Please note: I use four 13 week quarters (52 week years – with the occasionally exception) to avoid the vagaries introduced by numbers of weekend days, etc. that are introduced when working on a monthly / calendar year basis.

If these vary a little bit from STR’s Monthly / Quarterly / Annual stats – no hate letters are required – that should be expected. However, these line up very nicely with each other on a comparable 13 week basis.

So here’s the summary headline –

2020 Occupancy was 44.2 %, off 33.5% compared with the previous year. With ADR at $98.39, down 23.4%, the resulting RevPAR of $45.15 came in 47.8% lower than 2019.

For Team Glass-Half-Empty, the highlights might read:

Occupancy Rate

2009, the worst year of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), simply doesn’t compare – as it managed to attain 55%, where 2020 barely cleared 44%. The 1st quarter somewhat saved the year from even worse figures.
Week 52 of 2020 was the worst week for Occupancy (32.5%)I have ever seen. As a point of reference, the worst week of the GFC was the last of 2009 (week 52) at 33.8%. Plus, the 2020 figure does not count closed room inventory,

Average Daily Rate

The year 2020 rewound ADRs back to 2006 levels. That is some deep hole. The GFC did the same, but that was only a 3 to 4-year step back. 14 years is an entirely different matter altogether…
If not saved by its first quarter, the full year 2020 ADR would have been significantly worse. I estimate that a four quarter moving average of 2Q 2020 to 1Q 2021 ADR would fall into the $91.50 range – well below 2009 GFC levels.

Revenue per Available Room

RevPAR of $45.15 (again buoyed by a relatively stronger 1Q 2020) moves that benchmark back to 1997 levels – obliterating two decades of advancement. Even more gruesome, looking at a 4Q moving average 2Q-2020 to 1Q 2021, that RevPAR projects to drop to approx. $38.50 – in the ballpark of 1991 recession levels. That is one hell of a pit to fall in.
Ignoring the $27.09 RevPAR crater commonly referred to as 2Q 2020, 3Q and 4Q have recovered somewhat, but both were still nearly off $10 relative to comparable quarters during the 2009 GFC. Those $10 RevPAR shortfalls during the GFC took about 4 years to recover. As a point of reference, the 4Q 2020 shortfall eclipsed $40 when compared to 4Q 2019.

Bottom line – for anyone predicting a hockey-stick recovery in 2021, please ask them to provide the demand spike, supply contraction or pricing momentum that will trigger that outcome. If they exist – fantastic. If not, I’m not really sure how the math for such a projection could work out.

For Team Glass-Half-Full, the highlights are a bit more sparse:

Occupancy Rate

It could have been worse!
Occupancy wasn’t off quite as badly in 4Q 2020 (-32.04%) compared with 3Q 2020 (-32.11%). You wanted good news – I found some good news…
In early December 2020, weekly Occupancy was off 37%+ compared to the previous year. The last two weeks came in with deficits of only 27-33%, so a bit better than expected (Gratitude is a wonderful thing – practice it.)

Average Daily Rate

It could have been worse!
The big ADR drop of 2Q 2020 was exacerbated by a mix shift to lower ADR properties and the closing of large, urban, upscale properties that boost ADR. In 3Q 202, the week over comparable week comparison to the the prior year ADR declines were int he 24-25% range. In 4Q 2020, they were in the 27-28% range – understandable given lower demand / occupancy. Fortunately, the industry seems to be resisting any temptation to introduce irrational discounting.

Revenue per Available Room

It could have been worse! (Maybe CBRE’s Robert Mandelbaum can tell us if he knows of any time when things were worse, since he has data dating back to just after the Great Depression. We recovered from that, so there is no reason we can’t do it again, right?)
Week 52 of 2020 (last week) came in with a RevPAR of $29.94. The same week in 2009, the worst of the GFC was $29.02, so we have actually seen worse in recent memory. (No, I will not provide either an inflation adjusted calculation, or an economic (as compared to available room count) basis calculation.)

Bottom Line – It’s bad, but with vaccines beginning to be distributed, a new administration preparing to assume control and people sincerely wanting to travel again when it is safe to do so, 2021 should bring the US hotel industry some growth.

Again, be patient. The 1Q YoY comparisons will be less challenging than what faced the industry with 2Q-4Q 2020 performance stats, but later in the year, the basis for Occ %, ADR & RevPAR growth calculations will all be nice and low.

Just remember, if you lose 50% in one period, you need to have 100% growth to get back even. Expect some large growth numbers, but check the chart below to see how they really stack up historically.

The big questions remain, a) how quickly will demand return, and b) to what degree has the disruption reflected cyclical versus structural change?

This Week in Hospitality Marketing Live Show 282 Transcript (English U.S.)

[00:00:17.370] – Loren

Happy New Year, Mr. Dean. Happy New Year, everybody happy. One new day, new month, new year. And it’s going to be a love fest today, according to Robert Cocas. Thomas, look, when I was sending the email out to everyone, things, you know, is like there’s enough crap to talk about, like we’ll get over.

[00:00:35.380] – Loren

This is that is and yes, we’re in dark days and we probably have darker days ahead of us and all this other stuff. But now’s the time for optimism.

[00:00:43.200] – Loren

At least today’s show will be a point of optimism, trying to talk about what we should be really, truly trying to focus on this month. Now, that is a bright brand spanking new month, new year of what we can start looking at. And part of that goes towards a little bit of what field travel just put out there. Consumer sentiment study.

[00:01:01.770] – Loren

Robert was generous enough to get out early for Robert, his weekly curated list of top news articles that affect our business and hospitality. And for those who don’t know, to signup for it, it’s Bit.ly/rockcheetah and for those who may also not know which we really rare if they didn’t, is Mr. Dean Schmitt with Basecamp Meta Search Marketing with me on a New Year’s Day. Dude, you look Hawaiian and I know you’re not in Hawaii.

[00:01:38.670] – Dean

Mr. Dan Waxman, when you listen to this recording, this is for you based in Hawaii. Yes, yes, yes. Mr. Dan, send us back. Dan is in Hawaii and for him to join the show would be a very rough early, early, early, early morning for him on Tuesday.

[00:01:57.750] – Dean

And given his New Year’s Day on top of that, then, yes, I would say that we do miss him being able to join us. But we he’s with us in spirit in that sense.

[00:02:07.710] – Dean

And then how do you say is going to Santas? I never could say writes to Santa.

[00:02:12.180] – Dean

So I got to tell you a story a little bit behind that. I keep on thinking of the old Phil Collins song Sussudio. And I think once you latch onto that, you just can’t get that out of your head anymore.

[00:02:23.430]

I’m with you.

[00:02:24.090]

I never the same thing. It’s like, oh my God, since Santa and I know it has some deep meaning. Oh, the screen has turned into a Robert cold forehead. Dude, the camera Dasbach isn’t safe, is it? No, no, it’s not safe yet.

[00:02:43.430]

Hey, I was going to pick on you 20 over your notorious for picking on me about having a love fest today. I was going to complain that you’re just a little skeptical because in your later waning years of group travel, you went up to a farm in north New York in the 60s to say, hey, you should have a concert here and never got paid for it.

[00:03:03.110]

So you’re bitter. You’re bitter about this.

[00:03:06.200]

I know two people who went to Woodstock, actually, lots of people claiming to be there. Oh, yeah.

[00:03:12.290]

If everybody they claim to go to Woodstock actually was there, the entire state of New York would have been blanketed.

[00:03:19.070]

I do know two of my sister’s friends, actually, and they both said it was horrible. It was a mud pit. You couldn’t really hear anything. And it’s just awful.

[00:03:29.610]

Yeah.

[00:03:31.160]

So we were we were I was talking about the fact that today is a positive conversation, that. Yes, there is. You pointed out in your newsletter there is half full, half empty conversations to this process.

[00:03:42.290]

We are going to ignore the half empty part because in actuality, there is some cool stuff that is positive that you did drop into your articles. And we’re going to keep this a positive, constructively happy show right after and stuff.

[00:03:58.280]

Yeah, to the half full, half empty thing. I saw this to me earlier this week. I always like to remind people, regardless of whether you think it’s half full or half empty, you know, you can with fill up the glass right below about the problem solved. The problem solved.

[00:04:14.570]

Just 20, 20 was you had a cut on your hand from the broken glass.

[00:04:19.230]

That was, as you know, the other dark times and possibly darker times and so forth. But this for us, there is some really cool information, especially one of the articles you did share, but also something that Stewart and Melissa have put out, which was consumer sentiment study. There’s some really good numbers to look at of things sentiment wise. We should be focused on January 1st. Twenty twenty one. What should we focus on? There’s some pretty cool stuff out of it.

[00:04:46.400]

I’m not going to on the screen per say, but there is some really interesting I’m going to put the link up so that people have it.

[00:04:54.410]

The real value out of this information was how people are perceiving their travel plans to this. And Robert, if you take much time with it, and I think, Dean, you were saying that you were just glanced at it, but here is the link for the cool part that I really got out of.

[00:05:16.320]

This was from the sentiment study.

[00:05:19.140]

It was pointing out how much people are making January their travel plan month. Yeah, Jan is always a travel plan, but that’s not happening this this is different. Yes, I agree with you. Yeah, even more so now than ever. This is from aspirational. Wouldn’t it be nice to what would would be nice be. Let’s start making plans. Right. Right. Well, two things are not necessarily negative, but January and February is always wave season for the cruise industry.

[00:05:52.890]

Right. It’s a huge, always huge honeymoon bookings. Right. I mean, and things just skyrocket in terms of all of us. So people really start looking forward to that stuff. But, yeah, I think now with a vaccine now being administered and things like that, people have some options. OK, now let’s start planning things. But it’s still going to be based on when do they feel it’s safe. Right? That’s the bottom line.

[00:06:20.310]

Right.

[00:06:20.640]

No matter what, that’s going to be a determination of when the trigger starts getting pulled to to the to this question date that I’m referring to specifically, the question was in twenty twenty one assuming cases are dropping and vaccines are being distributed, when will you likely book your next trip? Forty five percent of the respondents said they would be ready to book a trip in the first quarter. Twenty twenty one. The reason why I’m bringing this up so pointedly is regardless of historical, yes, January is the time for planning and sex and so forth and so on.

[00:06:48.610]

I think there’s a couple of extra factors to this that we need to consider from a marketing perspective. One is everything’s on the table, OK, if there is not a matter of oh, let’s just talk about a thing. Let’s talk about getting anybody that’s interested in travel to either discover us or make finalized plans for it, because like from personal experience, talking with my wife is we’re looking at we always want to take the river cruise down the Danube during Christmas in Germany.

[00:07:17.230]

That’s the most expensive cruise river cruise you can book out of all the river cruises they offer because everybody knows the time of the year.

[00:07:26.050]

Yeah, because everybody wants to see their little Christmas villages thing on the side of the river kind of thing. And the price is right now because we’re still in that pricing mode of covid. And so everybody’s offering these amazing deals. So we also have cancellation policies that are very flexible. So why not just instead of thinking we to be nice, we’re translating that into what exactly would we want to do when and like that didn’t our time previous to opening up on the show is beginning to translate that into detail?

[00:07:59.200]

Like, I don’t want to miss the biggest all the time when I get there. I want to either the restaurant that really tells me I should eat and I should go do the things that people tell me I should not miss when I’m there. I want to stay in the hotels that I want to be told are the best ones to be there, because I’ve done all the extra research that I don’t normally do because I have time to do it between now and then, knowing that even if I can’t travel, if something bad comes again, at least I know I can get out of it without feeling I can financially, I’m giving myself.

[00:08:23.980]

So multiply that times. Many times you bring up some good points, Robert. You know, weddings that have been delayed. I know when my dear friends is delayed their wedding three times. Right. Yeah. You know, girl wants to get married. You know, those same for the for the group market. All the the Smurf stuff like that already kind of looked out. And that’s about all those things that are going to happen. They’ve just been postponed.

[00:08:52.540]

Those are going to happen. There’s going to be a certain I mean, yeah, they’re going to be some great opportunities in the wedding arena. And things like especially for venues have been shut down and things like that. The challenge is is really going to be all the stuff that just got canceled right now is the second quarter set, twenty twenty sales rah rah session or whatever. That’s not happening right now. I just got away from the schedule and it’s gone forever, so.

[00:09:23.590]

Yeah.

[00:09:23.840]

And those are going to rubber.

[00:09:25.450]

You brought up a really good point and some of the notes they made to about if you’re if you’re a salesperson in twenty, twenty one or really in any person, any position that is going to be your KPIs are based upon your performance numbers. Right. And you’re looking at twenty, twenty one over twenty twenty.

[00:09:42.130]

You’re not going would heaven forbid some other asteroid hits or whatever, but forgiving some major event like that. Your numbers are. Oh, he’s going to give you a hug. Hang on. Yes.

[00:09:59.250]

That’s my four second cut out of my wife.

[00:10:01.910]

I don’t know why it said. The thing is, I let you hang in there. Yeah.

[00:10:08.550]

So you’re going to have better numbers in twenty twenty one than you did in twenty twenty four, giving any major event that happens.

[00:10:16.050]

But you made the point that you can’t just be 50 percent better in order to get back up to par, you’ve got to be almost one hundred percent better. Right. And those numbers have come a long way. But there’s going to be a lot of people, I think, that are going to be raising their hand or raising their flag, saying, look at me, look how good I was in twenty, twenty one. Well, no, you just brought it from nothing up to something you like from fifty percent to seventy five percent of what.

[00:10:40.620]

Twenty. Nineteen. Right.

[00:10:44.240]

We want that to happen but yeah.

[00:10:48.200]

But that also translates a little bit, a little bit misleading because the basis is just a drop so far.

[00:10:53.620]

Sure. But then again we get from an action item of all this is for hotels that think that they’re going to stage a recovery based on operational priorities before marketing priorities. There’s a little bit of cart before the horse. If you’re going to go over and bring in people because you operationally need them, that’s fine. But if you don’t have the demand for business, you’re bringing in a cost and not in competition to a revenue source. You bring sales teams in, get them back on the phones, get them back on the emails, get them back in the communication cycle again so that they can begin to garner the demand that we’re looking at from this kind of service, from field travel that says people are going to begin to create these plants now that now first quarter is when people are going to want to start to put a sharper point and to it and define what it is that they want to do, where they want to do it.

[00:11:45.120]

And if you’re not in that space to communicate with them, even if they found you from all the other marketing you may be doing, if there’s nobody answering the phone or it takes too long for somebody to answer the phone or answer the response or inquiry, they’ve gone on moved on to the next one.

[00:11:58.170]

I mean, if you’re not getting back to them in the proverbial four to six hours that you most often salespeople to do within the day cycle, their phone calls argues that the one area where the hotel industry, I mean, a lot of other industries advanced ten years because of the pandemic.

[00:12:14.460]

Right. They got more. You just start thinking about being able to order online and pick up in parking lots. I mean, things look for pretty far and retail hotels are good except one area, which I think in terms of group quotes and things like that, you don’t need to go through the full RFP process. You need to be able to post your rates right. And say if you’ve got ten people, you can have it, you can have it off where people have to kind of go through a little bit of a gauntlet.

