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You already know your loyal customers.

Enabling the ability for a traveler to do just that in a particular location or property, thanks to the
is the tremendous amount of choice today’s advent of new guest reservations systems that But what about new customers?
consumers have when it comes to lodging. make it easier to sell attributes.

“We used to have four demand segments — While these blurred definitions or categories may Supercharge engagement with loyal customers, discover new ones, upsell
commercial, leisure, group, or SMERF [social, also be causing some confusion or even a loss guests, or re-engage with lapsed loyalists. Use Sojern’s travel intent data
military, educational, religious and fraternal],” of brand identity for some traditional hospitality
said Bjorn Hanson, clinical professor at the companies, they’re also forcing them to rethink and insights to reach the right traveler at the right time.
NYU Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality how they market themselves to consumers, too.
and Tourism. “Now, though, for every trip, it’s a
unique demand segment and consumers have And if the hospitality industry really wants to take
more choices than ever before.” on the online travel agencies, big players need
to think more like them — which they have for
The Consequences of Convergence at least the past few years.

If every individual traveler comprises his or her “If you look at what the platforms are doing, they
own demand segment, the implications for are aggregating all of this content, all of this
the industry go far beyond blurring categories, product, wherever they can,” Lehmann noted. “The
or borrowing ideas f rom different verticals. It consumer chooses what her immediate needs
means that the entire hospitality industry needs are, and she expects a certain level of service.”
to rethink how it organizes itself, how it markets
itself, how it develops product, and also how it The entire travel industry, hotels included, are
sells it. selling entire experiences, as we’ve noted before.
And as our overarching megatrend demonstrates
Organizationally, the hospitality industry can’t this year, in this post-experience economy we’ve
limit itself to any one category: Hotels don’t just entered into, they need to sell experiences that
do hotels anymore; hostels aren’t just hostels; are more than just commodities or that have
homesharing isn’t just what we might think of become shallow representations of themselves.
as homesharing. Brands and the developers, And the industry needs to begin marketing that
owners, and management companies behind all the more.
them need to think of themselves as hospitali-
ty providers first and foremost — and whether The hospitality industry has seen plenty of
that hospitality is being provided in a tent, or disruptions over the years, from the rise of the
in a massive 1,000-key resort, it has to be good, branded chain hotel to the boutique hotel, and
no matter what. now homesharing. And if the industry wants to
continue to evolve — and to be able to absorb
In other words, the product they’re developing the next big disruption — it needs to recognize
shouldn’t be confined to traditional notions of what’s happening right now, embrace it, and
what a hotel should be. And above all else, even think of how it can use this convergence to its
budget accommodations must possess some advantage.
baseline of quality; developers should strive for
premium mediocrity at the bare minimum.

We also shouldn’t be so focused on the room
itself. The hospitality industry has, for years,
likened itself to a business that essentially sells
sleep, and while that’s not necessarily changing,
what is changing is the fact that hotels shouldn’t
just be selling rooms anymore. They’re selling
different combinations of features in a room, or

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