To provide more energy, drive and ideas into predictably routine conferences, events & meetings, Crowne Plaza hotels (part of the Intercontinental group) is working with leading creative thinkers to do something different in their meeting rooms.
And the first of these comes from an inventor Roger von Oech - selected Crowne Plaza meeting rooms now come equipped with an exclusive Roger von Oech designed Crowne Plaza Think Box. The Think Box is an assortment of inspirational tools and exercises invented by him that allow participants to plan and participate in activities that will bring life into meetings.
More at their dedicated website - http://en-gb.crowneplazathinktank.com/Default.aspx
It is heartening to see big hotel companies moving from talking innovation to actually innovating - can they sustain it and what are the measurable changes from such innovation in customer satisfaction and revenues? We’ll have to wait and watch.
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Will your hotel benefit from having live flight information being made available to your guests? If yes, Flight Time TV promises a solution - the company offers solutions of software or in the form of plug and play systems.According to them, the logistics required to get the data to the hotel and distributed onto the network are minimal. The data is transported over the internet to the hotel or convention centre into the guest TV network.
Flight time TV believes that immediate ROI will be generated from the rebooking of rooms or prolonged stay due to cancelled flights or flight delays.
Will it work for all? Certainly not! But for big city destinations, the business traveller is going to love your hotel for offering that extra service.
At the moment the service is US based with no information available on worldwide coverage.
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One of the recent trends spotted by Springwise comes from a company which can literally produce a hotel on demand!
Abilmo a french company offers temporary hotel rooms 12 square meters in size with wood flooring, wood furniture and private bathrooms including toilet, shower and hot water. The units also offer thermal and acoustic insulation along with individual heating and air-conditioning.
So how does it work and how does the company expect its customers to use it?
Abilmo can create a pop-up hotel for use inside or outside at such events as festivals, seminars and sports events lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Very compact when folded, they require no cranes and Abilmo’s staff can set up as many as 25 per day. And apparently , interiors and exteriors can be customized to reflect any corporate image.
In my mind the dependency on the company team to build these temporary hotels is a critical factor and as far as the costs v’s revenue possibilities, it needs some looking into.
So will the idea catch on? What do you think?
According to a report in Hotels magazine, it is the turn of U hotels to follow W hotels by Starwood.
U hotels concept from a large property development company in Thailand aims to develop a deluxe brand of simple hotels in the region. Chiang Mai is the location for their first hotel.
This shift in purchasing and distribution patterns has been showing more and more clearly over the years - and according to the most recent comScore report, excerpts of which were published by www.hotelmarketing.com, the first quarter of 2008 has seen a 3% plus rise in hotel website bookings (the majors like Hilton, Marriott, Best western etc) and a proportionate decrease from online travel agency websites - OTA’s (majors like expedia, orbitz, travelocity etc).
Marriott and Best Western have achieved the best increases over the period with Hilton, Hyatt and Starwood losing some. Orbitz saw the most decrease among the OTA’s.
This percentage change seems to be the quickest ever and it will be really interesting to watch whether it speeds up further or stops at a plateau. My thoughts - it still has a fair distance to go before it hits that plateau….
So does this mean that the fight for independent hotels gets hotter with the major chains grabbing bigger and bigger slices of the OTA pie? Are there going to be more SMD companies (see a previous blog post) in the running? Definitely a trend worth watching for all hoteliers large or small!
For more on the hotelmarketing.com article click here
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