Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Guest sentiment data continues to provide hoteliers with insightful and valuable information that they can harness to position their hotel properties better. By learning what travelers say and feel about their hotel stays during spring, hotels and hotel management companies can better align their digital strategies for the busy summer season.  Through analyzing over 1.7 million reviews and over 7.5 million guest sentiment tags, Suite Spot host Ryan Embree and TMG Chief Technology Officer Jason Lee break down the top 5 takeaways from the 2nd edition of our annual Spring Guest Sentiment Report.  This is an episode hoteliers can not afford to miss. Tune in now! Suite Spot Podcast · 114 - TMG's Spring Guest Sentiment Report: Key Takeaways Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining us today, wherever you're listening from or viewing us from on our YouTube page. We are here in our content creation studio at Travel Media Group headquarters just north of Orlando. And I am here with a very familiar guest and voice, Mr. Jason Lee, our Chief Technology Officer at Travel Media Group. Jason, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Thank you for having me. Ryan Embree: We got a very exciting episode for you today. Memorial Day just passed. We saw the record breaking numbers, pre pandemic levels of travel. I'm sure a lot of hotel listeners are very excited to hear that. It's looking like it's gonna be an even bigger summer, which we're gonna talk about. But today what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be looking at all of that feedback that guests left us over this spring, and hopefully what this is gonna do is give us some insights, and some takeaways that we can use in these summer months to potentially leverage our marketing and increase our chance of conversion, which is what every hotelier should be doing. Since this is a sales and marketing podcast, we love to do that for you. But Jason, take us through first, what is this data that we're seeing and why is it more accurate than, let's say, a survey of just like a thousand travelers? Jason Lee: So what we do is we use natural language processing to pull out like key pieces of information. So it's traveler sentiment, so how they're feeling about these various items. So you could have people that are both happy and upset in the same review, based on categories. So we start this, we start this whole thing with category. So we look at a bunch of different tags inside of room category, inside of a facilities category, inside of a service category. And then further past that we look at the various aspects of those tags. So I'll just give you an example. So an example would be a room, it would be bed, right? So room would be the category. The tag would be bed. The aspects of that tag would be sheets, pillows, sleep quality. It could be all of these other pieces that, so many factors, Yeah. That make up this stuff. And so, so we extract that data from each, review that comes in regardless of so completely agnostic of the rating of the review, just looking at the actual information that comes from the text. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and that's something that, that we preach to our hotel partners is just because you have a five star review or a one star review on the other side, doesn't mean there's both positive, neutral and negative elements to that review. Absolutely. And what this is doing, and this is pulling out all of that sentiment, it's over a lot of data,

Join Suite Spot podcast host, Ryan Embree as he welcomes the President of Questex, Alexi Khajavi, as an official TMG Hospitality Trailblazer! These two hospitality-focused individuals discuss some incredible travel and tourism subjects in this episode, giving viewers great insight into the industry's current state. This episode is full of content from conversations regarding trends like staffing shortages, event & group travel, and an inside look at the inaugural launch of The Hospitality Show. Suite Spot Podcast · 113 - TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Alexi Khajavi Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. We are gonna be continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. We are having such fun with this series. Again, if this is the first time you're hearing this. This series is all about those people and groups that are pushing our hospitality industry forward. We've had a lot of hotel management companies, some brands on this. We're gonna take a little bit wider lens today. This is called TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. We're gonna look at the travel industry as a whole, and I think that's a perfect segue into an introduction to our guest, Alexi Khajavi, president Questex, hospitality, travel and wellness. Alexi, welcome to the Suite Spot. Alexi Khajavi: Thanks, Ryan. It's good to be here. Ryan Embree: Awesome. Well, this is your first time on the Suite Spot. We always love to essentially start our episodes the exact same way because as we know in hospitality, some people are born into it. Some people just find it, you know, some people, a lot of people say, "Hey, I want to be the guy at the hotel", or "I want to be the guy that's making all these memories within the