[00:12:44.880]

So they just may be out publicly posted. But at some point, if you can’t afford to have all of your sales people back immediately, just going, well, let’s just ramp up to one hundred percent of our twenty nineteen because we have no revenues right now and we’re hoping, yeah, whatever. Ninety days, one hundred maybe is to 70 days out or we’re going to have this back.

[00:13:07.650]

So you’ve got to get the stuff at the top of the funnel automated right. Where they can go in and kind of help themselves and go. What are the rates for, especially if it’s simple to rooms on this sort of thing, they don’t need a bunch of functions, space. How can they get a quote and get a ballpark idea? And then all of a sudden they start needing some things, get the sales people up, sell clothes, that sort of stuff.

[00:13:29.400]

That’s good. You want to kind of in the you know, the part where they’re going to provide the most utility, not just fielding a whole ton of quotes. I mean, Bruce Rosenberg with a O with a hotel planner. So I think the fourth quarter they had like twenty five thousand meetings planned and things like that and things like that. Nothing’s close enough. That’s the thing that’s also getting, you know, people are booking things, stuff, but nothing’s nothing’s converting.

[00:13:58.150]

You make an excellent point to this is that this is a chance to rethink what we’ve done, because you imagine how frustrating the retail space would be if we did retail like we do our hotel group business. Hi. I like to go and buy a widget. Oh, when do you need the widget? Why does that make a difference? Well, depending, but when you need the widget might determine how much to which it is. I’m sorry. Well how many people need the widget or maybe it’s or maybe it’s just arbitrary, right.

[00:14:22.080]

Yeah. They don’t do well.

[00:14:24.000]

It’s like look, I just want to have some relevance of how much it cost. Well, it really depends on all of these factors that we have to go through. And then we have to figure out what you drive a group like. You know, I want to know kind of what I’m looking at. So to your point, I was if now more than ever, break the mold and go, hey, here’s our base start, because there’s segments to the group business that we haven’t even really we’ve touched them on conversation, but we haven’t really seen coming to market.

[00:14:47.370]

When they do, they’re going to come in like a lion. And that is all the displaced corporate required travel. Meetings that they’re not going to do the corporate travel like they used to, but they certainly to gather in some capacity, they lost their central mothership. They’re not in big meeting rooms in their own retail space or the red friendly space anymore. They’re having to gather in some ways or get together. In some ways. They need a temporary meeting space or gathering points, regionality wise or whatever.

[00:15:10.810]

There’s going to be demand cycles that we haven’t even looked at yet.

[00:15:13.150]

They’re going to come into play and they need quick answers and they don’t need well, and they can train in the more they’re, you know, the younger they are. They’re like, you want me to do what I got to tell you to conform?

[00:15:25.000]

But most of the questions are applicable. What you know? Yeah.

[00:15:28.150]

It’s like, why do I have to we want to have your email address. You want to have your phone number. We want to be able to do all the stuff. And it’s like, no, I just want to know how much your product cost. It’s like Amazon and Target and Wal-Mart. They don’t work that way. Do you have it in it? Do you have inventory? What’s the price? Is that your stock? Can I. Is it available?

[00:15:50.050]

Can I. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s my sister down. We’re going to put a hood on your head. We’re going to throw you into the trunk of a car. We’re going to drive you around for a while this close.

[00:16:01.180]

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you’re going to put a gun to your head and then work out. Yeah. How’s that?

[00:16:08.420]

I mean, probably Robert start a new year. That’s probably the most solid like things to think about this year that I can think of is just dump your traditional and just people go over and have the argument. And I remember this even back when I was like I was so frustrated with sparse software like Springerville and all the rest are like I said, why can’t you do online spa appointments? This goes back a few years, obviously, back to Robert Wittstock years.

[00:16:33.520]

And so they’re like, well, because your competitors will overbook you so that you you end up and I’m like, seriously? Do you’re saying you’re not offering your views to the gas because your competitors were abuse it for you by making you overbook and blocking out and having staff and it wasn’t necessary on Ghost. You know, there’s technology that you say you can do that would prevent that from happening. And ultimately, you could still give a guest a great excuse by being able to book these things.

[00:17:01.210]

And they’re like, no, no, no, this is the way it’s always been done.

[00:17:03.880]

And the traditional B.S. kind of thing, the same circumstances here for groups.

[00:17:08.080]

Oh, if you put your group rates out, then your competitors are going to know how to price again.

[00:17:11.890]

They already know. Every competitor already knows with the group rate is of your competitor. I mean.

[00:17:18.520]

Well, they know what the target should not be. A static rate. Let’s just call this number. Right. That’s always the the big thing. It’s got to be broken out or you start looking at what is the day of arrival, what’s the length of one of these? And you can have little rules that say that you can have it be a percentage off the bar. That varies depending on the situation.

[00:17:42.590]

Oh, that’s a big one. No, it doesn’t have to be a flat twenty percent off the bar. So sometimes contracts, sometimes it should expand so you can figure that stuff. Now the problem is, do you have the revenue management system or the sales software or the or the web booking engine that’s able to do that. That’s where the gap is. Right. And that’s where there’s a lot of effort being done. Well, thinking about what else you’re waiting for to figure this out, because that’s how you know, that’s what the finish line looks like.

[00:18:13.230]

I have these conversations all the time where people are all frustrated or stressed. How we can’t do that. Why? Because our budget says we have to hit this. You know, you made the budget right. This is a self-imposed pain you’re giving yourself. You’ve made this line that says we have to hit this line under the assumption that when you made that line, you knew all the things that were going to influence it. Well, guess what? We’ve learned anything in the past eleven months that we don’t know half the goals of our influences, our business.

[00:18:42.130]

And you have to be adaptable, like why not tailor goals or lines based on total demand? Like if, you know, you’re getting X group business to your market and your fair share based on your community space and everything else is X percentage. That’s a better benchmark to say. Are we just like you? Star reports used to do tab for, you know, what’s my market percentage? Am I above or below that? Am I getting my fair share below it or above it know above it we a little harder because basically you don’t have the space to do it unless you really optimize roles.

[00:19:14.710]

But all in all, the idea would be then at that point it’s not a self-imposed pain. This is oh the budget we got approved is this.

[00:19:20.740]

No, you won’t meet that rule and you don’t you’re killing yourself because you’re saying, well, I can only quote this much because that’s the number I have to hit, get the business if the business is there.

[00:19:31.300]

And now because we start talking about all of our data and I’ve said this on previous shows, your data right now is nothing. Your data is crap. Anything you had before covid doesn’t matter.

[00:19:43.000]

Anything you had drinks. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. You just got to start getting data and knowing how to adapt to that on the. Hmm. It’s like a map that ends and you’re on the end of the map, you’re literally making the map. Do you remember when we first started the riverways, the platform? Now I remember that this. Yeah, well, I mean, Google owns it everything. But when Mays first started, if you drove off the map, you got extra points because you were literally mapping the road for ways as you were driving, because that’s how they figured out their maps initially until they eventually got bought up by Google.

[00:20:18.060]

That’s how they made the maps, was it would follow your driving patterns to know what roads are were out there. So, yeah, you’re literally making your own map right now.

[00:20:26.790]

Well, and you have to understand the dynamics of the segments, because that’s a regional market and you’re coming in. What are what are the demand generators that are getting these folks to to meet? Isn’t something like a wedding or something like that. That’s that’s fun. Or is it a regional golf club or something like that? They want to go in and start doing things because all of a sudden events are starting up. Maybe it’s concerts or sporting events or theater or whatever those things are for now, you know, shop shopping, whatever the case may be.

[00:21:00.390]

Right. Or just people getting together. And we just want to go for a break because now we feel safe. So you have to understand all those because those are have very, very different needs, right? They are very, very different. You demand patterns for pattern planning, time frame. And you just really I always say you have to step back to why do people want to stay in your hotel? Why that is the most important thing.

[00:21:24.780]

And you’re right. And why they did before covid. Maybe some of those reasons are still valid. But if you don’t if the NFL team isn’t playing in your life and the folks who are all set up for the Rose Bowl, it’s like going to Texas to the wrong state. Actually, I had friends.

[00:21:46.290]

I had friends in the lamenting the fact that they were going to be in their RV out there to catch the Rose Bowl as a bucket list item. They’re going to go down the beach on the RV and then they’re going to go to the Rose Bowl along, you know, the shores of Lake Grapevine, the lawn, basically the same thing.

[00:22:02.370]

So you can’t even tell the difference if you squint.

[00:22:05.850]

Hey, so back to the survey. Real quick question. Nine was in twenty twenty one. Assuming cases are dropping and vaccines are being distributed, when would you like to travel for your next trip? And the observation is, not surprisingly, the spring and early summer months of April through July are the most popular for forty seven percent of the vote. If you look at this graph, which again, if you look at the link, that’s that’s definitively of a surge of release because it actually goes down after June, because people I think are so pent up that as soon as they feel that that safety margin has been hit for them, boom, they’re gone.

[00:22:37.380]

And so it grows through March, April, May and June is at its peak, which that’s a tsunami for most places. But I would caveat this by saying there’s originality to this that has to be put into it. I don’t think this is a general statement that everybody’s going to see this type of wave. There’s going to be places, I think, that aren’t New York could be pivotal directly on if if Broadway opens up in June. Oh, to hell, yeah.

[00:23:04.050]

Everyone’s going to be shown up in New York if it’s safe to get back into that again. And they’re going to have a self sense of support and everything else, they’re going to be buying tickets and all that. I think that’s an element. Are they going to go to Aspen and Vail?

[00:23:18.720]

Hard to say, because right now some people are saying, well, a lot of people are going, yeah, they’re certainly going to those places.

[00:23:24.780]

Now, Stephanie’s in Aspen this week, and that’s all I know is thank you for that.

[00:23:30.780]

I ask. And she kissed me on. Yeah, but a number of snarky responses.

[00:23:36.240]

I resisted because it’s twenty twenty one. Yeah.

[00:23:44.040]

I think it’s important to understand your audience with that too, because as you look at people, they’re saying, hey, I’m ready to travel in April, OK, maybe spring breakers. But outside of that, if you’re a family, you’re a parent, you’ve got kids in school, you can’t just pick up in and take them out on the road. So but you’re seeing that surge come March, April and May. Those are people that don’t have the kids.

[00:24:04.950]

Those. Four locked in a retirement home for too long. I know I paused for seconds there again, but there are these people that have been waiting to get out and haven’t been able to. And so I think you need to think about what those demographics are, who that audience is, because you can have different types of people wanting to go, different types of places that my mom doesn’t want to go to the Las Vegas Strip. Some people her age might, but my mom is not one of us.

[00:24:34.990]

So making sure that you understand what those demographics mean. And the key. The one I thought was question six in here. Do you plan to get a coronavirus vaccination? More than a third. Thirty six percent said no. That extends out this timeline, folks. I mean, the travel industry should be all over, get vaccinated, right? Do the salvation of our industry. It is.

[00:25:04.750]

And it’s just like, oh, well, if you want if you want to just take another quarter off, keep going for another quarter. Fine. Yeah. Let let things slow down and people not got it and they will not feel safe and have little hot spots popping up and down, governments being conservative and saying, hey, we aren’t sure yet and we’re still that that’s the worst possible, worst possible outcome. It’s got to be like get it as soon as you can go.

[00:25:34.120]

Let’s make sure things are good and we’re we’re ready to roll. And I am hopeful that the data will support it. Whether the data will encourage it, I should say, and that as people start getting the vaccinations, that we start seeing that line graph go down. Right. So you can directly tie one to the other, get vaccinated cases go down. And as soon as people start seeing that, I think that that will trigger it in their heads that, oh, maybe I should do this, but I also got to go down and stay down.

[00:26:02.200]

Right. Because that’s what happened over the summer, I think came down here. It’s like we’re out of the woods, it’s over. And other people, all these talking heads out there are gone. Hey, there is no such thing as a second wave walk past us. That isn’t that bad. And then you have the new variant that, oh, it’s more transmissible and things like you have. Right.

[00:26:22.480]

So. The virus care doesn’t care about all these dynamics and how badly you want to travel, it just does what it does right. And there are ways you can stop it if you don’t stop it. Your ability to travel will be delayed industry.

[00:26:41.470]

So think of actually all of our association leadership should be totally laser focus on promoting the value of vaccination. Now, one thing I do want to bring up a marketing perspective that I am working on and tracking and going to be using. You have a lot of very tired, exhausted, mentally drained mentally.

[00:27:08.480]

I don’t know whether they pleaded depleted medical people, and when it gets to a point where there is no anticipation of having to be prepared for the next bad thing, there’s going to be a lot of need to go to a lot of places to get a lot of unplugging and a lot of health and a lot of calm and a lot of this out of their heads.

[00:27:32.510]

If you’re a wellness or resort or destination that can provide the scope of this, we’re not talking about a roadside hotel, although if the roadside hotel’s in an amazing location in the middle of Monument Valley, Kate, you’re in there.

[00:27:48.590]

You know, maybe a yoga instructor out there. Who knows? Yeah, but that’s this is this is that time to begin to cultivate your relationship. Remember, nothing happens. It’s not like one day. It’s not next day it is. And then you’re in the middle of it. Everybody keeps thinking that persona at that moment of conversion. You need be way up here into the decision conversation cycles. You know, you need to be discovered and participant.

[00:28:11.780]

And you made the point earlier when you said you have to answer, we have to answer questions. What are we what are we good for? For you. What is it that we can provide you for information beyond just the weather? We wash our hands and wear masks. It’s what are we here? What’s close to us? What’s things to do when you’re with us? What’s the things you want to come by and be with us for because of it?

[00:28:31.310]

All those things have to get answered in the context of our our dialogue and discussions and everything else from that. There’s certain market segments that are just literally sitting on the bottom of the tree waiting to happen. The medical community, the fatigued Battleborn medical community, the true heroes of all of this are going to need some transitional break. First of all, I think we should give all their debts, basically all their loans just go.

[00:28:58.280]

I think we should give them all a vacation that they all like. You know, as a hotel, you might even consider the fact that you give them a ridiculous ability to come to you. Yeah, because in all honesty, you’re going to want them ready in case the aliens do show up.

[00:29:15.080]

You’re going to want to go over and this that that is that ability to provide that and your community support and everything else that we’re talking about from all the various putting refrigerators in front of the businesses full of food that people drop off all the things that we do as a community. The collaboration is something we as hoteliers can be an active participant in. But that’s a that’s a segment community right now that is literally prime for a time and start date.

[00:29:37.550]

Have of you guys seen hoteliers really reaching out and doing so? I feel the first responder rates, teacher’s rates for teaching our kind of appreciation type things to the medical, things like that. And yes, you might want to say, hey, guys, to do this, we need to see some form of light. And too bad the devil is not here because it dealt with library. They had a great thing for doing all of their, like, anniversary packages.

[00:30:05.420]

Right. And they gave really good things. Right. I mean, you got you got upgrades and you got chocolates and roses. And she knew I don’t know what the percentages, probably half the people were the same that we are. And it’s our anniversary doesn’t matter.

