Because we don't have to if we don't want, so why the heck should we?
Investment is risky. Leave things be, and we can still have enough people come in the door at a rate we kvetch and whine isn't high enough, to keep the property running in the black and get a low return that we kvetch and wine isn't high enough. And people have little to no patience with results that aren't immediately apparent.
That's the way most people do it, anyway. Asking me why they don't innovate is like asking me, why would someone not eat, or why would someone not breathe? I can only speculate. But there are a lot of natural human flaws that get in the way, so some of this stuff even comes up for me more than I should let it.
So here goes with some speculation, based on my observations and experience over the years:
It is by no means an exhaustive list.
Originally appeared on Quora
Investment is risky. Leave things be, and we can still have enough people come in the door at a rate we kvetch and whine isn't high enough, to keep the property running in the black and get a low return that we kvetch and wine isn't high enough. And people have little to no patience with results that aren't immediately apparent.
That's the way most people do it, anyway. Asking me why they don't innovate is like asking me, why would someone not eat, or why would someone not breathe? I can only speculate. But there are a lot of natural human flaws that get in the way, so some of this stuff even comes up for me more than I should let it.
So here goes with some speculation, based on my observations and experience over the years:
- Franchise requirements: Most hotels are franchised. If Choice wanted you to have your innovative new thing, it would be a requirement in the rules for your brand. If not, yours is going to be the only Quality Inn that has it, but you'll still be expected to rent your rooms at a rate comparable to that charged by all the other Quality Inns - assuming your innovative new thing is even permitted by Choice rules. (Here, I use Choice Hotels as a punching dummy: being a punching dummy is one thing left that Choice does consistently well. With a lot of Class A and upscale brands, you have to get it approved by the franchise organization if you want to scratch your nose, and make a request in writing, and tell them which finger you'd like to use, and wait several weeks for a response, while several people go over it, trying to imagine the dreadful consequences that might occur if your request is approved . . .)Sometimes, a franchise organization just cannot support it. Wyndham-franchised hotels now have a promotion in progress where, if you stay two days or more, deep discounts kick in ( Save 15% When You Stay 2 Nights or Longer at Wingate by Wyndham | Save 20% When You Stay 3 Nights or Longer at Wingate by Wyndham ). These discounts won't last forever. They're too deep to be sustainable: in order to set such a discount and get your numbers to work, you have to set your rate for just one night so high that you'll lose one-night customers. The discounts really should be more like 15% for three days, but on an ongoing, permanent basis. A hotel that rewarded stays of multiple days would be a formidable competitor in its market, if it could be counted upon to give you such a deal, anytime. It would be the one hotel in that market at which you'd always know to stay if you're staying more than one or two nights. Variable costs associated with a stay of several days go down so much in any hotel, that it really doesn't make sense for a hotel to not do it. But if you have a Choice-franchised hotel, forget it - their piece of crap ChoiceAdvantage front desk system cannot be configured to support such a deal, even if the continued solvency of your property depended upon implementing something like that.
- What you have today is cutting edge, or as close to it as whatever could, as a practical matter, be had for you today. Really. (So was whatever anyone had on any given day since that very first one, when God created the heavens and the earth . . . ) Remember your grandma (or great-grandma) telling you the story of how when she was a child, back on the farm 90-100 years ago, she and her family used to brush their teeth with ashes from the fireplace or woodstove? Yuck! . . . Eewwww!! . . . But think about it: what would you have done if you'd lived back then, in that time, in that place? You would have done the same thing, and not thought twice about it. When you needed to brush your teeth, back then, that was the way it was done. No one imagined that it could be done better, differently, cleaner. It was, in its day, cutting edge 'technology'. In 1987, when I first started in the front office end of this business, so was this:
And we were just getting away from this (I worked at one property that still had one):
Any hotel that still uses these is asking for trouble - but some do:This was our credit card processor, the 'acoustic' model of the day (which worked just fine when night auditors were expected to actually have some accounting and bookkeeping know-how and do guest ledger-to-city ledger transfers, before electronic funds transfer became commonplace): - These slips . . . .
were originally designed, prior to World War II, for 'hotel front desk systems' that looked like these (ncr 4200 machine - Google Search ) . . .
. . . and I can't imagine who'd still be using an NCR museum piece this ancient (or how the heck they keep them working), but obviously, somewhere, several hotels are . . . Believe it or not, you can still order slips for them (Machine Vouchers, NCR 4200, ADJUSTMENT, Black Ink/Yellow Paper ).
