It’s the most wonderful time of the year (and the busiest). For the next few months, we‘ll be in the thick of the hospitality carnival; expectant travelers are circling in, drawn by conferences, family reunions and solo expeditions.
But just like booths at a bustling fair, not every option draws a crowd. Hotels that thrive don’t simply rely on seasonal demand; they know how to catch the right eyes, speak to the right desires and stand out from the crowd, no matter the time of year.
Capturing attention and turning curiosity into bookings calls for refined, precise campaigns that reach travelers at exactly the right moment. And just as every booth at the carnival has a different draw, the best approach varies by hotel. What unites them all is the need for a well-chosen mix of channels—diverse enough to attract new guests, engaging enough to keep loyal ones coming back and strategic enough to sustain demand when the peak-season crowds thin.
Inspiring travellers
Today’s boutique adventurers are browsing their options: checking the weather, comparing offers and deciding on a whim where to go next. In fact, on average, travellers consider six brands before making a booking.
So, what makes for a standout listing that turns interest into a booking?
A great way for independent properties to capture the imagination of prospective travelers is to partner with destination management organizations (DMOs) and local tourism boards. This type of partnership links your hotel to local gems, events and traditions, appealing to travellers who want an immersive trip.
Importantly, some of the best ways to drive demand are low-resource and can be managed in-house. Ensuring your website has accurate information, timely promotions and high-quality imagery are all effective demand drivers. Similarly, offering a simple, direct booking option empowers travelers to move seamlessly from inspired to booked. To tap into their sense of adventure and bolster direct bookings, consider fun incentives, like digital prize wheels, that add some excitement to the experience.
Independent hotels can also work with effective retailers such as specialised travel agencies (online/offline) who secure access to a dedicated customer segment and bring the offering in the way those customers expect.
Loyalty lovers, on board and booked
During the peak season, some travelers already know what they want. These guests are filtering by brands they know, trust and love. For them, leveraging hard-earned loyalty rewards during busy periods feels like a meaningful return—and keeps them coming back for more.
What’s most important for hotels to convey is how well they understand their guests. To return to our carnival metaphor, imagine taking a view from the top of the Ferris wheel: can you spot patterns across demographics, loyalty tiers or geographies? These insights help build a meaningful guest profile, allowing you to highlight what they love most about your brand.
These travelers are already looking in the right direction. Ensure your visibility is maximized by refreshing and standardizing SEO across hotel listings with updated page titles, meta descriptions and landing page copy to capture high-volume travel searches. This digital hygiene will also bolster visibility in generative AI models, including GEO search summaries. To support properties across the brand, run A/B testing and marketing pilots to uncover what works best and share this with different properties.
As for all travelers, the trip begins at booking, so it’s best to make that experience seamless. A centralized booking engine with simplified, unified branding helps them match hotels to destinations with ease, which is a great way to stand out from the crowd and keep them coming back for more.
From broad appeal to targeted success
At the franchisee level, finding the right balance between brand consistency and local character is key.
From group bookings to independent curators and loyal repeat visitors, you’re catering to a wider group of prospective guests. To reach this diverse mix of business and leisure travelers, leveraging branded tools, local distribution teams and tailored GDS campaigns ensures broad visibility across OTAs and GDS platforms. Meanwhile, negotiated corporate and group contracts help secure larger, more consistent bookings throughout the year.
Within these campaigns, it’s essential to champion the unique perks available at your specific hotel and highlight them on your direct channels. Not only does this make your offering more distinctive, but attribute-based selling can also unlock new revenue streams.
Making every channel count
A sophisticated channel mix strategy drives profitable demand year-round, and the peak season is the perfect window to refine it.
This period offers valuable opportunities to test, learn and adjust. Amid the hustle of the business, hoteliers can reach new audiences and create a more diverse pool of demand, strengthening long-term resilience by reducing reliance on any single market.
The foundation of an effective channel mix lies in deeply understanding your customers —who they are, what motivates them and where they can be reached most efficiently. Because every property operates within its own unique context, no two channel strategies should look the same.
But perhaps, most importantly, put yourself in your guests’ shoes. Think about how delight and relaxation compound when they’re met in their preferred channels with options that don’t just suit them but excite them. As they seamlessly glide from inspiration to booking and, finally, their stay, the days of frustrating, clunky research and discovery become a distant memory.
By leveraging data-driven channel management, hoteliers can stand out from the crowd, delivering seamless, memorable guest experiences that drive conversions and loyalty long before arrival.
https://hotelsmag.com/news/yotel-pack-up-go-partnership/?
YOTEL has partnered with Pack Up + Go to offer travelers a spontaneous travel experience within the United States. The collaboration combines YOTEL’s hotel properties with Pack Up + Go’s surprise travel service, allowing guests to book trips without knowing their destination until just before departure.
