Austin Hospitality Blog

Do you find enough conveniently located power outlets in your hotel room?

If you’re like most travelers these days, you probably leave home equipped with all sorts of electronic gadgets – whether a Bluetooth headset; Blackberry, iPhone or Palm; laptop; hair straightener or electric razor or maybe your kids’ DVD player or (with our family) their iPod Touches and Nintendo DS players. But Hotel Check-In readers say that hotels often overlook this fact.

Hotel Check-In reader WetFeetTheNovel recently raised the topic in  the discussion area called the Forum, and I figured it’s worth broadening the discussion…

Reader WetFeetTheNovel had just returned from a Doubletree Hotel, which they enjoyed more than they’d imagined. The hotel, in fact, exceeded their expecations from the great shower to room service. But when it came time to plug in the laptop computer, cell phone chargers or camera batteries…whoops!  Now the traveler has to move furniture or unplug table lamps.  Just an idea for hotel designers and renovators…we need power!  Power to the travelers!  Outlets positioned above end tables or desks would add the convenience and accessibility..

Reader SezWho echoed those sentiments in a Forum post, saying that power outlets is a major pet peeve. SezWho wrote that he travels with his laptop, phone, headset, iPod, camera, razor and Cellpod (battery backup) - and that excludes what his wife and family bring when they travel together.

When my wife and I enter a hotel room, the first thing I look for is the outlets while she checks out the bathroom.  It is amazing to me how many of these ‘renovated hotels seem to forget the need for power outlets.  Obviously they don’t think like the guests they claim they are trying to serve…Are you listening hotels?

Reader Hickson Chen also wrote me saying that “there’s never enough of them by the work desk.” He looks for four or give outlets to plug in his laptop, Blackberry, personal phone and Bluetooth headset and possibly a personal game system. He ends up charging his electronics in a few different places. He also raised another problem:

Sometimes, hotels have bad placements of outlets.  Jest recently, I stayed at the Aloft Hotel in Dallas.  They have electrical outlets just behind the bathroom sink faucet maybe three of four inches away.  I was scared to get electrocuted when I has washing my face and water splashed on the socket plate!

Benét Wilson, an online managing editor at Aviation Week Group, said her “dream hotel” in terms of plentiful and convenient outlets remains the Grand Hyatt at Dallas-Fort Worth. “I still have tears come to my eyes when I think about it,” she joked. But in nine out of 10 hotel stays, her hotel room doesn’t have enough outlets where she needs them, she told me.

So what can we do when we’re in a hotel room that has too few power outlets?

Wilson said that she always travels with her Belkin Mini Notebook Surge Portector with Built-In USB Charger, which she bought for about $15 at Wal-Mart. It rotates and fits in tight spaces, plus she uses it to charge her laptop and cell phone, and uses the USB plugs for her iPod and iPod Touch.

SezWho wrote that five-star hotels usually provide the most outlets. But if he’s staying in a less luxurious hotel, he travels with his own extension cord and unplugs lamps to free up outlet space. With his laptop booted, he’s usually able to charge a couple of other items through the USB ports.

Why do casinos smell like they do? No, not the smell of menthols, sticky drinks and desperation. That’s everywhere. Rather, why does the Bellagio smell like the Bellagio and why does the Venetian smell like an old man who has been wearing the same cologne for 40 years and steadily adding more as his tolerance grows?

The simple answer is that there are metal devices the size of breadboxes attached to the ventilation systems of nearly every Strip resort. The boxes vaporize highly aromatic and shockingly expensive oils into the ducts, where the airflow dilutes and distributes them. The first such systems in Las Vegas were installed into the Mirage in the fall of 1991 by Mark Peltier, president of a company called AromaSys. Since then, the systems have spread up and down the Strip and now Peltier has competitors.

But a better question is why would anything so profit-minded as a casino bother?

It’s because humans are wired so that smell is a weird and powerful sense. Smell and its sister sense, taste, have quick access to your emotional conditioning, your sexual urges and your memories. It’s why the smell of a familiar dish can transport you to your mothers kitchen or a perfume can return you to a lover’s arms. It’s also why many neuroscience papers include pretentious little Proust quotes.

