larry mogelonsky
The Real Cost of Housekeeping Is the Replacement
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky | March 22, 2023
By Adam Mogelonsky, Larry Mogelonsky The biggest line item for nearly every hotel’s operating costs is the housekeeping department. That isn’t going to change any time soon as rooms need to be cleaned in order for them to be resold. Yet, we strive to continuously optimize this expenditure, be it through overtime reduction, inflationary wage controls, automation or other smart labor management tools. The two of us caution, though, that there is a hidden cost here that hoteliers aren’t properly weighing within their analyses – the resources spent in finding replacement workers. There’s a lot of talk about the increasing costs of...
In the Year of Wellness Here’s an Example of Real Wellness
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky | March 15, 2023
By Adam Mogelonsky and Larry Mogelonsky Wellness is rightfully being lauded by major hotel brands, both from the employee wellness side as well as a means for significantly boosting ancillary spend. Needless to say, there are a lot of macro forces converging to sharply increase the demand for wellness travel products, but for the skeptics out there, we apply the adage: if you don’t have your health then nothing else matters. Alongside expanding awareness, this alone means that people are more inclined to stay healthy at their chosen hotels. Rather than drone on in abstract about what properties can do in the domains of nutritional pro...
Charging Four Figures in 13 Critical Steps
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky | March 8, 2023
By Adam Mogelonsky, Larry Mogelonsky There’s something special about crossing the threshold of $1,000 per night. With inflation roaring through the world, many properties – luxury, upscale or otherwise – are approaching this event horizon. But with it comes a profound psychological shift in guest expectations. Unless, say, yielding from $859 per night to $959 per night, this particular move involves customers seeing an extra digit in the price tag – the perception of the increase is disproportionally greater. This same principle is why retailers charge $9.95 instead of a flat $10.00; it appears cheaper. In the back of every gues...
Explaining Digital Centaurs via Conversational AI
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky | February 22, 2023
By Adam Mogelonsky, Larry Mogelonsky ChatGPT is the shiny new toy for Q1 2023 with many people in awe of its ability to generate cohesive, multi-paragraph answers to all possible questions. But if you pull back the curtain on this purported wizard of AI, you’ll quickly see that its responses are somewhat ‘soulless’, using the most obvious and perhaps a bit Luddite word to describe it all. The answers presented are cordial, neutral in political stance and generally speaking the grand average of the entirety of the internet. We mere humans, though, don’t gravitate to medians; we tend to reward passion, strong beliefs and flawed ch...
The Real Reasons for Book Now Pay Later in 2023
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky | February 15, 2023
Yet one more burgeoning technology to consider that many major retail shopping channels have already adopted, we ask whether or not Book Now Pay Later (BNPL) is right for your hotel. Specifically, are your current payment rails an obstacle – that is, a point of friction – to some guests who, for one reason or another, don’t want to pay the full reservation amount upfront? Second to that, can the embrace of BNPL be used to incentivize direct bookings? Rest assured, this wouldn’t represent an experimental enhancement to your website booking engine (WBE). We have Expedia partnering with Affirm while many airlines and cruises have sign...
Thinking Fast and Slow for Your Hotel Operations
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky | February 8, 2023
By Adam Mogelonsky, Larry Mogelonsky Yes, the title of this article refers to the iconic book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011) by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. If you haven’t read, we would recommend, although it’s quite long and extensively cited so perhaps a quick summary is in order. Human cognition can largely be broken down into two broad pathways. We are able to think fast in situations where we have unconscious brain connections well-established: feeling sad when seeing crying faces, getting hungry, laughing at a viscerally humorous joke on television or flinching if a snake were to suddenly drop out of the vents. We ca...
What the Data Reveals About Key Pre-Stay Questions You Can Automate
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky | February 1, 2023
By Adam Mogelonsky, Larry Mogelonsky There’s no panacea to the labor crisis hotels currently face. Instead, the best solutions are often the ones that help you to continuously improve the productivity of your existing team. This is why the two of us persistently extol automation, especially those solutions that are easy to onboard and offer a series of nifty applications well beyond their original aim. As we look ahead to 2023, many of us may try to shrug off this past summer’s staffing woes as a transitionary consequence from all that pent-up travel demand from the pandemic. Economic trends suggest the exact opposite. Our present l...
Five Trends to Grow Your Employee Wellness in 2023
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky | January 25, 2023
By Adam and Larry Mogelonsky Why is employee wellness so critical right now? There are a lot of macro forces at work, but the bottom line is that the hospitality labor pool will remain in short supply for the long run, so you need to think in terms of non-wage employee incentives in order to form that ‘sense of belonging’ to retain your teams. And we can’t say this enough, investments in employee wellness programming will not only act as a way to stave off staffing issues and inflationary wages, but when your team is healthier it’s also a cost-saver because fewer sick days will be taken (which may also reduce overtime pay), and ...
1
Technology
2
Appointments/People on the Move
3
Operations
4
Industry Happenings
5
All Things Independent
Today's News
voco Guadalajara Neruda Opens in Mexico With 104 Guestrooms
IHG Signs With Arabella Group to Develop Three New Hotels in Egypt
STR: U.S. Hotel Results for Week Ending 18 March
SAHIC Preview: Business Travel Demand Returning Across South America
As the first news aggregate for the hotel industry, Hotel-Online is the industry’s must-read daily news source for everything hotel curated for busy professionals. Sign up today for industry news delivered to your inbox.