According to a recent study from Skyscanner, 60% of Americans feel overwhelmed by the pressure to plan the ‘perfect’ getaway. The partnership aims to reduce travel stress by allowing guests to enjoy a curated trip while staying at a YOTEL property.
The new collaboration provides travelers with a Pack Up + Go x YOTEL Surprise Trip. Guests complete a short pre-trip survey to personalize the experience, but the destination remains unknown until the reveal email arrives prior to departure. The experience includes lodging at a YOTEL property, which offers space-efficient rooms, intuitive in-room technology, and public areas suitable for work or relaxation. Each location functions as a central base in the city for guests.
Pack Up + Go organizes the itinerary for each trip. Activities can include museum visits, live events, and other local experiences. Guests can choose experiences focused on dining, wellness, or general exploration. Trips are designed for solo travelers or groups seeking a short city break.
“Today’s travelers are seeking experiences that feel both authentic and effortless and give them an opportunity of true discovery,” said Olivia Donnan, vice president of Brand and Communications at YOTEL. “At YOTEL, we’ve always been champions of challenging the status quo to offer our guests something new and exciting that you don’t find at every hotel brand. Our partnership with Pack Up + Go takes that vision even further, inviting guests to rediscover the joy of spontaneous adventure without the stress of planning.”
“Our mission has always been to bring back the excitement and accessibility of travel,” said Lillian Rafson, CEO and founder of Pack Up + Go. “Partnering with YOTEL allows us to offer travelers a smarter, more streamlined way to explore, blending their cutting-edge hospitality with the thrill of surprise that turns an ordinary trip into an unforgettable adventure.”
The partnership marks a collaboration between a hotel brand focused on technology-driven stays and a travel agency offering surprise itineraries. Together, they provide a structured yet spontaneous experience for travelers who want to explore cities in the United States without advance planning.
I Tried Cheap Botox Abroad — Then Learned It Was Illegal
https://www.fodors.com/news/news/i-tried-cheap-botox-abroad-then-learned-it-was-it-was-a-counterfeit-cosmetic-treatments
What had I been injected with?
No matter how much I traveled, I couldn’t outrun time.
Silencing my morning alarm, I slumped from the bed of my Albanian apartment and began my day. But that day was different. Sometime between scrubbing sleep from my face and
dermarolling a thin patch of hair, it dawned on me.
At the end of the year, I’d turn 40.
I remembered my parents turning 40. They had three kids, a house, and friends to chide them over their age. At 39, I had an Xbox and a three-legged dog.
Previously, a dermatologist back in
Buenos Aires said I looked good for my age, though she might have also been trying to sell me a
facial laser treatment. I didn’t feel old either. Sure, my neck occasionally tweaked out at the gym, and my back would pop if I sat on the toilet wrong, but that happened to everyone. Right?
Still, I knew if I found myself sitting alone when my 40th birthday hit in December, all sorts of depressive thoughts would creep in, and I wanted to prevent that. Maybe an “I’m still sexy at 40” photoshoot with pics nobody but me would ever see would help. Just a little something to feel better about myself.
It was May, so I had time. I could blast away pounds with the leg press and Jazzersize on my own, but I’d need help with the crow’s feet clawing out the sides of my eyes. My “I’m still sexy at 40” photos wouldn’t look great if my face resembled a weathered catcher’s mitt.
On my daily walks to the gym in
Tirana, Albania, I’d pass a dozen or more cosmetic surgery offices. Signs advertising affordable medical care welcomed travelers landing at the airport. Phone numbers for people interested in perfect noses and improved hairlines were slapped on buses, while mailers for discount facelifts were frequently left outside my apartment door.
I was no stranger to international medical care. I received regular health screenings and bloodwork in Argentina, and
visited Mexico for dental care more than a few times. Outside of dated Good Housekeeping magazines in the lobby, the only differences between U.S. and Latin American healthcare providers were Spanish forms and thousands in savings.
Before my move to Albania, I had no clue the nation wanted to position itself as a go-to medical tourism destination. But several months in, I couldn’t walk a city block without some kind of advertisement–almost always in English.
Fortune Magazine did a write-up on Albania’s push to lure tourists to the country for cosmetic care, while
Vox reported the country brought in roughly €250 million ($288 million) in 2023 alone (not an insignificant amount for a country whose
GDP was $24B in 2023). With a trip to the States for a friend’s wedding a few weeks away, I decided to give Botox a try. After all, what better time to test a new medical service in a developing country than right before a wedding?
