Category: Technology

Hotel E-Commerce: Navigating the Complex Hospitality Digital Marketing Landscape

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 […]

Disruption from the Inside-Out: Innovation in the Restaurant Industry

by Makaela Reinke Opening the door to the highly acclaimed fine-dining restaurant Eastern Standard is akin to drawing back the curtain of a Broadway musical: the lights are dimmed, the music starts, and your attention is captivated by the beautiful set before you. Your spirit is soothed by the muted ruby reds and royal purples […]

The Making of Airbnb

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. […]

Digital Marketing Budgets for Independent Hotels: Continuously Shifting to Remain Competitive in the Online World

  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 […]

The Customer is Always Right, Right? A Look at How Yelp Has Taken Hold of the Boston Restaurant Industry

By: Rachel DeSimone Photography: Kristen Tieg Formal restaurant reviews made their debut back in 1941 when Duncan Hines, known today for his boxed-cake mix, put out his first restaurant guidebook, Adventures in Good Eating. The intention was, “to guide travelers and protect them from eating poisonous food from unsanitary places,” according to his biography by […]

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Financial & Competitive Advantages of an Effective Hotel SEM Strategy

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 […]

Delivering Food to the Front Door: A New, Or Very Old, Convenience?

By: Christopher Muller, Ph.D. A century of commercial competitive conflict between the grocery (food at home or “FAH”) and restaurant (food away from home or “FAFH”) distribution channels is now being fought on an unexpected but previously contested battlefield: who will own the “convenience” of delivery in the consumer’s mind. Just one hundred years ago […]

Re-imagining The Hotel Guestroom for The Millennial Business Traveler

  By Alexis Oliver By now we’ve all heard the forecast: the Millennial Generation is set to take the country’s business travel industry by storm. By 2020, Millennials will make up 50% of U.S. business travelers, and will carry $1.3 trillion to $1.7 trillion in total spending power, according to Jeff Fromm, a marketing specialist […]

The Food Photography Trend: A Discussion of the Popular Trend and Tips on Taking Great Pictures

By Lauren Greenfield It seems that people are more willing than ever to share their lives as a series of photos on the Internet. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make it easy to share every little detail with our friends and family and even with people we don’t know. We share photos of major […]