our course that we may just bring one ourselves and say, hey, there’s someone to make sure I love the hit and take out one more time.

[02:02:18.760]

I’m a shameless plug that we were already doing a train with plugs.

[02:02:25.920]

I mean, that’s that’s you know, that’s a given. But no, I just think that’s the topic stuff because we have an amazing, diverse co-host and that’s from all disciplines and aspects and everything else. And we’re not out to one up each other, although you know what Stuart’s on. We just got to go over transform, you know, read either.

[02:02:46.490]

But I don’t know, just as a thought, well thought around the e-mails in the next week or so, I’d be interested in just kind of Brinkman’s you guys, Ben and Chris, you guys are putting some really cool content into LinkedIn and posts and stuff. And I know some really cool articles you guys floated up there. Adele, you’re coming up as well. I mean, just your insights are always clean, Lily. You’re coming for some great content or think up right now.

[02:03:06.400]

I’m yeah, it’s like I’m clicking like on everything you’re popping up there. And I’m I’m what you read halfway through, you’re like, this is good. I like this. I’m turning into a lily fanboy. I really am a late night thing. Yeah.

[02:03:22.530]

So that sends me to the podcast to do the Etting. I listen to the podcast. I mean, it’s literally my chance. Listen to the podcast. So it’s putting on gun hand everywhere and then along with everybody else. I mean, honestly, you know, story would feel proud that they put out and everything. So we seem to have this nice self generated content or at least referral to things that we find a value, an interest in. Like said, Robert puts us with great stuff.

[02:03:43.240]

We’ll always feature Robert stuff. We’ll always make sure that a Wittgenstein’s were to get it and everything. But to our own cooking know we can bring our own things to it as well. So after only Melford. So with that in mind, Mr. Marchman, if you wanna know more about you.

[02:03:56.690]

Theset, enterpriser, TCR services, wherever they can find you.

[02:03:59.910]

First off, I just want to congratulate you for so many consecutive weeks of seeing those names correctly.

[02:04:06.910]

I got to five years for good. You can find us at tea, share in the services dot com for all things excellence and day to day revenue management. Or if you’re not sure whether or not to bring your staff back in, you just need a month to month solution. That’s that’s CRM for you. Think up enterprises dot com. You can find all things consulting help, selecting the right technology assessments to help you hit the next level in revenue and profitability and sales and marketing convergence.

[02:04:35.550]

And of course, the podcasts that Lauren is referring to is there as well.

[02:04:40.920]

Ben, other than being totally impressed that you read books, which are just revelation for me today, I’m like, oh my gosh, but I could give you a podcast on books if you wanted to see anything.

[02:04:53.160]

I feel anything that gets my children to leave you alone.

[02:04:56.550]

If you don’t get Minecraft out of my face, I’m going to tell you about war and peace.

[02:05:01.080]

If you don’t go down the face of, what, three and six, you guys, three and six digital without this dishonesty hospitality market agency behind the smoke and mirrors behind a curtain, we have no need to nonee need to try and bamboozle you or talk about, you know, one hundred forty seven day attribution windows.

[02:05:23.250]

If you’ve ever smelled an ad, we will take credit for that. You know, it is a it really is trying to pull back the curtain and be a little bit more open, transparent and accountable with CEO HCM Web site metasearch, the whole nine yards.

[02:05:37.260]

Where are you focusing in the EU? Only you global US. Where do you what do you you just fit, you know, everywhere in anything.

[02:05:44.280]

Global baby. Global, maybe global baby. Yeah. Yeah. Got some, some interesting.

[02:05:52.080]

We’ve got people in the USA. Yeah. We’ve got people in the UK and little bit over the Far East as well.

[02:06:01.420]

We’re expanding very rapidly, but taking on a couple of interesting clients this week where we’ll be able to say a little bit more about that next week. Try not to smirk when I say that.

[02:06:14.820]

Hey, Chris, anything to add to that other than, you know, you dress nicer, smell nicer.

[02:06:18.050]

You know, we’re groomed and have nicer zones or, you know, I think you said it all for me, but I put to Echo Lillies. Let me stop. So I’m just really impressed. You know, the difference between better interests, just, you know.

[02:06:30.170]

Yeah, I always say in our previous company, the CEO thought we one person called by countries, which is which is fair because we were always referred to as best interests.

[02:06:46.290]

Oh my God, this is good. Adele, I know there’s a lot going on. And it says that, you know, Expiratory, Rubert reputation, so forth. What’s going on?

[02:06:55.590]

After twenty years of putting the library hotel collection on the top of the list, then TripAdvisor and winning the number one highest guest benefit guest section ranked hotel in the world. For me, being pro, I am now on a mission to help hotels around the world expedite their recovery with a reputation renovation. And I have a new website. It’s Firebaugh Reputation Marketing dot com. And you can even get free assessment. Thankfully, with a bad idea, you can get a free assessment and the initial consultation puts you on a road to five star reviews.

[02:07:42.210]

That is awesome. I think your time you mentioned beforehand, the green room is absolutely excellent.

[02:07:46.780]

So tell us how many Hotel Teej over the top ten at one time. What was the what was the most.