Sifting through Google for top-reviewed cosmetic clinics, I booked an appointment. The Botox injections would cost €250 ($288), regardless of how many units were used (just as long as I didn’t require more than the 125 units in a single vial).
At the facility, which would have looked right at home in
Los Angeles or Miami, the staff cleaned my skin, lathered it with a numbing cream, then injected away, though I think they jumped the gun a little–the numbing didn’t actually kick in until I was back at the apartment.
Satisfied with the results and the trimming of my crow’s feet, I contacted the same service provider months later in October. That round of injections would last me through my 40th birthday and whatever “I’m still sexy” photoshoot I decided on.
The clinic responded that they were no longer offering Botox and instead pushed a variety of fillers. I declined.
Strange. What cosmetic offices didn’t offer the world’s
most used cosmetic product? So I contacted a second office. A third. Fourth. Fifth. Nobody offered the injections any longer.
Something felt off.
It didn’t take long to uncover the problem.
A year earlier, over 30 cosmetic offices in Tirana were busted for using either smuggled or counterfeit Botox. These weren’t shady, back-alley spots with tinted windows and flickering fluorescent lights overhead. These were Albania’s premier providers. As it turned out, Botox was an unregulated medical product, which meant there was no government oversight on its import. In short, the use of Botox in Albania was illegal.
It also meant that my facial injections months earlier were either smuggled, counterfeit (made in an unregulated lab), or real Botox cut with something else.
Whatever was used on me, I didn’t like it. I had visions of Walter White cooking up Botox in an RV somewhere, only for it to end up in the back room of my service provider. According to the
FDA, possible side effects of counterfeit Botox include systemic botulism, a rare yet potentially life-threatening condition if not immediately treated.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Those would not have been good 40th “I’m sexy” photos. Doubling back with the original service provider, they wouldn’t answer any specific questions, instead noting, “It is a service that here in Albania is not offered.” Another clinic said, “Due to legal reasons, we do not offer the service.”
Even the Google reviews for Botox services had vanished. I didn’t even know you could expunge those.
In 2022, the
Forensic Science International Journal published a peer-reviewed paper about the dangers of fake medicine and substandard medical procedures. In low to middle-income countries, one in 10 procedures relied on counterfeit medication. The “Botox” injection I received fell into that category. Thankfully, I did not suffer any adverse side effects. All of the fillers the cosmetic offices recommended were on the up-and-up. There had been no police raids to nab lip or forehead fillers, and the government regulates those products. I found it strange that the Albanian government regulated fillers and not Botox, but then again, questioning how governments work is a fool’s errand at times.
I did check with several
Albanian expat Facebook communities, and surprisingly, nobody had any knowledge of the lack of government oversight on Botox. Many stated they received the injections in months past with no adverse effects. Nobody seemed to mind not knowing what was actually being used on them as long as it worked. I’m not sure what was more concerning: people not caring about what drugs were used on them (especially considering potential side effects), or medical providers not informing their patients that what they were doing was illegal.
This is not intended to frighten anyone from seeking medical attention in another country. Exceptional care can be found outside of the United States for a fraction of the price. In fact, the rest of my experiences were all exceptional. These international services allow you to correct cosmetic issues robbing you of your confidence, restore your hairline, waistline, or bustline, and even give you access to treatments not yet approved in the U.S. (former NBA superstar
Kobe Bryant famously went to Germany for
platelet-rich-plasma injection therapy as the FDA hadn’t yet approved the product). Just make sure to do your due diligence and investigate not only the service provider, but also the service within the country.
For this, a little research goes a long way. Beyond looking up potential service providers, search the medical treatment within the country and look for any news stories associated with the topic. Here you’ll see if there have been any product recalls, cosmetic office raids, and so on. While you’re at it, do a deep dive on not only the service provider you’re interested in, but also the doctors on staff. Find out where they received their medical degrees. This info should be readily available on the service provider’s website. If not, contact the provider (usually via
WhatsApp) and ask. If they won’t tell you, it’s a major red flag, and move on to another option. Don’t leave any stones unturned, because if you have severe reactions to counterfeit drugs or products, you’ll be stuck with a massive medical bill back in the U.S. trying to fix the issue (which entirely defeats the purpose of going abroad for treatments in the first place).
In terms of determining the authenticity of a product–that’s going to be very difficult. You’ve done your research on the service and the country, so you know it’s legal and the clinic seems on the up and up. Really, the only other thing you can do is to see the product (i.e. filler or Botox) before it is used. Watch them break the seal on the vial and ask to see the expiration dates. At the very least, you will know the product is new and hasn’t expired.
