When it comes to dining at hotels, guests immediately consider their restaurant, bar and in-room dining options, but there is a new movement taking hold in the hospitality industry: fast casual dining. This trend presents hotels with an opportunity to engage with guests and staff while creating added value, providing guests with an abundance of dishes to explore without leaving the property. Internally, these menus encourage team members to experiment with new cuisine and showcase their culinary talents. Ultimately, fast casual dining allows guests to rediscover food as a social experience, where they interact with staff and other guests while sampling dishes rarely seen on sit-down menus. Hotels can take advantage of the fast casual trend in countless ways. READ MORE

Sometimes new is old, and old is new. In time for the 2015/2016 Miami Beach season we, together with our new Ownership, launched Jaya, a modern Asian cuisine restaurant whose concept was made to be a true departure from a traditional luxury hotel restaurant. Jaya, which means 'victory' in Sanskrit, was chosen by our team to honor The Setai Miami Beach's renowned interior designer Jaya Ibrahim and the hotel's first decade of successful Asian-inspired hospitality. My sous chef, Vijay Veena, and I collaborated to create dishes that much like the Hotel, did not focus on just one Asian country but featured cuisine from a number of Asian regions. READ MORE

In biology, symbiotic mutualism describes a dynamic where two species living in close proximity to one another engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. Iconic examples include the oxpecker-small birds that feed on ticks and other parasites found on large mammals-and the clownfish, which live in and around sea anemones, enjoying the protection afforded by their stinging tentacles while providing the anemone with nutrients, and predator and parasite defense. The commercial real estate market is filled with a number of similarly structured relationships: mutually beneficial connections that serve to raise interest, drive traffic, provide resources and conveniences for shoppers and guests, and ultimately create a positive feedback loop that has a meaningful and sustained impact on the bottom line-for all parties. READ MORE

To Spa or not to Spa? If that is your question for your hotel or resort, you are reading the right article. Luckily, there are more good answers from experts in the hospitality and spa fields than Hamlet ever imagined. If your property has the space and financing to install a spa, this is certainly a time to do it. Your guests are now conditioned to expect not only a fitness facility, but stress reduction massages and rejuvenating facials -- as well as the nurturing escape of a well-planned and run spa. READ MORE

Marriott first launched the SpringHill Suites brand in 1998 to accommodate the next generation of traveler. At the time, the hospitality industry lacked an all-suites hotel, which inspired Marriott to differentiate their services by providing guests with progressive design that was both comfortable and stylish. This fusion of modern luxury transformed into the SpringHill Suites brand that currently embodies +350 properties throughout the United States and Canada. Benedict Cummins, Publisher of HotelExecutive got the opportunity to converse with Loren Nalewanski, Vice President and Global Brand Manager for SpringHill Suites and TownePlace Suites by Marriott, for an overview of the SpringHill Suites brand and the direction it is taking. READ MORE

Regardless of the reason, customers are becoming savvy to the age old phrase adopted back in the 1970's “have it your way” in almost any dinning atmosphere across the continental United States. As an empowered hotel guest, one opens a menu at a restaurant and entertains the opportunity to choose their ingredients. Whether it be to lose weight, help fight off disease, or the presence of food allergies, this allows the diner to take ownership of what they are putting into tier bodies. Many of these are considered preference diets. Many can be more than a request for a vegetarian or vegan menu. READ MORE

At the end of the day there are three main areas in which the hotel has an opportunity to trigger meaningful and memorable brand experience; service (especially the arrival/departure experience), physicality (especially the guest room experience) or tactile (especially the food and beverage experience). Yet many hotels pay little or no attention to the F&B operation as a brand amplifier. In fact, increasingly hotels are giving up on F&B and outsourcing the foodservice operation in one way or another. This article discusses how to develop experiential operationalization programs for F&B that leverage and amplify the brand at the same time. READ MORE