travel industry". Where did your journey start and what led you to Questex? Alexi Khajavi: Well, you know, both my parents were big travelers, you know, so we, we were always, you know, trying to plan the next trip. So, travel's been a part of my life, you know, since being a little child. You know, ultimately, even professionally, however, I graduated from the UC of California. I came outta that and joined, you know, a tour operator that was doing some early educational trips to Cuba. Traveled around, you know, and was, and was paid to do. So, I then got into the early tech scene in, you know, the early .com, 1997 to 2001, a tech startup called unexplored.com. And really since then, I've, I've been in travel and I've been in on the marketing and sales side of travel and hospitality, lived overseas multiple times, running hotels, running airlines, and then ran an, an advertising agency based off of the travel and hotel space. So we were working with destinations, we were working with hotel companies, and then was introduced to Questex back in 2014. And the event space was something I didn't have a lot of direct experience in, but the ability to connect buyers and sellers, particularly in travel and hospitality, where face-to-face is so critical, was really the pinnacle moment for me to see that as being just an incredible culmination of my prior experiences, my love of travel, my love of hospitality, and the opportunity to bring both buyers and sellers together. And that's really been the beauty of Questex is, is that we inform, we connect, and we're able to do that both on the digital platform side as well as in the live engagement side. So it's a really nice, opportunity. I've been doing it, you know, for the last eight years now. Ryan Embree: Yeah. You know,

In this episode of the Suite Spot Podcast, host and TMG Marketing Director, Ryan Embree and Chief Technology Officer, Jason Lee, tackle how guest satisfaction surveys impact a hotel’s operations and influence overall bookings. From topics such as what questions to ask in a guest satisfaction survey to how they shape your hotel’s bottom line, listeners will gain unique insights on implementing a system at their properties that extract more guest feedback. Suite Spot Podcast · 112 - Responding to Guest Satisfaction Surveys Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you all for listening or watching us today. Remember, we are in the content creation studio, AKA the digital den, here at Travel Media Group's headquarters just north of Orlando. We're super excited to be on YouTube now, and we've got a frequent guest. This is your second time on video, but you've been on the Suite Spot quite a number of times. Jason, Chief Technology Officer here at Travel Media Group. Jason, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Yeah, thanks for having me again in the digital den. Ryan Embree: The digital den. Yes, we love to call it that. We've already talked about some exciting topics here in 2023. This one is a little polarizing, I'm sure for some of our listeners. If you, if you caught the title, so it's talking about responding to guest satisfaction surveys. We probably have heard that a lot from our brands, from our management companies, from a lot of people, from our guests. You've heard me talk a lot about responding to reviews. Obviously that's something at Travel Media Group we take a lot of pride in. We reached the incredible feat of responding to 1 million plus guest reviews last summer. Very exciting achievement. We had you on for an episode to talk about that. I'm curious, it's a different animal with these guest satisfaction surveys. Let's kind of talk about the differences between responding to guest reviews online and maybe guest satisfaction surveys. Jason Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest difference is that you've solicited this feedback. Online, what you're getting is someone has chosen to give you a public review and they're motivated by anger or motivated by happiness or whatever that motivation is. But in this case, you may have caught them in a space where they could give you objective information. So you've solicited that information and now they're filling that out. And so depending on your brand, it could be a lengthy survey, but typically it's done in stages so you can get some of that information out. But going back to your original question, I think the biggest difference in terms of tone is that you've solicited this feedback, now they've given you this feedback. Now what do you say back to them? And this isn't public. This is you with this guest, and you might know everything about this guest. You know who they are, you know what room they stayed in. You, you might have further, insight from your front desk or from other staff members who've maybe encountered this guest. So you have way more information than a public review where you might not know what room they were in. You might not know the guest, you might not know the situation. So now your response could be extremely specific. Ryan Embree: And you have to be careful with that response. I mean, some of the, the tips and best practices that we share for online reviews might not translate very well to an internal guest satisfaction survey. You know, where you're coming off as inauthentic.

