Apple Maps – What Can iDo.
As a small business owner, specifically a hotelier, management of your presence across the local listings ecosystem is essential |
CFO – Fall in Love with CEO Ideas ---- Slowly.
Too often CEOs fall in love with their ideas instantaneously, and then present them to the board without giving enough thought to how the board will react |
Hotel Management Contracts: Historical Trends.
Most hotels are managed by brands or independent operators - not their owners; the owner is generally responsible for providing funding for the operation of the hotel when necessary while the operator manages the hotel’s day-to-day operatio... |
Cloud Computing: A Mandate for Travel Companies.
This white paper looks at the different aspects of cloud computing and the opportunities it presents for travel businesses to reduce cost and create new business value |
Responsive Web Design, Demystified.
The explosion of the mobile and social media channels and the emergence of the new tablet channel present a major challenge to hotel marketers: Creating and managing digital content across three distinct distribution and marketing channels ... |
Three Cornerstones of Profitable Growth.
What essential elements does a company’s top management team need to put in place to create years of strong, profitable growth? Here’s my old family recipe: information, process, and value footprint |
Social Media for Investor Relations.
For listed companies, the main advantage of having IR best practices is that they minimize the penalty of the company’s stock value by analysts and funds, given that inadequate governance and transparency practices create uncertainties |
Buying a Hotel -- The Hotel Purchase Agreement Documentation and Process.
The Hotel Purchase Agreement documentation and process is where fortunes can be won or lost |
Earnings Announcements in the Hospitality Industry: Do You Hear What I Say?
This study examines how the stock prices of publicly traded hospitality firms respond to quarterly earnings announcements |
Open for Business: Report on Open Source Software.
Open Source Software has been around for the last couple of decades and its presence is now being felt across many sectors |
Hotel Management Agreements for Owners, Developers, Investors and Lenders.
What you need to know about negotiating, re-negotiating, or terminating hotel management agreements |
The Price of Loyalty.
Frequent flyer programs can earn big money for airlines but has the focus on short-term revenue gains jeopardized long-term loyalty? In 1981, under the leadership of Bob Crandall, American Airlines launched A Advantage, recognized as the ... |
The CFOs Role in Moving from Customer Analytics Insight to Action Delivering analytics.
Information is the hot currency to trade in today’s marketplace of smart, sophisticated customers |
Franchise Issues in Hotel Purchase and Sale Transactions.
The Hotel Purchase Agreement documentation and process is where fortunes can be won or lost |
Hotels Leave Money on the Table by not Optimizing Their Websites for Tablet.
iPad and other tablets starting to challenge old web shopping behavior, gives a look into how tablets are fundamentally changing the way consumers are browsing and shopping online |
How Hotels are Getting Ever More High-Tech.
Ten years after the great internet boom and bust, technology keeps on changing – and changing our lives with it |
Technology Offers a Great Way for Budget Hotels to Grow Revenue.
Budget hotels have always been in vogue, and more so in recent times when cost conscious travelers are cutting back on the frills while still packing in a holiday |
How to Terminate a Hotel Management Agreement: A Tale of Two Hotels - Marriott and Fairmont.
Two owners terminate long-term hotel management agreements, seize control of their hotels from branded operators, and then settle their litigation |
Coming Into Focus: Guidance On Social Media And Confidentiality Policies.
An Overview Of The NLRB's Most Recent In the last ten months, the National Labor Relations Board has issued three separate reports on social media |
Risk Angles: Five Questions About Applying Analytics to Risk Management.
An interview with Vivek Katyal, principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP, Risk Information Services (RIS) practice leader and Audit and Enterprise Risk Services (AERS) leader for Deloitte Analytics |
CFO Insights: Cash matters.
Much has been made of the amount of cash sitting on the balance sheets of US corporations |
Six Questions Hoteliers Should Ask to Evaluate Sustainable Technologies.
When hoteliers and vendors communicate early on to evaluate a common series of due diligence issues, it enables both parties to rapidly and efficiently identify whether a technology, service or product makes sense for a particular hospitali... |
Payments in Travel and Tourism are a Real Challenge.
One the biggest challenges I see working with tour and activity operators everyday is the challenge of payments |
Flexibility of Hotel Management Contracts.
In hotel industry, management contracts have become an interesting point of discussion with the appearance of hotel outsourcing, franchising and other forms of business ownership |
Turning Strategic Ambiguity into Strategic Clarity CFO Insights.
By leveraging the planning and performance management cycles as well as analytical capabilities, CFOs can minimize strategic ambiguity and establish strategic clarity for the organization and its stakeholders |
The Integrity Dividend: How Excellent Leadership Drives Bottom-Line Results.
A study of 6,800 employees at 76 franchised Holiday Inn properties found a strong correlation between the behavioral integrity scores of each hotel’s manager and that hotel’s profit |
Big Data – Big Opportunity or Big Headache?