[00:30:23.000]

Now, in this case, you want to put OK, let’s put some framing around it so you just don’t have people getting. Yeah. Kind of the free loaders getting a deal saying that they’re a doctor or something like that. Well, there are ways to kind of figure that stuff out that’s not too obtrusive. I just say look at what we’re doing is appreciation. And yes, some people may come back. Oh, that’s just opportunistic. You know, do it where it’s truly legitimate appreciation.

[00:30:50.090]

Be authentic about it. But that’s a fantastic thing to do. But I don’t see a lot of it in that right. So here’s what you do.

[00:30:56.660]

You give a number of gift certificates or coupons to your local faith regional hospital. Over here, you get a bunch of coupons to the doctors and say, here, you hand these out to the people that you know deserve them and put on their hands to regulate that and then boom, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:31:14.420]

If you can do it through closed groups, things like that. Yeah. Employee payrolls, things like that, where you go, they can log in. There’s a single site. Yes. They got the access to and all sorts of stuff.

[00:31:26.420]

But with marketing I can to people look at what T-Mobile does with booking. Actually I can’t remember they’re doing it with booking. I think they’re doing it with booking dotcom. I should know this, but yeah, if you’re a T-Mobile customer, there’s a single sign and they have their whatever they’re Tuesdays deal, right? Every Tuesday they trained everybody. You got to think, oh, you got a discount on fuel at Shell, you got Dunkin Donuts specials or whatever.

[00:31:51.830]

And it’s just kind of sitting out there, save on these hotels and what are they doing? They’re giving them kind of the insider rate. Right. And so it’s not a big deal for these guys. And again, they can channel it. They know exactly where it’s coming from.

[00:32:05.210]

They know the. And they know what they’re paying to access to this, and it’s fantastic, right, and it’s closed off, you can’t really go and scam it and come in and get the little coupon code that’s published and just use the other retail me not type thing. You can’t just go in through a couple of marketing layers.

[00:32:23.210]

First off, I can identify employees of any company and I can target them on at least two platforms, specifically three really, where I can be violating their privacy and GDP or not. It’s not it’s not at all.

[00:32:38.150]

It’s really creating custom audiences and Facebook and identify them by employer and can creating a targeting based on geography and demography and making sure that they see them. By the same token, you do the same thing on LinkedIn.

[00:32:48.890]

You can my Google, I’d say LinkedIn might be a little bit.

[00:32:52.310]

I can go to a hospital, make sure that the social media gets targeted for postings on social platforms that they’re using within that space if they trigger something, a vacation getaway. I can have some people going, hey, we’re going to give you this go here. Now, the other is is bots. Do you remember back? And I know Robert does, because he was back in Bethlehem when Southwest had their first of the first overbooking and worst over Boki.

[00:33:16.910]

Robert never got that was a three walking. Yeah, there was no place. You’re in the came out of the stable.

[00:33:25.430]

The front desk manager at the time did a walk. Right. With some other place. No. And that was early on.

[00:33:31.800]

He they got it right. But Southwest Airlines remember the ding ding and they had an opera come up. You know that that stuff’s coming back. Yeah. The ability to push now with with bots. I mean, if you can get a cab to see somebody that can give it worth it, like a hotel doing this is a little rough because in all honesty, they have to want that kind of notification for last minute deals. And right now, it’s not a last minute deal environment.

[00:33:59.840]

I’m not looking at a last minute deal that would jump on this weekend.

[00:34:03.210]

I’m travel and the engagement is real tough on them. They’re like, oh, well, it’s like it’s going to wind up in a spam folder. Yes. Yeah, right.

[00:34:13.040]

Who’s going to really when this deluge comes out and we’re all clamoring for everybody’s interest of what do I want to do? I feel like Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd and trading places a variant. I’ll buy it from you. I’ll buy it from you know, we’re going to be we’re going to get that point in June and July where the consumer is going to be like, what do I want to do? We’re all going, oh, my God, I want to hear this.

[00:34:36.260]

We’re going to be all clamoring.

[00:34:37.460]

And there will be no problem with a lot of companies to want to throw whatever they have to add it. To be one of those people that are saying it, the companies are going to benefit are the ones doing it now in preparation of communication, honesty, advocacy, communication with you, with guest, identifying what they’re looking for, creating that relationship with them so that when it comes time, they’re the first consideration, not that they won’t be seen against other people, but they’re the ones that they trust more than the ones that are popping up out of the blue of the woodwork, so to speak, going, oh, I got a deal for you.

[00:35:04.160]

So that pop up stuff that bought stuff, that engagement stuff will come into its play towards the end of the year. I’m forecasting where people are going to be like, I got the space of your boom. You said you’re interested in the stuff. Boom, here it is. Boom, one or more, boom. That kind of stuff is going to pop around to airlines. Trying to get back into the modalities that make them exist financially are going to be really about, boy, I got an amazing deal.

[00:35:28.400]

This mon’s crazy.

[00:35:29.480]

The thing to be here. I’m not tied to the airline in some in some cases, though. But it’s going to be very interesting because those guys are sitting there going, here’s the city pair, here’s the competition. Here’s the problem. And if you don’t have a direct, nonstop competitor, I’m not that old D there was a lot of ambition to not do anything. Go I’ll give you two modifiers of airplane parked on the tarmac is an expensive piece of real estate and they have a lot of planes parked on the tarmacs, too.

[00:36:07.430]

If I can put more seats, butts in the chairs, I can fly more equipment between the two places. I’m going to do it.

[00:36:13.760]

Yes, but but they also don’t have all that business travel traffic that’s subsidized. Completely true. We’ve got this high margin business of subsidizing the low margin stuff so we can throw these deals because they don’t have that right.

[00:36:29.480]

So the prices are down, fuel prices are down, the opportunity for margin is there and direct hard core lanes, especially if we get used to traveling non-direct like they’re forcing us to right now.

[00:36:43.850]

Remember? Remember. OK, Robert, I remember when we were in Nashville and we were so mad at that.

[00:36:48.500]

A person from the airlines that was doing that speech that was so cocky on stage that says, hey, we control the supply, we control the demand, and they do the kind of right because they divide up Delta doesn’t. Mess with Dallas American doesn’t mess with Atlanta right now. And they’ve they’ve ca but they’re both located there, but not the way they handle their pricing. They they understand there’s no reason doing a price war for American cutting fares to start with.

[00:37:28.070]

So they say price for.

[00:37:30.710]

I think I think they’re in modality of survivorship. And whether they did this legitimately, what they do or not, I think behind doors, behind doors, behind doors, there’s a how do we all survive here?

[00:37:43.610]

Because I can’t take on Dallas and Atlanta, but you have Dallas and I have Atlanta. I’ll let you play on a few games. You let me play on a few games, but I’ll keep the prime to this. I keep the prime to that.

[00:37:56.150]

I don’t know. I don’t know. I think Edgell, they’re dealing with equipment, so they’ll look at it and go, does this particular origin destination, does that need to have equipment on it? And do I need the third flight a day? Because.

[00:38:11.930]

Right, which is what I’m saying, I think they’re going to start collaborating, going, look, I’ll give you the gates and I’ll give you the ground. Or more expensive.

[00:38:18.790]

They’re all that are going to be purely utilization plays, which I, I don’t know. And a lot of those schedules, those are set months and months and months.

[00:38:31.460]

And so let’s add it into an article you gave about Airbnb list of places that people are most interested in traveling to the country.

[00:38:40.040]

Oh, you dropping off the happiest of New Years to think.

[00:38:45.980]

And for people that don’t know his podcast, everybody that people know more about you, where can they find you, sir?

[00:38:53.430]

Oh, four seconds. And I probably froze right there. They did. You did leave base camp dotcom, but a search marketing dot com find me on LinkedIn. And as you mentioned, we do have a great podcast next week, actually, about really the how all of the parts of metasearch tie into all the other parts of what we’re doing in the digital market, your search engine marketing, your display, retargeting, all those different things to the podcast.

[00:39:19.740]

Learn more. See you next week.

[00:39:21.290]

And you’re training your training during your training. You’re training. You’re training. You’re training our training program. Yep. Go to base camp Dotcom. There is a training webinar on there. There’s actually have a three introduction that you can get a high level Medda one on one. But then there’s a part that you can sign up for, for more advanced training, getting into the really the the weeds of things about connectivity and metasearch, about the nuances of the different channels and a lot of other things we break down, including all the KPIs that go with them.

[00:39:49.000]

Awesome, and I’m going to be hooking up with the hospitality pitch, I need to go. I figured you might be candidate number one for Jan, that we do the hospitality pitch next Wednesday if you want to record and broadcast it and go from there. So, yeah, anyway, but thank you. Happy New Year to you. The family, happy, healthy, safe, everything else. You guys, as well as everybody listening to. Take care.

[00:40:13.090]

Take care. Do you know it when they do, the pitches are a batter who can hit it. Can I be that guy?

[00:40:19.700]

No, no, no, no, no. Bats involved in the pitch can’t beat people. Robert, I know that takes away half your joy, but I know it’s again, going back to the airline conversation and going back to the destination stuff. I think there’s going to be, to your point, what drove the hub system.

[00:40:37.540]

In my mind, and I know I’m naive when I say this, but drove the hub system and subsequently what what what mechanical went to different locations to and from the hub systems was really corporate driven where business wise were traveling from and to inconsistency. I know that firsthand from when I first made level for American Airlines and I thought, you know, my instinct and I’m gold level and I’m going to Chicago from Dallas.

[00:41:02.470]

I want to be on the plane first for the first time. Yeah, everybody and their brother except for me was Dayman. I mean, that that route between Dallas and Chicago was main being business travel. And those dudes did it every week.

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So they were rank and file way above.

[00:41:20.980]

But the idea was that’s not there now. So how much travel really comes from Dallas to Chicago if it isn’t helping out somewhere else?

[00:41:28.180]

I think we’re going to find the smaller regional cities like PBI, West Palm Beach, which Trump wants to remain. But that’s another story.

[00:41:37.060]

And and the Sarasota’s where there’s people wanting to get to where they want to go to, but that will require legs.

[00:41:45.190]

There’s not going to be a lot of Chicago two or Dallas two, but maybe there will. But the idea is, yeah, you with the market marketer for your market, need to understand the lift that’s coming into your market.

[00:41:58.150]

Absolutely. Critically, critically important, because, again, some of these places have been basically cut off. Right. They just don’t. And this is always happening. Vacation to the Caribbean, Cozumel, they have places like that where a lot of people don’t realize that those those airlines would pay the destinations to.

[00:42:21.490]

Yeah. Or the I’m sorry, the airlines and the destinations would pay the airlines to have lift seven days a week or something because just having it where oh, the pattern is Sunday and Thursday that the a lot of people go, no, no, I want to go Sunday or Saturday to Friday or sometimes you can’t get there from here, at least without a layover here and such and such.

[00:42:49.000]

There are changing, changing carriers and all that stuff is not good.

[00:42:54.370]

And if you look at the Caribbean islands, which is a great case study for that, then you see the over the cruise boats, well, they’re gone. But when they were floating around, they didn’t need a hotel.

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All they needed was the retail and the persona of what the island was and the activities and the stuff around it. The hotels were sitting on as two thousand people getting off that Deng floating hotel and staying with me. And I got to wait for the people to fly in to stay with me. Their whole Hubbard existence was based on how people got to the island. I’ll say that when it comes to to these planning stages of airlift. And so there’s a lot of data sources to this, too.

[00:43:31.930]

You can get a lot of good API lift out of it and stuff. But I think there should be a study done from Madison, Wisconsin. It got cut off. Yeah, it’s interesting. The Madisons, there are still I think Southwest still has a Dallas native flight, which I was surprised I was there.

[00:43:49.840]

But the flights are like one every three days. It’s like an island.

[00:43:55.150]

And the impact on it is Delta has got Madison go in and feeding in Minneapolis. Right. So you have to stop there. You’ve got other ones. Were it going. United has it into Chicago. Right. Those are all but all those little non stops, which again, a lot of these carriers have done very well. Allegiant, right, Ali? Just a genius job of basically taking a tour operators.

[00:44:21.610]

Yeah. Model of distribution and basically say no work schedule. Karen, we do this, but we’re only going from Sioux Falls to Vegas three days a week or whatever, and they operate like a charter. Right. Except they they fill it up and they go from now. We’re going from Rockville. We’re going from wherever the case may be.

[00:44:41.680]

And that’s a great little thing. And you look at their model for a long time was. Yeah. Ninety six percent of our routes are nonstop with no nonstop competition.

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And you go and I think I think the charter framework is something that might be more adopted in the short term.

[00:44:59.920]

Yeah, yeah.

[00:45:00.970]

Because a lot of people, I mean, me included for a long time, didn’t realize that a lot of planes that were going from places to places weren’t ones that I could go and just booked through American Airlines.

[00:45:10.900]

I had to go through Wagonlit or I had to go through ungettable vacations or whatever, you know, forget what leasing.

[00:45:19.750]

You didn’t know that a lot of these planes went down. The Caribbean were actually chartered planes. The whole plane was because of the travel agency booking.

[00:45:26.620]

Even even United would allocate 60, 80, 90 seats of some of these planes to the tour operator. Right. And it’s at this rate. And here we go. Boom, you take care of it. You take care of the demand. You fill up the seats. And if you and that’s the problem, the challenge with why these charters just aren’t everywhere. There’s a lot of risk right now because you’ve got to go to work at great rates of hotels.

[00:45:53.050]

Now, a lot of hotels have gotten weaned off of this. And thanks from the intermediary perspective, I don’t know. To Dave Letterman and Bob Diener when they started Hotel Reservations Network, what did they do? They took a tour operator agreements basically and said, let’s take our black highlight our Sharpie highlighter and take out all these sections we we don’t like, which is owed deposits. Guarantees. Yeah, time for a booking lead-time, time frames, things like that, block requirements, get rid of all those terms.

[00:46:27.820]

But we still we don’t change that percentage discount. And hoteliers very largely just kind of went along with that.

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And yeah, there’s the merchant model sort of, which is basically you’re you’re getting the wholesaler discounts, which again, way back in the day we’re presumed to be oh, we have somebody taking risk who’s getting a low rate in exchange for volume. And they have a requirement to market that and costs and to distribute that, they’ve got to share part of that with the retail travel agent in terms of commissions. So, yeah, we got to give them 20 percent, something like that, to recognize the risk, recognize the volume, recognize the distribution that they’re bringing to us.

[00:47:12.280]

That’s fair. But then all of a sudden it’s just, oh, no, they popped up. They’re getting twenty percent. Why? Because they wound up. The person found them.

[00:47:20.530]

They found we we both can look back to 9/11 and realized that everyone was so desperate to allow that to become a mainstay. Yeah.

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And that’s it was one of the glimmers of hope that I, I had. It doesn’t look like there’s rampant discounting right now. I guess rates are twenty across the US are basically twenty eight percent lower than they were a year ago. But again, there’s a lot of shift that’s overall. It’s like, yeah, that big large convention hotel that was packed with whatever business. Yeah. That didn’t happen there. So all of a sudden you’re going to the lower, you know, the lower tier properties are are winding up, getting a greater share of the business.