Join Suite Spot podcast host and TMG Marketing Director Ryan Embree as he sits down and welcomes a very special guest, the EVP & Chief Commercial Officer of Sage Hospitality Group, Patrick Pahlke, in the latest episode of the TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series!  This episode has something for everyone in the hospitality industry, so tune in now! Suite Spot Podcast · 111 - Hospitality Trailblazers: Patrick Pahlke Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hotiers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for listening. Today we have another episode of our exciting series, TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. If you're just joining us for the first time, we are absolutely loving this series. We are bringing the brightest and best in our industry, those people and groups that are pushing our industry forward into 2023 and beyond. We've got a great guest with me today, before I introduce him. As always, you can always find our episodes anywhere you're finding our podcast, but also on YouTube. So check that out and let's go ahead and get rolling with the episode. So I will introduce our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer of the day. That is Patrick Pahlke, Chief Commercial Officer at Sage Hospitality. Patrick, welcome into the Suite Spot. Patrick Pahlke : Hello, I'm super delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: We're excited to have you, you're the guest of honor today, so let's go ahead and open it up with a question for all of our first timers on the Suite Spot. We know we work in an industry where people can come from anywhere and they have some, sometimes some strange journeys in order to get to where they are today. So tell us a little bit about your journey to Sage Hospitality Group. Was it more the traditional way of maybe starting at the front desk and working up or completely outta left field? Cause we've heard those stories on this series as well. Patrick Pahlke : Yeah, no, mine is a long one. I would say so. First of all, as you can hear from my pungent accent, I'm from Germany originally, and, I had, I had the opportunity of living in different countries as a child with my parents. And, at one point, when I was six years old, we stayed, we lived in a hotel for, for three months, and that hotel was my playground and the general manager of that hotel was like a god for me. It was in Jakarta and it was the Hilton International in 1981. Still remember very well. And I said to my parents, I want to be that guy one day, Mr. Schutz Sandorf was his name. And yeah, just kind of stuck to my childhood dream, you know, did an apprenticeship, entered the industry in Germany in the mid nineties. Worked in different places in Europe. At one point I studied, in Lozan in Switzerland, hotel management. Then, ventured out to Asia, stayed in Asia for 16 years, worked all over the place, mostly in the, in the five star field with Hyatt International. Worked with Mandarin Oriental as well. And then, in 2015, I ventured into the lifestyle space, you know, coming from the bigger brands, moving to a smaller company, commune hotels at that time, they don't exist anymore. They became two roads after a while and then two roads got acquired by Hyatt. Yeah. And, and once you make that move to the independent lifestyle space, you know, and, and you realize, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit that they, that they have, you know, from having a great idea to implementation when there's not much red tape in between. Once you get used to that, it's pretty addictive, you know. So since then I've never looked back,

This episode features the one and only President of Atrium Hospitality, Rob Mangiarelli, as he sits down and talks with Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree on all things hospitality. These two experts share incredible knowledge and insights on various topics that give hoteliers valuable information on how to make their mark in the industry. If you’ve been following the series thus far, you should know that these industry leaders provide listeners with knowledge and insights you can only get on the Suite Spot podcast. Suite Spot Podcast · 110 - Hospitality Trailblazers: Rob Mangiarelli Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check-out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining me. I am coming to you again from the Content Creation Studio here at Travel Media Group Headquarters, and we are continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. We are very excited, about our next guest who I'll introduce just in a second, but for those that might be listening to this for the first time, this series we started back at the end of 2022. It is all about the people and groups in our industry that are pushing us forward. We know over the past couple years, and we'll even get into it with our guests, how much our industry has changed and what to look forward to towards the future in those trailblazers that are pushing us there. So with that being said, I am very excited to bring in a first time guest to the Suite Spot, Rob Mangiarelli, President at Atrium Hospitality. Rob, welcome to the Suite Spot. Rob Mangiarelli : Ryan, thanks for having me. It's great to be on with you. Ryan Embree: Yeah, absolutely. We're gonna have a little bit of fun today talking about, Atrium Hospitality. We'll talk a little bit about the industry, get some predictions