The essence of hotel management is balancing business and management education with a thorough grounding in all practical aspects of the hotel. That's all the essence of the 50 blogs on this resource list, from analytics to anecdotes, the authors of these blogs all present extraordinary insight in the various aspects of hotel-hospitality management. So read on. All of these are worth your attention.
The Analytic Hospitality Executive
SAS has partnered with the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University to find solutions to hospitality industry challenges. In this blog the authors leverage the existing knowledge of the faculty, existing research and the experience of industry peers to answer the questions that hospitality executives face every day: Questions regarding topics such as revenue management and price optimization, social media analysis, sustainability, patron/guest lifetime value optimization, labor planning and marketing automation and optimization.
Are Morch: Hotel Blogger
Are Morch coaches hotels on increasing occupancy and revenue, and how to keep customers happy through the use of social media and collaboration. Hotels and social media, he says, is his my passion. Value propositions is the core of my vision.
The Blue Magnet Blog
The authors believe in friendly, attentive, effective customer service and tend to our clients and business partners as a hotel does its own guests. Their mission, they say, is to help hoteliers understand and integrate powerful online marketing tactics and innovative solutions that will help drive business online. And their motto: quite simply, "attracting visitors through sites and search," by emphasizes not only an ability to drive qualified traffic to customers websites, but also the magnet pull of the company as they endeavor to attract the most talented marketing team, the most exciting clients and the most valuable vendor partnerships.
Boutique Hospitality Management
The blogs produced by Boutique Hospitality Management were conceived by Keith Space. Space, as some of your might know, started this company in 1997 just after having worked alongside Ian Schrager at Ian Schrager Hotels and Morgans Hotel Group. Space has taken a unique approach in hospitality and formed a company focused on managing boutique hotels and resorts as a full service unique hotel management company. An interesting take on this upscale segment of the business.
Boutique Hotel News
An online hotel news and networking resource for boutique and lifestyle properties. The boutique hotel sector is booming – both small independents and large multi-nationals are investing heavily to establish a presence in this exciting market.Hotels tailored to this sector are opening at an ever-increasing rate, defying tough economic conditions. For the latest news, operating tips and other trivia, check out this blog regularly.
Boutique Travel Blog
Those who work in boutique hotels will enjoy this blog, which features interesting stories from around the world, from luxury travel and unique hotels to sustainable tourism and eco-chic lifestyle, from quirky restaurants to the ultimate in fine dining.
Confessions of a Hotel Insider
This is what blogging is all about: musings that both hotel workers and guests should read. From his introduction (no one says this better than the author): "I've worked in hotels for more than a decade. I've checked you in, checked you out, oriented you to the property, served you a beverage, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room service (before and, sadly, after), cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&M's out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. From New Orleans to New York, I've played by hotel rules and, in the process, learned every aspect of the industry. Due to the fact that I just don't care anymore, I will now offer easy and never-publicized tips and tricks." Awesome.
eHospitality Times
Another very informative hospitality blog is eHospitalityTimes. I would say that this blog is more feature-based than news-based, as the stories are broken up into overall categories such as "Tourism," "Marketing," and so on. This blog is also more "hospitality" based, so anyone that works at a hotel, from marketers to HR can benefit from reading it. Even hotel chefs can procure useful information, as there is a "Food & Beverage" section with cooking and presentation tips and news.
E-Marketing Associates Blog
E-Marketing Associates bloggers read all of the blogs relevant to hospitality marketing.They also sometimes feature hotels that are excelling at Timeline, social travel sites, and mobile travel applications, all while providing discourse on te latest in social media.
The Escapist
The blog informs, inspires and entertains. It keeps readers up-to-date with the latest goings on in the world of travel, featuring articles about art, design, shopping, fine dining, destinations and topical events. Other postings bring you information about global cultural events, from fashion exhibitions to national celebrations, interspersed with feature posts. Also the blogs features interviews with clued-up experts in the travel industry.
Fits Small Business: Hotel Marketing
Desirable guest amenities, competitive pricing, beautiful photos on a slick website– all of this is part of a successful hotel marketing strategy. However, the most important thing you can do to market your hotel is to develop relationships. Not just relationships directly with your guests, but with all the people or agencies who come in contact with your guests. In this guide, we'll discuss the top three actions you should take right now to create a killer marketing strategy for your hotel.
Guest Driven
Love this blog spot and its presentation. GuestDriven is revolutionizing the hotel industry they claim. Well… but they are extremely interesting and informative. They give hoteliers the opportunity to engage with their guests on a deeper level, giving them more chances to create relationships, build brand advocacy, and drive revenue. Their staff includes people with a background in hospitality, a keen eye for detail, and a passion to continue to build the best Mobile Guest Engagement platform available to hoteliers.
