Hotel SmartSuite has come to liberate the hoteliers. Here is how! Free analysis

Hotel SmartSuite is a Next Generation technology Web base multi hotel property management system. A SaaS system with a sophisticated rules engine, business logic and ability to grab work-flow provide seamless connectivity to all third party systems. A Hospitality Solution system which has all the standard management features such as reservations, check-in, check-out, guest accounting, night audit, groups, packages, yield management and management reporting with central database allowing for accurate Business Intelligence to aid you in making smarter decisions on where to allocate budgeting dollars.

In conjunction with Hospitality software solutions; Hotel SmartSuite offers Enterprise solution with integration with Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint Online, and Collaboration (email, messaging, video conferencing).hotelsmartsuite.com/”>Ask How!

The benefits of using the software as a service model is simple and breaks down to the motto “do what you do best & hire the best”, Hoteliers don’t want to manage data centers or worry about a server crash; they want to grow a business and focus on ROI with our executives dashboards we can Taylor it to the properties on choice.” Said Jason Marshall CTO of Hotel SmartSuite.

The SmartSuite solution gives your organization a true end to end solution that truly gives your team the winning advantage that allows the organization to free up your budget and creates efficiencies by being on one platform.

Additionally the beauty of this is that no mater where your properties are located at in the world your organization will be able to act as one on one platform.

With our team, software solution and advisers, we keep an eye out for the property manager who needs to keep an eye out for their capital expenditures and build their balance sheets. Hotel SmartSuite takes on the partner approach maintaining ongoing relationships with the hotelier.  There are clear advantages to moving to a financially guaranteed solution that takes your IT expenses from a Capital Expense (CapEx) to a Operational Expense (OpEx).

This is as truly as Plug in Play as it gets. Perfect for all hotels needing to upgrade to the new standard or the hotels that are being built or under new management. Easy to use, easy to learn, easy to configure, easy to migrate and includes great guarantee, great value, great support and that is scalable to fit your budget to help through all stages of a hotels life cycle.

Sing up at www.hotelsmartsuite.com

• Authentic friendliness of the staff
• Amazing location
• Exceptional personal attention
• Impressive original food
• Exclusive service
• Simplicity, no frills
• Unique design
• Warmth and true hospitality

1. Opensource CMS: For more flexibility in managing the content of your website you should use an opensource content management tool. It will allow you to launch new pages and change structure without depending on your web designer. (Joomla / WordPress / Drupl)
2. SEO: pick your keywords carefully, in your meta-titles and description focus on search behavior and not on product and brand. Sell what your potential guests are looking for!
3. Landing Pages: Pick themes, launch a page for every special offer and market segment or search. Think niche marketing and search engine saturation! Cater to each potential market segment on an individual basis. The long tail of travel seo works!
4. Languages: An easy way to expand your reach. What at the main tourist feeder markets for your destinations? Are you missing any languages?
5. Google Local Business Center: A great way to improve your listing and traffic. Powerful marketing tool which is only just starting to show its potential. The implementation of Google Maps Favorite Places gives you an idea where we are heading.
6. Google Webmaster Tools: Register your site map. Ideally you should have an XML sitemap that pushes your menu structure out to the search robot. If you are lucky Google will pick-up your menu structure and show site links below your URL when people look for your hotel specifically.
7. 
   Click to Call, Chat, Call Back: Be hospitable and available on your hotel website. Assist potential guests to increase the number of bookings. Remember phone conversion is higher than online as it is more personal. So let them call you! You can use a simple service like Skype or look at solution offered by companies like eStara