out of you. We won't hold you to them, but as I like to do with all of our first timers on the Suite Spot, we work in an industry where people really can come from all places, degrees, backgrounds and end up to where they are. So I love starting with this, especially in this Trailblazer series. Tell us a little bit about your background and the journey that led you to Atrium Hospitality. Rob Mangiarelli : Yeah, this is a great question and it's something I talk about, every week when I'm traveling and I'm talking to our teams. I fell into this industry, by accident like a lot of people who have come into it. I never thought that you could have a career in the hotel business. I was an economics major at Stanford and my goal coming out of college was either to go to law school or to become a math teacher. And I didn't wanna work in a big city. And I went back home to Colorado Springs where I grew up and while I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, I started working night audit at a Holiday Inn and I was working night audit because I loved playing golf in the morning after I got off work. And I thought, how cool I'll do this. And, you know, every morning the general manager would come down and he'd read the PNL cause I do the daily report overnight. He'd ask how business was, and we started talking about this as a business and I thought, wow, this is pretty cool. And six months after that I got promoted and six months after that I got promoted again. And then I started, I saw this job opportunity for Hyatt Hotels pop up, up in Denver. I drove up there and I had six interviews in back to back to back. They just said, wait here, let me talk to somebody else. And, they offered me the job and, you know, 25 years with Hyatt Hotels. And I moved around a lot,

Join Suite Spot Host and Marketing Director Ryan Embree as he sits down with TMG Chief Technology Officer, Jason Lee, to discuss the new integration of Instagram Reels into the OneView platform.  This episode details how hoteliers can use the OneView platform to easily create Instagram Reels and upload them directly to their social media sites with just one click for their followers to interact, engage with, and reach new travelers. Suite Spot Podcast · 109 - TMG Announces Instagram Reels & Video Content Creation For Hotels Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check-out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Okay, hello everyone and welcome to the Suite Spot. My name is Ryan Embree, the host of The Suite Spot. Thank you for joining us today. We've got a very special episode. I feel like I say that all the time, but there's a couple unique things about this episode. One, we are in our brand new content creation studio, AKA the Digital Marketing Den. We spent the last couple months revamping our entire studio, podcast studio for you, the listener, to make sure we had better audio quality for you, but also visuals. So if you were to go to YouTube right now, go to Travel Media Group's YouTube page, you would actually see and hear us. This is the first time we are doing video. We are so excited. We have a very familiar guest. Jason, this is the first time, if you can believe it, that we've been face-to-face doing an episode of the Suite Spot with as many as we've done since 2020. It's crazy. But welcome back to the Suite Spot, audibly and visually. Jason Lee: Yeah, this is awesome. It's, it's really awesome in here. You guys did a great job. Ryan Embree: Thank you so much. But we also have some awesome stuff to talk about. What you have been doing, Jason. So I'm gonna give the floor to you and talk about, you know, an amazing announcement. One of our most popular, episodes was the Instagram reels episode. I think year to date is our most popular episode. There are a lot of hoteliers that are interested in it, but it's not just Instagram reels. We're talking about video content today. That's right. So, let's jump in. I always love to kind of think, you know, take a couple steps back to get to where we are today. Why did you and your team decide to make this upgrade and, and create video content for hotels? Jason Lee: Well, I mean, obviously it's a must in the toolkit of any hotel marketer, you gonna have to have video and then looking at reels, looking at TikTok. Video content is extremely popular and extremely viral. So the things that are produced are seen, and it's not just seen by your audience. They're seen all over the place. So, last July, I think is when Meta made the decision to open up reels into their API. So making it available for developers like us to be able to offer it. And at the time we were really excited and I think it was probably an answer to what was happening on TikTok. They were like, we're gonna open this up and let it happen, but it, it made it available. So you have reels for Instagram obviously, but then there were also reels on Facebook. And so, making that all kind of come together and that's why our team did this. And so we had the capability of putting reels out a while ago. So, but we also wanted a way for you to do that. And I think what a lot of marketers have trouble with is what do I put out? How do I create a video? Do I need like an editing studio? You know, what do I need to do to create a video? And we've simplified it and we've made it a really cool part of our platform where you can just make a video from your media gallery. Ryan Embree: You've made it so simple.