Big Data is the breaking news story in the IT world; here’s the picture - sometime soon company managers will have an enormous amount of information at their fingertips, they will be able to see everything and optimize everything |
The latest wrinkle in EB-5 financing for hotels -- the Tenant Occupancy Issue.
EB-5 financing has become an important source of financing for hotel development in the past few years and hotels have become a favored class of investment for foreign investors seeking to get their green card with the required investment o... |
How to negotiate a Hotel Management Agreement.
It seems like hotel management agreements are on everyone's mind these days; development is coming back, many owners of existing property are repositioning their hotel properties and old management agreements continue to expire or occasiona... |
Action Plan to Ensure Your Hotel Website is ADA-Compliant
What’s the Issue? The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) is a civil rights law created to increase accessibility for millions of Americans with disabilities |
Meet Industry Experts on the Future of Hotel Website Design.
I recently sat down with Tim Skylarov, Creative Director and Vladimir Sobolev, Senior Web Developer – Special Projects to examine the latest best practices in website design and digital marketing technologies; we discussed the need for hote... |
Web Police? Google Knows Best.
That Google is referee & judge to any and everything dependent on its search engine has long been a source of joy to some and frustration to many leading to a long running anti-trust review by regulators |
Public-Private Partnerships: A Strategy to Minimize Public Subsidies.
This article discusses why the cost of capital available to developers influences whether they will require subsidies; a strategy to minimize public subsidies involves seeking the most qualified developer who also has the lowest cost of cap... |
The Professor’s Grinch List for Travel and Technology 2011.
While everyone is doing nice best of and worst of lists, I thought I would do my Grinch list; these are companies or classes of company who have managed to make Travel and Technology as bad as it is |
Open Travel Tour/Activity Schema - What it Means for Small Business.
For most small tour operators, the concept of creating a standardized set of XML messages for the distribution of tour and activity data probably sounds like gobbledegook |
The Future of Tip Credit - And The Businesses That Depend Upon It.
The US Supreme Court is being asked to decide what amounts to the future of tip credit for many businesses – particularly in the hospitality industry |
Things to Remember before a Technology Upgrade.
Technology is becoming a key driver in the hospitality industry, and is influencing the way hotels manage their property and service guests across segments |
Companies' Approach to Information Security is Failing.
Technology, media and telecom companies (TMT) are generally holding steady as compared to the prior year on their information security activities, budgets, governance, and reporting |
Hotel Asset Management has Changed Forever.
The focus of hotel asset management has traditionally been on cost control; reducing the operational or flexible costs on the hotel balance sheet is what used to determine the profitability of a hotel, but over the last few years, focus has... |
Hacking at Hotels: Mutating Threats at the Ramparts.
Earlier this month the WSJ reported on a New York City hotel company becoming the nth victim in an old and familiar scenario that compromised both the hotel company and many of its guests when an internal auditor has stole hundreds of gues... |
Travel, Hospitality & Leisure Spotlight - Lease Accounting Model to Be Reexposed.
This issue in the Industry Spotlight series focuses on the FASB's and IASB's tentative decisions related to their proposed lease accounting model and the implications for tourism, hospitality & leisure companies |
Digital Waste: Dumping on Social Media.
WPP affiliate and cutting-edge market researcher TNS Global has come out with a study that suggests putting a brake on the shifting of marketing funds by companies across industries to digital marketing in order to engage with consumers on ... |
Fee-less Wi Fi: When Giving Away Brings in More.
JD Power & Associate's latest survey of European hotels ranks the need for 'reliable' and free internet as one of the top reasons for consumer satisfaction with internet connectivity or lack of being particularly critical for Gen X and ... |
Are You Using Allocations as a Management Crutch?
For many finance teams, allocations are an article of faith, but today, some companies are questioning their real value as a management tool |
Cyber Espionage The Harsh Reality of Advanced Security Threats.
For decades, some businesses have been operating as if they were ostriches and the all-protective sand they hide in were composed of compliance requirements and safe practice regulations |
How High-Tech Can Hotels Go?
The future of technology in hotels is consistently evolving, reinventing itself and giving guests more control, literally, from the touch of button |
Strange Finance Problem: Too Much Accuracy.
One of the biggest problems in effective profitability management is the instinctive desire on the part of many CFOs for too much accuracy |
The Difference Between a Truly Mobile App and One that is Merely Mobile.
Last time I blogged (or was it the time before) I mentioned briefly the subject of mobile applications - I think I said then that a mobile application could (probably) be much more than an application built for the Apple’s IOS platform or... |
Corporate Development 2011: Scanning the M&A Horizon.
Corporate Development 2011 is Deloitte’s second annual survey of trends in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and Corporate Development |
EB-5 Investment Essentials for Hotel Developers: Why a Regional Center is Necessary.
In a previous article, we described how the EB-5 investment program can be used by hotel owners and developers to provide an additional source of financing for hotel development, expansion and acquisitions |
Hotel Technology: Peeves and Needs from a Business Traveler.
As a professional speaker and consultant focusing on events technology, I stay in hotels about 130 nights each year |
