Hola from this corner, Barry and hoteliers,
Heart-touching way of addressing your story, Barry...disclosing a quite alarming issue: are we getting it right when we build our room rates?
Over the last years, the pressure on the "two digts profit growth" has led to severe cost-cutting initiatives and short-term alternative sources of revenues, rather than a consistent investment in CapEx and service to gain a sustainable base of more satisfied customers and incremental revenues.
As a result of that, key guest-driven features which were taken into account at the time of differentiating and pricing the product (from toiletries to "sweet dreams" courtesies, from training on personalized guest service to in-room literature and comfortability) has been dramatically downgraded or standardized over the years. And hotel managers and owners have become cost-controllers, continouosly digging on "what do we give today for free, that we can either cut or charge for it tomorrow morning".
And I believe we all are forgetting that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that happens to be free of charge for the guest. Everything is for a price, either already built-in within the room rate structure or it is billed as an extra service. And everything, absolutely everything, is priced and delivered with the aim of winning a happy paying guest who will return and will make other travelers to turn into our guests.
Unless we look into the essence of the industry we work for, we will land into what I consider to be the biggest threat of the hospitality industry today: turning the hotel room into a sleeping commodity. And if we land in that runaway then...well...the P&L's might look nice (or worse), the RevPar might look nice (or worse) and the free cash flow might look nice (or worse), but -for sure- there will be no magic around travelling away from home to experience the home minded by somebody else for you (and many other consequences which are not so romantic...will there be a real estate premium on hotel buildings if the room turns into a commodity???)
...To be continued...
Cheers
Pedro.-
Received on Fri Jan 13 10:34:28 2006