[00:48:02.080]

So, yeah, that’s going to put, you know, that’s going to make the average rate come down when you look at it from a market perspective. So yeah, I don’t see signs of just a yet of crazy discounting. Again, that’s going to be a temptation when demand does come back. And it’ll be interesting to see what some of these owners do if they just say, hey, override the revenue manager, I’d love to get Clough’s from ideas and some of the guys from Dualla or whoever this guy.

[00:48:29.440]

Can you show us how many of these things the other of the arms is getting overridden? That would be really cool. That’s going to be a huge determinant of what’s really the industry.

[00:48:43.570]

Given that you did throw an article in from Clough’s, which is why is it still the Roaring Twenties for hotel revenue management? And I thought that was a very he made some really good points. The point that really resonated with me was revenue managers now are being perceived as an insurance policy, the human stopper, as it were, to the EHI interpretation of data, because as we all said, the data aren’t working because you need you need a good amount of quality data.

[00:49:18.880]

You need to understand how those that data can get related. The signals that say, yes, this here is the outcome, there’s some sort of cause effect relationship, I mean, that’s that’s fundamentally what they’re trying to build and there’s no cause effect on the timing. And it’s just it’s a mess. Right. So, yeah, you’ve got to have smart people in there kind of doing it to bridge the gap until you can get a good deal of quality data, good training on the on the technology.

[00:49:50.210]

So so from a from a from a logistics point of view, it makes sense that when when all this hit, our industry revenue managers were one of the first to get sidelined because a lot of companies just saw that there was nothing they really could do in the sense of your abilities based on the department was vaporized. And so really kind of turning on autopilot. And then the plane fly itself was a cost savings. Right.

[00:50:13.910]

As long as they knew somebody could get into the system and make changes if necessary, that’s all they really needed. They didn’t need the analysis or interpretation because there was nothing to analyze or interpret it. Just your county, your community was being shut down. You had no demand coming to market. Your segmentations were going to channel, contributions were gone. You just need to make sure if you’re trying to leave the lights on that the system worked. And now as we’re getting back to trying to renegotiate and navigate, not negotiate, mean we navigate the waters as to what where demand is coming from now differently and everything else.

[00:50:47.840]

Now the revenue manager, and make sure that the system doesn’t go wrong or just to bring up a bad 737 Max idea. The software goes glitchy, you know, and tries to crash the plane because it misinterprets data. And that’s that’s where the revenue manager turns into the pilot and say, no, shut it off. That’s not right. Everything is not what it says it is. It is this. And I know this because I’m experienced in this.

[00:51:12.170]

So, you know, in that mindset, revenue managers need to be in the same category that we’re putting salespeople. These are critical component team members that need to come back in to make sure that the planes flying straight, that you talk to the people that are communicating with you as they’re beginning to emerge out to making plans again and that you need to have these people in place before you begin to assess how many housekeepers you need to bring back on board, how many front desk people you need bring on engineering staff, restaurant staff, all these other things, because you got to know what business is coming in the door.

[00:51:41.060]

Typical top line, bottom line conversations. How much money is coming in before we know what we’re yielding against, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have to you have to you need someone who can interpret that and do that properly because it’s not just having it right. It’s having a good revenue manager right now sitting there which is good or says or whatever or risk going to do this and keep whatever, dropping the prices or whatever goes through them and not optimize anything.

[00:52:14.070]

Right.

[00:52:14.600]

Just because they can recognize a red blinking light doesn’t mean that they know what to do about it or that it’s bad that that’s telling us something’s bad or that a lot of them.

[00:52:25.820]

A lot of them. I think that’s one of the benefits of pandemic, just like everything else.

[00:52:30.350]

When the 9/11 disruption really, really nailed the travel agents. Right. Because all the ones who weren’t creating value, who we just kind of out there taking or not really contributing much, but just basically transacting business. Right. Right now, we’ll all do this for you instead of booking yourself on your own. They went by the wayside because they weren’t creating value. So why should you pay for something in this in this chain that doesn’t create value, get rid of it?

[00:53:01.760]

That’s going to be the same thing. The revenue managers, the ones who don’t create value, should be sidelined. Right? If they are if they aren’t doing anything to help the hotel.

[00:53:11.660]

Yeah, I think that third party as well, because third party do the same thing. What did Expedia do when you had problems? They had nobody on the other side of the phone for you because they they chopped so much back and branded it to themselves, too.

[00:53:25.550]

It’s like, what’s your value proposition? Oh, there’s nobody here to answer the phone right now.

[00:53:29.840]

That whole department’s been furloughed, you know, and that’s and that’s the key because it’s. Yeah, having nobody do it is not good, but if someone’s making a good management decision and kind of say, no, these are the rules, here’s how we’re going to do it, we’re going to kind of put this. Yeah, here’s what we’re going to do. But keep measuring and comparing performance are going, OK, let’s try and maybe should we try something different, see if it works.

[00:54:00.830]

And that’s the big problem is do you do a lot of these groups that have Falletta or do they have the throughput to do a lot of that or the the capability to handle that kind of additional work workload to to do that thought? Or they just literally we’ve got to get these rooms cleaned or we’ve got to go do whatever. We’ve got millions with the lenders. We’ve got to do this.

[00:54:22.360]

Yeah, I know a couple of the articles you throw up. I was I mean, having had a relationship with Red Line before, I think I was going to wake up Big Arctic.

[00:54:33.050]

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:54:34.040]

That was I think people are going to wake up to a new world order. I mean, Celesta was and I don’t mean this in any contrived way, was not really a player. I mean, they were there and they had stuff and sometimes if they weren’t an influential owner, but now you’re going to come into the market and go, who are these guys?

[00:54:50.110]

A Boston based. They had some stuff in Egypt. I mean, it’s not like they weren’t around.

[00:54:57.460]

Yeah. Now it’s like dying or core brands have a lot of properties they picked up. I think from a branding perspective, though, they’ve got you know, they don’t have the Marriott umbrella and the the loyalty program kind of understanding of what they’ve got that was built over them. Same with those guys have advantages, right? I mean, the Marriott Starwood thinks people understand that that’s shifted now. They’re under the same umbrella. I think it’d be interesting to say, OK, so what are the brands that are under Sonesta now?

[00:55:32.810]

And people are going to have a struggle, right? Because Red Lion had a lot of stuff that wasn’t just red line. Red line was actually the minority of most of it. Really? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Because of the advantage. Because there’s things like that, though, the AbbVie acquisition. So I actually I’m on their Web page right now, our brands and they have three six.

[00:55:56.570]

They’ve got eight of them. Right. Hotel RL Red Lion Hotels. Right. That’s the one that was established back in the late fifties, early sixties. Red line and sweets. That’s still Red Lion.

[00:56:10.040]

So that’s kind of a new brand.

[00:56:13.010]

That was the holiday collective holiday and the that they acquired signature in guesthouse America’s best value in, which is also the best value. And again, that’s another brand. So it’s really six and then nights in that they bought from Wyndham, right? Yeah. And oh nice. Sorry guys. Night then. That’s a rough one. Right. That is all that American America’s best view of the technology are. Those are tough brands because I remember the work I did with J.D. Power.

[00:56:51.590]

People forget, um. Oh the. I’m trying to think, oh the score, it’s why am I having oh my brain stopped in twenty twenty one or where you take the top and these off the bottom me or you throw out the stuff in the middle of net promoter score.

[00:57:13.460]

What. Wow that’s not good.

[00:57:16.010]

This is going to be a rough year folks or people forget that you can have negatives. It’s plus two hundred to minus two hundred or something like that right now. How can you do that. And so or plus one hundred minus whatever the whatever you think is going nice in minus twenty five. Yeah. That’s not good.

[00:57:41.090]

Where more people say I don’t like it than do like it. That’s, that’s right. And America’s best you and kind of in the not as bad but down there in the zero range not where you want to be.

[00:57:56.390]

Well we’re lying here. Made the promise that they were going to take those in and create a consolidation between everything else was doing with hotels. We’re doing well and they they basically overpromised, but they never delivered.

[00:58:07.950]

And if you can up the portfolios and go, wait a second, let’s get some brand integrity and things like that. Yeah, I think they were looking at yeah. A lot of these might wind up being OIOS or something like that or fall out or God knows where they go independent. But we need the classic cleaning that Holiday Inn did years ago.

[00:58:28.490]

Right. It was a big we’ve got to clean this stuff up because it’s not like the brand and it’s the the brand as a whole is a negative dragging off these independent. That question did the same thing right, if they have for a while a really bad consistency problems in the US and they cleaned it up and it took a while. It took a while. And so Wall Street doesn’t like it because all of a sudden things are shrinking instead of negative inventory.

[00:58:57.180]

Yeah, but, yeah, you wind up being able to do that. Well, now, scenesters got to do it. And let me tell you, Celesta already tripled in size just with their main Sonesta brands. Management wise, that is going to be a crazy, crazy situation. They’re adding people like crazy. We’ll see if they can if they can do it right.

[00:59:18.210]

I mean, a huge challenge from a positive point of view now more than ever, the chance to to pull from the labor pool the best. Oh, yeah. From the other is now more than ever.

[00:59:30.060]

If you’re going to have to purge inventory, branding and consolidate because they have a logistics issue and every one of those brands not. And I’m sure also before the run in the red line that creating that that commonality of usage and everything else and so forth and herding cats, I do not envy the role that they have to play to make that happen. I mean, they basically they have to turn into a you do this or you’re not a part of this.

[00:59:53.640]

That’s how this works.

[00:59:54.660]

And they have done a good job with even their marketing suite and CMS. And since they had cobbled together I can’t remember what they called it, but it was basically Oracle. And this is for the Red Lion properties. Right. And this is a few years ago. But, you know, they they were all Oracle based as a RPM’s. I think they were using next guest as their CMS. I think it was Serenata was the CRM. If they had it kind of together, at least a platform, and you could go, oh, could you do better components, you’re there.

[01:00:26.490]

But again, they had to kind of all together where things were working and you kind of go, oh, that’s great. But then all of a sudden when you got America’s best value in and signature and all those guys are like, oh, they don’t have it, we are not going to be able to go put Oracle. That was a gap.

[01:00:41.340]

And all of a sudden they had these kind of two two and a lot of properties didn’t even have online booking component. They had no integration to the PMS. Everything was manual and they had no means to facilitate their franchisors from actually enforcing the requirements right now.

[01:00:59.400]

And so that now with Cinespia coming in, at least they get the hey, look, guys, this is done. You do it this way or you’re not now.

[01:01:08.190]

And you and for a lot of those lower end property, you don’t need a massive amount of technology. You can I mean, Mariotte centralized the handler function. I mean, basically, Mariotte property management systems do not have reservations modules. It’s all Marsia. Everything’s oh, my commercial. That’s bottom line of it. You can consolidate. Yeah. Ayran marketing for an economy again. This was way back in the Stone Age, but what did we do.

[01:01:42.480]

We had very, very simple operations. They only received reservations. Right. That they had to then go put in. At that point there was no RPM’s. Right. But what did we do instead of having a reservation ID that was maybe central a central counter at the central level, go? No, no, let’s make sure there’s a delivery ID so they could have a little ledger and go, oh, we have reservation two thousand one hundred and sixteen and two thousand one hundred eighteen.

[01:02:15.390]

We’re two thousand one hundred seventeen. I think we missed a reservation sort of thing or or at least a delivery. And you do something simple like that, you go, OK, they can keep track of that right sort of thing. So you don’t need over the top, especially a lot of these places. You check out these places compared to just something with a cash register, like you take an independent, truly independent or kind of B and B type thing.

[01:02:40.890]

What do they do? Oh, do they have sophistication of, oh, you got charge for this or that? Oh, no. That was a standard thing. We’re going to take it off. Well, they can just do that on paper. There’s a line of people waiting built. They’ll handle the settlement of that later, right? Yeah. I’ve subtracted thirty five dollars. That’s right. That was a mistake. It went from somebody. You don’t have to pay for it.

[01:03:01.800]

I’ll take care of the accounting later. Got their credit card. They’re done. They’re working with the next person, right? That’s right. Versus the PM’s world is like, oh, I’ve got to credit the thirty five bucks off of here. And then to put it there and I can’t do this and you can’t get through the process to settle some of the folio. All of a sudden you go, wait, the technology’s making a limitation to being able to to do this properly.

[01:03:24.570]

So yeah, you can keep abuse. How do you keep those things simple, but also how do you enforce the brand standards to make sure the owners understand, hey, you cutting corners hurts the brand. We can’t have that. And. Once everybody gets on the same kind of mindset of going, yeah, we’re cleaning this thing up and then that’s going to be good and we’re going to will wind up benefiting from higher radars and higher demand and everybody will go in Motel six kind of did an OK job of that, weirdly enough.

[01:04:00.740]

Right. I mean, they had that huge advertising campaign way back with Tom Bodett, leave the light on and things like that. And was there great consistency?

[01:04:11.520]

But it was very inexpensive and they figure it out. Here’s the level of what we’ve got and what we’ve got to have. Right, and maybe the bar is pretty low, but they’re looking at people paying this much. They’re expecting that much. And so let’s make sure that and that’s what makes sense and signature. And all those guys have to. Now, that’s Anasta has to figure that out. Right. So very true.

[01:04:34.630]

Um, I don’t want to miss some of the articles you throw in there that I thought I did. It’s not necessarily negative. It’s a positive going forward. But the deceptive digital marketing I want to get to. But I want to hit some of the tech trends stuff because I think going in the spirit of what we need to be looking at for January twenty twenty one and going into this year and the fact that there is some perpetual thought to light at the end of the tunnel and all this other stuff that.

[01:05:00.230]

Jan, is the discovery, so forth, but there are things to consider marketing wise, and I think without being too specific to the article itself, because I think the article alluded to it and let me say in the article is pretty as pretty high level.

[01:05:14.010]

Not good. But but I would like to point out the fact that trending Facebook, I feel, has a Pexton certain way. Facebook is facing some challenges this year that it has yet ever faced before, and that is collaboration or work abilities with Google. Apple, as to tracking for made people may not be totally familiar with, is that the tracking component of cookies on websites, the ability to see where you’ve been and where you’re going and what you did while you’re with us on our website is being shut off.

[01:05:46.340]

The first level of it was third party. The first part was the third party cookies of, you know, I can track you so I can retarget you because I can see by putting a cookie on what you did when you hit my site, that’s being shut off. It’s becoming more and more aggressive.

[01:06:01.310]

Google Analytics, which has been the mainstay of everyone’s basically free tracking of what their websites are doing, is turning to Google Analytics for Geia for Angoff, or is a non cookie based tracking that relies upon Google to tell you what’s going on without showing you how it knows it.

[01:06:22.550]

Basically, you come out of it and and turn a lot of that stuff off. You have to say IP addresses are getting anonymized and things like that.

