The triumph of everyday design

From Seth's Blog

The triumph of everyday design

Luxury goods used to be better. Better than the alternatives.

The best-made clothing, the best saddle, the most reliable luggage. The top of the market was the place people who cared needed to go to buy something that had the highest performance.

Today, though, a Toyota is a better car than a Bentley. More efficient, more reliable. The Vertus phone was a joke, and no one needs a $200 mouse when a $9 one is faster and easier to use.

I spent some time at a high-end hotel on a recent gig. The light switches were complicated and didn't work quite right. The door handle was awkward. The fancy faucets sprayed water on whoever was standing in front of the sink. All expensive, none of it very well-designed.

As materials have gotten cheaper and easier to find, it's design that matters. And the market is demanding better design--which is easy to copy and easy to improve.

Expensive is not the relevant metric, utility is. 

       

Can we open our own restaurant by studying hotel management?

Obviously you can, lots of people do . . . but without specific knowledge, skills and ability in the management of a food and beverage operation, you're adding a great deal of risk to what is already a risky venture. 80 to 90% of independent, non-franchised restaurants fail within the first two years.

I've actually heard human resources people talk as though middle management is middle management — if you can run a hotel, then obviously you can run a restaurant; if you can run a convenience store, then obviously you can run a movie theater; if you can manage a daycare then obviously you can run a hotel — and I've always wondered how such genius evolved on earth.

I've managed hotels for years. I've managed motion picture theaters for some 15 years in addition to that, and there isn't that much about running theaters that qualified me to manage a hotel. Even the art and science of supervision is different: with theaters, you use minimum wage teenagers; with hotels, you employ adults who have to make a living on what you pay them, who are more likely to question the legitimacy of any authority you try to assert, and with whom you cannot deal so arbitrarily. Supervising kids truly is ‘kid stuff’ (bad pun) by contrast to supervising adults. Things we associate with “management” — organizing ability, hiring, training, staffing, discipline and supervision; vigilance, marketing ability, troubleshooting and problem solving, recordkeeping, overall responsibility and accountability — are all together just one part of the required skill set; and many of those parts aren’t doable without some specific subject matter expertise. If you don't know what you're trying to manage, there's a very low limit to how well you can manage it.

It's Not All About Millennials. Why Hotels Need to Focus on Older Singles & Families

From HotelSpaces

Read article

How halal tourism is reshaping the global tourism industry

From e-hotelier

Read article

Is it common for large companies with a lot of applicants to ignore a job candidate’s follow up email after an interview if they’ve decided not to proceed with the interview process or job offer?

We do it all the time, and — since there's always a chance we could maybe do something next month or quarter with an applicant we passed on this month or quarter, we always try to avoid committing ourselves to an outright refusal — we're probably doing you a favor when we do.

(Unless, of course, it's your attitude that you were entitled to that or any other specific job, in which case we don't want you . . .)

Our application forms (the use of which we we require at every level: we don't accept resumes, letter of reference or recommendation, or other instruments of “obfuscation, misinformation or embellishment”) clearly state that your application is merely a unilateral expression of interest by you and does not, by the simple fact of its submission to us by you, make you a candidate. While as a matter of practice we probably will, we don't owe you to even look at it.

What do you think of the following business name: ''Last Room Club'' for a business selling hotel rooms for the same day with significant discount?

It's as good a name as any for something that there's already dozens of out there, and that even hotel operators who deal with them deal with them at all only because they feel like they have to, lack enthusiasm for, and even resent a little. (Actually, I like the name better than many that I've seen for deep discount online travel agencies.)

As names go, worse can be had, I suppose. Most of the ones I can think of for deep discount OTAs aren't suitable for use in polite company.



A few things that drive us nuts:

We don't like dumping our rooms cheap because we can't find a way to rent them for a decent price. If we can afford not to, we won't. I'd rather let a few $140-per-night rooms stand empty than to rent them to people who, if I let them have it for $75 one time, will get spoiled and never again see them as worth more than $75. Letting you sell our $140 a night rooms for fifty bucks, and making it too easy for too many people to get them at that price, doesn't exactly enhance the perceived value of our product — why should anyone want to pay even a hundred bucks a night for something you can get for fifty bucks? And when we have to because we can't afford not to, it makes us sick. If you're just doing it because you need the money, you may be relieved to getthe money, but it still makes you feel like a loser.

How do you know a hotel will do well in a given location?

I've seen hotels built for the most respectable reasons, after carefully researching a market, the planned location of the hotel, and that area's needs, and what sort of hotel would best answer those needs. I've seen them built for reasons as not-so-respectable as the fact that the owner owned the site and wanted to put a hotel on it (never mind it would be the worst part of town in which to locate a hotel, or that town had less-than-zero need or demand for new hotels at all), or someone had friends, family or a girlfriend living in a certain town; or someone had a relative who needed a job and the owner figured, how hard can running a hotel be? People who can access the resources to build a hotel can put one wherever they can secure a building site, and many do so, shall we say, quite freely.

Here is how I go about it.

We look at the specific location within a town that we have in mind. Just being in one part of town or another can make quite a difference even in a smaller city. So, you want to sort out your existing hotels in a city by the individual submarkets within that city in which they are located.

HVS divides most larger cities into recognized submarkets, but you can identify them yourself (adequately, if not altogether accurately by HVS's methodology) by bringing up a city in which you're considering a new hotel on Google Maps, searching 'hotels', and noticing in what areas of town that the little red symbols that represent the hotels that come up seem to be clustered on that map. A few isolated properties will occur, but each of these clusters indicates the presence of a separate submarket.