AVE MARIA, FL—With guests wanting personalized and local experiences, hotels have a huge opportunity to enhance the guest experience by being neighborhood experts, recommending niche and interesting venues and activities. But can technology make that service a little easier? Brian Lawe, CEO and founder of locally based MyRestaurantList Inc., thinks so.
The company launched an online listing service that enables those in the hospitality industry to make money by recommending restaurants. How does it work? When guests ask for recommendations, employees point the guest to their own online list of favorite restaurants, where guests can read comments and reviews by the list owner, with star-ratings and suggestions for what to order.
The ideal list size should be seven to 12 restaurants, with a cap at 20 dining establishments. A hotel can also promote its on-property restaurant above all others on the list. “The chosen list of restaurants can match the hotel’s brand positioning,” Lawe said. “An upscale hotel will recommend very different restaurants from a budget hotel.
“The idea for MyRestaurantList.com was born out of a traveler’s frustration,” said Lawe, who travels extensively for business. The executive often relied on TripAdvisor or Yelp to discover interesting local restaurants, but he also asked hotel staff.
“The local hotel staff definitely knew the local restaurant scene better than anonymous Yelp or TripAdvisor postings, but the staff fell far-short of relaying their knowledge when asked,” he said. “Yelp and TripAdvisor offered maps, personal reviews, hours and pictures for many suggestions. The hotel staff only had time to make one or two brief recommendations by name.” Armed with their recommended name, Lawe would then have to hunt online to find the name of the hotel’s recommended place and get details himself. Often, TripAdvisor and Yelp were much easier, he said.
Lawe noted that technology drives the travel industry. “Either technology will make hotels more irrelevant to their guests’ needs or technology can bolster the hotel’s key influencer position,” he said. “TripAdvisor and Yelp have already eroded a hotel’s historical role in suggesting local restaurants. If that erosion continues unchecked, hotels will lose an important value-added service guests expect. MyRestaurantList was built specifically to give hotel operators a simple, new tool to help them provide an exception guest service experience when recommending restaurants.”
The service has the added benefit of also creating a new profit stream for the hotel. Once the list has had 60 views, the list owner can make money from restaurants that advertise on the list page. The company signs up the advertisers, and list owners receive 80-95% of all advertising revenue. “The more guests who view a hotel’s list, the more money the hotel can earn.” Lawe explained. “At the end of each month, the hotel owner/manager can use the generated money to create a bonus pool they can distribute to employees for their help in creating and promoting the hotel’s list to guests.
“With just 15 minutes of work, a typical 150-room property, with a 65% occupancy rate, could earn as much as $15,000 a year in pure profits, all while offering a much better service to their guests,” he concluded.