How May We Hate You?
Sometimes you just need to have some fun. Here are blogs by two comedian/writer/actor people trying to make it big in New York City. After falling into concierge work, they started posting their funniest, most bizarre experiences on their private Facebook pages. At the prodding of their friends, they started this blog as a way of cataloging everything. In under a month, they've reached 14,000 followers and have been featured on the New York Observer, Daily Mail, Readers Digest, Huffington Post, BusinessWeek, Mashable, Brokelyn, and many other news and entertainment sites. Their employers do not in any way endorse our blog. However, they're okay with us being open about our own identities, as long as we don't reveal who we work for. We just keep our actual full names off the page to put one step between us and the blog. Managers need to read this…not just for entertainment value, but for educating themselves.
Horizon Hospitality Blog
Useful tips and ideas from the folks at Horizon Hospitality Associates. Blogs like the importance of restaurant reviews, the cost of a bad hire and how to avoid it, and what to do about finding good hospitality employees are wonderful starting points for discussion in any hotel management office.
Hotel Marketing.com
Although this blog's name solely mentions marketing, it is critical that anyone with a stake in the hotel business, not just marketers, read this blog. It aggregates stories from a number of sources in online travel, marketing and hotel marketing. Many of the posts answer specific questions you may already have about hospitality and marketing, such as "14 reasons no one talks to your business on Facebook" and "How to drive direct hotel bookings."
Hospitality.net
This is a great blog that every hotelier should be reading. The daily newsletter is jam-packed full of information varying from hospitality industry news to marketing and customer service tips specifically designed for hotels. It even details staff movements at relevant hotels all around the world as well as industry events. If you're looking to further your career in hospitality, there are even lists of schools, job opportunities, and useful books to read.
The Hospitality Blog
Cornell is internationally known for its hotel management programs. Every Friday, the authors highlight some of the most interesting articles they've been reading from around the web. They cover hospitality marketing, hotel revenue management, hospitality social media marketing, SEO, SEM, and a few others for fun.
Hospitality Labor and Employment Law Blog
The two authors of this very important blog spot are Michael S. Kun and Aaron F. Olsen. Kun works in the Labor and Employment practice in his firm's Los Angeles office. He is the national Co-Chairperson of the firm's Wage and Hour, Individual and Collective Actions practice group. He is also the national co-chairperson for the firm's Hospitality Employment and Labor Law Outreach. He represents clients in such diverse industries as hospitality, transportation, health care and banking. Olsen is an associate in the labor and employment practice.
Hospitality Marketing
Cvent created this blog to help venues attract and host impressive meetings and events. Group business is a massive and frequently overlooked area of business for hotels and other properties. Learn how to increase group business at your property, while at the same time raising the bar on meetings and events.
Hospitality Trends
Founded in 1998 by Thomas Wahl and initially focusing on the hotel industry, Hospitality Trends has evolved into the leading online information and knowledge base for not only the hospitality industry, but also the all and many other channels. This blog spot, what the authors call their "network," syndicates content to a worldwide audience and targets segments including chains, groups, individual owners and operators, industry associations, educational organizations, consumer and industry press, news aggregators, consultants and suppliers. Users are aggregated through portals, corporate intranets, association web sites, newsletters and both public and private content feeds. A terrific source of insider industry information.
Hotel Chatter
The top ranked hotel blog as measured by blog rank, and worth noting for its wide scope of information about new hotels, sites, upcoming industry events, innovations. No location in the world is overlooked, from the U.S. to Europe, Asia, Africa. Well worth a regular click at the start of your day.
Hotel Cluster
Hotel industry news, trends, insights & travel tips. One of the recent entries is "Eight Ways to Become an Outstanding Hotel Manager." Hotel Cluster is one of those blogs that you need to refer to on a regular basis, because it is constantly updated. Subjects are generally of interest to managers, from personnel issues, to front desk and currency exchange.
Hotel Law Blog
Incredibly interesting series of blogs covering a myriad of legal topics, all under the banner of hospitalitynet.org. Some of the recent topics include Using condo hotels for financing new hotel development: Traditional condo hotel structures as "non-securities" and ADA Compliance & Defense Lawyer: FAQs on "service animal" requirements of the ADA. What every hotelier needs to know. Why Uber was sued over service animals. Vitally important material, if that is your specialty.
Hotel Manager Talk
Hotel Manager Talk is a podcast and website dedicated to hotel employees hosted/produced/created by author Kevin Levine. Unfortunately, the hotel industry isn't a 9-5 job and thus hotel employees don't always have the time to research what's going on in their world, Levine writes. The podcast is a collection of news stories gathered from various resources that you will hopefully find interesting, helpful and relative. Stories range from news, to trends, to management issues in an effort to keep fellow hoteliers up to date and give some good topics for water-cooler talk.
