In terms of hospitality services — hotels, airlines, cruises — Google is a significant power, simply because so many people start their planning at the search engine. As a result, you need to have Google Ads.

In other words, you need to pay to get your brand in front of searching customers.

For example, search “Times Square hotel” in Google and see what comes up. First off, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a part in which brands appear in the first few pages of results. But there are hotel companies that have paid to have their name at the very top. You have to pay for Google Ads to get your name out there.

Say you’re a Moxy Hotel, a Marriott brand targeted at Millennials. You want to make sure that when a consumer in this demographic searches for ‘Moxy Hotel New York City,’ you’re at the top of the first Google page.

The advantage of sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Booking.com is that they can compare rates for several hotels.

If you go directly to the website for a Moxy location, you’re not comparing rates with other properties. There’s more information comparison — and maybe transparency — happening on Expedia, Kayak, etc., than at the hotel’s specific site. But it’s more costly. For example, if the customer books on Expedia, they could pay 10-20% more.

Simply put, hotel brands want consumers to visit their sites directly. How do they do this? For starters, they offer price matching. If you find a lower price than on their site, they’ll match it.

Hotel brands also say that you won’t collect loyalty points if you book through external channels like Expedia or Booking.com. Booking directly gives you loyalty points, and you’ll also get preferred treatment at the hotel.

Finally, in some cases, inventory — not the desired rooms — shows up in search results of external booking sites. Instead of offering a garden or ocean view, these could be on a lower level, windowless, or facing a busy highway.

Ultimately, hotel brands show a preference for consumers who book directly on their site. Having your hospitality brand at the top of Google search results means you’re more likely to have direct bookings.

Suggested Image (if needed): https://unsplash.com/photos/cwr02zo0gP8

Professor Richie Karaburun is originally from Turkey and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor at New York University’s School of Professional Studies Center of Hospitality.

Professor Karaburun has been in the hospitality industry about 25 years. He started as a management trainee in Los Angeles, then climbed up the ranks. When he left the company, he was the Vice President of Product Development and Contracting.

He was then recruited to be a president of Gulliver’s Travel, which was one of the largest wholesale travel business at the time. After they sold the company, Professor Karaburun joined The Radius, which was one of the largest corporate travel companies at the time.

Here, says Professor Karaburun, “I had my entrepreneurial ideas come up and we founded a company called Roomer Travel. And we raised money. Roomer was an online travel agency similar to Stop Hub.”

Currently, Karaburun is studying marketing and consumer behavior. His research interest is all about social connectedness and its impact on consumer behavior.

He is considered to be a hospitality guru. After 25 years in different aspects of hospitality, he is now proud to teach at NYU Tisch Center of Hospitality, predominantly business development, entrepreneurship, and hospitality marketing.

In this course, you will learn about entrepreneurship and innovation: what does it take to be an entrepreneur? You will also learn whether you are a true entrepreneur.

You will explore hospitality industry disruptors such as Airbnb, and what it takes to create a company from an idea. You will learn how to draft a proper business plan, get funding, hire a team, and manage the team.

Finally, you’ll examine how to create value for the industry you are in, and how you can plan an exit strategy for your business.

Entrepreneur is a French word taken from entreprendre, which means “adventurer” or “one who undertakes.” Entrepreneurs look for and recognize opportunities. They also take an enormous amount of risk to move on to these opportunities and create value for their industries.
An entrepreneur is a risk-taker because success is rarely guaranteed. But, as Edison says: “I didn’t fall a thousand times. I learned many new things.”
Entrepreneurs try to solve problems in either the product or service industry. Products are more tangible items, whereas services are more like hotel, legal, and financial services. #
Lauren Grench details her journey into entrepreneurship, and what it means to blend all these services into a cohesive, memorable experience:
“So LLG is an event management and design firm that specializes in luxury destination weddings. We plan and design luxury destination weddings. That encompasses planning the guest experience. It also includes all the budgeting, vendor negotiations, and contract negotiations.
“Anything with destination planning means complex logistics, [which means] understanding international law, international relations, socioeconomics, understanding what’s going on within our political atmosphere with all the different countries that we’re working with.”
According to Grench, the customer experience defines the industry.
“Hospitality is at the epicenter of event management. You need phenomenal customer relations. You need to make sure that your guest experience is also just as important as your client experience and your vendor experience and your venue experience.”
Each of these areas is vital to the success of any event. Optimizing customer service, customer relations, and the guest experience is about getting them all to work together and ensure the proper execution of the event.
“A common thread for entrepreneurs is that they tend to be really creative, innovative individuals,” Grench says. “They’re always looking after something new, something that would solve an existing problem for the industry. This could be a hospitality industry, financial industry, even a regular taxi industry just like Uber did.”