The machines I used in the '80's were made by Micros, not NCR; and were smaller, had more electronics, and looked more like a countertop cash register, but weren't really that much more of an advance on the big, clunky old vintage NCR models. Still, it was amazing what we could make it do at the time. (Sorry I couldn't find you a picture - even on Google image search - but it makes perfect sense that there wouldn't be one. The Micros machine had what ultimately turned out to be a brief - ten year or so - history: an amazing machine in its day that - like the Bristol Britannia and Lockheed Electra airliners, and later, Windows ME -- was something neat, but still based on obsolete technology that would give it only a short life before being permanently relegated to the cruft pile of history. As a second-year, $5.00-per-hour night auditor, I even spent my own money and sent off to Micros for the programming manual, so I could come up with ways to make it better and get it to do more new tricks . . . ) Yes, we'd heard stories about front desk computer systems being installed, in big hotels, in big cities, but it was all kind of exotic. One for our hotel? Maybe someday, but not in my lifetime. It would cost thousands and thousands of dollars. At the time, even 'cheap PC compatibles' sold for two or three grand. It's not worth it. Nowadays, of course, no hotel has an excuse to be without a PC-based front desk management system. But back then, we had no way of knowing that, and it would have been out of reach for us with the technology of the day if we had. Meanwhile, what we had worked fine, if used with a level of knowledge and skill that no one managing a front desk should be without.It's like a law: we only get one Steve Jobs, or Albert Einstein, or Thomas Edison, a generation. And even when we do (assuming he has the social skills or influential supporters to enable him to emerge beyond the detractors who are going to put him down as a mad scientist or a boat-rocker), it takes awhile for word to get around. And usually, he'll have a more wide-ranging, world-changing, agenda than to focus on then how to run a hotel better. (Hey, Anthony Melchiorri, your credentials as a world-class troubleshooter and fixer are established and impeccable, but are you truly an innovator? We're waiting for the rollout of your new hotel brand).- Planned obsolescence. Or even worse, mindless and unforeseen, even though quite foreseeable, obsolescence. Recently, I've been going nuts trying to spec a satellite TV system for our new Salem Inns (http://pinterest.com/beechmont27... ). World Cinema wanted to sell me something that involves putting an external box on every TV set in every room. For a hotel this size, that's 61 extra pieces of hardware to break, or 252 extra cable connections to work loose; any of which has a one-in-three - or better - chance of happening on third shift, where my night auditor has better things to do than run up to a room and troubleshoot it, and I'd really rather not have him leaving the desk on autopilot during that time of the night. And for what? High tech innovates: insert a couple thousand lines of code, and Google has a radical new innovation. Hotels are more of a high-touch business. So, in five years or so, something newer, more innovative and better will be out, and it'll be time to unhook and toss all that external hardware in which we'd have so much invested. Every penny you put into something like that is denied some innovation that would have made an appreciable difference to the guest if you'd gone with that instead. (Fortunately, for better or worse, Spot On Networks [GuestWiFi WiFi & Energy Management for Hotels ] solved the problem for us. They were sensitive, or at least open, to our needs; and put together a good, solid, workable wi-fi system, that is simple and required no external parts other than several routers - but it has to be plugged into the local cable TV system. So, scratch our originally-planned satellite TV from the plans: we've got to go with cable anyway - which is just as well, since all the satellite systems anyone proposed involved external parts, at a cost that would more than wipe out the cost savings that would come from going with satellite instead of cable.) Not very innovative on my part, but most hotels have regular cable anyway; and your wi-fi will work, provide you with all the bandwidth you could need (and we generally won't charge you for it, although we can, and will, if you bring five devices, download movies on each, and really pig it), and we can upgrade it three years down the road as new wireless - or cable or satellite - technology comes out. We even let the Spot On people have a say in the building design: we're going with drop ceilings in all the corridors, so any needed future upgrades can be installed quickly and economically.
- Cost-benefit analysis. Since people have little to no patience for results that aren't immediately apparent, anything new must show up in the form of ability by the hotel to charge a higher rate for the room. (Even I'd like to hope that what I'm being asked to buy and put in can over time contribute to that ability.) Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines put new technology of questionable value to the 'passenger in seat 5A' test. If the flight crews wanted some expensive gizmo installed in all of the aircraft, but it wasn't essential to the safety of a flight and its value was questionable, Kelleher would board a flight with a sample or a brochure of the device, approach the passenger in seat 5A while en route, whoever it was, say hello, introduce himself, and ask him or her, "Hey, our pilots/flight attendants want us to buy a whole bunch of these and install one in each of our aircraft. Here's what it's supposed to do . . . If we buy this gadget and install it on each of our 569 planes, it'll add two dollars and forty-eight cents to the cost of each passenger's ticket on each flight. Would you be willing to pay an extra $2.49 for your ticket on your future trips so your pilot can have one of these in the cockpit, or your flight attendants can have one of these in the galley?" Needless to say, he didn't have to actually run that test very often: just telling the story was usually enough to sway the decision.
