Hooters’ concept relies on [...]]]> I often use Hooters as a case study in my Human Resource Management class for its controversial practice of hiring strictly good looking waitresses. I, however, have never expected that there are people who would dislike Hooters so much that they want to fight Hooters for opening a business in their neighborhood.

Hooters’ concept relies on “natural female sex appeal.” The first Hooters restaurant was opened in Florida in 1983. By 1993, Hooters had become a popular national restaurant chain, with 100 locations and 200 million in revenue. Hooters restaurants refuse hiring male servers and expect that Hooters’ Girls “should project a positive attitude with a bubbling personality and the prettiest smile in the world.”

Between 1991 and 1994, EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) launched an investigation into alleged discrimination because of Hooters’ hiring practices. In 1994, EEOC reached a conclusion that “no physical trait unique to women is required to service food and drink to customers in a restaurant.” Hooters’ defended its concept under “Bona Fide Occupational Qualification” and claimed that “Hooters Girls” are providing “foodservice” plus “entertainment.” In the end, EEOC dropped its demands and investigation.

I ate in a Hooters restaurant before. It was just like any other sports bar except that I was served by some young and good looking waitresses. Interestingly, a group of Park Slope moms in Brooklyn are “ready to fight Hooters on all fronts from opening a restaurant in the area” (per this CNN news video), the same group of moms who wanted to ban ice cream trucks in April.

I can see how Hooters’ concept could be controversial. I am trying to understand here, the rationale of the claims — ice cream is tempting for kids, so ice cream trucks should not be allowed in the neighborhood. Hooters’ concept is appealing to _______ (please help me fill in the blank), so it should be banned.

I wonder what will become the next item on the Park Slope moms’ ban list. Any predictions?

We know of one small luxury hotel that generates well over $1 [...]]]> Email marketing, when executed well, is one of the most powerful sales media a small luxury hotel has in its marketing toolbox. The problem is, not that many hotels do it well and as a result fail to realize its full revenue generating potential.

We know of one small luxury hotel that generates well over $1 million a year as a direct result of their email marketing program. For every dollar they spend in email they generate $50 in revenue.

It pays to do it right. Here are 7 ways to help your email marketing program work.

1. Create a Voice – For email to work people have to open it. So you have to create and deliver messages people want to read. You need a style and a voice people enjoy reading so your emails will get opened. Do it well and over time subscribers may even start looking forward to receiving your emails. That should be a goal for your email campaign.
2. Be Personal and Relevant – Email should be viewed as a personal communication as if you were talking to a subscriber one on one – as an individual. You may be sending out thousands of emails, but they are opening them one at a time. They can tell if you are sending a personal message with relevant information or a junk mail blasted to the masses. They prefer and respond better to a personal message.
3. Audit Your Program – Once a year do a complete audit of your email marketing program. Look at every aspect from your subscribe notice on your website, sign-up form, your welcome message and all the way through to how you handle people who wish to unsubscribe. Are you capturing the information you need? Are you treating people the way you would want to be treated? How can you make it better, more personal and are you testing ways to make it more effective?
4. Measure What’s Important – Open and click through rates are easy to measure but what you need to know is how much revenue each email generates. That’s difficult, but not impossible to determine with some of the simpler email services available. There are also much more sophisticated solutions that connect to your PMS and can give you an accurate accounting of the return on investment your email program is generating.
5. Keep It Simple – Many email newsletters we monitor provide far too much information. They have too many articles that ramble on forever. Your objective should be to get subscribers interested in what you have to say and have them click through to your website for more information. Once on your site they can easily navigate around, learn more about what you have to offer and hopefully buy. If not this time then next time, which leads into the next point.
6. Think Relationships – Want to turn someone off? Make them think that all you’re doing is trying to sell them something. And that’s what far too many hotel email programs do – sell, sell, sell. Your regular email newsletters should provide interesting and relevant information about the hotel, the staff, awards, interesting news about upcoming events in your destination, fun stuff, funny stories and more. Of course you can have a special or two, but  it won’t work if it’s nothing but special after special after special. It’s boring and unlikely they will ever look forward to receiving your emails.
7. Follow Tested Direct Marketing Disciplines –  According to the Direct Marketing Association direct marketing is “an interactive process that uses one or more advertising media to effect a measurable sale or lead with this activity analyzed in a database for the development of an ongoing mutually beneficial relationship between a marketer and its customers and prospects.”
   