8. Tourist Guide: Become a travel agent instead of a hotelier. Don’t push your product but sell the destination. Use maps, Google loves this!
9. Events: What is going on in town while your guests are staying with you. Include it on your home page. Make an event section and show it in confirmation emails. No need to do it all by yourself, pull event calendars in through RSS feeds from your local tourist board website or sites like Eventful.com
10. Video: Integrate videos into your website. Shoot your hotel room with your own camera and put the videos on YouTube and list them afterwards on your site. It helps you in 2 ways. We all know pictures say more than a 1000 words. Well videos kind of have a multiplied effect of this. Secondly it is a great SEO move. Make sure you pick your keywords smart in YouTube! Oh yes don’t forget to add the videos to you Google Local Business Center listing.
11. Review Monitoring: Make sure you know what people write about you. You can set-up a control panel for free using RSS feeds from review websites, Google Alerts, Yahoo Pipes and Netvibes.
12. Review Response: Thank everyone that write something about your hotel, positive or negative. They are your guests. Engage and show them you care and value their feedback. Keep in mind potential guests will notice that you are involved.
13. Review Stimulation: Email guests after check-out, ask them to write about their experience on review websites like TripAdvisor or TravelPost and you hotels FaceBook profile. This way they help you to spread the word.
14. Review Recycling: Filter out the positive stuff. You can use Delicious and create a feed you can send to FriendFeed, FaceBook and Twitter. Just like the movie companies on their posters, ‘New York Times says: Best Movie of the Year’. Good thing is, you did not write it! This works, we tried it!
15. Blog: Integrate the hotel blog into your hotel website and become a tourism journalist. Write about interesting and original things. Cover events in your city or destination. Please don’t write about your hotel’ it’s usually boring. Except of course if you have something really original will spark interest. But it has to be really really special!
16. Online PR: Those interesting articles you write for your blog can now be placed on tourism news websites with links to your hotel website. There are also many blog syndication pages. It is one of the most effective SEO strategies. Moreover if you started to get recognized of a provider of great content you will be branding your hotel in the strongest possible way.
17. RSS: Use Feedburner to distribute your blog by email and RSS Syndication.
18. Listing Websites: List your hotel on as many free listing websites that allow you to put in a link to your hotel website. Please do not participate in link exchange. Start with WikiTravel, Yelp, VirtualTourist.
19. Web 2.0 BroadCasting Station: Link all of your profiles from social networks, photo and video sharing websites and book marking website to save time. This way you don’t have to post the same thing over and over again. FriendFeed is the mother of all 2.0 websites. It allows you to link up all the others… You should be on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, …
20. Mobile: Start with a simple mobile website so you can be found if people look for your hotel. Have picture and click to call button. Simplicity should do the trick for now.
21. eCRM: Personalized confirmation emails, pr-arrival and after check-out emails work. But again they need to be personalized. Include weather forecast, events during the guest’s stay, restaurant suggestions etc. Step 1 though is making sure your reservations office and front desk is capturing email addresses! Make sure you build a proper DB and develop a plan for implementing a hotel CRM strategy.

Do you recall the classic statement, “the only constant is change”? It is an ever-present phenomenon, and by comprehension at the level of man’s intelligence, a tricky one, because change is in constant clash with timeless principles, which by evidence of established patterns, do not change.

The winner is the one who knows how to maintain and manage the balance between change and timed, principle-based progress on a daily basis, which all boils down to the little decision-making that counts. One thing is for sure: the “final decision” is the only one that is expressed in action, which will translate into results. How you arrive to that decision ultimate hinges on the summation of your reaction to the present moment (a moment of change?) and your personal values (are they timeless?).

Interestingly, if you should look back at how you made your ‘final’ decisions in the past, you may find a pattern and a set of reasons for why you made your decisions in a certain way. Now, this is a part where you as a reader would be wondering what point I am driving at.

It’s all in the habits.

Habit is the encompassing definition of the translation from “how you think” to “what you do”. It is incredible that general statistics point to a real fact that 80% of businesses do not last over 2 years, but at a personal level, people don’t seem to realize larger implications and consequences in the scheme of things even as they drudge through the motions of daily work.

Some things never change, particularly knowledge at grassroots level. An effective habit grounded well is knowledge applied from grassroots level onwards. In business, how many people know how to increase leads, build a database, convert them into customers, develop relationships with them, treat them right, follow-up and mold them into repeat customers? But this is the foundation for future profits, no matter how you work your business and how often you change your methodologies or habits.

It is not easy for people to bear principles in mind while being adaptable to changing situations, but no matter how vague the truth is, it is that “the root of all things keeps them in a firm position”. Therefore one can be down but never out. Setbacks are temporary only when they don’t displace you completely. Yes, you can solve them with a tweak and a change.

