We're just a couple months out from what is likely to be a pivotal summer travel season for the hotel industry. The next few months will be extremely telling on the overall trajectory and sentiment for travel as the overall economy looks to weather a recession — big or small.
Despite most prognosticators saying the industry and travel will fare relatively well — and I suppose you can read "relatively well" as historically great — but even in a nice recession there will be winners and losers.
So this is my grand pronouncement of the week: The companies that win this time around are the one that make things easy.
For too long, the hotel industry has expected people to jump through needless hoops on the way to making bookings from everything from rooms to meetings and event space. It's 2023, and I think we should all have realized by now that the No. 1 goal should be to make it simple for people to give you their money when they want to, tech obstacles and legacy systems be damned.
With that in mind, I was glad to see — after the fact since I was off all of last week — Hyatt's announcement of the expansion of its Together by Hyatt platform that promises meeting planners "an interactive, easy-to-navigate online platform" for meetings and events.
Meetings and events have long been an overly complicated portion of the industry, particularly from a distribution perspective. Anything that empowers people to handle more — and eventually, ideally all — of that booking process online is a massive improvement.
None of these thoughts are particularly new. I've sat through countless panels and presentations at marketing-focused conferences talking about the ideal of one-click bookings in distribution, but it seems like as an industry there is too much time and energy sunk into thinking about why it can't actually happen.
Every time some potential customer, whether it's a traveler, a meeting planner or anything else, has the thought that they'd like to give you their money in exchange for your goods and services, and your structure and policies keeps that from happening, you've failed as a business in at least a small way. And those small failures can cascade into big ones.
Don't die a death by a thousand cuts. Or maybe put more realistically, don't let potential business walk down the street from your hotel to a competitors simply because they made it easier than you did.
Let me know what you think on Twitter, LinkedIn or via email.
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