Aside from the potential for food and beverage sales on property that many don't tap into, there’s a growing view that more revenue can be had by taking an active role in the local community.
Speaking at Mews Unfold, the hotel technology company's customer event in Amsterdam this week, Lou Zameryka, Airbnb’s global head of hotel enterprise and connectivity partnerships, said hotels leave guests feeling unfulfilled.
"I look at hotels, I own a small hotel that runs on Mews, and I think of it as a base camp for the destination. I intentionally went to Airbnb because of their mentality around the relationship between guests and hosts. What you're looking to do as a great host is not just welcome people into your walls, but into your community, into the surroundings and facilitate them doing the things they came to do.”
He said he sees this as the next distribution model, with companies such as Airbnb partnering with technology providers, hotel operators and owners to create an ecosystem of guest experiences that hotels can use to generate additional revenue. He pointed to Mews’ recently announced partnership with Uber as a good example of a new revenue source for hotels.
“I spent 17 years building Booking.com and it's a great pipe for transactions. What comes next is not that idea that we are too dependent on distribution. I'd like to get to a point where there's a partnership in the ecosystem, between distribution, hotel owners and operators, that fulfills more guest needs than ever before on the trip.”
Mews founder Richard Valtr agreed and said most hotels "don't have a well-developed sense of place." He said they treat food and beverage on property as well as their neighborhood as an afterthought. He believes artificial intelligence could be the answer in terms of helping hotels “connect the disparate dots.”
“That's the really interesting thing, you should be able to say to this restaurant, ‘How many of our guests did we send you last month?’ Or to the local bar. You should be able to figure out data sharing agreements with all of those different places to say, ‘You guys generated this much revenue from our guests.' Let's figure out how we always make sure that ... every new batch of guests gets to feel like a local in that area.”
Valtr said that this type of thinking and these kinds of relationships would enable hotels to increase their share of the guest wallet, adding that he believes it’s where the “next $1 billion opportunity is for hotels.”
Data dominance
Panelists also discussed whether the power was shifting between distribution platforms and hotel operators and what might drive that shift. Zameryka stressed information, how hotels structure it and how they choose what data is most valuable to their businesses or objectives is “really where the power is going to come.”
“It's not going to lie in the fact that you have a lot of information. Soon, everybody will have a lot of information, if not too much information. AI is creating synthetic information," Zameryka said. "It’s really about who can structure what they have, what they're structuring for and how intentional they can be.”
Kamalesh Patel, former chairman of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, agreed that the data is available but hotels do not know how to read it to understand why guests choose their properties.
“If that person comes through your door, it is your responsibility to understand why. And how are you going to make sure that you capitalize on not just that guest experience and why they came to me but the next 200, 300 or 400 people? We get complacent, do a performance boost here, cut revenue 5% there, but we’re not willing to understand what led that guest to us. If we figure out that part, it's a different game.”
This reporter's attendance at the event was supported by Mews.
Tags: Richard Valtr, Mews hotels Asian American Hotel Owners Association,Lou Zameryka, Airbnb
