Renzo Iorio: "We try to stay connected, of course, as much as we can.  We think that during the stay of the client, which I do think that is an important task that we have to comply with.  And in this sense all the investment that we are doing in order to … how to ... the check-in, this function is devoted not to reduce the contact but to allow the contact with our people and with the guest in a constructive way and an emotional way rather than just in procedure and doing things.  Then it’s important that a good measure of communication on emails, on the stimulation by the web is there, especially to be able to listen to our client through the guest perception etc is there.  Probably something more should be done in social media, mainly in terms of listening in freedom what our client is telling about us, both in the way of increasing and upgrading our performance.  But also in terms of understand how far the client understand what we are trying to do in the hotel, so really to better communicate.  I am not sure that using social media in terms of commercial or a way to promoting is something which is efficient in this sense."  

Renzo Iorio: "The main problem is to be on one side, very visible on the net, because 85% of the decision of a holiday, of a trip, it starts on the web.  So it’s crucial to be there as a company and as a destination, hopefully both together. Then it’s important in terms of infrastructure that the hotel has a large connection, a very efficient connection.  I am not thinking that the IT tools, gadgets, tablets etc is crucial, I mean I think it’s much more crucial that the device that the client is bringing with himself could be very well connected and efficient in this sense."

Peter O'Connor: "For those hotel groups, right now what they’re doing is they’re basically just using demographic data and a small amount of preference data about their customers to do their target marketing.  But you can take it so much further.  So you can take it into operations and you can use those preferences to customise the guest experience.  This is starting to happen.  Just Monday here when I checked into a hotel, not to this hotel, two days before I received an e-check-in email which was really interesting, being a technology guy this interested me.  I obviously clicked on it and they allowed me to check-in to the hotel two days in advance.  When my room was available on Monday I got an SMS with the little 3D barcode which allowed me to go to the hotel, flash the barcode and receive my key.  Great.  Now during this process they asked me about my preferences.  You know what preferences they asked about?  Smoking or non-smoking, there is a missed opportunity.  They could have found out maybe just two or three key things about me this time and two or three key things next time and two or three things, key things next time.  And  they could have used that to enrich the experience and to tie me into their brand.  They didn’t, missed opportunity."

Peter O'Connor: 'The whole area of online distribution for hotels is one that is constantly evolving and it’s really confusing.  And there are few hotel companies that really get it at the moment.  Many peoples’ knowledge is probably two to three years out of date.  So for example on the panel this morning the representative from Expedia was getting a really hard time.  Now, Expedia 10 years ago was probably a naughty company, they were probably doing some things that weren’t good for hotels.  But that’s evolved.  And I found it amazing that the audience hasn’t actually evolved in their perception of the company.  But OTAs, online travel agents, they’re partners.  If you work with them they can deliver a business to you, it’s expensive but they’re providing a service, they’re putting heads in beds.  So as a result they deserve to be rewarded.  The key challenge we have for hotels working with OTAs is they don’t work with OTAs, they begrudgingly give them rooms and moan about the fact that they have to pay so much afterwards.  But most hotels are running at 60% occupancy, maybe 65, that means one-third of their rooms are sitting idle every night.  I’m a businessman, at the end of the day I would prefer to sell those rooms at 75% or 55% or even 50% rather than not sell them at all.  And yes, you can talk about the damage to your brand, you can talk about so many different problems, but at the end of the day we have to make money.  The other area that was quite interesting today as well is we were talking about developing business models, so one of the models that’s developing most rapidly at the moment is the whole area of flash sales.  And today we were lucky, we had a representative from Groupon on the panel and again this is a model that’s misunderstood by many hoteliers.  They see a large cost without seeing the benefits that Groupon can bring in terms of reach, in terms of targeting.  They all say, “Oh, it’s easy, we could do this for ourselves.”  But actually in reality if they try to do it for themselves it would be much more expensive."

Peter O'Connor: "Right now social networks, you look at the statistics in the UK, almost a quarter of internet users time is spent interacting with other people on social networks right now.  Hotels are very personal, there is a brand image issue, there is a connection with the customer if they do it right.  If they were to leverage social networks effectively they could actually start to talk and interact and engage with the customer.  Right now the majority of hotel chains are using social networks as an advertising media.  And unfortunately when you try to sell to people over social networks it just doesn’t work.  It’s a little bit like a very, very pushy car salesman coming to you at the bar when you’re having a drink with some friends and you’re trying to relax and all of a sudden you’ve got a guy in there trying to sell you a used car, it just doesn’t work.  It’s like an awful lot of developments that we’ve had in the electronic distribution arena, the hotel industry just doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t give it enough resources and by the time they figure it out the consumers will have moved on to something else.”

Peter O'Connor: "We have sites like TripAdvisor where reviews are being posted of our properties, good and bad. We have on the online travel agencies, reviews that are being posted as well, very few hotels are taking that opportunity to actually go in, see what consumers are saying about them and react.  If they’ve had a bad experience, trying to do some service recovery, if they’ve had a good experience thanking the customer for actually talking about it and reinforcing the good message.  If we look in other industries this is very, very common practice, in the hotel industry we’re aware of the issue but we don’t give it the resources and we don’t give it the priority that it needs.  Now, one thing I’ll add there is in order to do this you can’t do this on an amateur level, you have to be highly professional about it.  In order to do that you need tools and there are a large number of online reputation management tools out there which take those reviews, they amalgamate them together, they amalgamate what people are saying about you on Twitter, on blogs and on lots of different social media channels and they present them in a very, very concentrated format and give you the ability to respond in a consistent way."

