Curate Update: Now Including Distribution and Technology!

By Christopher Durso, Vice President of Content Development, Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI)

And that makes two! We recently concluded our Fall Curate 2018 event — held at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore Inner Harbor on Sept. 5–6 — which is just the second time we’ve presented our exclusive Executive Insights Forum for HSMAI Organizational Members. In many ways it built off the debut Spring Curate 2018 at Terranea resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, in April, with an inventive program that combined interactive voting with small-group brainstorming to explore priority issues facing hospitality sales, marketing, and revenue-optimization professionals.

At Spring Curate, attendees chose to focus on three issues: innovation, data analytics, and talent development. At Fall Curate, they added two more issues — distribution costs and inadequate technology platforms — and worked in small groups to answer four questions about each one: What specifically about this issue gives you heartburn? What would make it better for you and/or your company? Who is doing a good job dealing with this issue — and why? How could HSMAI help?

We’ll be using the responses to these questions and to other activities conducted at both Curate events to help create content and other resources for our Organizational Members. (For starters, look for articles about the economic forecast for the hospitality industry and what characteristics industry executives look for when hiring — culled from the results of a speed-voting session at Fall Curate — in this issue of Executive Insights.) Meanwhile, here are links to the insights we captured during conversations about the priority issues at Fall Curate:

Distribution costs:

  1. What specifically about this issue gives you heartburn?
  2. What would make it better for you and/or your company?
  3. Who’s doing a good job dealing with this issue — and why?

Inadequate technology platforms:

  1. What specifically about this issue gives you heartburn?
  2. What would make it better for you and/or your company?
  3. Who’s doing a good job dealing with this issue — and why?

Look for more on both these issues — plus the three we focused on during Spring Curate — in the weeks and months to come. And we’re already thinking about next year’s Curate events: March 25–26 at the Thompson Nashville in Nashville, Tennessee, and Sept. 4–5 at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida. Save the dates!


Categories: Marketing, Revenue Management, Sales
Insight Type: Articles