As every hotelier knows, budget season is the most stressful time of year. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a GM, marketer, revenue manager or even an owner – we’re all struggling to keep our heads above water right now.
We are forced to deeply analyze last year’s performance, market conditions and strategies then setup a concrete plan of how we’re going to attack the market next year despite massive global and market-based instabilities.
Silicon Valley’s startup culture understands this kind of stress well. Startups deal with existential crises on a daily basis so The Valley has evolved sophisticated methods and practices to win under intense pressure. Bring the Silicon Valley philosophy and lean startup methods into your hotel this season to differentiate from the compset, win budget season and outperform.
Set-up structured team brainstorming sessions
The budget process too often occurs in silos but one only has to look to Silicon Valley to understand that innovation stems from collaboration. Too many hotel groups engage in this traditional siloed approach where specialists like marketing managers work for weeks on end to eventually pitch management and ownership on ideas that they’ve developed in a vacuum.
In the end, your hotel is a product and the users are your guests. The people who are closest to those users are the ones who deal with them every day on the ground – your front desk agents, bellman, servers, and housekeepers. When you make strategic decisions about revenue or marketing strategy without listening to those who know your users best – you’re missing half the story.
When YouTube first developed its mobile app, its core team consisted of right-handed engineers. So when the product came to market, lefties were uploading thousands of videos upside down. By not considering multiple perspectives, you can dramatically impact the power of your product.
