Hospitality Paradigm

For most roles, conventional wisdom advises managers to select for experience, for intelligence, or for determination. Talent, if mentioned at all, is an afterthought. Conventional wisdom says:

• “Experience makes the difference.” Managers who place a special emphasis on experience pay closest attention to a candidate’s work history. They pore over each person’s resume, rating the companies who employed him and the kind of work he performed. They see his past as a window to his future.
• “Brainpower makes the difference.” These managers put their faith in raw intelligence. They say that as long as you are smart, most roles can be “figured out.” Smart people simply “figure it out” better than the rest. When selecting people, they tend to favor articulate applicants blessed with high-powered academic records.
• “Willpower makes the difference.” This is the “Success is 10 percent inspiration, 90 percent perspiration” school of thought. Managers from this school believe that the technical part of most roles can be taught, whereas the desire to achieve, to persist in the face of obstacles, cannot. When selecting people, they look for past evidence of grit.

As far as it goes, great managers would agree with all of this advice – experience can teach valuable lessons; intelligence is a boon; and willpower – which great manages actually label a talent – is almost impossible to teach. But conventional wisdom stops there. It fails to take into account that there are so many other kinds of talents and that the right talents, more than experience, more than brainpower, and more than willpower alone, are the pre-requisites for excellence in all roles – talents such as a waiter’s ability to form opinions, empathy in nurses, assertiveness in salespeople, or, in managers, the ability to individualize. Conventional wisdom assumes either that these behaviours can be trained after the person has been hired or that these characteristics are relatively unimportant to performance on the job.

Both assumptions are false. First, you cannot teach talent. You cannot teach someone to form strong opinions, to feel the emotions of others, to revel in confrontation, or to pick up on the subtle differences in how best to manage each person. You have to select for talents like these.

Second, talents like these prove to be the driving force behind an individual’s job performance. It’s not that experience, brainpower, and willpower are unimportant. It’s just that an employee’s full complement of talents – what drives her, how she thinks, how she builds relationships – is more important.

Airbnb is teaching people how to shop for lodging and what services to expect in a democratized environment that creates comfort with a very uncomfortable concept (sleeping in a stranger’s home).  Adding traditional hotel inventory into this process will be simple and is a logical extension of their service offering just as Amazon was able to extend their offering to more and more adjacent categories in rapid fashion over their 20 year history.

It is no longer a question of whether hotel rooms will be sold on this new channel – it is a question of who will be first.  Independent hotels, seeking more affordable sources of demand and alternatives to high-cost, low-margin OTAs, will begin testing the channel within the next few months.  Smaller chains should follow soon after.  It is predicted that within 18 months, one of the major chains will announce a partnership that includes listing significant inventory for sale on the site. While this will not drive any new long-term share gains for hotels, the first movers will be able to capitalize on travelers who are intrigued by what they’ve heard about the core Airbnb service but simply can’t pull the trigger – fleeing to the safety of the tried and true bed-bath-TV combo of a traditional hotel room.

The four keys of talent management

• Select for Talent
• Define the right Outcomes
• Focus on strengths
• Find the right fit

 Conventional wisdom encourages you to

• Select a person … based on his experience, intelligence, and determination.
• Set expectations … by defining the right steps.
• Motivate the person … by helping him identify and overcome his weaknesses.
• Develop the person … by helping him learn and get promoted.

 However, the revolutionary insight common to great managers is

• When selecting someone, they select for talent … not simply experience, intelligence, or determination.
• When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes … not the right steps.
• When motivating someone, they focus on strengths … not on weaknesses
• When developing someone, they help him find the right fit … not simply the next rung on the ladder.

Organisational, peer or social pressure dulls our sensibilities as individuals. Cultivation of senses is necessary to refine aesthetic experiences which act as filters through which individuals can be stimulated. If these filters are opaque, they would block out a lot of sensations that could otherwise have triggered a creative process in our minds.

The JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa in California has launched “Your Spring Selfie” package, which includes overnight accommodations for two, a hand-held selfie stick, a guide to the resort’s most photogenic locations. Guests are also encouraged to share their selfie stick photos with hashtags such as #SpringSelfie, #DesertSprings, #DesertPlayground, #HaveItAll, and #experiencejwm. Each month, the resort will select a winning Instagram post for a complimentary room upgrade for the winner’s return visit.

“Instead of guests choosing between the mountains, the palm trees, or their smiling face, we saw the selfie stick as an ideal solution for taking those quintessential shots, and still being a part of the picture,” says the general manager of JW Marriott Desert Springs.