[01:06:32.120]

So a lot of a lot of the the forensic way of identifying people and knowing who they were in general terms, anonymous as it may have been to what we want to think it is to now is changing to be more about us just being a river flow. And where the water flows is where Google is telling you which way the water is flowing and you have to rely more and more and be the same thing with their Omniture program or what have you.

[01:06:56.150]

Same mentality. They’re going to infer through their analytics what you but they think you need to know to make decisions, spending money with them. It’s a dangerous combination. One is you appreciate the anonymization of people in a better way than what was done with cookies. But you also are fearful the fact that the very people that you’re paying to get to audiences are telling you what, those audiences are a little on the rough side.

[01:07:20.600]

So you’re going to be looking at different variations. And from that, Facebook’s having a problem because Facebook to work in collaboration with Apple products and Google and what have you is being told that some things that it does in tracking are not going to be allowed anymore, period.

[01:07:38.120]

Yeah, Facebook is all about, but at the end of the day, it’s going to happen because Facebook doesn’t control them.

[01:07:43.430]

So Apple sit there and go, huh? Who really controls everything inside our walled garden? Do we want Facebook mucking around with our. No, we want complete control because we’ve got our little told. Look what they did to Adobe.

[01:07:58.280]

We don’t like Flash. No Flash, Push and Flash died. I think they actually do Flash officially go away. I guess it’s officially gone. It is. Officially, yeah. Yep. It’s officially gone.

[01:08:11.480]

HTML5 is the only platform. Flash does not exist, doesn’t run, doesn’t do anything really.

[01:08:17.190]

Because if you have old flash runners, if you’re updating your systems on Mac want won’t let you run it. And Windows Ten, I think as of November, the last update says, hey, you got to flesh for not running flash.

[01:08:29.690]

Yeah but yeah, actually I haven’t learned about OS and you’re still running it or whatever.

[01:08:34.220]

It will still run if there’s a flash on something. But anyway, so you have all this going on. But Facebook now has really Zuckerberg has pushed the limits of his exploitation to the limit. It’s going to have to come fragmented. He’s got to get rid of WhatsApp or Instagram potentially. He’s going to have to play with the other kids in the sandbox a little bit more than what he has done.

[01:08:54.860]

And Facebook as an audience builder and as an audience definer is fine and it has value still. But that is going to potentially go on the decline as it begins to isolate itself more from its integration capabilities with other platforms. There’s going to be a variance from this. People have to find or resources have come into play. They have started creating platforms that are alternative options to Facebook that work on the things that people griped about Facebook doing like it’s me and stuff.

[01:09:26.990]

I’m not a fan of it.

[01:09:28.490]

I think that’s still in a very infant stage and that it hasn’t really defined. It’s a adaptation. I have one client that we’re actually building their own social community on their site. Now, this is not a new thing. There’s been the ability to create your own message boards and what have you before. But Facebook in real practical terms, is the arbiter of good and evil. They can shut you off and not tell you why and never tell you that you’re ever going to come back on again and not tell you why.

[01:09:56.400]

And they’ve done this with one of my clients. Persistent. They shut them off with no explanation and there’s nothing that they tell you as to why you did it, but for some reason it triggered something with Facebook that said, nope, we’re just going to search page of this after having literally thousands of people following the page and nothing was being put on it that was, in our mind, anything.

[01:10:15.400]

And nobody could tell us what it was because they keep those sections in Facebook very isolated. So anyway, Facebook has built a lot of enemies over time, is what I’m trying to point out. And these other alternatives to platforms that are saying, hey, we’re going to do it this way, we’re going do it that way, are coming through.

[01:10:29.110]

But the key element, I think out of this one article and let me throw the article up since I keep ranting about it, is that there is the marketing component of one where people are going to start owning their audiences.

[01:10:41.620]

Absolutely. They’re going to be the ones that control the dialogue. So when I bring up the example of the website that has its own community, we can say what we want to on the community.

[01:10:51.910]

We can guide what we want the community to be a part of. We want to put what we want on the community for it.

[01:10:56.650]

And people are going to instead of using a central source like a Facebook to be told what they want to be interested in seeing, are we going to choose what they would like to know more about? I’m going to what I’m interested in traveling to this destination. I’m going to be more in tune with the community from this hotel that is sharing that kind of data. When I’m not I’m not going to be as engaged, but I will have a means of communication or they will have a means communication with me to let me know should I be needing to be interested in what they’re saying.

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I anticipate market is going to be as the shit out of that, but in between now and then, it’s going to be a useful thing. Bot’s dialogue, personalization are going to come out a lot more valuable to do that.

[01:11:37.300]

Well, you need to understand your guest and have the architecture and the under the underlining the underlying technology to be able to collect that data accurately and then to act on it. Right. And that’s a challenge, I think, for the players. You’ve got a lot of folks who come and go, oh, we’ve got this thing and you can target this and do that like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s the underlying data that you’re relying on to trigger the yes, boy?

[01:12:08.140]

You have the school rules engine and you can do this and you can reach up. Do you have a clean list which is updated, especially since people haven’t stayed in your hotel in nine months and a bunch of people have moved and things like that? Yeah. Is this still is this still working right? Theoretically, their email addresses are still going, but oh, wasn’t there a business email address and they’ve now been furloughed from the. Is that still functioning?

[01:12:36.470]

And things like that’s not going to be helpful if you try to go execute a bunch of stuff based on cracking down.

[01:12:42.440]

And that goes to the other article that you brought up that I want to make sure gets included with this. And this is the deceptive digital marketing.

[01:12:48.570]

Oh, yes. Now, too bad we don’t have store with us today, which we know being New Year’s Day. We didn’t. I mean, Robert, again, thank you for making it a point to come on New Year’s Day because gosh knows it’s a holiday. We shall be chillin and just being reflective of meditating and thinking about happy thoughts.

[01:13:01.220]

But welcome to the Love Show. Love Show. I have no lives. That’s right. Actually, we have lives for just making this a part of it. That’s all. It’s all happy.

[01:13:10.640]

Bayway OK, if Stewart was here, he would be the first to show off his t shirt that I think he made saying attribution theft is real. Yes. In this article, let me put the article up.

[01:13:24.410]

The first thing about deceptive digital marketing practices Hotel should watch out for is misleading attribution windows, which I would be happy to speak more directly about.

[01:13:36.320]

But pretty much there are a lot of people in the industry offering services to the industry that are saying that they can help increase direct channel conversion. Yeah, they could do this by offering incentives for people when they land on your website.

[01:13:49.010]

You may not have been well for for yourself. Things like discounts to Starbucks or generalized Goober’s or whatever have you, whatever it is that might float somebody’s boat to see if I booked this with this hotel, I get these extra benefits.

[01:13:58.820]

Yeah. Or they might go and say, oh, look, this great marketing is X or something like, yeah, whatever the case may be.

[01:14:05.110]

Got a bunch of folks in there. Yeah.

[01:14:07.190]

Or look the right that you’re looking at is way lower than all these other channels, you know.

[01:14:12.950]

But meanwhile behind the scenes, the person that came in because of your ad or because of the content that you meticulously put out there or what have you, as soon as that gets triggered to show that information of option to you, they hijacked that session from where it came from, whether your ad campaign you spent money on or your organic content that that people followed and said, no, we brought it to you. Right. Because of us, you got this booking or because of us, you got this traffic.

[01:14:41.840]

And so look at all the stuff we’re giving to you. And I say to anybody that even considers these platforms, look at what your conversion is doing. If you want to test them, sure test them, but see if your actual business goes up, not stays the same. And now they’re saying that they look at what we did. We did. We brought you all this business. Yeah, my business actually didn’t go up. You just took credit for the business I was already getting.

[01:15:02.810]

Well, yeah. And that’s the bottom line. It’s like, wow, we’re paying all this money. Look at all this is great. And, you know, the bottom line sales, then what happened.

[01:15:12.300]

Right, right. And most importantly, get them back off of your platform when you take them off. I often find so many times in tracking codes and information, they’re still pulling massive amounts of data from your website that you didn’t even know that they were still doing because you put in their code.

[01:15:28.550]

This is what we need, this code put in there so we can show you all the stuff we’re doing for you and then you get take it out or and this is the worst element of it. The code that they give you basically pulls all the information from your website.

[01:15:40.430]

You’re feeding them every scrap of data your website is providing you to them, may be violating all your privacy guidelines and you can’t control their safety.

[01:15:50.120]

Which brings me to a thing that I did, my latest podcast. There’s a really cool platform. You probably need to look at this for your website while still and so that. Simmo Are you Benda?

[01:15:58.740]

Ayoubi are you Binda? It is a plug in that. The cool part I like about it is it does all GDP are complex EPA compliance, Canadian can spam, Brazil does all of this.

[01:16:13.580]

And what’s really cool is it’s a dynamic content. So here’s the cool part.

[01:16:18.980]

As things get changed, the content on your site for compliance also changes.

[01:16:25.160]

Oh, and depending upon which platforms you use when you first configure it for your terms, conditions, policies, privacy’s everything else that it does give you weeks embeds for your site if you want to separate subdomain, if you want to separate context, if you want to. But it also you can choose all the platforms you’re using and identify all the pieces of data that you’re pulling from those platforms.

[01:16:47.300]

And it puts it into the formatting.

[01:16:49.520]

Oh, and you can get five licenses, which is good enough for one website for forty nine point fifty nine dollars lifetime.

[01:17:00.260]

Oh, really?

[01:17:00.980]

As opposed to nine dollars a month. This is an app sumo deal, huh. Yeah. Good afternoon. Pick that bad boy up. I’ll give you my link if you don’t have an absolute can because I go.

[01:17:08.310]

Oh please do. Please. I actually I need that because hopefully that didn’t expire yesterday or anything like that.

[01:17:17.990]

I’m going to go look at it right now. Just make sure that it is still there. As far as I know, it is still there because I. They need to do that with a client, and we were planning on doing it on Monday to clean up all that stuff.

[01:17:30.310]

I mean, I’m going to give you the first thing, too, but I’m going to give you my. Do, darling, whatever that link is, a referral link. Yeah, I get it, I get a 10 percent discount on my next purchase, which, by the way, is like cotton candy to me because I do it all the time. I mean, they should send me Christmas presents for all the stuff early because we’ve been working through this one.

[01:17:52.740]

One of my clients on the whole migration to Google Analytics for and I mean the complexity now of having even the folks who are just using Google Analytics and they weren’t using Adobe or anything like that, all of a sudden you now have these two platforms. Right. And where were they controlling all these texts using something like Google Tag Manager or something like that, or at least everything’s in the same the same bucket? Or was it just crap that was hard coded into the website and it’s just thrown out there and they don’t know what’s what’s happening?

[01:18:25.150]

It’s it’s crazy.

[01:18:27.160]

And that’s the link to the link for it. But here is the I’ve been a link. If you take a look at what it is I have. Simmo It is wicked cool.

[01:18:37.600]

I’ve used it for myself from my websites, from my wife’s coming to my company. The club is growing up this month. I put it on all of those. Plus, I’ve kept one part for clients.

[01:18:46.210]

Should we need it? You put that in and you put the ADA compliance plug in and stuff like this. And what’s really nice is it’s er I mean the forms, if any rules change in any of these and you can pick everything that you’re wanting to put in there from your kooky policy, does it, does the pop up saying, hey, we take this for the information we get, it has the policy into it, it has all that stuff, it takes care of all of that stuff.

[01:19:08.470]

And then should the rules change, it’s dynamically linked to update it from the lawyers that are doing this so that your information is always the most recent needed for it. You don’t have to write your terms and conditions. It takes care of all.

[01:19:18.670]

That’s excellent. Now, yeah, that’s that’s really important because, I mean, you get this is the complexity of managing all these things and keeping them updated is, as I think, especially for some of these hoteliers who are trying to do it on their own or that sort of thing or not being dependent on quality agencies and things like that. It winds up it’s it’s it’s going to get very difficult for these guys. It is just like the client I I’m working with, they sat there and they said, oh yeah.

[01:19:51.690]

And they’re using a WordPress site, which is great. Right. That’s very flexible, things like that. But they’re they’re saying they’re using Google sidekick site. QEP is a plug in, which is fine. Right. But now you go, oh, here’s Google Analytics for little known thing. They won and they screwed up. All of their pages are doubling. Right? It’s like, wow, this is great taking off. Look at this page user up seventy three percent and hey, the bounce rates down below 10 percent.

[01:20:19.210]

This is fantastic. Like time out would be great if it was real. Seems to have hockey stick on this. What happened on the 17th of December. Oh that’s what we put in for Stofan. We did not upgrade to such and such. It’s like when you did four, did you?

[01:20:42.310]

I can’t remember exactly what Google calls it. We’re it says, oh, you have an existing universal analytics account. That’s fine. And as far as I can tell, GE for there’s not GAFOOR is not the easiest situation.

[01:20:56.350]

It’s a subset of gross subset of functionality.

[01:20:59.530]

For me, it’s it’s running parallel right now.

[01:21:02.920]

It does really cool stuff, but it’s a subset like the reporting and stuff is good, but you can’t get in there and go, oh, did you set that to say here’s this and you can’t really see it? Right. It’s not like a separate tag because they’re they’re both using the tag JavaScript and you can’t see what’s happening.

[01:21:22.840]

And you go, hey guys, you need to turn that other thing off and type and why that doesn’t make any sense, because when you implemented it, you said yes, do the cross, you know, analytics thing to link up and it’s double counting and the best the best for them if you come into the shell right now and then have it separate.

[01:21:45.400]

So you have the data from it separately. But even the shell is going to be changing sometime this year from Google at the time Gitmo was going to go away.

[01:21:51.730]

But yeah, but these guys were using Google, they were using psychic, which is produced by Google. They’re using the tag manager, they’re using universal analytics, are using for everything’s kind of organized properly. But again, why the. Well, and the really interesting thing that we’ve dug into was, yeah, because you did this one for was was implemented. It’s now duplicating that because of sidekick. There’s nothing that’s raising the hey, this is because you have these separate identical tags firing.

[01:22:24.280]

So that’s about the worst part is so now site site, get the psychic plugin which is very good. It goes, oh, if Universal Analytics isn’t activated. You don’t have to Google the optimization, one doesn’t work now, and you sit there and go, well, they go, oh, we don’t want to lose that. And it’s like you need to lose that. Otherwise you’re going to be double counting all hitches, which is catastrophic.

[01:22:49.890]

Nothing back on the. You mean to just remember I’m with you on this too, is that it also keeps track of when somebody accepts the cookie dough somebody contests that. I didn’t know you did this. You actually have a log of people that have accepted it.

[01:23:00.260]

Oh, wow.

[01:23:01.580]

So you can go back and research who they were and see when it is that they went through and said, that’s fine. You have to keep a log of that stuff as well. And as a reminder, since this is January 1st, OK, a lot of rules that were made, laws that were made that we tend to forget that were made are now in force, not everything. But there are there is different regionality laws, municipal laws, state laws, federal laws that roll in the calendar years.

[01:23:26.180]

And some of the privacy stuff changes as to the requirements.

[01:23:30.740]

We had a conversation, a live show months ago about the fact that 28 other states are trying to create their own CCPOA laws like California.