Hotel food and beverage is a hot topic. The success of the Food Network has elevated the profession of Chef to near cult status. Guests are more excited and knowledgeable about food and beverage than ever. They are dining out frequently and sharing their experience with others. In fact, sixty percent of postings on Instagram are about food and beverage. It is not enough to be good anymore, you have to be great. Your food has to be fresh, relevant and compelling or you will be out of business. In this article we take a look at some of the emerging trends in hotel food & beverage. READ MORE

The best thing about Gen Y sommeliers and wine waiters is their enthusiasm. And the worst thing? Their enthusiasm. Youth has ever been a period of intensely romanticized responses. No one has ever felt a love like this - captured such a clarity of insight - no one has ever felt so angst-ridden and bereft - no one has ever tasted a wine like this with such purity of focus and appreciation.No one has ever loved/lost/felt/tasted as intensely as this. Youth has despaired through history over this self-evident (to them, at least) truth. With Gen Y, however, this attitude is through the roof, living as they do in a social media-created echo chamber that consists largely (perhaps only) of like-minded tastes. READ MORE

We are living in a golden age of dining, so why are we still dealing with traditional three meal restaurants in hotels? In 2016, I think it's fair to say that dining and restaurants have firmly entrenched themselves as key players in our culture. Chefs have long established themselves as members of the celebrity class. Every major network seemingly has some sort of cooking, travel or food related show. And hundreds and thousands of blogs, yelp channels, instagram feeds, and publications are dedicated to tracking, celebrating, and recreating it all. More important, rising costs in major cities, a sustained interest in local products, READ MORE

After striking silver in Nevada and becoming one of the wealthiest men in the world, James Fair, an ambitious Irish immigrant, aspired to build a palatial residence in San Francisco atop Nob Hill. Almost 40 years later, his daughters, Tessie Fair Oelrichs and Birdie Fair Vanderbilt, decided to build a grand hotel on the “Fair Mount” to honor their late father, who had acquired the premier property decades earlier. The hotel was within days of being completed when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the Bay Area on April 18, 1906. Fires that followed ravaged more than 80 percent of the city, including the interiors of the Fairmont, but the grand marble and white granite shell survived, standing high on the hill as a beacon of hope for all of San Francisco. The owners vowed to restore the hotel and open it a year later—which they did. READ MORE

Re-brand; re-fresh, re-position, re-frame, re-articulate, re-contextualize - an entire universe of “do-it-again-branding” to confuse, confound, and just plain con hotel owners, operators and marketers. The reason is not complicated: Branding is an ongoing process, and as tastes competitive environment changes, so must the hotel's brand change. The question is: how much does the brand need to change, and how profound does the change have to be. In other words, is a re-brand, re-positioning, refreshing, re-articulation or re-what? In this article we look at the differences between the re's and when which is appropriate. READ MORE

Imagine a hotel meeting space that you'd walk into a decade or two ago. Do you see a 3,000-to-5,000-square-foot ballroom designed to seat hundreds of people, along with a patterned carpet and crystal chandeliers? Partitioned walls that subdivide the room to create secondary meeting spaces for smaller events and meetings? Do you conjure up an image of a boardroom for a dozen or two executives, with the requisite large oval table and leather chairs? A vanilla pre-function room for registration before an event and maybe a cocktail after? READ MORE

When selecting renovation contractors, many hotel owners' and property managers' decisions are based solely on the bottom line. In short, the lowest price bidder wins. Other hotel owners and managers, however, carefully consider the intricacies of their project's scope and can assess the confidence they have in their selected contractor that the renovation can be finished on-time and on-budget. What these hotel owners appreciate that others don't are the many value-added, non-financial advantages that a talented contractor brings to the project. READ MORE

These are the facts; Facebook currently has 1.65 billion monthly active users. The microblogging website Twitter has 320 million monthly active users. Instagram has more than 400 million monthly active users and Pinterest has over 100 million monthly active users. Social media has helped shape the consciousness of the new millennials who actively participate in sharing every aspect of their daily lives. The world has shrunk to the size of a smartphone and we are now part of a global community that influences and is influenced by what we think, read, visit and eat. READ MORE