With the advent of Alitrip in the Chinese lodging market; Amazon planning to come into the hotel booking space; the potential end-to-end travel experience Google is capable of offering; or TripAdvisor’s Instant Booking feature, the future of the travel industry could be driven by these retail and tech giants and not necessarily the traditional OTAs like Expedia, etc.

More competition means better pricing. But in the longer term, if these retail and tech giants are transacting room inventory at a magnitude larger than traditional OTAs and on their terms, the bargaining leverage of brands, and worse, independent hotels, will be even less than in the OTA world we now live. These giants need consumer engagement and hotel inventory. They already have the first part, and it may be only a matter of time before they can get the second.

Hotels may have to work with these giants to collaborate so they don’t become expensive discount channels. If the industry doesn’t engage them, they’ll find rates and inventory from other places – like Expedia – and become just another source for room nights.

Many hoteliers are rationalizing Airbnb’s entry into the lodging space as non-competitive. As the hotel industry learned from the dawn of vacation rentals and online travel agencies, ignoring groups that fulfill lodging demand at scale is a bad idea. Airbnb is now operating at scale, and just getting started.

Airbnb takes an asset-light strategy to a new level, operating a digital exchange that matches individuals to individual lodging units. Airbnb has A-tier investors, smart management and a sizeable valuation. Its next funding round will value the company at over US$13 billion. As of mid-December, that put the firm slightly below Starwood (US$14.2 billion) but above Wyndham, InterContinental and Hyatt.

One single night, during July 2014, Airbnb housed 330,000 total guests (20,000 in Paris alone). It should be noted that Airbnb offers three distinct types of product – host present/shared rooms, host-present/private rooms, and host absent/full unit stays. The third option may be most directly competitive to hotels, but as mainstream travelers become more familiar with Airbnb, traditional hotel guests, particularly Millennials, may start considering alternatives. The biggest difference, however, is the guest experience. Airbnb’s ultimate goal is to provide a great host to guest match. When it works, visitors are no longer tourists; they live like a local and get an expert insider perspective on local experiences that can make a stay truly unique and memorable.

Airbnb disrupts the hotel industry not only by introducing supply at a lower price point, but also while enhancing the guest experience through personalization. That improved value proposition is the future battleground for traditional hoteliers. To successfully compete with Airbnb, hoteliers must ask “why“ guests are staying and organize service delivery standards to offer unique guest experiences – just like Airbnb.

The Internet is everywhere. Customers can browse and buy, anytime and anywhere. There are approximately 13.4 billion Internet-connected devices in the world and roughly two Internet-connected devices for everyone on the planet. Context is important to the connectivity conversation. For instance, hotel marketers need to think about where their guests are when they access information, what is most important to guests within those contexts and how marketers can use that information to drive consumers to book. Think about how you can segment customers by context: observe, measure and learn your customers’ pain points in each context.

We’re all publishers now. We need to help our customers find the content they need in the contexts that matter to them. Great content can lead to: product differentiation; more inbound website links; websites that are “sticky” and convert at a higher rate; engaged customers and an increase in loyalty; and the ability to leverage social media channels. Marketers need to cut through the clutter and create content that is: snackable: simple text, easy to read and easily scanned; shareable: use imagery to convey your brand because images sell; and sharp: content should be large, bold, clear and should answer customers’ questions quickly.

Deep customer insights. Guests are leaving digital footprints. This data gives access to deep customer insights into what your customers really care about. Data can highlight customer behaviors, wants and desires; leads to product, promotion, placement and pricing decisions; and cannot be easily duplicated by the competition. Marketers should be willing to start small. “This isn’t about big data; it’s about big questions. What are the things that matter to your guests? What are the questions that they have? And how can you use the data that is created to help them answer those questions and help them make a booking decision?”

Storytelling. Storytelling should be kept top of mind when it comes to content marketing. If you are trying to tell your story and differentiate, your website needs to be more like a book, more like you’re telling a story and more engaging. This is going to make people want to come in and visit and learn a little bit more: a) Sell the experience with a consistent story. b) Make pictures easily viewable across different devices             c) Incorporate video to engage customers (keep it short for mobile users) d) Use Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to share photos e) Create a YouTube channel

Design for mobile. Hoteliers need to keep mobile in mind for marketing as travelers will often abandon non-mobile-optimized websites. When it comes to designing for mobile: a) Leverage unique capabilities (swipe, zoom and pinch features) b) Make the experience easy with features such as click-to-call and interactive maps c) A mobile-optimized booking engine is mandatory.