[01:23:38.550]

And because of that, you have all this mixture of stuff that’s going on. That’s what makes making sure you’re in legal compliance very important, because it’s going to be a point where lawyers are going to start shifting and saying, where can I make money or what and what have you?

[01:23:55.490]

And then as people start using more and more of what we’re offering, if you’re exposed to this, you don’t have ADA compliance, you don’t have your legal terminology in terms of conditions and cookie policies and what have you, strike abilities and durability of data and so forth. Or you’re doing international travel, which is not now, but will be are going to be opportunistic.

[01:24:12.020]

Yeah, I’m going to hire from you. And you all have a lot of clients that complaining that you’re taking their data without authorization and you get to go with the platform like you’re going to go, who are they? Let’s go find out.

[01:24:23.570]

Oh, yeah, they said yes, because that that is going to be a huge, huge downfall. Right. Because again, you got and again, maybe it’ll be the bigger guys because that’ll be the low hanging. Yeah. Let’s go elephant hunting for the people who are sure badly.

[01:24:41.930]

But but then it’s going to start working out some of the mid-sized and smaller guys. And those are not because all of a sudden, oh, you’ve got to get a lawyer. It’s basically almost the same as these guys who go and walk out the lobby, all the hackers who who lock out the website and the ransomware. Yeah, because you’re like, oh, I’ve got to now pay a whole bunch of money to go and there’s enough in the ransomware thing.

[01:25:04.880]

You can fix this one. It’s like, oh my God, this could get. Yeah.

[01:25:08.930]

And the part that people forget and it goes back to copywriting with Getty and all the rest of them. You forget the Getty is a lion.

[01:25:15.770]

They go over and buy stuff that used to be open source, all these photography things that basically rolled out of patent and they snarf them all up, slap on their back. They’re tracking pixel to it. You think it’s Freebo imaging and most people get sloppy about this. They go and Google why the picture is such and such. Oh, that looks good. Click Take it, use it, monetize it with an ad and then obviously you get a call for me to go and use one of our pictures.

[01:25:41.060]

Yeah, that’s eight thousand dollars please. Oh I’m sorry. No that’s that’s.

[01:25:45.890]

Anyway, can you show us that it’s your picture because we can show you it’s ours and we’ve got the photographer because of photographers being and here’s a snapshot of you using it and they’re very good about this. They have already laid the track before they ever reach out to you that they have they’ve locked you against it. Oh, yeah.

[01:26:03.560]

Well, and not just scary, I think, in a lot of I mean, I got mailed with one of these and had to be like twenty thirteen or twenty twelve or something like that. And all I had I had an article on the Who write and it was something about Keith Moon trashing hotel. It was just a little blog post. Right. And so and I had something that I actually went to, I think it was the Detroit Free News or something.

[01:26:27.170]

I went and tracked down the guys who had the article and said, hey, can I use that image? Yep. No problem. Right. Well, they used it, but they didn’t actually have clearance from the photographer. And some guy from Seattle who used to work for a software company who had a legal degree from the University of Washington, went out on his own and went, wait a second. Instead of doing the software that protects people or copyright, I’m going to go out and start looking for photographers who have pictures do this.

[01:27:02.180]

And then he could come in and go, I’ve got a portfolio of X hundreds or thousands of people who are illegally losing your photo. Would you care to do X, Y, Z revenue share? On what? I can collect zero risk to you. You want some checks and then you’ll make sense to me and you take a look and that’s two thousand dollars and you go, but I got clearance. Now this is R and we represent the original photographer.

[01:27:35.210]

He didn’t give them clearance to give it to you, sorry, pay up, right? That goes farther into the social post because somebody’s argument. Oh, well, they posted it publicly so I could use it.

[01:27:48.530]

No, no, they posted it publicly, which is fine. You’re monetizing it as a business by using it without my permission.

[01:27:58.280]

I was not even monitor. It was just on my.

[01:28:01.480]

No, I’m saying this this goes even further into the conversation of where people go and say, oh, one of our guests went over and posted this picture of a beautiful sunset. We’re going to use it in our post.

[01:28:10.500]

Yeah, new because you need to go over and reach out to them, say, hey, X, Y, Z gets you. This is a beautiful picture of the sunset. Can you give us permission by saying yes to this email that we can use it and posted it on our our our page listing? And if they say yes, great, because then if somebody goes say, hey, use my picture, be like here’s an email from the person that took the picture.

[01:28:30.560]

Now that said I had the reverse happened to me with Getty, which was fun because I actually got to get money from them. We had a picture of one of our hotels. This goes back many years of the port of. Well, go figure. And another favorite. I love us. Yeah.

[01:28:47.120]

And so I was using it and what they did was they found it on another site and they reached out and they said, oh yes, it is same reversal like. Oh yeah. But they didn’t, they had taken it from us.

[01:28:58.430]

And so the Getty goes up and says, Hey, you’re using my picture. I’m like, no, we have it here. It is where it is. And like and here I have me taking it. Yeah, it’s my photo. My date’s here. It is. That’s my picture. Here’s their minds. Like, No, no, no, no. Now reverse the person that’s using it. We would like them to pay us or refund that this year off first off and then pay us for having used it for what they did for or percentage of the revenue that they gained from it.

[01:29:26.690]

Yeah, whatever you like now. So it was kind of embarrassing.

[01:29:33.450]

I think folks get into all of a sudden they can’t prove they took the picture, you know, whatever. They lost the document. Yeah. They stripped the information off of it when they post on their website for whatever. And it’s like, oh yeah, I don’t have the best.

[01:29:48.700]

The best things you can ever do is reverse look images and see where it came from. Yeah. Because at that point you can tell whether it’s owned by Getty or a film stock or anybody like that, that they may have rights to it. Where did it come from? And I always try to tell all of my clients, it’s like, look, it is better for us to have our own photography and videography that way. We never run into questions.

[01:30:12.140]

But please understand, if you’re going to get people where you can identify their face, at least if you record them on video, acknowledge for them to say in the prerecording to be real, you know, hey, we’re going to do a video with it. Yeah, we’re fine. Something. So if they come back and you made a million dollars off of the fact that you were perfect couple at the perfect time on the perfect video in the middle, and they think they can get money from you be like you said, it was OK to use your video.

[01:30:34.760]

You didn’t say you wanted to get paid for it or anything, but they said, OK, great here. And I still want to say walk around with with whenever I take pictures of people and because I don’t have the audio, I going make them sound a little quick thing on my my tablet that says, hey, I give Bush a few uses.

[01:30:49.790]

You know, you’re dealing with business.

[01:30:52.010]

It’s not a personal thing. If I take a picture of me in a sunset and there’s people behind me, I’m not making money off of it.

[01:30:57.560]

And it’s not an intentional sort of thing at that time when that happened. Oh, well, we didn’t. It’s like that doesn’t matter. It’s now four years later and that person’s going, oh, wait, somebody told me I could make some money off of this. That’s tonight.

[01:31:13.040]

And yeah, it’s one of those things, I think the worst abuses of the wedding once where you were, you as a staffer takes pictures of weddings, but didn’t ask the wedding people that it was OK to use it in your candling.

[01:31:25.610]

That’s that’s an ugly conversation, because I have I’ve heard stories that way of them coming back, going, hey, you used our picture of our wedding in your in your website.

[01:31:36.080]

We didn’t give you permission for that. We want money or we’re going to sue you for it or whatever.

[01:31:40.640]

Yeah, this is Klara’s working with somebody, the photographer. They’ve done a whole lot, you know, good photos. They thought they were spectacular. It’s like I’ve seen better, but they’re like, oh yeah. It’s like, whoa, did they get clearance from those? I know they shot that wedding and they have it on their website. And maybe the bride and groom said, yeah, we love you. You did a great job, of course, put it on your website.

[01:32:06.500]

But to go on another website, was that really clearly done or who are these guys? Do they have clearance from these guys?

[01:32:13.880]

Again, it goes back to you have to prove it, not just because you said it was OK. I remember that.

[01:32:20.390]

And those are uncomfortable conversations because this client wants to use their photography. Right, because it’s really good and, you know, that’s great. But what you need to have that conversation with them, they’re like, oh, that’s going to be kind of uncomfortable. It’s like you’re. Or do you want to go put yourself at risk for a third party who you don’t know is suing you for using their passion without authority, and then you go, well, I got it from someone.

[01:32:49.030]

So, like, that doesn’t always work like that. Right. Who has more money that they can go get it from right now that that’s the part that wedding photographer or they go after you and it’s like, oh, yeah. So a lot of the money. Yeah. Well, actually a quick thing from the tour operators, but the worse and this is a horrible situation, I think. I don’t know if I mentioned this on the show before.

[01:33:14.740]

I work for this very large, largest tour operator in North America. They had a guest who was with their family at an all inclusive resort. Right. Who wound up dying in the water in a snorkeling class. Right. And that’s horrible. And the settlement wound up being a million dollars to the family. So superficially, you go, that makes a lot of sense right now. That’s that’s bad. But the way it actually happened was this person went out.

[01:33:46.910]

They did not get drunk at the all inclusive resort that they were booked out. They went to one next door. Right. Got drunk and then went to a snorkeling class. It wasn’t through a hotel a wasn’t through the second hotel where there was just some guy or whatever they did. They just kind of tagged along, got the equipment as an extra person. And yes, they were dead drunk and and drowned. Right. So what did they do?

[01:34:14.540]

They sort of sued the tour operator who booked them on. And it’s like, wait a second, how can we protect against complete irresponsible behavior of this individual right to get drunk at another property and then go on to an unlicensed, unrelated third sort of vendor where the thing happened? That’s just awful. We had nothing to do with it. It’s like convince a jury. Right. And the jury looking, this person had two young kids and the wife.

[01:34:46.340]

And this is horrible, sympathetic jury, good lawyer. And what’s interesting was the insurance company was like, we are not going to fight this as like one million, no fight. That’s that’s completely like we are going to lose. And next to the client, why were they convinced that they said, no, you are going to fight this? Because this is just stupid. The legal counsel or in-house legal counsel is like, no, we got to draw some lines here.

[01:35:17.390]

And they lost sympathetic jury in East Texas where all this stuff ends up getting litigated right now. It’s crazy. Yeah. So you can’t protect yourself if you don’t protect yourself at the front. Maybe it’s low frequency, high severity stuff, guys.

[01:35:32.420]

So I’ll even add to it in some aspects of the same story, different the thing with diving and so forth.

[01:35:37.850]

If you’re collecting the money for an operator, you’re assuming you’re in the chain of of of responsibility at a hotel.

[01:35:47.660]

If you’re collecting money for a dive trip and something goes wrong or if you collect money to go to an event and the event goes wrong. So the real benefit of this advice is that if you do these things were you create packages that you charge for your component. And make available to whomever you’re collaborating with, that they get to charge for their component. Yeah.

[01:36:13.810]

And so that they are responsible for their functionality based on the vendor purchaser vendor relationship should be something be amiss with what they provide. Unless it’s your own operation, I would not accept payment for another operator.

[01:36:29.800]

It’s just that it’ll be the whole packaging thing that gets really challenging. Absolutely. It’s it’s turnkey. Right. Just how do I do this? All inclusive and that’s included. And that’s great.

[01:36:42.520]

Third party, it can get rough. And in this case, these guys got sued and lost four million dollars for something that they never they didn’t collect payment for. That snorkeling instructor didn’t get paid for the guy because he never signed up for the thing. He just tagged along. Right. There would be no financial business, contractual anything relationship with it. And yet they still wound up because what were they going to do? Where are they going to sell?

[01:37:13.120]

Where are they going to sue the scuba guy who’s probably unlicensed or whatever? No, he’s got nothing. Are they going to sue the Mexican the hotel next door where the guy got drunk? No. Are they going to sue the Mexican hotel? Where is. No, they oh, here’s a big person in the US. That’s a tour operator. Let’s go after them. Right. And yeah. And even with the best lawyers, they’re like, yeah, can’t can’t do it.

[01:37:42.640]

Bad situation. And so again, if you’re a little guy with some of these and you wind up with somebody getting, as far as I know has fairly good lawyers and they work with a lot of people and they have a process that they have worked out and honed that just breaks.

[01:37:59.620]

And yeah, it’s it’s like raking the leaves out in the sort of thing. Right. They know what they’re doing.

[01:38:08.110]

I do want to go back to one article before we start wrapping up on time today. But the the article from The Business Insider about the Adobe product manager and so forth, I want to debunk something that I think is still prevalent in our dialog as to what we anticipate for our marketing strategies.

[01:38:27.790]

We still seem to keep harboring on.

[01:38:30.190]

And this is only because he’s talking about it from the perspective of all technology for all aspects of trend. And that is we’re going for that magical, elusive young consumer. Oh, OK.

[01:38:44.740]

And when I would like to point out, is the young consumer, the younger consumer, the ones that are just starting families and or yet to start families and are yet to get married or so forth? The aspect of business for us in relationship to them is the Smurf business pretty much or the road warrior. I’m going to travel because I have to because my my job growth right now depends on my sacrifice to my company that they give me my job.

[01:39:13.010]

But the real market that we should be looking at is the financially stable time, flexible, older segment that has the ability to act on their interest of travel financially and time wise. Right. Because those are the two major components that are coming forward. As you pointed out earlier in our discussion, we were talking about the field travel consumer sentiment survey.

[01:39:38.410]

There is a willingness and desire to travel, and a lot of people will push themselves past the financial comfort zone to do so simply because they feel they earned it.

[01:39:46.150]

It’s justified or that just so cooped up in the quarter, right? Yeah, we had a rough year. Let’s if I deserve it.

[01:39:53.050]

So, yes, it’s like the Rio Grande over extend ourselves to go. Right.

[01:39:58.060]

The real discerning traveler, one that will be one that will send the length of stays go to the places that require more financing to do so than the other ones and so forth, are really the ones that have more control over their time, have the financial resources to make those types of decisions where they’re not sacrificing their livelihood because they’re later in life. So they’re not willing to sacrifice their retirement or whatever, having to do these things, those people. So instead of chasing the 16 year old, that’s on tick tock right now.

[01:40:29.860]

OK, and looking for that. Oh, let’s get them interested. They don’t have the money right.

[01:40:34.750]

And they don’t have the aptitude and they don’t have the age even yet. So all that that seeding of people. Yes.

[01:40:40.060]

Let them let the platforms work themselves out as to who’s going to be used five years from now, ten years from now, whatever it is. I mean, as Tim says, we always underestimate the short term and overestimate the long term, whatever that is, that’s something we really can’t control other than our participation. But the real value of our messaging, our content, our strategy should be about the people that are in the position to take advantage of it.

[01:41:01.930]

Right. And those people aren’t.

[01:41:03.190]

Twenty one years more your product and it might be younger maybe because it could. The Dink’s right, dual income, no kids flexibility, there are going to be huge opportunities in that area, especially with people working from home where they are old and having to be in the office. But we’ve got great connectivity. You can work from here, get all your stuff done and yeah, no harm, no foul. You can go replace take this great vacation and go.