Tune in to this insightful episode and join host Ryan Embree as he and Linda give you the 411 on everything OCI Hospitality. This podcast episode includes amazing information and expertise for hoteliers looking to connect with their travelers, increase bookings, and increase revenue.  Suite Spot Podcast · 108 - Hospitality Trailblazers: Linda Saron Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. I mentioned it before in past episodes, but we are getting rolling right along with our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. This is the first time you're hearing this. This is something we started right at the end of 2022, where we're interviewing and bringing on the Suite Spot some of those individuals and groups that are pushing our industry forward as we go into 2023. Beyond such an exciting chapter for our industry, I've got an amazing guest, another first-timer here with me, Linda Saron, President and COO of OCI Hospitality. Linda, welcome to the Suite Spot. Linda Saron: Thanks, Ryan. I appreciate it. Ryan Embree: And I hear you are right up the road from our, Travel Media Group headquarters in Tampa. You have some exciting things in the works over there in Tampa? Linda Saron: Yeah, we're so excited. Yesterday we officially closed on a new OCI Hospitality property, the Double Tree, Rocky Point Waterfront. It is a beautiful location and an awesome team, and we're so excited to welcome them into our portfolio. Ryan Embree: Well, that is absolutely exciting news and we're certainly gonna talk about all the things that you've got rollin' here with OCI Hospitality in 2023, but off to a very, very, hot start. And next time we'll have to have you in our podcast studio over here. You just right up the road in Tampa. So. Awesome. Well, before we get talking about OCI Hospitality, I wanna talk about your journey. You know, every single guest that I have here on the Suite Spot, we always like to say, you know, what led you to hospitality? Sometimes it's starting in the industry, sometimes it's just by fate. So, tell us a little bit about your background. What led you to OCI Hospitality? Linda Saron: Absolutely. You know, Ryan, I think for me it was fate. It was meant to be. I started out not to age myself, but I started working in the hospitality industry about 24 years ago. I popped into a hotel thinking, gosh, maybe I could work the front desk and help in housekeeping and do my homework while I was in college. I started working for a small owner operator, a gentleman named John Willie, who still remains close to my heart. He was an engineer by trade and decided to use his money, because he was tired of some of the bureaucracy in General Electric. So he took his money and he bought a hotel and he was truly an engineer. So I joined him and he was the owner and operator. So, I was in college and had a very interesting experience with him. He didn't necessarily interact with guests the best. After working with him for a little bit, he really gave me the opportunity to take on some of the guest challenges we were experiencing and housekeeping challenges. And before I knew it, he was asking me to pay the real estate taxes and come up with a sales and marketing plan. So I worked with him all through college and had a great experience with John. He actually spoke to me and convinced me that I needed to stay in hospitality. I had intended to go on and pursue law school, and he had created a chart. I'll never forget, I went into the back office of the hotel and he had created a ...

