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The Hospitality Industry

The hospitality industry is an industry which offers a unique product. Hotels and motels do not sell features; they provide benefits that are designed to meet very specific (and fluctuating) needs, wants and desires of very specific target markets. It is a perishable product that cannot be sold in the way other products are sold. It combines a product (rooms, space for rent) with a service (hospitality), and must be resold each day. Marketing a hotel requires that a specific number of rooms, seats and square feet of meeting space be sold each day. Unsold rooms cannot be sold twice tomorrow to make up for the loss; an empty banquet room cannot be rented out twice in the evening to make up for unsold time.

Andrew Schwarz and David C. Dorf take on the issue of hotel (and motel) sales in their book, Contemporary Hotel Sales. They understand the unique industry in which hotels and motels operate, and recognize that sales is the central point around which a hotel operates. The most deluxe hotel located in the most prime scenic area cannot generate a profit if there is not an active sales program.

Part of the unique aspect of the hotel industry comes from the fact that hotels do not necessarily operate according to traditional views of supply and demand. A 300-room hotel always has 300 rooms for sale, regardless of whether the demand for a given time period is for 400 rooms, or for 200 rooms. Hotel sales executives must sell a fixed product which cannot be stored, which is highly perishable and which cannot be handled in the traditional way that other inventories are handled.

More than anything, the authors stress that the hotel product is different from any other type of product on the market. Hotels do not sell features; rather, hotels offer intangibles, such as romance, dreams, opportunities and a number of necessities. This means that traditional business and management principles used by industry as a whole must be ad...

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The Hospitality Industry. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:59, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682446.html