[01:41:33.370]

They’re going to be huge opportunities for that for midweek midweek. Leisure business might look like that. Wow. That’s going to be absolutely fantastic. Who’s really set up to figure that stuff out right now is that’s that’s tricky because again, people who are anchored to to kids and school. Well, yes, through the pandemic, they are going. But kids are going to be back in classrooms. Look, it’s not going to be virtual school going on.

[01:42:01.630]

I mean, they may do some extensions and things like that and more e learning from colleges and universities where you don’t have to go pay tuition and show up and live in the dorm. Right. That’s but and again, that might be an opportunity to to get those folks to travel if they if they can.

[01:42:19.060]

But that’s a pretty small subculture is going to transform.

[01:42:24.700]

You’re going to have those that participate in the campus experience and you’re going to have those that show up for the diploma.

[01:42:29.980]

But yeah, and you’re going to have this because they need that to survive, because they need audience size. Classrooms and colleges are going to have a mixture of people physically. They’re virtually there. And in VR, they’re they’re going to be mixtures of everything.

[01:42:44.030]

OK, so what I’m saying is, is that from a perspective of what we’re offering now, messaging people now both in thinking Christmas and Thanksgiving and New Year’s on NBC, there’s this one artist and I know he’s a tick tock, sensationalist stuff. And he did the he’s his music from his home. Right.

[01:43:06.160]

And it was the flames in the water over the pool and the girls dancing and gyrating around him and all this other stuff he did in every one of the he did it from his house, supposedly, which is that the thing on that is sets.

[01:43:20.200]

So, you know, he had this thing going on. Everybody that has a luxury resort.

[01:43:25.270]

Once the metrosexual millennium success story, millionaire getting off of his private jet to get into his upgraded test, the Rolls Royce combo, whatever it is to show up at their doorstep thing to the computer.

[01:43:41.410]

Yeah.

[01:43:42.010]

You know, and they show up with his little entourage of girls and guys. And everybody in that audience is this small. And they are not they are not looking online, nor their handlers, four or five or eight hundred dollar room. Sorry. Those are the guys that you girls that go to the twenty five thousand dollar exclusive.

[01:44:00.550]

Nobody even knows I’m here places right now. So, so getting off of that hifalutin, that’s who we’re looking for. You’re looking for the older, financially established flexible time willing to travel safely. OK, destination based length of stay people if you have the resort destination capabilities, other nuances to it. I would talk about medical teams and so forth, other nuances of wellness, mental wellness retreats. You know, the old remember, the old Ashwin Ashram’s were a big thing.

[01:44:32.290]

You know, that whole I need to recentre get away, you know, get away from what I was doing, be around some people, but safely do it, but feel good about what I’m doing for myself now.

[01:44:43.060]

So there’s a lot of aspects to the business now that are going to improve.

[01:44:47.650]

And that’s not to say roadside hotels between point A to point B and some of these may be in they aren’t even tertiary destinations. A great example, the a focus group of a very small, very small five. But my daughter. Right, she’s she’s thirty years old. She’s married. What do they do? A year ago they went to Thailand. Right. For a couple of weeks. An amazing thing. They’re elephant sanctuary there on the beach.

[01:45:15.910]

And what are they? They aren’t doing that this year sort of thing. They’re finding these little cool because I live in Austin. They’re going to Wimberley and they’re looking at Fredricksburg and they’re doing little getaways where they’re isolated. They’re going to big cities, they are going to big hotels. They aren’t going to an Airbnb. They’re wanting to go to little. Yeah, nice bed and breakfast type place. They might do an Airbnb, but, you know, just kind of depending on what what is there to go do and yes.

[01:45:48.790]

In that area. And again, if you’re a small baby or something like that or, you know, small property or a little historic thing and stuff, you can do really cool things. Go, you know what? We’re going to do a yoga retreat. We’re going to have an author come along and maybe not right now with the with the pen.

[01:46:07.410]

Coming out of this, you know, we’re going to have like a little author series of regional people who wrote about bluebonnets or birdwatching or whatever, maybe, and all of a sudden you can start getting and communicating, as we said before, with the people who love your place and all of a sudden and they stay there once and they’re gone moving the. Hey, yeah, let’s go back.

[01:46:29.940]

And there was this lecture or there’s this or there’s a community and let’s start. Oh, they’re sustainable. They’re doing well and they’re doing whatever. This is, you know, great things that can develop the relationship with whoever that might be. Older people who have the world could be younger people who have the time. But again, understanding what what are you doing? Why do you exist?

[01:46:51.240]

Why would people travel going back to the future, telling consumers in question 14, pick the top three reasons that you prevent you from staying in a hotel room right now, the number one, and it was actually more so for people under 40 than was above 40, was fear of interactions with other guests.

[01:47:07.290]

Absolutely. The lowest ones when the lowest ones was fear of hotel staff interactions, which means for most for the most part, we have done a good job in showing what we as staff and hoteliers are doing to protect our teams. Like our teams are dedicated to doing this. This is where we have failed, is showing that we’re enforcing that with our guests so that you’re not a fearful of other guests, like making people wear masks, making people follow the guidelines, CDC guidelines that we’re having our staff follow so that you feel because my attitude is this and I see the local restaurants do this, the best tweeks my shorts is, oh, our our staff wear mask, but we let them choose if they don’t want to and end our guests, our patrons.

[01:47:49.920]

We let them choose if they don’t want you. One person not wearing a mask means nobody’s wearing masks. Right. Sorry, just if you’re not all doing it, then we’re all not benefiting from being done because the cook in the back, if he’s wearing a mask, that means it’s everywhere. If if the staffer decides not to wear mask, if, if the table besides who’s not wearing a mask, even if they’re staffers wearing a mask and he comes over to my table and whatever they have, he’s now with him floating over to me.

[01:48:11.130]

OK, yeah. I mean, and and it goes from the top manager because again, you’ll see the top management guys are the ones who are wearing the Chandipur and things like that, and they’re trying to make the set and you’re just like, no, you’ve got to be consistent. And again, you wind up having maybe some uncomfortable discussions saying, I’m sorry, here are rules and here’s why we’re doing it. And we know it’s a pain. We don’t like wearing these things either, but we’re doing it for the good of everybody.

[01:48:39.490]

We’re trying to slow start because if we can slow this thing down and get it done with, we can get back to business. That’s why we’re doing it. And at some point, you may have some guests to go, well, hell with. You were gone somewhere else.

[01:48:54.750]

And you’ve got to be willing to say I’m here’s your money back. We’re really sorry. We wish you could stay here. But, yeah, this is what we do.

[01:49:05.350]

I mean, you do your annual doctor, some of that was going to one million dollars for nose and stuff like this. And big sign on the door. You know, it must must be one go up to the counter. Hamas must be warned. Staff was kind of almost wearing them. Right. Anyway, on their mask on going a good thing because I want to stay away from all the stuff in the lobby was mostly empty. I’m staying off of the corner like a puppy and this guy walks in, no mask on.

[01:49:30.750]

And as he’s walking, he puts it on as a bib, goes up to the girl. She doesn’t challenge him, OK? Then he goes outside to smoke a cigarette now comes back in because they called him back in Noma’s this time again, not challenged. Right.

[01:49:46.770]

So the doctor after my visit is to say, hey, look, know let’s see, you know, this is what happened. And, you know, he tried to be nice about it, but, you know, it’s so hard. It’s, you know, we get a little lax, so we get complacent.

[01:50:00.010]

You’re a doctor. Yeah. This is a doctor’s office, OK? And it’s actually was sinus office. So it’s not like you’re not familiar with what’s going on. OK, you know, it’s like you should be militant. I’m sorry if your doctors are. I just I just got my annual physical, but a couple couple of weeks ago, I was taking this bill and it’s a it’s a medical building, right? Associate of the hospital. I walk and go up there.

[01:50:28.760]

They’ve got the little stickers on the floor. It’s like six feet apart. So it’s really clear where you are supposed to be standing.

[01:50:38.060]

There’s a woman with a little cart and a PC standing inside the door with full mask masks. She’ll all that she comes in, asks you your name, she goes out, does this, takes your temperature, gives you a little sticker with what your temperature was. And that’s the key. That’s the key. And you can’t go in until they say you can go into the waiting room and which side of the waiting room you’re supposed to be on. And again, they’ve they’ve got things broken up where if somebody was sitting in that chair, it’s not just you can’t sit in half the chairs, right.

[01:51:14.840]

Because they think like, oh, no, somebody just sat there, somebody out there going, OK, we’re going to clean that off when they got off. And we’re going to say, you can’t sit in that one anymore.

[01:51:24.290]

And they’re they’ve got a process that we’re cool, very cool. Goes through coffee and nobody’s sitting around for a long time, like 15, 20. It’s all running like clockwork. And then you go and they have their little blood work lab and things like that. If you’re going to stay in this room right in the exam room until we call you and then they’re Sustagen and they’re explaining exactly what’s going to happen. So people are wandering around. It doesn’t go into the lab, which is kind of a relatively enclosed area, and they’re like, no, and you’re going to sit there and then do this.

[01:52:00.620]

And I mean, and it worked very efficiently. There weren’t delays. You weren’t sitting in areas for a long time not knowing what to do and everything went through. And no, you don’t have to check out everything’s online. You’re feeling good. Good bye. So they figured it out where there weren’t pinch points, everything flowed. They had thought through it. And everybody’s safe and good. And you’re like and it makes you feel really good about the doctor doing that.

[01:52:30.560]

You’re a guy. It’s kind of like, wow, I don’t know this guy.

[01:52:34.560]

I mean, honestly, like, interested in positive health outcomes or is he just like we’re going to take them because they’re going to pay me? Right. And the times are tough right now. Business is down. Yeah. It makes you think makes you think twice.

[01:52:49.610]

It’s a shame that this is behave again on a positive, happy love fest day. We can’t overemphasize the fact that vaccinations are a absolute mandate for survivability as an industry. Absolutely. And that we need to be not just doing it. We have to be vocal about please.

[01:53:09.560]

You’re not doing a restaurant a favor by showing up now without a mask on saying, I want to support my local restaurant.

[01:53:14.630]

You’re only giving them a slow death right now because they can maintain their business levels the way they are. And the more we keep prolonging this by extending it, by creating these surges, whatever else is going on, because people refuse to to follow these kind of things, then you’re only delaying the inevitable. Closing the door. Yeah. And yeah, look, eastern restaurants, right? Yeah. Maximum capacity of twenty five percent ain’t doing anything beneficial for that restaurant you want to get out from under that limitation or even fifty percent or seventy five.

[01:53:47.150]

You want those things gone. And the only way you can do as we said was ten months ago in that webinar, you’ve got to fix the public health outcomes first. The economy isn’t is an output. It’s not an input. You’ve got to fix things then that will not work.

[01:54:08.120]

And we talk about the fact that you go to a restaurant not because of just their food. Yes, it’s great that you can pick up their food. Would you like their food? You go there because you get to go there and enjoy the food with people in that environment. And so taking that away means that you mean ghost kitchens have a purpose? I’m not by any means. I’m a fan of those kitchens. I think that goes in kitchens, will have a great usage in the future tense.

[01:54:30.200]

But I never in a million years ever want them to replace restaurants or restaurants have a purpose in a place that is truly the experience of what they give, not just the food that they provide most kitchens or about the food that they provide based on the convenience you want them for. Do you want them at a picnic? Do you want them at home? Do you want them in a in a in a group setting, whatever the restaurant can accommodate internally?

[01:54:50.480]

That’s one group. Those kitchens are great. OK, but if I want to have a fun great dinner laughing and joking and somebody is taking care of the plates disappearing in the food coming. And also you can’t do that unless you’re at a restaurant and you can’t be in a restaurant if you’re constantly going in there and increasing the productivity of covid. And now with the hypersensitivity, what covid can do and the new variations would be new. We’re going to be coming up with OK.

[01:55:15.460]

And you’re only exacerbating the circumstance, get the vaccine when it’s available, Weinzweig available and until then, follow the CDC guidelines.

[01:55:22.250]

And and last night’s a great example. Last night was New York City and of course, didn’t go out to a party or going out.

[01:55:29.170]

We’re just hunkered down. But we decided we’re going to go get a pizza and a nice Mediterranean salad, which normally would probably go out of this place or something like that from places like Best Pizza in the area. Right. I went in there. And first of all, sign on the door, they’re closing at 9:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. Right. And you kind of go, wow, I walked in this at about seven thirty eight o’clock, something like that.

[01:55:58.010]

There were no customers. I mean, we’re talking and again, it was also last night in Dallas, it was pouring rain and yeah, it’s really nasty. Right. Which is is not going to help anyway.

[01:56:10.760]

But you go there’s nobody they don’t have a deuce in the car and nobody is there.

[01:56:19.580]

And it wasn’t like they had a whole bunch of takeout or you’re like, oh my God, the that’s that’s rough, right? Yeah. You look at that and go, yeah, you’ve got to stop this pandemic. And the bottom line is if everybody got their act together and that’s what we’re all staying inside for three weeks, that’s it. No interaction with anybody else. We’re going to just insert a cart of stuff in for if I need stuff and I Zubari sort of door that that’s it.

[01:56:50.660]

It’s gone. Right. And it’s kind of one of those, you know, the solution. But, yeah, everybody’s trying to you know, we don’t want to do that to let everybody have a great time. It’s like it’s a pandemic. This is a medical thing. You can’t do that. And the better this outcome is to have those hard conversations go, nope. We’re just going to do our part to get this fixed fast.

[01:57:16.100]

And we are at that time, we don’t want to miss the power or just real quick, boop, I think is fun because there’s always one or two, huh?

[01:57:26.940]

Yeah.

[01:57:28.070]

The road, just the road was just tens of thousands on Vegas Strip despite warning last night. And what what could happen? What could go wrong.

[01:57:38.720]

Well, look at Los Angeles. Fourteen thousand cases a day and they’re still throwing parties again. It’s the ignorance of people that thinking that this has no effect, that it’s somebody else, not them. Let them go through a couple of weeks of losing friends that they didn’t anticipate losing our friends that had lost friends.

[01:57:53.900]

Let me tell you, my my wife has a business associate who’s not she has a lot of other other conditions. She’s on a ventilator right now, you know, and you kind of look at and go, we have a friend who’s interventional radiologists. You spend a lot of time with other people doing all sorts of all sorts of stuff is going well. You know, the people who survive on the ventilators because it’s pretty good. It’s fifty to sixty five percent range.

[01:58:24.440]

And you go there’s a lot like a one third. The half. Yeah. Chance she’s not going to make it. Those aren’t great. Yeah.

[01:58:36.800]

That’s, that’s a and then we’re finding also that the long term effects of this too.

[01:58:41.270]

So again on a positive note, ninety two thousand twenty one that we know all these things are happening, they’re going to probably go through other cycles of this darkly of a positive point of view.

[01:58:53.270]

This is the year that hopefully we will see the better side of what we’re dealing with right now and that there are things to be into, planned for, market for and to anticipate and be excited about. Personally, I’m looking forward to sitting down with my wife and looking at the real reality of planning a trip, the real reality of going on a riverboat, which right now would be like, you know, in Germany during Christmas or thereabouts around Christmas to go to these Christmas festivals in probably a larger than we normally would spend room or suite or something on the boat to truly enjoy the experience with.