Steve Pateman: "Sky have a great way of communicating with me about films. They know I like films.  They know I like sports.  So they connect with me in the areas of sport and films.  They sort of create a sort of connection with me in my own time and my own space.  They’re not forcing me to do something at a time that suits them.  They’re giving it to me at a time that I can choose, and it’s information I’m interested in.  And that’s why I go away and read it and then kind of watch the films and so on and so forth.  And within Santander we’re going to try to do the same, to use the data we have about people to connect with them in their time at their convenience in a way that’s useful to them.  So for example if we provided a mortgage for someone then actually we should be able to provide their house insurance without having to ask them how many bedrooms it’s got and who’s living there, because on the basis we’ve provided the mortgage we should actually know whose living there and how many bedrooms it’s got.  But we don’t, we ask them the same information again.  And I think that’s a way of turning a customer off and actually not using the data you have intelligently.  So I think you can use a huge amount from some of the new guys, some of the retailers I see and I’ve talked about, you can learn a huge amount from somebody like Sky, who are much more innovative in that space.  And you can use the data that you have on customers to find a way to connect with them that’s relevant to your business."

Robin Rowland: "We absolutely love social media, we’re probably one of the early adopters, we’ve got about 3,500 people now on our email database, which is the old news, we’ve got over 100,000 people on Facebook, about 25,000 on Twitter and you have to remember we’re still quite a small business.  But what’s interesting to me is the two bits of feedback that I get, are about 50,000 people go online and give us feedback on their meal experience, so that’s always helpful.  But as helpful, we have over 1,000 of our team members on Facebook and they’re chattering away to each other. So, we and the whole company is kind of run with the mindset of a 20 year old and we’re listening and we’re learning and we’re actually trying to be a little bit experimental in terms of how we communicate with both our guests and our team members.  We love social media and it works incredibly well for us."

Robin Rowland: "The way we keep on top of our sort of our data, and particularly dealing with our Twitter feed, is we have a one person who is dedicated to looking after that information flow and we’ve done quite a bit of profiling work with different people in the company.  And one person seems to be able to manage the traffic we’re getting at the moment.  That probably will change.  It’s where, I mean half our marketing spend is now on the social media world so no doubt that probably expands as other sort of media becomes more dormant, I guess, going forward."

David Fenton: "Obviously the emergence of the online travel agents has been a hugely disruptive technological change, massive effects on profit margins and the elements of a power struggle going on in the sector.  The other big technological change of course is social media which is completely changing the way that we experience hotels, I mean we've all read a thousand reviews before we even show up.  We're sifting through, dismissing or choosing certain hotels on the basis of what other people said.  Whereas in the past of course it was much more on the basis of personal experience, a brand that you trusted or maybe the recommendation of a friend or a colleague.  So this is massively changing things, shifting the focus towards greater transparency and really forcing hotels to raise their game across every single area of service.  Because we all know what it's like when we look at these reviews, you always focus on the one thing the hotel's got wrong and think I'm not sure I want to stay there, at least that's what I do.  That's maybe not fair but I think that's how consumers operate."

Cyril Ranque: "The main benefit of mobile is being able to have a constant connection with the customer, which is not what the website can do, right.  I mean with mobile you're literally in the hand of the customer all the time.  So, to the extent that you can build some technology that provides information that is relevant to the consumer either before they book, after they book, before they check in or during their stay or after their stay.  Then you have a place in their hand.  S,o it is a unique opportunity to connect one to one to consumers that the desktop  does  not provide or the phone does not provide."

"I think we are all are looking for luxury, but luxury in the past was maybe a crystal chandelier and white gloves service. Today it is more in the hybrid environment, when you flip open your laptop that you have an internet connection.  Historically we would be categorised by gender or by income or by origin or by, well, whatever. Today we travel in jeans, we have on the cheap t-shirt. We have a designer watch, we sip champagne, and then we take the bus home. And we do that both for leisure and for business.  What we feel is that today, people gravitate to a lifestyle. And you wanna belong to a certain lifestyle. So with the day and age of Apple iPhones and computers. We take a strip of sushi. We would like to have fashion and architecture, and err beautiful objects around us. And that provides us an environment that we’re comfortable in, or that we aspire to. And that’s what we try to provide uh at citizenM."

Michael Levie: "I figure that if I can get a cup of coffee for three bucks and get free internet with it, then where we sell our rooms a little bit higher than that cup of coffee we should provide internet for free. I think it is just completely stupid not to provide it for free. We’ve gone much further. We provide our content on television free, because they’re usually at mid-market segment, cannot be put on the expense report. We’ve even gone as far as voice over IP phone systems in the hotels where we charge Skype rates to guests.  If our guests associate it with your brand and love your brand then that reflects in the rate and that should cover everything. That’s it. Don’t nickel and dime people."