It is both a discipline and a science. There are rules to follow based on rigorous testing that shows what works and what can produce the desired result most economically.

Email is a very powerful direct marketing medium. Done correctly it can produce an amazing return on investment.

Don’t just do it, do it right.

I see today that the World Travel and [...]]]> In 2008, I posted on this blog: “Tourism is Not the World’s Largest Industry” — which actually came from my book: Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach (with C.Michael Hall, 2009, Routledge, UK). That post has been one of the most visited on my blog.

I see today that the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has recently commissioned a study to, yet again, prove to policy makers that tourism is a really big deal (see their press release here: Travel and tourism larger industry than automotive manufacturing; and on more on the wttc.org website here – they have a couple of ppt files on their site that details their findings, though as usual, the methodology is fuzzy, at best).

The problem is that the co-called “tourism industry” is so diverse that almost any activity remotely related to travel and hospitality can be considered all or part of it. The WTTC tends to use the Tourism Satellite Accounting System to “guestimate” how much each sector of an economy contributes to tourism — and this really is just a guess! In addition, the Tourism Satellite Accounting System is inherently unsuitable for comparison across political boundaries (beyond a single country) and across different industries. Each of those transgressions involves exponentially greater guesswork. Also, comparing service industries to manufacturing is wrought with challenges and is not recommended by the WTO (World Trade Organization), which compiles most of the international trade data for the world. (I know, I did make this last transgression myself in my original blog post on the topic, but at least I admit that it is a fundamental flaw in my analysis.)

Anyway … yes, I fully agree that tourism is a huge global economic activity that just continues to grow despite economic upheavals across the globe. However, I caution everyone to be careful in accepting the illusion of hard number results from any study that tries to compare tourism economic activities with other industries at a global or even regional scale.

(Originally posted/cross-posted on TG TourismPlace)

I see today that the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) [...]]]> In 2008, I posted on this blog: "Tourism is Not the World’s Largest Industry" — which actually came from my book: Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach (with C.Michael Hall, 2009, Routledge, UK).  That post has been one of the most visited on my blog.

I see today that the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has recently commissioned a study to, yet again, prove
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Here is my [...]]]> I just finished writing a book chapter on the World Geography of Scuba Diving for a book that a friend is putting together on recreation dive tourism. One of the things that I did for that chapter was to look at 15 online lists of “the top ten dive sites in the world”.

Here is my list of the World’s Top 10 Dive Destinations that comes from my combining 15 lists created by other people. (A longer version of this list will appear in the book when it comes out.)

COUNTRY (REGION) -LISTINGS- DIVE DESTINATIONS

1) Australia (S Pacific) -10- Great Barrier Reef, Heron Island
1) Indonesia (SE Asia) -10- Sulawesi, Raja Ampat
1) Mexico (M America) -10- Baja California, Riviera Maya and Cozumel
1) Thailand (SE Asia) -10- Koh Tao Island, Phuket Island

5) Malaysia (SE Asia) -9- Sipadan Island, Mabul Island
5) Egypt (Africa/M East) -9- Ras Mohammed Nat. Park, Red Sea (south)

7) Belize (M America) -8- Barrier Reef Reserve, Great Blue Hole
Fiji (S Pacific) -7-
9) Ecuador (S America) -6- Galapagos Islands

10) USA – Hawaii (C Pacific) -5- Kona Coast
10) Maldives (Indian Ocean) -5-
10) Micronesia, F.S (S Pacific) -5- Chuuk (Truk) Lagoon

OK. So my list is more than 10, due to so many ties. But let me explain it.