[01:59:27.650]

I think that’s a fascinatingly wonderful, warm, fuzzy feeling to think of that.

[01:59:32.300]

Yeah. Oh, reality to it. And I would think that there’s other opportunities between now and then to even look forward to. I don’t know what my conference. Cycle will be I’ll be honest, I don’t know how we grow into one. And you are a big and you’re a big enjoy conference, let’s go. This is going to be great. Excited to go guy, right? And that’s that’s the part. I love them. That’s going to you.

[02:00:03.980]

Do you love you? You thrive on it. You look forward to them and you’re hesitant to go back to them. Right. And that’s not that does not bode well for, you know, I’m the. Well, let alone the companies who are going to be going. Should we be sending 10 people or let’s cut that to five this year or we’re coming? Who else is going to be there? Maybe we’ll just skip this year and go next year.

[02:00:30.680]

That’s that’s going to be a challenge for the civil service to thrive on the unconference business. That’s that’s going to be an anchor dragging dragging behind them.

[02:00:42.770]

I mean, I’m the guy is you know, when I go to college, I’m a big hugger and, you know, and just in. Let’s go, let’s go. Go and do this. Let’s go eat here. Let’s do that.

[02:00:51.350]

I mean, it’s it’s it’s an enjoyment to me. The networking of the conference is by far better than any content or anything like that.

[02:00:57.920]

I mean, is, is the networking right now. But these companies are going to be looking at let’s reduce the expense and then let’s reduce the risk and things like that. And the big one is what croi I mean, there’s just the intense what are we going to get out of it on. Is this a must-have or a nice to have. Right then those questions and with business travel. Right. Those, those hard questions are going to be are going to be asked.

[02:01:27.390]

So anyway but I put the boot up in the list contained pretty, pretty damn cool place.

[02:01:34.230]

They are pretty cool. They are very cool. I would like to go look at them and go yeah. Heck yeah, I want to be there.

[02:01:40.430]

There’s some amazing ones. And, and this is going to be very interesting is what people find the most interesting, because the cool part is during this pause, people have had the chance to go past the surface level of the Venice of Italy in the Florence’s and the palaces and the Londons and go into the. What do you mean? There’s a really cool place that’s in a small village off two or a small town off of our small city here, or I didn’t know that even that was there.

[02:02:08.720]

And there’s going to be a whole mess of other things that people have discovered that they’re going to be like, oh, I had to go see that, you know, like this, the Dairy Queen, the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon, like, OK, yes, it’s a big difference, but and by no means never take away from where the great in your lifetime.

[02:02:25.520]

You’ve got to see the Grand Canyon just truly do. But you’ve got to go to Yellowstone National Park.

[02:02:30.530]

You’ve got Bryce Canyon is is just isn’t on in a different way. And there’s so many places like that and there’s even places smaller than that.

[02:02:40.490]

And the things that we probably took for granted that I didn’t think it was worth the trip, but going through an apple orchard and going through to the little side stands and picking up homemade apple cider versus homemade apples from that over time versus almonds from there. I mean, there’s a whole new discovery that people are going to be having in their travel ideas. Oh, yeah. Well, we need to take your hands on this list of hotels. I mean, yes, it’s from Architectural Digest and they’re beautiful.

[02:03:05.630]

But you look at what they’re doing, OK? No, what? PENDRY West Hollywood. Right. They’re using an Architectural Digest top one hundred designer to do it and things like that. Wolfgang Puck is doing the restaurants, but it’s it’s inspired by the city’s rich cinematic history. So it’s tying into Hollywood, right into the destination it’s making. So, OK, so then the next one is a safari lodge, right? That’s that’s great. It’s Red Carnation Hotels, who does an absolutely fantastic job.

[02:03:38.090]

They’re going to do a great safari lodge. Got it. Check Newbury in Boston. It’s overlooking Boston Public Garden Building is built in nineteen twenty seven. And you just look and go, this is going to be great. I mean that’s a fantastic place to be in Boston, right. One and only. Portanova Oh it’s in Montenegro. OK, one and only does great hotels haven’t been in Montenegro. That might be interesting in Montenegro. It’s on the Adriatic.

[02:04:08.240]

It’s, I’m talking about Venetian palaces and things like that. That’s a great place. Adrian Zaca did a human resorts. He’s teaming up to do a little hotel on a small island and know in Japan. And you kind of go, wow, it’s a renovated one hundred and fifty year old Japanese compound. That could be cool place in London, which actually has three hundred and fifty rooms, which is in six dining outlets. A bathroom for eight.

[02:04:38.870]

Sixty four. You kind of go, wow, that looks urban resort. You go with a Londoner. I hope that one makes it because that scale is pretty big. But you know, the proper in L.A., which is downtown, I’ve got another top designer. You’re going to go very cool. The Four Seasons, Napa Valley can’t beat that combination of Brand and Ritz Carlton in the Maldives. They might be able to do a pretty cool job.

[02:05:08.260]

So, yeah. And you’re just looking through Hutten Brick Yards. It’s in New York. It’s only thirty one cabins and suites you can go. Wow, that’s a that’s a pretty cool place, that’s a potato head. Yeah, I thought that was kind of an interesting off the off the beaten track type thing. Yeah. Some Villa’s Rosewood’s Sao Paulo, the line and San Francisco line does great, great properties. And again, you start looking at these, you go, oh, two hundred thirty six rooms, two hundred and forty two residences for you know for food and beverage outlets you’re going oh oh.

[02:05:49.940]

An outpost of a local nonprofit theater company. You’re going these are creative sort of six senses, great resorts. They’re doing one in New York, right. Oh that’s that’s a Lifehouse. Chattanooga, right. That’s life started in Silicon Valley there. Miami, Nantucket, Denver, Chattanooga. Secondary City. Got all you know, these are great, great little product. No bad London. That’s great. Good time in Miami. It’s Pharrell Williams is working on this.

[02:06:21.790]

It’s like being in a Wes Anderson film, right.

[02:06:25.100]

That, you know, two hundred sixty six rooms, forty five thousand square feet of retail space. I don’t know about that. That that may put in a little bit of rest. But these are these are creative, creative places, which is great. Yeah. You go. Yes, I you know. It gives us great things to look forward to beyond even the ones that are in market right now. These are the new and innovative in the different than others right now.

[02:06:52.560]

But there are other amazing hotels and not to discourage anybody. This is I don’t have one of these or I’m not in one of those places or I’m not a resort. I’m not a destination. I don’t even have food and beverage service. Everybody has a unique value proposition. The hotel and the BMB and wherever it is that you have is located for a reason next to something, for a reason. And because of that, you have purpose. There are things you may think, oh, I was built here because truckers drove between point a point and that this was a place great.

[02:07:20.970]

But also people are looking to be in different venues and different opportunities and maybe they want to travel the same road for different reasons. It’s identifying, quantifying and communicating with them what it is that you offer and answering questions as we keep saying, what are my safety protocols? What is around me? What is it you need to know? How can I help you understand what it is? It’s a value that I’m doing that you want to have. That’s the purpose.

[02:07:43.710]

Now, it’s not rates and dates and, you know, super sales and sunny and seventy twos. It’s about what am I what am I to you and what is it I can offer you to be knowing about so well.

[02:07:55.230]

And a great, great example. I’ve got a friend I used to work with. She took a kind of her life savings, renovated this little cool. It’s a bed and breakfast in Glen Rose, Texas. Right. It’s a little bit out from Dallas and Austin, you know, kind of hill country. And you kind of go, well, why would somebody well, they’ve got dinosaur fossil rim. They got this dinosaur national park type thing, which is kind of cool.

[02:08:20.910]

They’ve got this wildlife center with all of these kind of exotic kind of like the lion country safari type thing or the San Diego Zoo does. But it’s right downtown. It’s on the river. And let me tell you, last year they were all set up to really do a great, great job. And here the pandas don’t yell at all the renovations done all set up with the weddings and everything. And just almost like she survived through the pandemic sort of thing.

[02:08:50.880]

It’s a great it’s a great little place and there are reasons to go there. And, yeah, those sorts of places should do great. And yeah, she doesn’t have to have an Architectural Digest top one hundred designers, but she’s figured out here’s the whole history of the place and it’s here and we we renovated it and we kept the exterior. It’s all very authentic and that ties in and there’s a reason to be there because it ties into its location and it’s like, that’s fantastic.

[02:09:19.740]

That’s exactly what you want to do. Right. And there you can do that anywhere you go. Yeah. Like I mentioned, the one place and have the the nonprofit theater thing and it’s like, wow, could we do that in our unused ballrooms or medium space sort of thing.

[02:09:37.140]

It’s like those breakout rooms could convert the dressing rooms and they can tie in backstage because of this. You may be able to do some stuff like that again. All of a sudden you got a reason for being you can help a local community thing that ties into the community have some reason. And then when things come back a year from now or two years from now, all of a sudden that local theater group can be doing their whatever their New Year’s Eve gala fundraising thing with all the people from the community.

[02:10:08.610]

And you have the audience and you have that audience that you’re directly communicating with. You’re not relying upon third party platform, skip the communication. You’ve developed a relationship with those people to make that response from them, relationship for them to return. Absolutely.

[02:10:21.240]

Or the relationships with the hospitals. Right. What we helped you through the pandemic we gave you guys, like Dean was suggesting the coupons, the discounts, that people could relax and do this and get some breaks or we gave you rooms when things were really bad. That’s great. What can hey, do you need help or you’re doing your fundraisers and things like that? How do you know how to participate in your oh, your cancer centers quilt type thing?

[02:10:48.540]

Can we display those in the lobby? Can we have, you know, whatever people selling those? Can we participate the silent auction or whatever? Can we give you a venue even if it means taking local artists, putting their artwork up in your lobbies? If if it’s the cause of. OK, so obviously we can talk about rain and sunshine all day cause we already well over two hours and it’s just us.

[02:11:09.810]

We’re like the good old days, all days. It’s like, yeah, we can think for two hours. Everybody stop. All right. Thank you, first off for the fact that we did keep it about the positiveness, the fact that it is a brand new shiny new year. And despite all that we know that’s happening, it can still happen.

[02:11:26.880]

There are things to look forward to and to plan for, like this statistic on the analysis so that ADR could go back to nineteen. No, no, no, no.

[02:11:36.750]

I’ll let you gloom and doom this another show, but not today. Today, shiny, happy love fest, OK.

[02:11:45.390]

We’re walking we’re walking 80 yards back.

[02:11:48.160]

No, no, no, no, no, no.

[02:11:55.080]

Anyway, Robert, if you want to find out more about you and what you do about it, Anderson, from your amazing newsletter, which we use every week, what can you find your rock cheetah dot com or at Robert Cakehole on social media? Or if you go to Bitly lives structure to a lower case, you can subscribe to that weekly newsletter which was published on Christmas Day. And I regret to say, yes, you know what?

[02:12:22.740]

It takes a holiday for you to get it out early.

[02:12:24.780]

I’m just saying normally, hey, you got it came out a little bit earlier. Yeah. And you got plan on that next week.

[02:12:33.720]

But for all those to get to meet us and join us this week because of the holidays, we know that. And thank you so much anyway for the goodwill and everything. You know, from the emails that I sent out for all the speakers to join us that a lot of people got back.

[02:12:49.110]

Of course, Stephanie, we will go over and review about the fact that you went off to Aspen rather than join the show, which I think is things I think she’s hanging with Chris Candle and Carly.

[02:13:00.000]

I think that’s kind of her posse. I don’t know.

[02:13:04.140]

I don’t know. But, you know, Tef boy, you know, first rule of Fight Club was always be on the show, but that’s just us.

[02:13:11.130]

Yeah.

[02:13:13.030]

Oh, I was late.

[02:13:15.480]

The late delivery. MailChimp is telling me that late delivery really works for openness and things like for open.

[02:13:22.020]

So I know I’m getting kind of negative reinforcement or positive reinforcement to do something negative, to deliver to any who if you want to play back this show in its entirety and or piecemeal or whatever, you can, of course, go to hospital digital marketing dot com for a live look for show to our number. Eighty two there. Also, you can subscribe to continuing being notified of our future shows, which are every Friday, and you can tell rain or shine, holiday or not, we’re on every Friday, eleven thirty pm Eastern US Time, whether we have really, you know, a ton of people to talk to you or but few people talk to, we’re always here doing it for now, many, many years.

[02:14:06.900]

With that with that in mind, we thank all of those that did watch, listen to attend and to keep in mind that we do recast this and more equitable hours for people globally because we’re now in. Thirty nine countries. Yes. Thirty nine countries. We do translate this to eleven languages, English being inclusive, ten others and asked for subtitles and we do send it on eleven thirty am eastern Sydney Time and eleven thirty a.m. and nine a.m. Eastern.

[02:14:34.590]

Eleven, thirty a.m. Sydney time limit three a.m. London time Wednesdays.

[02:14:39.540]

So it’ll be recast out as normally is, but you can always go do a replay in all the platforms that you find us on, which is Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn and showboats are all there with links and of course Robert’s excellent curated list of happiness. Enjoy that.

[02:14:55.980]

And don’t ask why Lauren knows where you work, your credit score, all of your family, your family history, your children’s grades.

[02:15:06.270]

I don’t know. But he just uses his little Mac app on the world.

[02:15:11.130]

Just get some information completely legally. You know, actually, strangely enough, with this live show, I actually don’t track anything. All I do is keep the list for people to sign up so that they can get notification. I don’t even bother. But this is not monetization. You know, it’s like it’s our happiness anyway.

[02:15:27.990]

So we know all about non monetization. Oh, yeah.

[02:15:31.750]

All right. All right. So that Robert, a happiest of New Year’s, healthiest, safest and most of all, happiest of New Years for you, the fam and everything else. And we hope that this is the year that we hope it to be and that it is towards that that we want to do.

[02:15:49.860]

And for all those that are listening to this and also to both of our viewers and newsletter subscribers, you’re implying there’s two others other than us.

[02:15:59.790]

Don’t know that’s stretching it.

[02:16:00.900]

And I know this one we couldn’t even get the co-hosts on. Am I going to be one? If I could just watch those guys, especially this late into it?

[02:16:12.180]

I don’t think we I don’t use the one is just I to that end. Thank you so much, Robert. Have a great rest of the weekend. How do we get over you? Don’t play. Relax, relaxing. I know you probably going to be a man in demand again next week and hopefully get you back on.

[02:16:26.370]

So consuming for the link and the tip on you. Bender. I will be using that problem.

[02:16:31.770]

Yes, please. It’s a great platform. And I did it in the podcast as well last week. Talk about this week, the show being one of them on the podcast. I’m going to do here in a few minutes, but yeah, it’s a great platform. So thank you, Robert. And we will see every. Next Friday show No 2083, 11:00 a.m. Eastern, Friday, US time. So to that end, everybody.

Loren Gray

Founder / CEO of Hospitality Digital Marketing

aahoa, ahla, hospitality, hospitalitybroadcast, hospitalitymarketing, hsmai

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