Briefing: The opportunity and challenge of hospitality alternatives

A report by JLL has found that serviced apartments account for less than 10% of total room inventory in London – and in UK regions account for only 3.9%. This highlights that there is still a lot of opportunity for serviced apartments and other types of alternative accommodation to grow. But are these relatively new products less attractive to investors?

Four hospitality experts discuss the performance of hotel alternatives:

JLL’s report found that there are over 1,500 serviced apartment rooms due to open in London between now and 2019. This shows that the sector is only going to become more mainstream, and with that there will be more evidence on performance for investors.

As discussed in the above videos, some regions across the globe, such as the US, have a bigger alternatives market than others. JLL states that the number of serviced apartment rooms vs hotel rooms in Singapore is higher than in London with 10% of total room supply.

In Europe, the market is still developing. According to JLL, the key serviced apartment operators at the moment are AccorHotels, The Ascott Limited, BridgeStreet Global Hospitality, Frasers Hospitality, and Go Native. They also state that some up and coming operators are Staycity, Zoku and Starwood Capital.

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Video clips produced by ybc.tv for the Hospitality Channel, including interview from industry conferences such as the IHIF conference as well as specific Hospitality Channel shoots.

Briefing: Are alternatives now mainstream?

Osprey Equity Partners recently agreed to fund an £80m development of a GoNative aparthotel in East London. They are backed by LJ Partnership.

Alternative accommodation types like aparthotels and hostels are becoming increasingly attractive to investors. More in-depth data from historic transactions and long established properties in the sector, have given investors greater insight on which to base their decisions. This is slowly bringing more products into the mainstream, as our industry experts discuss in these videos:

A report by WATG released last year showed that one attractive element of aparthotels is the cost effectiveness to build. It states that on a site with an £17.5m acquisition cost, a 4 star hotel would take £28.2m to construct and a 4 star aparthotel only £27.2m. It also states that terminal value on the aparthotel would be £93.1m and only £82.3m on the hotel, where both have an exit yield of 5%.

Another difference between hotels and aparthotels highlighted by WATG is that, in an aparthotel, rooms division accounts for some 93% of revenues, whereas hotels take a large portion of revenue from F&B and other areas.

Finally, WATG’s report showed GOP margins of 63% and 49% for the respective aparthotel and hotel.

When completed the GoNative aparthotel will be a 21 storey property. GoNative will manage the property under a hotel management agreement.

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Video clips produced by ybc.tv for the Hospitality Channel, including interview from industry conferences such as the IHIF conference as well as specific Hospitality Channel shoots.

Briefing: How competing with Airbnb has impacted hospitality

Airbnb just keeps growing. According to the website it has now had 60 million guests, 2 million listings worldwide, and is used in 34,000 cities. Summer travel with Airbnb has grown 353 times over in 5 years. In summer 2015, nearly 17 million total guests stayed with Airbnb hosts.

Other couch surfing/ hosted accommodation sites include 9flats.com, homestay.com and couchsurfing.com.

What does the growth of this type of accommodation really mean for hospitality and how does the impact vary across sectors? Our experts discuss:

Competing with Airbnb is made more complex by the fact that it offers such a variety of accommodation types. It could compete with everything from a hostel to a luxury hotel. The accommodation on offer includes yurts, RVs, boats and castles. Airbnb appeals to both holiday makers and business travellers so can impact all corners of the market at different levels.

Airbnb is typically most popular in cities. Top destinations for business travel are San Francisco, CA, London, UK and New York City, NY, and Paris, France. At the beginning of this year Airbnb also released some statistic about more surprising destinations that are gaining momentum including Chūō-ku in Osaka, Japan which had 7000% Growth in 2015, Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which had 1200% Growth, and Poncey-Highland in Atlanta, GA which had 240% Growth.

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Video clips produced by ybc.tv for the Hospitality Channel, including interview from industry conferences such as the IHIF conference as well as specific Hospitality Channel shoots.

Briefing: Guest satisfaction – Meeting expectations

A new study from J.D. Power has found that the overall hotel guest satisfaction score in the US has risen to a record high of 804 out of 1000 in 2015.

It is a different story in the UK. A survey by Hotel Info looked at guest satisfaction scores in Europe. The UK only scored 7.39 out of 10, which put them second from bottom in the list and far behind the top ranked Slovakia, which had an impressive score of 8.22.

So what makes the difference in these scores, and how important is guest satisfaction anyway? Our experts discuss how to ensure guests have what they want:

J.D. Power’s 2015 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study is in its 19th year and this is the first time the overall score has passed the 800 point, having risen 20 points from 2014. The factors covered in the score are; the reservation, check-in/check-out, guest room, food and beverage, hotel services, hotel facilities, and cost and fees.

