In the run-up to the Hospitality Marketplace #Justpitchit event scheduled for December 1st through 4th, we decided to quiz a few of the coming event’s participants. The FunnelTV event will present forty travel and hospitality experts in a live-streaming meetup focused on the best tools and services for hospitality and travel for 2021 and beyond.
Today, we connected with RevitUp’s Business Development Manager Nikos Giokas to get his take on the event, and on the new normal the industry is adapting to. Here’s what Giokas had to say during our brief interview:
Argophilia: The #Justpitchit event will be, in part, about product and service offerings that best fit the current market. What developments do you see as being “most” effective for hoteliers dealing with the COVID shift?
Nikos Giokas: Technology has moved years ahead in the last turbulent 8 months. Alexa von Tobel said it best a few days ago when she described how historical data to produce demand forecasts has been turned upside down by the pandemic. As she suggests, 2020’s figures are now useless and using 2019’s data to forecast demand patterns for 2021 just makes no sense.
The whole landscape has changed radically, as Alexa suggested, and we now need to find other signs of incoming demand before we get the first reservations OTB (On the Books). RevitUp used to count on brand.com’s and booking engine’s Google Analytics data long before COVID-19 and now this method seems to be the most accurate to predict demand and leverage it through digital marketing.
Argophilia: RevitUp is a fairly new, and highly successful player in the field. Can you tell our readers briefly, how your business has had to shift/innovate to keep pace in this pandemic?
Nikos Giokas: What RevitUp is bringing to the industry is the first service that completes the hotel revenue operation. While there are a multitude of digital and traditional marketing and sales tools and services to establish and “increase” hotel profits, there is not one that optimizes every facet of the process. What I am seeing is a service that not only elevated digital presence management, performance marketing, online distribution, and revenue management but one that puts more human power behind its proprietary technologies.
Argophilia: All the industry experts now know the pitfalls and negatives brought into focus on account of COVID-19 effects. Can you tell us about a few positive outcomes because of the changed landscape?
Nikos Giokas: Technology will play a crucial role in the upcoming season. One positive outcome is that more hoteliers are truly interested in finding tools or outsourcing services offered by companies that can fully facilitate these brand new tools. The competition will be enormous in 2021 and you can’t cope with excel files anymore. You better start learning the fundamentals or hire an expert.
Old school entrepreneurs that used to know everything and were happy by managing on their own digital marketing tools will vanish. They simply will not make it in the new era. In post-COVID-19 season survival will be about being the “fittest” and hoteliers are going to have to shift to become more agile and adaptable, in order to prosper.
Final notes: RevitUp was developed by the veteran team at EyeWide Digital Marketing, one of the most successful hotel marketing firms in Europe. Created to be the first truly holistic service for optimizing hotel revenue, the service is backed with unprecedented expertise from teams dedicated to service clients. It’s one of the few startup ventures out there that melds highly skilled personnel and new proprietary technologies to enhance proven digital strategies.