You can see why it’s so tempting to use scents in a casino.

But smell is tricky. It’s not that everyone smells something different — scents are the same volatile chemical compounds for everyone. The problem is, smell is tied up with your memories. For instance, Peltier has a good friend who loves the smell of skunk because the first time she smelled it, she was on a pleasant trip to her grandmother’s house. Every time she smells skunk, she remembers that day and is happy.

“There’s no expression in our genes that says you will like this smell and not the other,” Peltier says.

Still, Peltier has some guidelines that work for most people most of the time. Citrus smells are refreshing. Floral smells are relaxing. Herbaceous smells are usually relaxing but can also be invigorating, especially peppermint. Cedar and other wood smells relax and sooth. By blending these various smells, Peltier and his competitors evoke moods or environments.

The environments vary throughout hotels, from lobbies to spas to casinos. In most of the world, Peltier and AromaSys try to make the hotels smell like the ideal version of their location, so that in south Florida he uses citrus scents and at a Colorado ski resort he’ll use woodsy scents. But in Las Vegas, each resort supplied by AromaSys has a signature theme. The Mirage smells Polynesian, Mandalay Bay smells Southeast Asian and the Bellagio has the scent of Northern Italy. The Wynn and Encore “are very unusual, you may never smell anything like that in the world.”

“Mr. Wynn,” Peltier says, “has extraordinary sensory ideas and knows what he wants. It’s more of a co-creative process with him.”

And the Venetian, Mr. Peltier, who is responsible for that smell?

Well, AromaSys is. It’s called “Seduction” and features a very significant amount of musk and is described as “strong, soothing and sensuous.”

“I actually think it’s turned up a little too strong, but the management insists on it being that way and actually kind of resented me offering my opinion,” Peltier says, before adding that the Venetian is a “great and loyal customer” and “They sell a lot of it as room sprays and candles, so what do I know?”

If you want the VIP treatment at hotels these days, show up with an entourage.

Hotel companies have long extended room-rate discounts and perks—such as free breakfast and Internet access—to big corporate and leisure groups who book dozens of rooms. But now, facing a decline in business travel, some hotels are extending similar deals and freebies to much smaller gatherings of family and friends traveling together.

When Lori McVicker travels with her 13-year-old son’s soccer team, the budget usually dictates stays at basic hotels with small, uncomfortable rooms. But during a soccer tournament in September, just $89 a night got the team rooms at the four-diamond-rated Renaissance Fort Lauderdale-Plantation Hotel in Florida, which offers flat-screen TVs, evening turn-down service and free shoe-shines and newspapers. (The hotel’s typical weekend rate during that period was $139.)

“It was a wonderful experience,” says the 44-year-old.

Indeed, as revenue from business travelers and large corporate meetings has fallen this year—a victim of the economy and corporate skittishness about executives being seen holding meetings at luxury resorts—small leisure groups have become increasingly important to hotels.

“We are actually going after” these groups for the first time, says Nabil Salloum, general manger at the Renaissance in Plantation, the Marriott International Inc. hotel where Ms. McVicker stayed. “We understand these groups are price sensitive, so first of all we are working within their budget” by giving them better rates than in the past, he says. Next, “we are adding breakfast maybe with the stay. We might be giving them free Internet.”

In October, Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., which owns resorts, casinos and restaurants, launched a program that allows any group booking at least five rooms access to a designated trip director who can organize hotel reservations along with shows and meals. And if the group books a restaurant or show, too, it gets to jump to the head of the line of folks waiting for a taxi outside the hotel.

The Alex Hotel in midtown Manhattan—which touts “limestone baths, rain showers and plush bedding”—started giving discounts to tour groups, including youth groups, in late 2008. The hotel “gave them [youth groups] a rate that we wouldn’t give them in past years,” says Mary Lou Pollack, general manager of the hotel. “We decided we wanted to replace that nonexistent corporate business.”