The top four countries that tied for first place were each listed on 10 of the 15 lists that I looked at. No country appeared on more than 10 of the lists, indicating how variable these lists are. Malaysia, which is where I am currently living, appeared on 9 of the lists, as did Egypt.

To the right of the listings number are any specific sites that might have been mentioned more than once. Lists tend to combine countries (like the Maldives and Fiji) and destinations (such as the Kona Coast or Sipidan). My list is based on countries. Dive destinations are shown only if they appeared on two different lists or more. So Maui, which appeared on only one of the 15 lists, did not make it onto the list above.

Personally, even though I included top dive destinations from both the US and UK, I think the results are a bit biased. Based on other data I used for the book chapter, I believe that Australia, Indonesia, Mexico and Belize may be ranked a little too high and Pacific Island countries area little too low.

Australia, Indonesia and Mexico are all far larger in land area and coastlines than any of the other countries on this top ten list. (The mainland US and Canada were in the top 25, but not the top 10.) This gives them an advantage in that they have many more potential dive sites and they have dive sites from widely different parts of their countries. Mexico and Belize are boosted by their close proximity to the very large US diver market, which puts them on more top dive lists than they otherwise might be. On the other hand, the Pacific island countries may be a bit lower because they are so remote from both North America and Europe (the second largest dive market). Many, but not all, of the top 10 dive spot lists are written for specific diver markets, such as the US, the UK or Australia.

In addition, I doubt that very many Americans get to Egypt’s Red Sea to dive, as I almost never see it in articles or advertisements in the dive magazines in the US. However, it still ranked quite high on this list. I believe that this is because it is such an important dive destinations for the UK and Europe in general. The Red Sea is the closest tropical-like coral reef destination for Europe.

All of these destinations are in warm water regions of the world. Europe does not appear at all, not even on the full list of 25 countries that I ended up with. Colder water dive sites, in general, only occasionally appear on top 10 diving lists that I reviewed. I wonder why?

I have personally dived at five of the places on this list, and snorkeled at one more of them. One of the problems is that any one dive spot, no matter how fantastic it is, may not be that great on the day that you are there due to water and weather conditions. Thus, my one day diving experience at the Great Barrier Reef was not very memorable, in part because a large cyclone a couple of months earlier had covered a lot of the coral with muck.

Still, I love scuba diving, and I love the Asia-Pacific region — and I now have a (growing) list of places that I need to visit!!!

(This article was originally posted on my Tourism Place blog.)

Taken at Pulau [...]]]> I just finished writing a book chapter on the World Geography of Scuba Diving for a book that a friend is putting together on recreation dive tourism. One of the things that I did for that chapter was to look at 15 online lists of "the top ten dive sites in the world".

Taken at Pulau Sapi (Sapi Island) very close to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia.

Here is my list of the World’s Top 10 Dive
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I was reminded of this statement from the over 3000 years ago following my recent visit to Hanoi, Vietnam. I was there for a conference that brought together 60 Fulbright Scholars (professors and PhD students) from [...]]]> “A guest never forgets the host who had treated him kindly.” – Homer, The Odyssey, 9th Century BCE

I was reminded of this statement from the over 3000 years ago following my recent visit to Hanoi, Vietnam. I was there for a conference that brought together 60 Fulbright Scholars (professors and PhD students) from throughout Southeast Asia. It was the most Americans I think I had ever seen in one place in Southeast Asia, which is generally not on the travel map of people back in the US! I opted to stay two additional days as I had never really spent much time in Vietnam and I had heard that Hanoi was an especially interesting place. I was not disappointed.

Prior to our visit, my wife had read about a “Food on Foot” tour on TripAdvisor.com. Being an amateur “foodie”, this sounded like the kind of tour that we would be particularly suited to so we gave Vietnam Awesome Travel a call when we got to Hanoi (their website, www.VietnamAwesomeTravel.com, had been hijacked and was not accessible). Mr. Anh came to our hotel and we arranged to do the three hour Food on Foot tour for dinner that night (US$20/pp). It was a great introduction to the city’s Old Quarter, and especially to its food.