With some extra research, you can go into an international medical service with peace of mind knowing you’ll receive excellent care. And if you ever have any doubts, walk away. It’s not worth a roll of the dice. After all, there are far worse things in life than looking like a weathered catcher’s mitt for your 40th birthday.
https://ivyexec.com/career-advice/2020/bridging-communication-gaps/?
Imagine this scenario. A
baby boomer in management and his
millennial coworker are meeting for her end-of-year performance review.
He tells her that he wants to give her a raise for her hard work this year, but she stops him. She instead proposes that she should be rewarded with a more work-from-home options instead. He’s surprised; he’s never imagined that there would be something one of his employees would want more than raise.
How to Bridge the Communication Gap
Ultimately, he feels slighted, and she feels misunderstood – a symptom of intergenerational communication gaps in the workplace.
However, this conflict doesn’t only arise between baby boomers and millennials – the two age demographics we hear most about – but can also include the other three major generations –
Gen X – and occasionally, the
Silent Generation and
Gen Z.
The modern workplace is growing increasingly age diverse. Over a third of the workforce – 35 percent – is comprised of millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), while another third are Gen Xers, born between 1965 and 1980. About 10,000 baby boomers (born between 1945 and 1964) are reaching retirement age every day, so they now only make up about a quarter of the workforce. Long-working Silent Generation (born from 1928 to 1945) and young Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2002) make up the remaining 10 percent.
Each of these generations has slightly different communication expectations than their older or younger colleagues, making for workplace communication gaps.
Changing Expectations
Baby boomers. Have you ever heard a baby boomer say that it’s quicker to pick up the phone? That’s because unlike their younger coworkers, this generation prefers to communicate by phone or in person.
Gen X. Gen X wants to be leaders in the workplace, while also wanting to fit in. They were also the first generation to be large-scale adopters of email, so they prefer to communicate with short, to-the-point missives.
Millennials. Millennials perhaps notoriously changed the communication landscape by preferring text and chatting through apps rather than talking on the phone. Millennials also like emailing or online messaging, rather than speaking in person.
Gen Z. You might not be surprised that some millennials are not
digital natives, but all of Gen Z is. These young people grew up hyper-connected, with 65 percent of them reporting that they’d rather talk online than in person. Gen Z may also want to be more entrepreneurial than their older millennial counterparts.
Common Intergenerational Miscommunications
Understanding tone in written communications. With most generations preferring written communications, there can be misinterpretations of tone and punctuation in these documents. For example, baby boomers and Gen X’ers might see the ellipses as a thought trailing off without needing to be finished, while millennials might perceive it as s communication that will be followed up with something else. If nothing else comes, they may be concerned.
Or, take the common period. Older generations may find younger users failing to end their thoughts with periods to be sloppy or unprofessional. On the other hand, younger generations may find the use of periods in chat or text communications rude, uptight or even angry.
Viewing each generation stereotypically. Baby boomers might think of millennials as spoiled, entitled people who never get off their phones. In turn, millennials could perceive baby boomers are workaholics who can’t operate technology. These kinds of negative beliefs don’t help anyone; instead, they strain communication among colleagues who could have been friends.
Communicating professionally in the same way as personally. Older generations might think the only way to communicate with the tech-savvy members of their workplaces is by interfacing with them online. In fact, the best way to connect with a Gen Z’er is in face-to-face communication, perhaps the only way to rise above the noise of their online lives.
Addressing Communication Gaps
Rethink your company culture. Who are you leaving out? All generations have a need for a sense of belonging at their workplaces, so consider if you’re missing opportunities for building a culture of respect.
For instance, creating a more flexible workplace culture can go a long way in creating a more satisfied workforce. Spherexx.com, an advertising agency, has had success in implementing flexible working hours and improved technology. At the same time, a more Internet-connected workforce needs specific guidelines for virtual and face-to-face communication.
Develop mentoring relationships. Develop a mentorship program in which more senior employees can nurture and guide their younger coworkers. This not only lets older generations feel like their leadership is valued, but it also gives younger workers the feedback they crave.
Communicate using multiple methods. If you’re only communicating in one style, you’re leaving generations out of your correspondence. Savvy managers will email, use messaging, texting as appropriate, and face-to-face meetings to connect with their workforce. Most people of any generation respond well to hearing an important message more than once, too.
View each person as an individual. While it’s important to understand generational expectations, it’s equally necessary to make sure this knowledge doesn’t turn into ageism. Each person – no matter when they grew up – has their own communication preferences. After all, who doesn’t know a tech-savvy baby boomer and a millennial who still owns a flip phone? Be mindful that generational communication preference are just guidelines for workplaces; they’re not rules.
Communication gaps typically arise when an employee of any generation feels disrespected and dismissed. Implementing these tactics not only can improve intergenerational communication but also builds a community of trust at your workplace.
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