Join TMG Marketing Director Ryan Embree and Vice President of Product and Technology Patrick O’Brien on this episode as they analyze and give insight into the top 5 guest sentiment trends of 2022.  You will learn about the most talked about topics and how travelers felt towards them so you can adjust your hotel operations for the new year. Suite Spot Podcast · 107 - Top 5 Guest Sentiment Trends of 2022 Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. We have made it 2023, but today we are going to talk all about 2022. Yes, this is one of our annual episodes. We've done it, I think now for two or three years. Want to welcome Patrick O'Brien, Vice President of Product and Development and Technology. Back to the Suite Spot. Patrick, welcome back. Patrick O'Brien: Thank you so much for having me. Ryan Embree: Yes, and we've got a great episode for you today. If you've listened to the Suite Spot before, you've heard this around this time of year, as you know, we are the premier solution provider for the hospitality industry and reputation and review response. And with that comes a lot of data. If you've listened to me and you listened to a lot of episodes, you know, I love data, give so many analytics, insights, blueprints into what we as hoteliers can do to improve our guest experience on property. And this episode is all about that data. We are gonna be looking at the top five sentiment trends in 2022. But first, Patrick, this is always a question that literally makes my jaw drop every time I ask it. I know we hit a incredible milestone. We had a whole episode dedicated to it. The 1 million guest review mark that we at Travel Media Group and your respond & resolve team has responded to. Congratulations on that feat. But how many reviews do your respondent resolve team respond to each month for hotels? Patrick O'Brien: Well, first off, thank you very much. That was an exciting, you know, milestone to hit. And you know, I think the crazy thing with that, you look at that number and then you look at where we were last year and where we're moving to, just the kind of the snowball effect of those amount of reviews and all that our team is getting accomplished is, is really significant. And the number of reviews month to month obviously varies. It really based on kind of trends that you'd expect to see where the review flow will increase fairly dramatically around spring break and summer travel and around holiday travel in 2022, our team responded to just under 220,000 reviews. Or, you know, if you average that out, it'd be around 18,000 a month with our highest level occurring in July at 23,800 reviews. And I think while that number is really impressive, and when you look at it in regards to our million reviews, it's very impressive. Our team treats every response good or bad, really like a mini PR opportunity for our customers. So not only are we ingesting and understanding the customer review, we are also identifying all the qualifiable sentiment areas in that review, we're crafting a response, providing an opportunity for the customer to approve that response and give feedback. So really be part of that conversation. And then our team has a separate analyst review, the combination of written response and custom feedback, really again for grammar clarity and consistency before they post that response to our clients guest and their potential guest to see. So that number actually really represents 220,000 written responses, 220,000 customer approvals, 220,000 grammar edits, and 220,

The final Suite Spot episode of 2022 is here! Sit down with host Ryan Embree and Travel Media Group President Dana Singer as they reflect on the progress TMG has made over the past year and relish the amazing achievements it brought with it.  From exciting innovations like Social 2.0 and TMG Translations, to the 1 million reviews responded to milestone, these two aficionados cover all the highlights of 2022.  Listen now to bring in the new year with Ryan, Dana, and all of TMG. Suite Spot Podcast · 106 - 2022 Year in Review with Dana Singer Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio.   Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. I am super excited for this episode, our last episode of 2022, but this is an annual episode. This is kind of a Suite Spot tradition now. We've done this for about three years. We're taking a break. If you've been following with our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer series, we're taking a slight break, but we're gonna be back in 2023 with some great guests lined up. If you're just hearing about this for the first time, this is all about those hoteliers and hotel groups that are pushing our industry forward as we go into this new chapter. But I would almost consider today's episode somewhat of a trailblazer's topic. We've got Dana Singer with us. She is the President of Travel Media Group. Dana, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Dana Singer: Yeah, thank you Ryan. Good morning. Pleasure to be here. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and we're super excited to have you. And with Dana's voice, that can only mean one thing. We are here for our TMGs year in review, and as I mentioned at the top of this episode, this is one of my favorite episodes of the year. We do this once a year because it's, we are in an industry and we work in digital marketing, which is constantly evolving in 2020, 2021, 2022. Obviously our main topic of conversation, Dana, was all about the pandemic COVID 19 and moving through that, there was a lot of uncertainty. It feels like as we move into 2023, we finally have maybe a path, right? And, and things are getting back, I'm afraid to say it, but things are getting back to that new normal, and we're moving into this new chapter for our industry and TMG as a business. So reflecting back on 2022, I'd like to start with just talking about maybe some of the most significant technology development and maybe share the impact that they've had on our hotel partners. Dana Singer: It was definitely an exciting year, for the industry and for TMG overall. And we made important strides with our tech innovation. All of our new developments are focused on how we can provide our partners with tools and solutions that enable important competitive advantages. As I look back, the launch of Social 2.0, which is a part of our OneView platform, has been very well received. This update enables our partners to build their social media profiles more effectively through connected accounts, post scheduling, approval processes, and re-engineered media galleries, just to name a few. It's just so important to enhance our social solution because our hotel partners are connecting with their guests through these digital channels more than ever. And so with new digital platforms emerging and entering the space more frequently than ever, we're committed to staying ahead of that curve. Another exciting and significant innovation that came to fruition this year was TMG translations, and this is a part of our review response, respond and resolve solution. As we think about international travel being forecasted to c...