But some business hotels find that it can be tough to accommodate groups of vacationing families—including noisy kids—alongside their typical business clientele. Jamie Eighteen, a 33-year-old banker from Edinburgh, Scotland, who stays in hotels about 60 nights a year, found teenagers monopolizing the business center during his stay at the Crowne Plaza Philadelphia-Downtown earlier this year. On FlyerTalk.com, an online form for travelers, he summarized his findings: “Kids permanently using the business centre to access Facebook, Bebo and god knows what else whilst playing music on mobile phones! Swiftly followed by charging up and down the stairs and along the corridors.” When the noise continued into the night, he spoke to a security guard in the lobby. “He was responsive,” says Mr. Eighteen, and the teens quieted down.

While the hotel didn’t comment on Mr. Eighteen’s specific complaint, Bob Cosgrove, general manager of the Crowne Plaza said, “No matter who you are and why you are here we want to make sure everybody has a great experience.”

Indeed, lower room rates mean small, price sensitive groups like high school sports teams and church groups are ending up at higher-end properties. Business is “bad enough that they don’t care who is coming. They just want someone in their beds,” says Patrick Connor, vice president of the Student Youth Travel Association and president of Director’s Choice Tour & Travel, a Texas-based company that operates tours for school band and choral groups.

Hotels are handing out these perks because of a fundamental shift happening across the travel industry: Business travel has plummeted this year, while leisure travel, though still weak, has remained stronger. Hotels and industry researchers say the contrast is especially stark when it comes to people traveling for special occasions like anniversaries, family reunions and children’s choir competitions. People are still willing to spend money on those events because they think “it’s only our 50th anniversary one time,” says Mark Woodworth president of PkF Hospitality Research, a hospitality research and consulting business.

On HotelPlanner.com, a Web site owned by Lexyl Travel Technologies Inc. where groups can solicit bids for their trips from hotels, fewer corporate groups are posting trips on the site, while leisure groups continue to solicit bids, says Tim Hentschel, chief executive of the company. He says rates being offered to groups on his site are down 30% this year compared to last.

Traditionally a hotel starts handing out lower rates and perks for bookings of 10 rooms or more—what they define as a “group booking.” That still stands, but some hotels are being more flexible. Connie Tompkins, owner of Group Travel Specialists based in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, says more hotels are willing to give perks to groups as small as five rooms. Earlier this year she booked five rooms for the Cherokee Cheerleaders from Denver at the Embassy Suites New York in the financial district. The standard rate at the hotel at the time was $259, she says. Because it booked five rooms, the group paid $189, an unusually low rate for a group that size, she says. The hotel’s general manager said he could not confirm the group’s rate.

In Hammond, Ind., near Chicago, the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Hotel, is giving out one free room with every booking of 20 rooms. Before, groups had to book at least 30 rooms to get the free room, says Shruti Buckley, vice president of global brand management for Fairfield, a Marriott brand. The Fairfield Inn in The Colony, Texas, near Dallas has started giving small leisure groups that reserve at least 10 rooms—and return their contract within seven days—2,000 to 5,000 Marriott Rewards points.

Making sure groups mingle smoothly with independent travelers is possible with some management tweaks, say some hotel general managers and group-travel organizers. The Renaissance in Plantation, Fla., puts groups on the same floor, saves several floors just for business travelers, and if a group checks in, there is “probably a little more security roaming the floors in the evening making sure it’s calm,” says General Manager Mr. Salloum.

And some business travelers say hotels are working harder to smooth over infuriating moments caused by unruly groups. Dan Nainan, a 28-year-old stand-up comedian and actor from New York who sleeps in hotels about 100 nights a year, says lately hotels are more willing to refund a night’s stay if he complains (nicely) about noise from a loud, unruly group staying near him, likely “because their business is down and they want to keep their customers happy,” he says.

But Mr. Nainan also recommends taking matters into your own hands at times. A few years ago he got stuck next to a rowdy rock band at a hotel in Taiwan. After repeated rude awakenings throughout the night, he got up around 6 a.m. to catch his flight, taking time to get “vengeance.”

