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In preparing for HSMAI’s very first Curate event, held in April 2018, we surveyed sales, marketing, and revenue optimization professionals working at our Organizational Member companies about the main challenges facing the hospitality industry. They identified nine, including a lack of innovation — which Curate attendees then chose as one of three priority issues to focus on.
Since then, we’ve regularly focused on innovation as a topic, featuring speakers from inside and outside the industry at subsequent Curate events, interviewing the authors of relevant new books, and more. Our latest resource is a new HSMAI Special Report, Strategic Innovation in U.S. Hotel Companies, featuring original research conducted for us by Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL). As the industry pivots to recovery in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, this Special Report offers valuable insights into the barriers and pathways to innovation, which will — or should — be a part of every hotel company’s strategy moving forward.
The report offers three key findings:
1. There is little strategic innovation: Innovation in hospitality sales, marketing, and revenue optimization (SMRO) is risk-averse, focused on the short term, and convoluted. It’s big on tactics but light on strategy.
2. Silo thinking impedes strategic innovation: Despite sharing common innovation challenges, there are few synergies across the SMRO disciplines.
3. The solution is personalization and data management: Predictive personalization by means of social media data emerges as the key innovation in data management strategy.
Read the full report to learn even more about strategic innovation as it is, isn’t, and might be practiced at U.S. hotel companies.