Hotel Managers Group Blog
Since the Company, Hotel Managers Group, was founded in 1985, they have been providing award-winning hotel operation and management services for properties ranging from small, individually owned boutique hotels to major chain hotels and luxury resorts in the United States. HMG here provides creative solutions for hotel owners who are willing to "take the next step". That next step may be a simple diagnostic review of operations, marketing, and accounting at the property level to determine where the hotel is positioned with respect to competition and what strategies should be implemented to increase market share.
Hotel News Now
What we like about this particular blog is its look into the future from the perspective of someone who knows the business inside out. Hotel News Now is certainly a blog spot for anyone to bookmark for the latest industry news. Highlighted here is only one of their many blogs.
Hotels
We would be remiss not to mention the Hotels magazine website, which features a number of blogs written by their staff, and people in the industry. Some recent blogs focused on the food service industry, design, and branding. Really worth your time, even if you do have a subscription.
Hospitality Operations and Management
This is a career information blog authored by the folks at Fortis.edu. That said (and they do present a large number of career option blogs), their hospitality operations and management blogs are all-encompassing, covering all aspects of a career that prospective students would want to understand. Sample articles: "How to Become a Hotel Manger" and "What is Considered Excellent Customer Service."
Hotel Management, for a New Generation of Hoteliers
To remain competitive, hotels will move all business processes and guest interaction to the internet. This blog covers topics relevant for hotel business in the future. Some of the issues explored are: New forms of guest interaction with hotel: What processes? What devices? What will it look like? How will it work? Distribution of rooms: Online travel agencies? Hotel website? Brand website? GDS? Associations? And IT Infrastructure in hotels: Despite the Cloud, some hardware will remain in the hotel. What hardware is still necessary for the hotel of the future?
Hotel Marketing Strategies
Re-launched January 2014 (it was first online in 2008), Hotel Marketing Strategies is a crowd-sourced collection of photos and screenshots showing creative hotel marketing in action -contributed by a global community of people working to use technology to create better travel experiences for hotel guests and drive revenue growth for owners.
Hotel F&B (Food and Beverage) Blog
Hotel food and beverage professionals share experience, skills and commentary. These hotelier blogs reflect a variety of unique career perspectives and real-life workplace stories, observations and opinions.
I-Escape Travel Blog: Hip Hideaways
i-escape.com is a UK-based website dedicated to helping discerning independent travellers find and book exciting and unusual places to stay in some of the world's most beautiful and fascinating locations. The site features a growing collection of our favourite small hotels, guesthouses, retreats, eco-lodges, private rental properties and unforgettable travel experiences, all of them personally visited by the authors and reviewed with total honesty, great detail and lots of photos. The authors are not travel agents or tour operators, and this is an independent, highly researched interactive travel guide. For hotel managers, you want to be high on their list of likes. Great bloggers too.
Hotel Reputation Management
Hotel Reputation management is recognized as the practice of monitoring and influencing the image of your property throughout the web. The concept arose within public relations but quickly shifted its focus towards newly emerging review sites, social media and search engine results. Barely any other industry is likewise affected by the impact of Reputation Management as the hospitality industry. This blog is unique in its discussion of these relevant issues.
HSMAI
Invaluable material from the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI). The association, of course, is committed to growing business for hotels and their partners, and is the industry's leading advocate for intelligent, sustainable hotel revenue growth. The association provides hotel professionals and their partners with tools, insights, and expertise to fuel sales, inspire marketing, and optimize revenue.
Institute of Hospitality Blog
The Institute is the global professional body for individual hospitality managers and aspiring managers. Established in the United Kingdom in 1938, the Institute has been promoting education and professional development in hospitality, leisure and tourism for over 75 years. Institute members are now located in over one hundred countries. As a registered charity and membership organization, the Institute promotes ethics, hospitality management standards, continuing professional development (CPD) and hospitality management education through its member benefits as well as its UK and international Hospitality & Tourism Management Qualifications.
Little Hotelier
Little Hotelier is an all in one accommodation management system specifically thought about, designed and built for B&B's, guest houses and small hotels. It's a very smart and powerful channel manager, a commission free booking engine for your own website and an intuitive, easy to use front desk system – which together, is everything you need to easily run the daily operations of your property. It's packed full of clever technology without the hefty price tag.
Living With Legends
This is the Hotel Chelsea (we ALL know how famous that hotel in lower Manhattan is) blog, but it's much more than that. It's hip. It's cool. It's about the neighborhood. The arts. And the changing scene in New York City. We love this site, this blog, and you will too. For a real taste of what New York is.