Hotels have a high degree of operating leverage, a relatively high level of fixed costs, and a relatively low level of variable costs. This level of operating leverage makes the business volatile. When a hotel is below the break-even point, it can lose money very quickly. But once it gets over the break-even point, the marginal cost of filling one more room and servicing one more guest is insignificant. Profits increase dramatically.
The hotel industry is much more volatile than other real estate industries, like office buildings and shopping centers. It is much more similar to the airline industry, which has comparable operating leverage.
If a plane has 100 seats and has sold 99 seats, the marginal cost of selling the last seat is a few cents. The passenger gets half a can of soda and some pretzels. But the plane neither hires any more flight attendants nor another pilot. So, the marginal profitability of selling that last seat is pretty close to 100%.
The hotel industry is similar in that the marginal profitability of selling each additional room after crossing the break-even point is remarkably high. So, its profits increase quickly. On the flip side, when business deteriorates, the economy weakens, a hurricane comes, or there’s a health or other momentous event that affects people’s travel plans and disrupts the travel cycle, hotels can suffer drastically. It is very challenging for the industry to tighten its expenses to cut losses.
Hotels are always trying to be nimble, but they’re working against the structural aspects of the industry. It is hard to be efficient. When the hotel industry is doing well, profits rise dramatically. But when the industry is suffering, profits can erode rapidly.

A lot of events—like sports events or art events—really wouldn’t be possible without sponsorship. What we see is that private companies will invest to have their brand logo displayed or to have advertisements during the event so that their brand is connected to the brand, or the event itself.
At the Olympic games, major sponsors might be, for example, McDonald’s or Samsung. They invest a lot of money so that their product is aligned with the value of the event itself.
This can also happen in much smaller events. For example, there might be a local food festival where you live, and there might be local restaurants or food companies that sponsor that. Ticket sales, of course, are a major factor. Hopefully, you can sell enough tickets to raise the money that you have invested into staging the event.
There are other ways, particularly if you work in the arts. You could tap into government funds. There might be an application process so that you can host your event for the sake of the greater good of the community. That’s where local governments often invest.
They often do that because of the tourism impact it might have. You might attract people to the event that will spend money and thus bring benefits to the community. Maybe your event has other benefits. Maybe you have a community sports event that promotes healthy living or healthy eating, and the government wants to support it.
If we think of the venues where these events might take place, some of the main stadia in New York City you might well be familiar with. Think of Madison Square Garden or Radio City or the Barclays Center, but don’t forget that a lot of events also take place outdoors. For example, the New York City Marathon ends at Central Park, or the US Open, a tennis tournament, takes place at Flushing Meadows. Other famous examples would include Yankee Stadium and MetLife Stadium.

Let’s take a closer look at mega events and the hospitality industry. These events help with long-term regeneration and can transform a city for the better.

We’ve talked about some events and how important it is to coordinate between different stakeholders. But some mega-events change cities as a whole.
The Olympics are a key example. When the Olympic games are hosted the planning process starts a decade in advance. Cities have to apply to become host cities. They have to put in an application document.

They also need to start building the venues and the Olympic Village where the athletes will need to be housed. In some cities, there will be reorganizations in terms of transport infrastructure. We see that some cities approach this as a vehicle for long-term regeneration-so in other words, a vehicle for long-term change and new prosperity to different areas.

The London 2012 Olympics were a great example of this. They were hosted specifically in East London, an area that was, for a long time, seen as an ugly, polluted, former industrial area and where nobody wanted to build or live. So it was a bit of wasted space in a major city. What the Olympics did was inject a lot of investment in that area.

There was an entire soil cleansing process. All the old industries that were located there had left heavy metals in the soil, creating a very polluted area. The whole area was cleaned up and if you look at it now, it’s almost unrecognizable. None of that investment would have happened had the Olympic Games not come to town.

Sometimes, the event itself is much bigger than the two weeks that it takes place.

You have the Olympic Games. You have the Paralympics. And in principle, then everything is over. But the lasting effects of an event for a city can be much, much more significant.

From healthier options to gourmet burgers, fast casual is changing the way we eat and think of food and is taking business from well-known fast food chains.

The restaurant business is responding to some consumer trends better than others. One key trend is healthy eating. A good example is the whole category of fast-casual, which is eating business away from traditional fast food.

Why? Because consumers want healthier options.

They want more choices. They also don’t want to go to a traditional restaurant during lunchtime, sit down for an hour and a half and wait for someone to serve them.

When walking down Broadway from 42nd down to the 23rd, there are about 20 new restaurant concepts. Just by observing, many of them are based on salads. There’s a green wave and the consumer wants fresh, innovative salads. That’s a key growth segment.

You also have a gourmet burger. Shake Shack is a good example of that. It’s not necessarily a gourmet burger, but it’s a much better burger that you can get in McDonald’s. Then if you take bread-based companies, like Panera, which dominates the category, there are other players but they’re not even close to as big as Panera.

Panera understands that consumers want freshly baked bread with innovative combinations, not the traditional ham and cheese. They also make good salads and soups, and it’s pretty fast.

You can use technology, especially here in Manhattan. You can order, pay online, and then just go pick up, or they can do delivery.

Talking about trends in Mexican, Chipotle owns that category. If you consider the ingredients that they have, there are about a couple thousand options that the consumer can choose from through this combination of a dozen or so ingredients.

Again, it’s fresh. The ingredients are fresh. It’s prepared right there in front of your eyes. It is not something that happens in McDonald’s where it’s prepared behind the counter, and it’s always the same standardized. You have more flexibility and better ingredients.

Fast-casual is taking business from the casual family restaurants, the TGI Fridays of the world, and the fast-food players like McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s.