[02:07:52.890]

Well, of the four hotels in New York, they are today through 2020. Number one. Number two, number three. And number, 18 years ago, they were number one. Number two. Number three. And number four. And they pretty much all been in the top ten. For almost 15 years. Only in the past year did one with the top 10. It’s five hundred 511 hotels in New York. So I think that’s pretty awesome.

[02:08:27.840]

Pretty small to be awesome. Like, that’s the whole there will be to it.

[02:08:31.510]

That’s winning the lottery every week in Budapest was number one in Budapest within three months of opening, who stayed there for five years and was also named the number one hotel in the world on TripAdvisor for 2017. At one point, one million accommodations, the Aria Hotel Prague, which I helped launch. I spent 18 months going back and forth from Prague to put that on the list. It was the number one hotel, unplug it right away and was named the number one hotel in the number one luxury hotel in the world.

[02:09:11.770]

On the TripAdvisor is for some boards a few years after opening. And even the hotel I stayed at when I was when I when the aria was a construction site that became a hotel.

[02:09:23.700]

So I kind of know something about the phobia. I’m wondering if you might know a little bit about, you know, culture and quality, sir. Yeah.

[02:09:33.610]

I have to. Does not want more the hotel. Toronto isn’t even completely finished yet, and it’s already number four in Toronto. So, yeah, I see.

[02:09:42.830]

I do want to connect the dots down here. But you see, it seems like everything you touch turns to gold.

[02:09:50.290]

I tell my desk Guttmann I like my marketing new name. Yeah.

[02:09:57.280]

Yeah. Never. And as I said, it can happen in any classification of hotel. And I, it actually thrills me. And as I said, to see Jewry’s take that to that great spot in the cabi powers of Lloyd’s, though, it’s so satisfying to see that happen.

[02:10:16.660]

It’s brilliant to see you out doing this for other people about. I wish you all the success and all the luck with it. And I can just say, when we were managing the digital marketing for your your hotels, our success that we got for you had nothing to do with us whatsoever. It was entirely about you. TripAdvisor.

[02:10:36.090]

So I’m telling you.

[02:10:38.370]

Well, you definitely have to market the best hotel in New York. All the worst with. That’s one. Yeah.

[02:10:49.800]

Yeah. That’s easy to do with extremophile, but yeah. No, it’s it’s very true. And again, it goes back to showing the components of the it’s not changing landscape is more or more pronounced now that it’s not just the markets, just not the revenue minister. It’s just not the operations. It’s just it’s it’s the culture. It’s it’s all the things working together in that process. And that’s what makes kind of dialogues we have so much fun is because we’re all approaching it from different angles of like going to do this.

[02:11:12.220]

This is great. But if everything else fails, that one thing doesn’t succeed. So it’s the accumulation of everything. And it is a real pleasure to have everybody be willing to do that. So thank you all very much for. And anyone going to play back all previous to him, 58 episodes include now the turn. Fifty nine of this plus also we do the podcast, which is we do a quick recap as tools and techniques. And then, of course, Ben Ben, use going to podcast someday.

[02:11:34.420]

I mean, you’re kind of out of the club here. What’s up? No, we will be.

[02:11:37.900]

But we’re fortunate we’re being too successful at the moment. Oh, I’m sorry.

[02:11:43.600]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’ll have my Secretary Loden call your secretary and we’ll get all these people being posted.

[02:11:52.570]

Hey, I’ll take a private jet. We’ll fly over together. Well, I will.

[02:11:56.320]

Middle seats empty, of course. I just said that. I’m not calling mom. And again, I am not your secretary. I mean, you addressed a bit like one, so that’s fine.

[02:12:05.640]

Well, you know, his height doesn’t really sound like the girl you think he does.

[02:12:13.660]

Where can people get a touch when you get hotter?

[02:12:16.810]

Positive about cum forced last live as we get all the episodes and hospital demartino digital marketing dot com forced this podcast with podcasts. Yeah, that’s the places for all the archives of the shows and everything else is cool and fun and all the links we have for everything. And again, a tribute to Mr. Ivankov for giving us a list. You can get this downloaded at or sign up for to get it every week at Bitly B Eyeteeth. Our Y fort’s last rock, Chitto Low all over case incentive to get the list of the links that you’ll see in the show.

[02:12:43.440]

Notes from that all as well. So that is mine. Lisa, Joan. Thank you. Privacy of your time and more fun for everybody else.

[02:12:51.130]

Holly, nobody else has been in vain, LAX and everybody else. And Tamara, for your comments, for Gene, for your comments there were not participated kind of quiet on the other channels, which was. Okay. Apologize for Lincoln again. I think our bitrate is throwing us off when we do the same cast and it just doesn’t do it on its own. So the group will be a replay of LinkedIn on LinkedIn, I should say, on Monday of the show, and I’ll answer any emails that come out.

[02:13:12.280]

Then, of course we some. Cast this on eleven thirty Wednesday, Sydney, time for the APEC group and eleven thirty a.m. London time because a repeat for the EU group.

[02:13:22.570]

For those that may have missed the library cast today. So with that. Thank you, everyone. And we’ll see you all over 30 Eastern Time next week. Bye bye, guys.

Loren Gray

Founder / CEO of Hospitality Digital Marketing

aahoa, ahla, hospitality, hospitality broadcast, hospitality marketing, hsmai

About us and this blog

We are a digital marketing company with a focus on helping our customers achieve great results across several key areas.