Not Always Right
We love this blog. What a hoot. But important stuff. Here is what this blog is all about, according to the author: "We've all heard the popular phrase, "The customer is always right," but is it true? Can the customer always be right? Not Always Right is a website that tells the other side of the story by collecting memorable and often hilarious tales from employees that prove, The customer is not always right. Although we believe that customers deserve to be treated right, so do the employees and the other folks that serve them. Not Always Right is about leveling the playing field for those of us who toil and sweat every day trying to juggle demanding customers and often unreasonable corporate expectations."
On the Fly
On the Fly is a blog devoted to inspiring food and beverage professionals of all levels by connecting them to a wealth of industry resources, tips and ideas. Our team of writers work with FSW's very own product experts to bring you the best advice on equipment, kitchen tools, industry news and trends.
Owning a Hotel Blog
So, what's it like to run a hotel? Do you think that you have what it takes? There is lot to consider even before you start scouring business agents for an appropriate property. Running a hotel can be a pleasant way to make a living, and a rewarding experience. It could be something that you want to do alone or with a partner. There's lots to think about and this author lays it all out. Wonderfully written, smart, and to the point.
Reknown
Reknown develops strategy, content, training programs and guidelines to help hoteliers and travel marketers across the globe understand and adopt the latest trends, tools and best practices in online marketing, social media and reputation management. Reknown's founder Daniel Edward Craig is a former hotel general manager and marketing executive turned author and consultant. His articles are published worldwide, and he is a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events.
Saturday Briefing
Although this blog is all-things Outrigger, the author's insights are instructive and interesting. Here, you'll find insight and observations about travel, tourism, featuring Chairman Emeritus Richard Kelley's weekly blog, plus the latest news, happenings, photos, guest stories and updates on the special ‘ohana that is Outrigger ® Hotels and Resorts.
Scholarshippositions.com
Scholarship-Positions.com was started in 2007 by Oxford University graduates to help international students in finding suitable scholarships to study abroad. They claim to have helped thousands of students in securing scholarships and financial aid in the world's top universities. Their stated objective is to help international students in finding matching scholarships.
Shift Gig
Everyone's had a gig. Rahm Emanuel worked at Arby's, Sandra Bullock was a bartender. Warren Buffet worked as a grocery store clerk. Nicholas Cage sold popcorn. Doesn't matter who you are, a great gig is important. It allows you to pay your bills, gain some experience, and have some money to spend on the weekends. It can shift the way you live your life. That's why thisw blog spot empowers people to find the gig that's right for them. And they make it ridiculously easy. Shiftgig has the largest number of food/entertainment industry gigs in your area. All you have to do is Search and Apply.
Small Luxury Hotels of the World Blog
Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH) is a group of over 520 hotels spanning more than 80 countries, which together offer an infinite variety of experiences tailored especially to travellers. The authors blog away with the latest from SLH and share their passion for small luxury hotels, which are tucked away in some of the most amazing places in the world. They hope to provide you with some inspiration and ideas whilst planning your next luxury hotel stay. Instructive, too, for small hotel management.
Software Advice: The Hotel Management Blog
Software AdviceTM is a resource for software buyers. They provide detailed reviews and research on thousands of software applications, in this case software that is relevant to Hotel management. Their team of software advisors provides free telephone consultations to help buyers build a shortlist of systems that will meet their needs. Pretty cool stuff. Very helpful.
Tnooz
Tnooz is the place to get updates and commentary on how new technology affects the travel industry. Any sensible hotelier knows that the industry is rapidly changing daily with along with the technology that consumers have embraced in recent years. Tnooz is an excellent tool for keeping up with trends and popular sites such as social media, booking engines such as Expedia and Kayak, TripAdvisor, mobile applications and much more.
TriMark Blog
Dedicated to food service equipment, supplies and design. There are several aspects of the foodservice market that are changing now more than ever, and hotels are hoping to appeal to customer demands when they address these trends. Well written, nicely researched posts.
This is a guest blog for people who have enjoyed the service provided by companies listed on verygoodservice.com. If you wish to tell your story, share an experience or contribute some good customer service examples, the site managers invite you to do so. In any case, good reading.
Xotels
Great one-stop site for advice of all kinds for hotel managers. Xotels is an international hotel management company founded in 2006. From their offices in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Brussels, New York and Jakarta they support clients throughout Europe, North-America, Middle East and Asia Pacific. The site offers independent hotels know-how that allows them to outperform their local competitors including properties belonging to global hotel chains. In today's highly dynamic and rapidly evolving market place it is vital for independent hotels to have the right tools and support to become market leaders.