He called the next room pretending to be a front desk employee. There is a “very pretty lady that wants to see you,” in the lobby, he explained. “But you must come down to get her.”

While presenting at the Hospitality Leadership Forum in early November, Mark Lomanno, president of research firm Smith Travel Research, made a statement ominous enough to send chills up the spines of revenue managers everywhere.

“On an inflation-adjusted basis,” he began, “ … it’s going to probably take eight to 10 years to get room rates back to where they were in 2007.”

This assessment was more severe than the reality faced in the aftermath of 9/11, when it took rates six years to recover on an inflation-adjusted basis, according to STR. But then again, this downturn also has seen historic extremes in industry performance declines.

Still, not everyone agreed with Lomanno’s projection. Jim Rozell, senior director of revenue optimization at Carlson Hotels Worldwide, said that 2007 was an inflated benchmark to begin with.

“In 2008, portions of 2007, rates were not where they should have been,” he said. “They were well above where they should have been,” adding rates are now where they should have been.

For the industry to think it will recover to 2007 levels is probably unrealistic, he said.

Yet others, such as Bonnie Buckhiester of Buckhiester Management, a Seattle-based yield management consulting firm, concurred with Lomanno.

And whether you agree with the claim or not, it’s important to start thinking about recovering rates at the onset of the economic upturn. Here are five questions every good revenue manager should ask himself or herself to get started:

1. Have you forgotten your price point?

There’s a difference between slashing prices and making discounts look like promotions, Rozell said. The former implies cutting rates to establish the lowest competitive price point among your peers, assuming that guests’ booking decisions are based solely on price.

Promotional discounts, however, offer cost-conscious consumers a value-oriented deal that maintains a reference to the original price point. For example, if a guest buys two nights and gets one night free, they still know how much that third night is worth.

“The key thing is to keep that higher reference price out there, so that people being driven by value still realize this is a (US)$299 product,” said Chris Anderson, assistant professor for the Cornell School of Hotel Administration.

2. Are you using the right comp set?

“Revenue mangers have to go back and revisit their comp sets and determine if they’ve got the right comp sets,” Buckhiester said. This is especially important as revenue managers learn to navigate the new normal, in which five-star hotels are charging four-star rates, four-star hotels are charging three-star rates, and so on.

Read “It’s all about who is in your comp set.”

3. How often do you update your forecasts?

Monthly forecasts are great for C-level boardroom meetings, but they don’t provide the type of up-to-date information needed to make accurate, day-to-day decisions from the revenue management perspective, according to Buckhiester.

So how often is often enough? Track accuracy by the day, Buckhiester advised. This is especially important for hotels at which revenue management is not outsourced or automatic.

4. What’s your most profitable business mix?

It’s not enough to determine your most profitable business mix in general, Buckhiester said. You must determine the most profitable business mix for today’s market conditions, and then adjust it accordingly as the economic climate changes.

To do so, look at all revenue streams, all income, all internal and external costs, and really drill down into them to determine what mix of guests will generate the highest total revenue—not just the highest initial room rate.

5. Does the product match the price?

Price points shouldn’t be arbitrary; they should accurately reflect the product and demand, Buckhiester said. While this might sound obvious, far too many hoteliers aren’t analyzing where the demand for certain guestrooms and packages actually lie.

Buckhiester advised taking a month or two to track upgrades to see what guests want and are willing to pay for. Then, build in up-sell opportunities to capture that demand.

Kimpton Hotels, for example, offers guests upgrade opportunities in their confirmation e-mails. “This is what you bought … you can get this upgrade for (US)$10 right now instead of (US)$20,” Buckhiester said. “It may or may not be available when checking in, and you can change your mind.”

1. PCI Compliance and Certification
PCI compliance and certification is number one on the priority list for 2010 because of the consequences of non-compliance.  The PCI standards guidelines stipulate that by July 1, 2010, all credit card acquirers must ensure all merchants that use payment application software, utilize only hotel software systems validated as compliant with the PCI, PA-DSS requirements.  This is a top priority because operators risk penalty fines if they are not certified compliant by the deadline.  Unlike chain properties, independent operators must handle the PCI issue themselves with the help of their tech providers.  NORTHWIND’s Maestro Property Management Suite is fully PCI PA-DSS certified to support operator compliance, and NORTHWIND also provides professional property PCI audit assistance.

