By Leora Halpern Lanz It’s challenging to be a hotel market today, let alone one who needs to understand and masterfully manage digital marketing for one or more properties. How do the hotel marketer and revenue manager ride the endless wave of online travel agency (OTA) distribution, commission structures, and rate parity? How much should […]
By Daniel Lesser,Jonathan Jaeger, & Jeremy Gilston of LW Hospitality Advisors® Should the deal ultimately close, the recently announced acquisition of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc. (HOT) by Marriott International (MI) will be a lodging industry game changer. MI is a trailblazer of the dual-branded hotel trend and will be well poised to accelerate this […]
By Morgan Brown Shortly before Thanksgiving of 2015, it was announced that Airbnb had raised $100 million at a valuation of $25.5 billion. That $100 million was a drop in the bucket compared to the war chest of $1.5 billion the company raised earlier in the summer, raised on the back of increasingly strong growth. […]
Written by Daniel Lesser and Jonathan Jaeger of LW Hospitality Advisors® The U.S Lodging Industry is currently experiencing peak levels as evidenced by year-over-year growth in many of the major performance indices. After the economic downturn in 2008/2009 when the industry experienced substantial decreases in overall performance and valuation, U.S Hotels have rebounded with many […]
By Michael Oshins The complexity and challenges of owning and operating a hotel have changed over the years. Traditionally most hotels were owned and managed by the same person (or company). In today’s marketplace, several entities can be involved, including owners, developers, management companies, brands, affiliations/consortiums and asset managers, resulting in a far more complex […]
By Joshua Bowman In July 2014, Zack “Danger” Brown famously launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter website. To his surprise, he raised ten times the desired amount in the first day. Within a few months, Mr. Brown raised over $55,000 from 6,911 different complete strangers. Mr. Brown’s idea? Potato salad. Mr. Brown’s crowdfunding campaign […]
By Leora Halpern Lanz and Megan Carmichael The hotel marketing budget, typically amounting to approximately 4-5% of an asset’s total revenue, must remain fluid, so that the marketing director can constantly adapt the marketing tools to meet consumer communications methods and demands. Though only a small amount of a hotel’s revenue is traditionally allocated […]
By: Bradford Hudson Historic hotels are a recognized product type in the lodging industry and may be found in significant numbers throughout the globe. Much of the academic and popular literature about these hotels focuses on their architectural, social, or business history. Less has been written about how such history might represent a value proposition […]
By: Leora Halpern Lanz & Jovanna Fazzini Inefficient algorithms drove various search engines throughout the 1990’s. Search results were at times unrelated to the proposed query, and were cluttered with spam. Google soon devised a more organized and systematic search result listing, and the relevance of search results improved exponentially. The plethora of data distributed […]
By: Susan Wilson April 14, 2015 was the 150th anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. This is the story of how that fateful day was linked to Boston, the Booth Brothers, and the Parker House. Hotel personnel have always collected wondrous tales about the visiting celebrities they’ve observed over decades of service. Few […]