Hospitality Marketing Summit in Review: 5 Key Takeaways
We want to thank the wonderful organizers of the Hospitality Marketing Summit (HMS) for putting together a fantastic first conference as well as thank the attendees for joining us! We hope you enjoyed the opportunity to chat with our very own Josh or Jeff at our booth, as well as see the RezStream Cloud demo!
This event was such a hit with attendees, hospitality industry experts, and the vendors. We had the chance to get to know you and your hotel’s needs better for future products and you got the chance to learn from the pros!
If you couldn’t attend, we’ve compiled a recap on the key takeaways from the conference:
- New format: One unique aspect to the HMS conference was the devotion of time to one-on-one sessions with vendors. Attendees could select certain vendors they wanted to speak with and were allotted 30 minutes of personal, uninterrupted time with the vendor of their choice. We loved being able to get to know the attendees and their property better and we felt this was a big hit with attendees as well.
- Two tracks of educational sessions: Sometimes conference educational sessions can be hit-or-miss, sometimes it’s perfectly tailored to your skill level and leaves you with information you can implement at your property, other times the speaker is using words and acronyms that leave you confused more than ever, or the information is so low level that you could have given the presentation! The great thing about the HMS conference was two tracks: one executive which shared business practices, tips and tricks, and advice; the other was the technology track to get people up to speed on the latest and greatest in tools, and search engine and website best practices.
- Yield management was a hot topic: Many attendees were discussing tools and strategies for yield management. This continues to be an important topic for independent properties and a feature we’re working on for our Cloud PMS.
- AirBnB: It’s what everyone, we mean everyone, was talking about. Many voiced the opinion that it’s a threat to the industry but understand AirBnB isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Others voiced that we should embrace it and take the opportunity to stand out as a “real” Bed & Breakfast that offers an experience rather than just a place to sleep at night.
- The desire for data: We also recognized many innkeepers and property managers are looking for a leader when it comes to sharing industry data and setting benchmarks for comparison as it relates to ADR, occupancy, and so on.
Overall, the conference was a smash hit and we can’t wait for HMS 2015! We’ll keep you posted when we learn new details. If you attended, we hope you had an excellent time and have already started using some of the educational information you received! If you weren’t able to schedule time away from the conference to meet one-one-one with us but would like the chance for a free marketing and website review, please email us at sales@rezstream.com to get the conversation started!