The study suggests that there are two very important elements in achieving good scores. One is that staff anticipate needs and offer friendly service. The second is that the overall operation meets the guest’s expectations of that hotel. The expectation element will vary depending on the branding of the hotel, whether it is a luxury or a budget hotel, and the cost. Guests expect to get what they pay for, and seek out good value.

The survey put The Ritz-Carlton top of the luxury segment, and put Microtel Inn & Suites by Wyndham top of the Economy Segment in the US.

Hotel Info’s survey of six million guest evaluations compared guest satisfaction in cities in the UK.  Sheffield had the highest score in the UK at 8.03 whereas the UK’s biggest market and capital city, London, lagged behind with a score of 7.12.

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Video clips produced by yBC for the Hospitality Channel, including interview from industry conferences such as the IHIF conference as well as specific Hospitality Channel shoots.

Briefing: Online Reviews – How getting involved increases bookings

Online responses to customer reviews by hotel managers encourage bookings, according to research by TripAdvisor. The review site analysed customer usage of its pages and found that responding to 50% of reviews increased the likelihood of hotels receiving a booking enquiry by 24% (compared to not responding at all). The study places management responses as the factor with the third biggest impact on customer engagement behind the number of photos and the total number of reviews that a property has.

Experts give their views on the power of online ratings, including TripAdvisor’s Minesh Shah, who offers advice on responding to negative reviews:

TripAdvisor’s research also shows that responding to reviews increases ratings. Properties which respond to 5%-40% of recent reviews have on average a 4.04 review rating, compared to a review rating of 3.81 for those which don’t respond. The highest factor influencing bookings and clicks on the site continues to be photos, with just one image increasing engagement by 138% compared to properties with no photo.

TripAdvisor advisor is not the only review site and reviews are also integrated into OTA sites such as Booking.com. TripAdvisor is currently the largest travel site with 280 million unique monthly visitors in the second quarter of 2014 and more than 100 new contributions posted every minute.

In response to a poll by TravelClick, 78% of hoteliers said that TripAdvisor was the social media channel which drove the most bookings to their property site.

The poll also found that these hoteliers are investing in other social media with two thirds now spending on Facebook advertising. Nearly 11% of the hoteliers polled named Facebook as a booking driver with the same number mentioning Google+. Facebook is also integrated into the TripAdvisor site and statistics from Facebook say that users logged in through Facebook contribute more than 1 in 3 new reviews on TripAdvisor.

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Video clips produced by ybc.hpgcms.wpengine.com for the Hospitality Channel, including interview from industry conferences such as the IHIF conference as well as specific Hospitality Channel shoots.

Briefing: Disengaged employees need some inspiration

According to research by Gallup, only 13% of employees Worldwide are engaged in their work. Similarly worrying statistics have shown up across several studies in recent years. Boston Research Group, for example, found that 27% of corporate bosses and only 4% of employees believe their firms are inspiring places to work. People are vital in hospitality at all levels. Studies suggest that, when it comes to motivating teams, it can be the basics that make the difference, such as positive contact with management and a pleasant working environment.

In this briefing experts share their insights on employee engagement and motivation:

The 2013 study ‘State of the Global Workplace’ by Gallup suggests that it is important to ensure employees have good working lives. This is because “engaged employees are more likely to be ‘thriving’ – i.e., to rate their overall lives highly on a zero-to-10 scale.”

There may be many different ways of dealing with this issue across different companies and hotel brands. One element of Misha Pinkhasov’s (featured) ‘shared value’ approach to business, is to always considering things on an individual level. The approach suggests that companies as a whole need meaning so that individual employees are inspired.

Engagement, or lack thereof, also reflects in a company’s profits. Gallup estimates that employee disengagement costs Germany €112 Bn to €138 Bn per year ($151 Bn to $186 Bn) and the U.K. between £52 Bn and £70 Bn ($83 Bn to $112 Bn) per year.

A report by Towers Watson suggests that good leadership can make all the difference. It says: “in companies where both leaders and managers are perceived by employees as effective, 72% of employees are highly engaged.” This report, Global Workforce Study 2014, also states that whereas some employees may be engaged on a basic level, they are lacking the ‘enablement’ (tools and resources) and ‘energy’ (from a good work environment) to perform at their best. They say that that this ‘unsupported’ worker accounts for 19% of the global workforce.

If you’ve been sent to this page and you’re not yet on the circulation list to receive these regular briefings and you would like to sign up, you can do see here. It’s free.

Video clips produced by ybc.hpgcms.wpengine.com for the Hospitality Channel, including interview from industry conferences such as the IHIF conference as well as specific Hospitality Channel shoots.

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