Written by: Guillaume Bendiyan
– Current ESSEC IMHI students
A few days ago, I received a message from a
friend of mine totally freaked out by registrations for the upcoming trimester.
ESSEC offers its hospitality management students an extensive range of electives
to supplement the required fundamental courses, allowing us to customize our program
to acquire the skills and competencies we need to accelerate our future
careers. Therefore, every trimester, students face the agonizing ritual of
contacting previous students to get advice about individual classes and
building their personalized schedule.
At that point, my friend’s dilemma was to select
between a class called “Snapshot, hotel demand management” or to take something
completely different. The cause of his apprehension was an email sent by
Snapshot’s lecturer, highlighting the words “intensive boot camp” half a dozen
times and barely hiding (and in fact highlighting) that it will be a tough
week. As he knew that I had taken this class the previous year, he reached out
to me to have my feedback. A few hours later,
with a couple of beers on the table, we started to discuss my previous
experience in this demand management boot camp.
I started our discussion by confirming that
the class is demanding, but that’s the point of a boot camp: No pain, No gain!
And talking about gain, I asked him what he was expecting. “Don’t know exactly, but the name sounds good and many people said
that it was a great class”. What can I add to that…? All the user feedback
was positive!
To better understand the class, I should start
by saying that it’s a class designed by professionals for professionals. This might
seem meaningless, but you should remember that in hospitality, there is often a
big gap between people in operations and those in the corporate office. The
lack of a mutual understanding between people in sales vs. revenue management;
between management vs. front of house; or between headquarters vs. the property
often leads to a lack of alignment in term of strategy. Thus, having people who
truly understand operations create a class like this helps brings clarity and
understanding to many of the challenges being faced by hotels today. Snapshot
is a company founded a few years ago by hoteliers who wanted to facilitate the
centralization and interpretation of data in hospitality to enable the managers
to focus less on trying to find the right figures and more on actually growing
revenues. Later, realizing the great knowledge gap that existed, they created a
department in charge of education, which mission is to take participants
through the basics of a more holistic approach to hotel management and revenue
management. Thus the hotel demand management boot camp was born.
Planned over five days, during the boot camp you
study all the topics that help a manager to drive more value out of a hotel:
Revenue Management, Marketing, Distribution and E-commerce and finally, Asset
management. That being said, my friend made a good point, which is that we
already have all these classes at ESSEC. So why should he take them again?
Well, just because it’s always beneficial to review those topics with a fresh
look. Plus, since these help to drive demand, each of them impacts the others
and it’s important to link them together around a common example. For example,
Revenue Management classes typically focus on selling the right room at the right
price to the right customer. However, few revenue management classes focus on
which channel is most economical to acquire that customer, something a
distribution class will typically do, but the latter in turn fail to explain
how to optimally price the room. During the boot camp lectures build on previous
knowledge to strengthen participants’ understanding not just of each discipline
but to highlight the importance of considering each of these aspects
holistically as a future manager.
In addition, the boot camp classes are not like
regular lectures, as a wide variety of knowledgeable guest speakers also gave
highly interactive presentations, discussing real-life example and sharing great
anecdotes. For example, we had the chance to meet David Turnbull, the
co-creator of Snapshot, who gave us a lecture on distribution, and Martin Soler,
consultant in marketing and former General Manager, who discussed concrete
cases on which he had previously worked. Hearing this my friend started to
worry, because he had previously a class given by various guest speakers, and many
of them repeated and overlapped with each other. To avoid that, a facilitator
stays all week to coordinate both the speakers and the content. This helps the
guest speakers to concentrate on delivering their personal core message as they
do not have to re-do introductory material each and every time they start a
class. This greatly enhances the attractiveness of their presentations, which was
much appreciated by the participants.
Lastly the boot camp adopts a “hands-on” approach
as you are doing a real-life case study in groups, where you are given a hotel
with competitor, financial and occupancy data. It is because of this that the
boot camp notion all makes sense because, although it’s interesting, it’s very
demanding: market trends study, competitive analysis, review scanning on
TripAdvisor, income statement analysis… you certainly never have the time to get
bored! Soon, you discover that your
hotel faces several issues, including a low average daily rate, a less than
perfect rating on the social platforms, an unbalanced business mix and inefficient
marketing campaigns. The idea is to work as if you were the general manager to try
increase both the earnings and the value of our hotel. On the last day, you
present your action plan which is analyzed by all the guest speakers you met
during the week. What a great jury! And great thing: the class doesn’t stop
here, and you get a detailed feedback on your project a few days later.
At that time, our beers were empty, and my
friend more than motivated. A couple weeks later, I happened to see him and
asked about his reaction to the class.
“You were right, it was very instructive. The guest speakers and the projects
are very interesting, and it makes a great recap of our two years. I’ll
definitely recommend it too!” Told you!