Based on our interests, which border on the more exotic, we at a variety of dishes, each at a different restaurant. In fact, each of the restaurants specialized in a particular dishes, and several only sold that one dish. The restaurants were mostly on the sidewalks, where we sat on small step stools and ate on slightly taller step stools. We had dumplings, deep fried fermented pork, fresh jicama and green guava as vegetables, eel soup, pho bo (beef pho noodles), and a fresh fruit cocktail with thick cream as a dessert. We ate so much! It was great!

We stayed near the southern end of Hoan Kiem Lake, which put us just outside of the core of the Old Quarter, but within a very easy walk. During our Food on Foot tour, Mr. Anh introduced us to some of the major sites and interesting back alleys of the area, where some of the restaurants were located. Hanoi’s Old Quarter is such a great walking area — compact, lots to see on every street, Some of the most narrow buildings you’ll ever see, easy to get lost and then re-found, and very easy on the wallet (be sure to bargain). There are also lots of small hotels and tourists everywhere.

Downsides? Well, there are a lot of motorcycles, which the government encourages by charging a fairly low licensing fee compared to cars. Some of the streets near the Dong Xuan Market were among the most crowded I had ever seen — with motor scooters. It is actually a very intense experience, almost overwhelming at times, but also quite memorable.

The other downside that we experienced was our day trip to the famous Halong Bay limestone islands. After a 3.5 hour bus ride with off and on rain, we got to Halong Bay to find that none of the boat tours had been allowed to depart. All of the tours were standing around waiting to see if the port authority would allow them to go. After awhile we went to a restaurant for a long lunch, and then finally, giving up, we returned to Hanoi. At least we got to see the Vietnam countryside — and why Vietnam is a major global rice exporter. And we also met a very international crowd at our lunch table: China, Netherlands, UK, Italy and Thailand.

For us, at least, it was not a total loss since we had seen Halong Bay a decade earlier on a Star Cruise from Hong Kong. We felt bad for the others, though, who have yet to see this remarkable place. We did, however, get a full refund on the tour. Mr. Anh, who had arranged this trip for us, said he works with this particular tour company because they share his high service values, as evidences by the 100% refund. Other tour companies only gave a 50% refund for canceled tour boats.

Everywhere we went in Hanoi we met such friendly people. You can find foods at international level restaurants with international prices, but you can also find great foods at really low prices, like about US$1 for a bowl of pho bo. I really liked the ice cream cones for 6000 to 10,000 Dong (US$0.30 to 0.50).

Also food related, we booked a private city tour (USD$55/pp) on a Sunday, our last day in Hanoi. We decided to do the private tour, rather than a group tour, so that we would have more control over our time and places where we went. We did some of the standard city tour sites, such as the Ethnology Museum, Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and home, and Temple of Literature — all of which were very interesting. And we also did the top of the Sofitel Plaza Hotel, which a friend told me had the best view of the city and Red River — and which was a first time visit for Mr. Anh.

Yes, Mr. Anh was again our guide for the city tour and he gave us the option of either having lunch at a restaurant or with a private family. We chose the family option, which turned out to be with his family and sitting on the floor in his apartment. He said 90% of his guests choose that option, which he usually only offers on Sundays because of the family’s work schedule. Meeting his wife, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and toddler aged daughter and nephew was another highlight of the trip!

We left Hanoi feeling really good. We thoroughly enjoyed the city and felt like it was a place that we both wanted to visit again some day. Part of that was the great walking and exploring opportunities of the Hanoi’s Old Quarter. Being able to “explore”, “discover” and be “surprised” is a really important part of a good tourist experience.

The other key to our very positive experience of Hanoi, however, was the friendliness and hospitality of the people we encountered. Not just one person, though Mr. Anh really stood out, but also so many of the other people we encountered. Homer was so right when he wrote that “A guest never forgets the host who had treated him kindly.”

For a version of this blog post with photos, please visit: http://bit.ly/hanoi-awesome