LODGING LEADERS
062 | Sell More Rooms for Your Hotel Tonight with Jared Simon
LODGING LEADERS
Jared is a co-founder and currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer of HotelTonight, the on-demand hotel booking app. Prior to HotelTonight, Jared led partner development and served on the founding executive team at online video production and distribution pioneer TurnHere.
Jared previously worked at online travel agency Orbitz, serving on the launch team for the hotel product and eventually taking over as General Manager of the company’s Lodging.com brand. He has a BA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
In This Episode, Jared Talks About …
- The inspiration behind HotelTonight, and how he and co-founder Sam Shank saw some of the same issues and same needs, and blended their complimentary hotel and consumer experience to solve them.
- The two types of customers they have; hotels and travelers, and he describes their ideal customer for each.
- The process, and what you can expect when you sign up.
- The relationship between HotelTonight and your hotel’s reservation system, the many options hotels have to utilize their platform, and how that ultimately translates into an actual booking.
- How HotelTonight is different from the big players (Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz, and Travelocity) … and how they’re able to compete with them.
- HotelTonight’s unique features, like geolocation, that not only enables travelers to find hotels near them, but also allows hotels to market to a travelers based on a specific set of criteria, e.g. near the hotel or from a particular geographic region.
Booking windows are getting shorter and increasingly happening on mobile devices.
If you want to reach the ever-growing number of guests who are choosing to be more spontaneous about their decisions, I encourage you to give HotelTonight a test drive and see if this is a good option for you.
HotelTonight Created a Promotion Specifically for the Lodging Leaders Community.
If you want to see what the HotelTonight experience is like from the consumer side, they created a promo code specifically for the lodging leaders community.
First time bookers can get $25 off using the promo code with a $135 min spend.
Resources & Links
LODGING LEADERS
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346 | Repositioning For Recovery: Hotel conversions to outpace new builds
Lodging Econometrics has tracked the hotel industry since 1998. Its global database includes new-hotel pipelines as well as renovations and brand conversions. Hotel franchisers once eager to launch new brands are focused on converting existing hotels because it’s a faster way to recover revenue lost to the COVID-19 pandemic than through new construction. In Episode 346, Lodging Leaders explores the increasing number of conversions in the U.S. hotel industry and what owners and operators need to consider before repositioning an asset.
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345 | ‘Rosy View of Future’: Hotel industry sees unleashing of pent-up investor demand
In the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., financiers anticipated a swell of distressed hotel businesses. Some raised rescue funds to respond to what they thought was a pending crisis. Though there are financial rescues taking place, the level of such activity is far below what industry advisers and fund managers expected. Commercial real estate investors positioned to act in the early days of the pandemic held off and are now just beginning to unleash their cash hoards totaling billions of dollars. Episode 345 of Lodging Leaders podcast explores the state of capital investment in the hotel industry.