For decades, hotels have been engaged in ‘co-opetition’ – but surprisingly enough, you may not even realize you’re doing it! Sharing history and pick up on groups for the greater good of everyone is just one way you’ve cooperated with your competitors… but why? What reasons do you have for doing it? Because it benefits all parties in the end to know if Group A picked up their rooms last year or not. We want to know that information for ourselves, and therefore we share it with our competitors.
- CVBs: Convention and visitors bureaus are a great example of co-opetition. CVBs for destinations near major cities often partner with their larger city competitors. Partnering with other destinations bring a greater number of people to the area while offering a customized travel experience for the customer. In the end, everyone benefits from the cooperative competition.
- City-wides: Whenever there is a large event held throughout an entire city, hotels must come together to handle the high volume. Dispersing room and meeting space booking throughout the city keeps all of the hotels busy, but not too busy that they individually can’t handle the load. City-wide co-opetition brings a large volume of visitors (and revenue) to the city without being overwhelming.
- OTAs: Sometimes hotels have a hard time coming to terms with the idea of working with Online Travel Agencies because of their high commission costs on room bookings. What some hotels fail to consider is the increased business brought in from the OTA. Many hotels cut on internal marketing costs and bring in more business by working together with OTAs.
- Readerboard Services: Readerboard services provide field research to the hospitality industry by recording the list the events that hotels display each day. Readerboard services tend to be collaborative, however. In order to read a large number of hotel readerboards each day, many different hotels must subscribe to the service in order to make up the cost of operating the service. If many different (competing) hotels didn’t collectively decide to use a readerboard service, no one would benefit from it.
So what if there were other group characteristics that would be empowering to share? Perhaps timeliness of master account payment? What about meeting space creep after the booking? Dropping shoulder dates? Excessive concessions? Why not share a few more basics of what we all wish we knew before we booked a group? With Insight 3.0 you can take power back and, instead of being on the receiving end of group reviews from Trip Advisor, you can find group information reviewed by other hotels! There is power in sharing knowledge.
