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.

Find out more

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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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If you are really particular about how you travel and where you stay - not just which airline and/or class or which hotel brand, but to exactly pick out where you want to sit and where you want to  sleep, check out these websites.

Seatguru  launched in 2001 by frequent flyer Matthew Daimler - He started with a single color-coded interactive airplane seating chart. Having experienced firsthand the vast differences between airline seats, he was determined to collect this useful information and share it with other travelers. Now seatguru.com covers more than 300 airplane seatmaps from more than 45 different airlines and was purchased by Trip Advisor in 2007.

Seat 61 is not strictly comparable but a unique site dedicated to train travel around the world - if you want to know something about trains in Inner Mongolia to the palace on wheels in India, this is your ultimate resource.

Tripkick - and now tripkick.com promises to do for the hotel industry what seatguru.com has done for airlines - early days yet with the site covering some US regions, but it has every chance of taking off.

Even for the seasoned traveller, India has always been a hard country to negotiate, particularly when it came to budget travel. More like a lottery as far as getting accommodation right was concerned - you won occasionally but lost most of the time. Sometimes amazing value and at other times you’d get a complete wreck of a hotel room for an inflated price.

At the top end though, travellers usually had ample choice and could choose from the best luxury hotel brands. And whilst these hotels never came cheap, one usually got what one paid for.

But now, things look set to improve - with the fast growth in the tourism and hospitality sector, there are signs of rapid change and new hope for the budget traveller. 

The Indian middle class has started travelling more - with more leisure time, a higher disposable income and globalisation all contributing. And they are no longer satisfied by generations of run down lodges and hotels which were hardly ever renovated, the unfortunate hallmark of Indian budget travel over the last many years.

The larger hotel companies were the first to recognise this requirement - Ginger, a TATA enterprise, has twelve hotels already with another 6 hotels coming up. They offer good value rooms with the latest technology including self check-in options. Some of the other new brands in this sector include Lemon Tree, Hometel & Premier Travel Inn. 

Another company which introduced a unique new concept to India six months ago is HOME-LIKE HOTELS. The company which was launched in November 2007 works on identifying unique, independent, boutique properties which offer great value across the length and breadth of the country. Once identified and approved based on their criteria, the company then makes the selected hotels available as part of the HOME-LIKE collection.

This offers a clear win for the traveller as they avoid the uncertainty of booking through travel portals like yatra.com or travelguru.com which list every hotel without qualifying them under set criteria.

Currently the HOME-LIKE HOTELS collection features over forty carefully selected boutique hotels in over 25 destinations. They aim to have over 100 hotels available for travellers to book from, by the end of the year. More information on their hotels and destinations is available at http://www.homelikehotels.com/

The key difference between HOME-LIKE HOTELS and the traditional model is the unique character of the individual hotels. They avoid some of the bland standard features that all chain hotels invariably have.

Welcome news indeed for the budget traveller - with the price range for most of these hotels ranging between 2000 and 5000 INR (approximately £25 to £60) a night, the choice for travellers looking for an authentic Indian experience has just gone up.

So is this all achieved by compromising service and what gives to make these all so reasonable priced? Not service apparently - similar hotels usually maintain an employee per room ratio of about 0.5. In India it could be as high as 1.5 in most hotels.

The future certainly should hold a whole new India experience!

Salzburg’s hidden gem is not so hidden any more according to a good friend and local resident who took me there last week. Overlooking the river in central Salzburg, The Dachterrasse (Roof terrace) at the Hotel Stein has fabulous views in all directions and is absolutely not to be missed if you are in Salzburg.

And this recommendation comes from someone who actually spent 9 months in the city and never discovered it then….can’t believe that this fuzzy mobile phone picture is convincing, but here it is anyway

Travel Management reports on a study by PWC which shows that 38 new hotel brands have been introduced over the last three years - with most of them targeting younger travelers for whom technology is indispensable.

For the complete article which includes a list of the new brands click here.

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