Join host Ryan Embree as he sits down with Hospitality Trailblazer Richard Alberigo, President & CEO of Alberigo Hotel Management. These two hospitality experts outline 2023 travel trends and traveler behavior, the true meaning of hospitality, exciting developments at Alberigo Hotel Management, and so much more. Suite Spot Podcast · 105 - TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Richard Alberigo Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, continuing our fantastic TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. Got a great guest with us, another first timer to the podcast. So very excited to welcome him on. Richard Alberigo of Alberigo Hotel Management, Richard, President and CEO. Welcome to the Suite Spot. Richard Alberigo: Hey, Ryan, thanks a lot. I'm glad to be here. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we're really excited to have you, Richard. Again, my first question, I always start out, especially with the first timers, just hearing about experience, right? This is one of those industries where if you had a hundred bucks, you could never guess. Nobody's taken the same path twice when it comes to this industry. So tell me a little bit about your hospitality experience and what ultimately that journey that led you ultimately to founding Alberigo Hotel Management. Richard Alberigo: Well, sure, Ryan. So, it was not planned at all back in the, I guess, 80's, somewhere in the mid 80's. I took a job as a bellman in a hotel, at a full service Hilton Hotel. And the industry was really not even in my mind, right? You know, I did it for money. Somebody told me, you make good money as a bellman. I did that for like two years, and they learned a lot about life as a bellman, and everybody loved Richard, you know, because, and they gave me money. They threw cash at me every night. So I came up with a big wad of cash and I'm like, this is great. Yeah, nothing better. And somebody told me, well, you know, if you wanna make this a career, Richard, you may have to work at the front desk. So I looked up at the front desk and I said, you know, well, you know, it looks like a glamor job up there. You know, I'm kind of slaving with luggage and taking people to the airport, you know. Up there, I'm kind of, I'm all that. So I took the front desk job, and then after about three months, I'm like, maybe this isn't for me, because now everybody hated Richard and nobody threw cash at me. So, you know, I, I basically took a cut and pay. So I, I hung in there, hung in there. I always like to talk to people. So I guess that was, you know, I love to talk. So I guess, that was a good thing for the front desk. So then I just worked my way up through the ranks, took a job as a, general manager about three years after that. And then, took a job with, IHG, which is the Holiday Inn Corporate Office, and did that for seven years as a, regional support person. And following that, started my own company nine years ago. I was gonna be a broadcaster, actually, that was what my job was gonna be, sports broadcasting, which I did a little bit on the, that on the side. But hey, you know, weird things happen. And now I'm a hotelier after 35 years. Ryan Embree: This is, you know, some broadcasting here, you know, on the Suite Spot podcast. But yes, bellman to former bellman. I think that's so interesting. I, I started the same way in the hospitality industry, and you do learn a lot. Front desk, you could be doing some things, you could be helping housekeeping, delivering things. But you're really talking to the guests most of the time.