On the other hand, the need for a change can make one uncomfortable depending on its scale. Ultimately, think through this: if your business is not doing as well as it should for quite some time, what decisions have you made and actions implemented to elevate it from your current situation, so that it won’t be the same or even fall towards failing tomorrow, next week and next month? Strange but true, as long as bad times continue, today is the best time for you to reflect, take stock of your business and re-strategize for the better. If you have not done so, do not procrastinate. If you feel stuck in a quagmire, I would like you to be fully aware that your habits of yesterday produced the results and outcome of today, and whatever you do today, you will be tomorrow. This is an irrevocable and natural law!

If you do not change, change will conquer you! Being smart at conquering change is all about being creative and inventive at doing things in a different way, not doing completely different things, but the primary purpose is the same: to survive! No business can ultimately be a success if it is unable to survive. Every business needs to know what changes are occurring within its environment and will be in the future to effect a corresponding change within the company. When right and wrong decisions are separated by a fine line, they must be made without regrets after careful evaluations of the best actions that will steer the enterprise in the preferred course. Awareness and experience through the rough times can only help to sharpen your survival instincts for better days in the future regardless of any unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances. If there’s anything good that came out of setbacks, it is that you have grown to respond against complacency and proactively take charge of your life with new ways, new habits and new solutions.

Embracing a readiness for proactive self-change is actually a catalyst for spotting and working out opportunities, which is essentially an act of stepping yourself up to the next level. Setbacks and problems are everywhere waiting for someone to solve and profit from them. If only you have talked to enough people and opened your eyes wide enough, you would have seen that the hotel, airline, retail, tourism and F&B industries, among hundreds of others, are in dire need of help. Every other day, people are looking forward to the next savior who can propose a solution—be it sales and marketing, customer retention, loyalty and affiliation schemes, products and services, technology optimization etc.—that makes them say, “Bingo!”
This is where Online Brand management and promotion are critical at this time to grow market share online. I will touch on this topic in more detail soon.

So for this article, I touched on 3 major issues: embracing the need for change, considering the impact of habits and laying the foundation of principles. He who can work within the ebb and flow of these 3 issues will be enriched with professional experiences. It is with experiences and through awareness of these experiences that wisdom can be cultivated, and with wisdom comes understanding, pertaining to the nature of a problem, in order to arrive at an appropriate solution through creativity and innovation, endorsed by all.

By Garen Armstrong

After you define a target market, you must work to clarify your ‘desired’ value proposition. Without it, its hard to resonate strongly with customers and can invisibly destroy your business. But what exactly is a value proposition? And how is it different from ‘elevator’ pitches and Unique Selling Proposition’s?

Elevator Pitches & Unique Selling Propositions

Value propositions are often confused with elevator pitches or unique selling propositions (USPs). However its impact on your company’s success is fundamentally different.
An elevator pitch answers the question “what do you do?” Its a one sentence answer that defines your customer and the general area you help them:
“My company provides Hotels efficient property management system and room distribution over the Internet”
An elevator pitch is the foundation of a value proposition; but much weaker.
A USP answers the question, “what makes you different?” And looks like the following:
“We are the only company to that is a SaaS based Property management system with a integrated room distribution for hoteliers”
The USP is another piece of the value proposition, but again it lacks the impact of a strong value proposition.

The Value Proposition

A value proposition is a clear statement of the concrete results a customer will get from purchasing and using your products and/or services. It is focused on outcomes. So as opposed to the above examples, the smart businessperson will always speak in terms of results that products can create or results it produces produces.
A good example might be: “Our products help people leverage the internet to triple their market reach and cut marketing costs in half when launching new products.”

Value As Strategy

Strategy is all about execution of vision with results ending in enhanced customers expectation of service. Since the creation of value is the end destination in business—it is important to establish what your value proposition will be in the future.

First things first in business are to figure out what your value proposition will be to your customers. Hence, the goal is to help improve operational efficiency its time to assess by how much, by tracking and measuring your results. Then talk to your customers and ask them if your plan is based in reality and a viable product.

To roll this out as a piece of your plan, simply state an value goal in your business or marketing plan, e.g. “we plan to reduce Cost of goods sold while improving inventory controls for hotel room distribution while providing business intelligence for your hotel.”

Once you have established your core “value strategy” you will have a measuring stick to measure your efforts. And then you can use your value strategy as a basis for making decisions—whenever you have a choice to make, you can ask yourself, “will this improve our value proposition.”

This holds true if your message is communicated via the Internet through Internet Marketing strategies or in person.

Read more on MindSpring Software Value Proposition Here