Hospitality Paradigm

Play to win but win with fairness

Life is competitive and of course, you play to win. But think about the balance. Will you do anything, to win? Perhaps not. Think deeply about how and where you draw the line. Each person draws it differently, and in doing so, it helps to think about values. Winning without values provides dubious fulfillment. The leaders who have contributed the most are the ones with a set of universal values, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King for example. Napoleon inspired a ragged, mutinous and half-starved army to fight and seize power. This brought him name and fame for twenty years. But all the while, he was driven forward by a selfish and evil ambition, and not in pursuit of a great ideal. He finally fell because of his selfish ambition. The Pierre de Coubertin Fair Play Trophy was instituted in 1964 by the founder of the modern Olympic Games and here are two examples of its winners… A Hungarian tennis player who pleaded with the umpire to give his opponent some more time to recover from a cramp… A British kayak team trailing the Danish kayak team who stopped to help the Danish team whose boat was stuck. The Danes went on to beat the British by one second in a three hour event!

I always say that at the end of the day, if I can look myself in the mirror and be proud of who and what I see in the mirror, then I have won the game for the day. Play to Win, but with Fairness.

The jury is still out on Hotel Flash Sales Sites…

In my post dtd 01 Feb 2012 – A Revenue Manager’s ‘yes’ and ‘no’ for 2012, I had mentioned that OTAs may be used for need periods: weekends, group cancellations, low season, etc., and not as a replacement for or alternative to the direct online channel. Also mentioned was the danger of flash sales sites which cause your hotel to rebuke the principles of rate parity leading to “The Law of Unintended Channel Share Loss”

Despite the immense popularity and relative newness of flash sale websites such as Groupon, BloomSpot, JetSetter and Living Social, hoteliers are still wary of the effectiveness and real value of these sites for a hotel’s marketing plan, according to a recent survey from TravelClick.

Forty percent of the approximately 900 global hoteliers surveyed have used a flash sale website. Of the 40% who have tried these sites, 38% have found it less successful than they had hoped and do not plan to use again. Hoteliers believed that the sales gave up too much revenue to the site operator (25%), did not attract the right caliber of customer reflective of the brand (21.7%) and did not see enough return business from the promotion (21.7%).

Nearly 40% of those surveyed have not tried a flash sale promotion and have no interest in executing one in 2012, while 23% say that they will try a flash sale site for the first time this year. When asked which flash sale website hotels chose to use, 53.3% of hoteliers polled had partnered with Groupon.