The Kessler Collection.

What are the prominent challenges in hospitality marketing and revenue management?

The challenges differ for every sector. In terms of marketing, reporting that includes curating, gathering, and analysing marketing metrics is a challenging aspect. We strive to make it easier to deal with.

Finding and recruiting the right talent with the right skills for sales also continues to be hard. In fact, sales talent is one of the top three most intricate skills to find. Successful sales are nurtured with practice over the years, and it is often difficult to explore those in a brief interview session.

The revenue management space, on the other end, is conflicted by technological advancements. Businesses spend most of their budget on running technologies, but managing them all together takes a lot of effort.

Could you cite how technology impacts revenue management, to elaborate on your last point?

With numerous products and services in the hospitality space today, different technology partners and vendors provide different reports. This makes it challenging to analyse the key performance indicators properly.

In this regard, we have partnered with a company called Revenue Generation. It has created a customised reporting template for us where we could put different revenue reports from different partners. It is an efficient way to figure out our key performance indicators in one place, without putting in an enormous amount of work.

What are some of the current trends in the industry?

The marketing space is completely shifting toward digitalisation. In addition to leaving traditional and print advertising behind, clients also prefer videos over photographs. This has actually made marketing efforts easier to be tractable.

“It is crucial to find a differentiating factor and innovative ideas to call that out in hospitality marketing.”

On the other end, the pandemic has caused a constant shift in the segmentation mix as customers have begun to re-evaluate their priorities and needs. Only a flexible team working on the changing trends can tackle this situation, especially in the revenue management space. We constantly focus on remaining flexible and staying on top of the trends.

Could you shed some light on any of your initiatives that stood out in the space?

Our advertisement on Times Square for the holiday season was a huge success. Rather than focusing on our hotels’ features and facilities like how every hospitality advertisement goes, we found a differentiating factor – art.

Considering that our founder, Richard Kessler, is an avid artwork collector to the extent that he builds hotels to have a place to put all his art, we made that the topic of our advertising campaign. We ran an art contest on the Time Square advertisement. It was conducted to find emerging artists and brand awareness with art as our identity.

The campaign received 3600 pieces of art from 1200 artists. This also proves the level of exposure our brand received. We learned that it is crucial to find a differentiating factor and find innovative ideas to call that out in hospitality marketing.

What do you think are some of the qualities a leader should possess?

An innovative mind and the ability to think out of the box are key. Leaders should be capable of breaking guidelines if needed to find solutions that work well for the business. They should also refrain from depending on third-party companies for data and resources.

How do you envision the future of hospitality marketing and revenue management space?

Marketing services and vendors who provide them will continue to grow in the coming years, making it a more complex choice. Marketing leaders should learn to weed through the enormous number of options and choose exactly what they require.

What would be your piece of advice to your peers?

I urge you not to rely on key performance indicators based on the metrics your vendors provide. Instead, leaders should be capable of doing the work and backing up data to analyse and identify their key performance indicators for better success, like how we did.