25: Lock the Deadbolt
Susan Barry has slept on a coffee table after locking herself out of a hotel room, but that's not entirely what this is about. In this solo deep-dive episode, Susan wonders if hotel sales teams are pushing boulders uphill while they swim against the tide. She muses here if hotels should try harder to meet buyers where they are and spend more money on marketing. Hot tip: This is a controversial one, so don't listen with diehard hotel sellers in the car.
You can find Robin Moncrieffe’s podcast Don’t Look Under the Bed on all major podcast apps.
Jargon, terms, and concepts in this episode:
“Owned and Managed” - The ownership and management of hotels is very confusing. The hotel real estate (building, land, etc.) is owned by the owner. The owner pays the brand — i.e., Marriott — to license the name (which we call flag just to confuse things even further) and access the standard operating procedures, loyalty program, all that stuff.
Since owners are often (but not always) in the real estate business rather than the hotel business, owners hire third-party management companies to operate the hotel. Thus, the brand doesn’t run the hotels that bear its name(s), and often the owners of the real estate don’t run them either.
But why? In the early 2000s, big hotel companies began pursuing what they called an “asset-light” strategy, meaning that they started selling their hotel real estate, and started focusing on selling franchises instead. Susan worked for Starwood in the days when the company owned and managed most of its own hotels, at the beginning of this shift. Honestly, just explaining this topic could (and should) be an entire episode of the show.
Floor plan - Like any other floor plan, but in this context it shows how the meeting space is laid out in the building and where the event rooms are in relation to the rest of the hotel.
Capacity chart - This shows how many guests can be accommodated in each room in ten different set-up styles. For example, a 2,500 square foot room can hold about 100 people at classroom tables and 200 people at 6’ rounds. Here’s a great meeting space calculator that didn’t exist 25 years ago, so hotel sales people had to do math.
“Schoolies and serps” - These are slang for classroom-style tables (which are narrower than typical folding tables) and serpentine-shaped tables that can be used to make circles and other cool shapes. IYKYK.
Funnel - This refers to the sales funnel (or the marketing funnel). If you think of a funnel shape, the top is the big group of potential buyers. As those buyers narrow down their choices and become more likely to actually buy, they move through to the bottom of the funnel. This is a dramatic over-simplification but Google is your friend.
Big Book (aka Function Diary) - This one is a signal (and potential trigger!) for hotel people of a certain age. Before computerized (who even uses that word?!) reservations, space management, and databases in hotels, there used to be this gigantic, custom-printed book with one page for every day of the year and every meeting room in a hotel.
There were carbon paper reservation forms that salespeople had to fill out, and then someone had to sit there at the diary and cross through each meeting room with a pencil. There were codes for whether the business was tentative or definite (meaning signed contract), and it was all very draconian and silly. It worked, but it was dicey.
And if you were the person who snuck into the book and erased space so you could claim it for yourself, may you have the day you deserve.