- Scale. If you operate ten, 62-room properties, you can't buy just one of your innovative new thing that you'd need one of in each room, you have to buy 620 of them. (Oh, sure, you can start with 62, and test them in one property, and see what guest response is like; but if the guests like it, in time you're going to have to put it in all your other rooms at all your other properties . . . And if they don't, that initial 62 was wasted.)
- Misdirection, when we do 'innovate'. Does it really count as 'innovation' if it adds no value whatsoever to the hotel or to the guest experience? See Michael Forrest Jones' answer to When a hotel has an electronic "Do Not Disturb" system, what happens, and where, when a guest toggles the setting?
- One of the reasons I'm such a fan of Seth Godin (WWMD: What Would Mike Do? The hotel blog ) is that he's more knowledgeable about marketing than >95% of the people I've seen who (pretend to) do hotel sales and marketing. (At least the things he says seem to work better when attempted, and make so much more sense generally.) Today, in his blog, he nailed it right on the head: Neophilia as a form of hiding. We kid ourselves that we're 'innovating' even when we're really doing anything but. Fortunately, of all the hotel DOSMs out there in the world (who as a class generally drive me absolutely nuts), who could have opened an account on Quora and stayed with it for more than the week or so it would usually take them to notice that you're not going to score a fast-and-easy 'social media networking' coup out of it (Michael Forrest Jones' answer to Why is Pinterest declining so rapidly?); Quora is blessed to have Susan Deluzain Barry on board (I'm Changing the Name of This Later , and, shoot, I kinda liked the old title of that blog . . . :-) Here's her 'real' one: Blog | Hive Marketing ), who appears to me to be the (rare) real deal in hotel sales and marketing. Small wonder she's a consultant, rather than working for a single hotel or company; and that's a good thing, too. Once we're a little closer to ready to launch our new brand, I want to bring her (and a couple other folks I've met on Quora; one to do the websites, for example) to North Carolina for a few months . . .
- Loss aversion. I've read a couple of Duke professor Dan Ariely's books, and am taking a very interesting behavioral economics course he's currently offering on Coursera (Coursera , if he's still allowing people to sign up for it in the second week), but he explains human irrationality so much better than I can. Loss aversion (Loss aversion ) is the common human phenomenon that makes us creatures who'd rather avoid risk or loss than lean into it and reap a return or a benefit, even when the potential return or benefit is greater than the potential risk or loss. We'd rather avoid losing $1000 than give ourselves a chance at making $1000 - or even $1500.
- Since the competition isn't, why should we? (Of course, I've probably buzzed by that one a couple times already, even if I haven't quite amply covered it . . .)
- Unhealthy and/or excessive sales and marketing dependency. Many hotel owners and managers lean way too hard on sales and marketing, try and use it to compensate for deficiencies or for having allowed their property to fall behind and not be so competitive. "Of course we have [whatever weakness], it's just the way it is, you have to sell it . . ."
- Unhealthy and/or excessive 'service' dependency. Many hotel owners and managers lean way too hard on 'service', the personality of members of the staff, greasing the squeaky wheel when an 'important' customer becomes really aggrieved; and try and use that to compensate for deficiencies or for having allowed their property to fall behind and not be so competitive. "Oh, we have [whatever weakness], never mind that; we still have the most fantabulous customer service of any hotel in town! . . ."
- Inbreeding within the 'hospitality industry' that would be considered scandalous even in the 'hollers' of Appalachia. I actually learn more from non-hotel people on Quora than I get from 'industry' bloggers or writers: besides the fact that folks on Quora tend to be the type of people I'd want as guests (and therefore, what they say, or think, is going to be very important to me), people who think outside the 'hospitality industry' box seem to be more of a contribution (see my remarks about Seth Godin, above . . .). It's like deacon John up at St. Dominic's in Southington, Connecticut explained to me years ago, "Theologians write for other theologians". All the folks who write for hospitality trade publications and blogs seem to care about is how other people in the hospitality industry do it or might do it, and how they might impress other hotel industry people; rather than how they might share useful information. (I've lost count of the HOTELSMag.com blog posts that end with, "What is your experience with [shuttle service, or Halloween parties, or front desk management systems, or whatever]?" If nearly all of the information that you or members of your group acquire about your business is attained by comparing notes within the group, is your group, collectively, learning much of anything new? Can a group - or its individual members - achieve wisdom or awareness by combining the collective ignorance of its individual members, and looking to no outside sources? By the way, that magazine/website's lead story, as I write this, is about Choice Hotels' new corporate headquarters. Who gives a . . . ummm, who cares?) When you're that inbred, it doesn't take too much to count for 'innovation'.
It is by no means an exhaustive list.
Originally appeared on Quora
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