2. Direct Website Bookings and eMarketing to Lower Costs
Direct website booking capability is becoming an important strategy for independent operators to market themselves, stay competitive and control booking costs in 2010.  When an online booking engine is fully integrated and developed by the property management system (PMS) provider, as with Maestro’s ResWave solution, it can accurately sell last room availability and show real-time optimized rates across all channels for maximum profitability.  The system must also provide a seamless GDS interface to capture third-party online reservations. With Maestro’s eMarketing tool, all customer emails and relevant data can be consolidated from all channels (GDS, POS, CRS, Call Center, etc.) to drive reservations direct to the hotel website booking engine and lower costs per booking.  It is important to note that when vendors add a booking engine to their PMS ‘at no cost,’ or offer a self-hosted solution, there are often costly fees associated with remote hosting, system maintenance, and online travel agencies (OTAs) transactions.   Booking engines that are self-hosted are also required to be PCI PA-DSS compliant.  As a result, operators must require vendors provide verification of PCI compliance for both their booking engine and PMS.  Maestro’s hosted Web booking engine alleviates this requirement to reduce the operators overall PCI obligations.

3. Focus on Total Guest Experience to Increase Loyalty and Referrals
Personalized service and a positive guest experience will be king in 2010. When properties anticipate a guest’s needs and deliver personalized service, the result is repeat business and profitability.  The most effective way to deliver high-touch service is with a robust, easily accessed guest database that is integrated with the property’s PMS to get a 360 degree guest view at every touch point. The Maestro Property Management System provides over 20 integrated modules that utilize one centralized database that records every guest transaction and request across a single property or multi-property hotel group.  A property team can leverage this information to deliver amenities and intuitive, personalized service that builds loyalty, increased spending and referrals.  Savvy operators should use BI tools such as Maestro Analytics to view in-depth reports, spending patterns, determine most valued services and create highly targeted lists for effective email and direct mail campaigns. Effectively targeted campaigns will attract guests based on their guest profile, stay patterns and activity preferences to fill rooms during seasonal soft periods.  When promotions are intelligently designed and personalized to guests that are most likely to respond, guests feel valued, revenues go up and everyone wins.

Further, Maestro’s integrated GEM (Guest Experience Measurement) module enables operators to automatically send online comment cards to capture departing guests’ perceptions. The survey results are stored in the guest’s history record for easy access during check-in. GEM’s detailed reporting provides operators with valuable predictive and actionable intelligence to keep guests coming back, increase up-sell and resolve issues quickly.

4.  Yield Management and Revenue Management to Maximize Profits
2010 will be a year of recovery for the hospitality industry.  As with the post 9/11 turnaround, operators who utilize effective yield management and revenue management systems will lead their comp-set with higher RevPAR in 2010.  The Maestro PMS includes a fully-integrated proactive yield management system that lets operators and hotel management optimize rates for all segments across all reservation channels, including OTA’s to create and maintain smart revenue strategies without resorting to emotional rate slashing tactics.

5.  Social Marketing Essential in 2010 for Hoteliers to Stay Connected
How we stay connected is changing and experts agree social media is here to stay. Today’s guests are communicating with friends, family, colleagues, and companies they do business with online through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels.  In 2010, the most successful hotels will reach guests and create brand advocates by using social marketing tools and channels to grab the attention of new visitors and keep in touch with their loyal client base.  Learning to create and execute effective social marketing programs may not be easy, but Maestro is ready to help.  Maestro’s Web Connection suite of online revenue generating tools leverages viral marketing features such as email ‘forward to a friend’ and ‘Share This’ plug-ins as well as icons and links to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Maestro also develops custom guest and group landing pages that connect online shoppers with track able Web pages offering unique promotions that increase occupancy while boosting referrals and loyalty.