Last week we hosted the first ever Indianapolis Hotel Symposium in cooperation with the Greater Indianapolis Hotel & Lodging Association.  The primary objective for the symposium was to provide an overview of trends seen at the local, regional and national levels that are impacting the hospitality industry.  This type of data is critical as each of our Indianapolis hotels is entering the planning phases for their budget, marketing plan and sales strategies for the 2009 calendar year.

To that end our ICVA team lined up a slate of experts that presented information and data to over 100 hotel general managers, directors of sales and even a few revenue managers who attended.  The outside experts that presented were:

• Dr. Michael Hicks, Director of Bureau of Business Research at Ball State University
• Vail Brown, VP Global Sales & Marketing for Smith Travel Research
• Rick Ylagan, Director of the Midwest Region for Expedia
• Jeff Eastman, President & CEO for Trends Analysis Projection LLC

This week I'll be offering some highlights from each of the presenters - beginning with Rick from Expedia.

Rick spoke mostly towards the leisure travel impact that on-line travel agents (OTAs) are having and trends they are seeing with those bookings.  He shared that travelers are not completely curtailing their travel plans, but instead are buying down - meaning they are downsizing the size or frequency of their trips and when they do travel they are sometimes staying in hotels in a lesser tier than they normally would.

Hotels trying to recapture this business need to look into better promotions and provide some additional value to the customer in order to keep their market share.  For instance, this summer it wasn't uncommon for some hotels to offer gas cards to those that booked rooms at their property.

A few good examples of hotels partnering and creating promotions here locally would be the longstanding partnerships that the General Hotels Corporation properties have had with various attractions here in the city.  For instance you can see here at the Holiday Inn North the number and variety of packages they have created to add value to a guest's stay.

He also reinforced the notion that the Internet has made the travel buying experience SO much more transparent than it ever was.  Hotels need to be keeping a close eye on the websites out there (www.tripadvisor.com for instance)where customers are sharing their experiences because customers are likely reading a sampling of recent reviews immediately before they choose their accommodations and make an on-line purchase.  Here at the ICVA, we have even gotten into the game by adding customer reviews to www.indy.org.

Sometimes it is just a matter of getting a critical mass of reviews into these websites (something we are still working on for many of the hotels, restaurants and attractions on our website).  One hotel Rick mentioned went so far as to set up an Internet station in the lobby of their hotel and offered guests "to go" snacks if they would take a few minutes to enter their feedback about their stay into one of the customer review websites.

Planners - are you monitoring these type of review websites as part of your site selection process?  If so, how much weight do you put in what you read there?

Hoteliers - are you keeping an eye on comments posted by your customers?