Hraba Hospitality Consulting

So apparently this launches at 1:40pm today, and I am REALLY excited.

http://millvalley.patch.com/

It is a REALLY interesting new content distribution model for community / municipal news… sort of like the old neighborhood rag (of which many still exist in paper form, (more…)

An impressive LEED Platinum for a hotel, Napa’s Bardessono.  I would like to take the time to point out that the incredibly complex reuse project from the NPS and ECB/Fort Baker Retreat Group, Cavallo Point, was just awarded LEED Gold.  Being NPS land, historic buildings, and completely “green” presented an  interesting array of problems (aka opportunities), and I am happy to say 2 years after opening it’s doors, it has finally received it’s status.  It is a shining light for the Bay Area, a stunning addition to the National Parks and GGNRA, and a model for future development being ethical and about sustainability.  I applaud (more…)

FIRST:  Daniel Craig at EHotelier is incredible funny.  Well played sir… 2010 Trends.  Hilarious for us dorky hotel types.

And… anyone that wants to look at and figure out this abstract from a couple UK universities:

A model of hotel occupancy performance for monitoring and marketing in the hotel industry

Spas adapt to these rough times:

appetizer sized spa portions… down economy forcing a reorientation of full sized treatments

green recoverings – donating used linens for the needy
a simple, PHENOMENAL program that would be easy, and (more…)

A professional acquaintance and I were communicating today about the odd nature of social media in regards to “friending”, and navigating the tightrope that is personal and professional.  Social Media and Online Communication are still very young, and it is still learning to become the “metaverse” Stephenson conjectured, or at least fantastical replication of the physical world.  As it starts to more accurately and efficiently replicate tangible existence, we will see a new vision of a social platform – something that is capable of being augmented, and adaptable enough for the most diverse of us. For now, we have the frustrating complexity of navigating our professional selves, and awkwardly surrendering our personal lives in lieu of building a professional network.

The question she asked was “How do you decide who to friend when someone finds your profile off of the page you administer?”

This is the million dollar question.  The online world is slowly revealing itself to be a (more…)

So…

This is a fairly funny, interesting article about the complexity of social ads, and how they can exploit any of your proprietary data for their own ends…. in that you agree it isn’t proprietary anymore by uploading it to the site.  IE:  Complain all you want, but if you are on a social media site, they own you.  Some try to be (more…)

Spot on and completely hilarious, I am sure many of you have felt this frustration. Apparently, everything is negotiable nowadays, eh? This makes it nice and ridiculous, for easy lunch time digesting.

Once again, I got carried away with a response to a blog post, and decided to expound on it.  I am sure this counts as real business right?

Newsweek’s Budget Travel has a great article about TripAdvisor trying to deal with the long coming revelation that many of their users and reviews are not legitimate.  This is, frankly, a huge blow to the site, and should pose a happy problem in it’s early adolescence as they deal with all the changes that come along with growing into adulthood.  Frankly, I am thrilled that this may provoke User Generated Content sites to seek the same verification model other sites have.

At any rate, this is vital to all of us, and it recalls some of my previous post (which I seem to mention once or twice):

You know I am skeptical of social media, whether speaking of Facebook’s lack of meaningful interaction, or Flickr’s nebulous TOS.  In general, I have had major concerns since my yelp research project, and resulting thoughts on ethics in social media. I had even mentioned in January that Yelp should consider verification processes.

One scotch fueled evening my jocular side protruded a wee bit and I became a prankster. To be honest it wasn’t to learn the lesson I did, rather just good fun.  I speak of the Ryan Air Twitter spoof of mine, which got considerable attention in traditional media (namely because Ryan Air claimed @ryanaironline was their account).  It  helped me realize that there is a grave concern for brands and trademarks, and both (more…)

Another “coffee break” post that has nothing to do with hotels, and is just waxing about the nature of tech, or being dorky, etc. So here ya go….

My friend was commenting about the contest, started 8th of June, giving away 30 iphones in 30 days. I was (more…)

A colleague and I were bemoaning the difficulty with modern customer service, and the fact that so many tech support numbers are no longer offered as toll free unless it is someone like HP or Dell. Per usual, I fanatically inject my own experiences into the situation, and muse about the long and wild road of in-room phones at hotels… specifically the way technological innovation and advancement has, constantly, caught our industry unaware to the point that we shoot ourselves in the foot.

It isn’t right not to have access to free phone tech for a product, but it is the way modern business is happening. Telephony has altered greatly (understatement) in the last two decades…and property level we are still calling them “PBX”. What’s more is that the IT guys at hotels are well versed enough to know just to ignore it.  I have seen one or two try to explain.. “Well the PBX doesn’t really exist anymore”, the GM will point to the operator, and then the IT guy capitulates with a shrug.

We hotels used to gouge consumers for phone calls because they had no choice, and it was a BRILLIANT revenue stream. Then came calling cards, and hotels started losing lots of revenue… and per our typical furrowed brow, it took us a couple years to figure out why. Even dial-up modems for AOL and prodigy services were (more…)

Basically… email has been around 40 years. Wave is a rebuild of the concept, building email as it would look with all the modern tools in today’s world. From our perspective, Wave is going to be perfect for hotels, eventually replacing outlook and slimming down on unnecessary meetings, facilitating real time business.

Watching the hour and twenty minutes was better than a sci-fi movie for a (more…)