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Will in-store or online win this holiday season? It’s not so simple
Emma Fitzpatrick MarketingEvery year, beneath all those magical twinkle lights and pine-scented evergreen wreaths, it seems like there’s a battle going on. Will brick-and-mortar stores be able to win back customers, or will online shopping beat ‘em? Online shopping is expected to grow this holiday season (as it does every year). This year, people will spend an estimated $124.1 billion online. That’s a 14.8 percent increase year-over-year, according to Adobe research. But even as online sales grow, last year, the majority of holiday sales (85 percent) were still done in brick-and-mortar stores, according to PYMNTS data.
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Exploring upcoming hotel technologies
Bambi Majumdar Travel, Hospitality & Event ManagementSpending for 2019 in the hotel sector is coming soon. Technology upgrades for sales, marketing, operations, and every area focused on ROI are priorities. The most significant digital shift for hotels has been to incorporate artificial intelligence and Internet of Things in their operations. Artificial intelligence, thanks to devices like Alexa, can now offer guests the same experience that they enjoy at home. Meanwhile, IoT devices with automated settings make rooms hands-free. They not only personalize guests’ in-room experiences but continue to improve operations.
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4 steps to make your business intelligence teams more relevant
Andrew Wells and Kathy Chiang Business Management, Services & Risk ManagementThe world of analytics is changing. Self-service analytical tools like Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are enabling business users to perform reporting and analytics on their own with little to no support from the IT organization. This trend has evolved due to several factors. Organizations are flooded with data and IT organizations are not able to keep up; easier to use business intelligence tools make it more efficient for business users to directly create their reports rather than go through IT for a project; and IT organizations’ analytical projects can take several months when a business needs this information in weeks.
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Want to get a room on Airbnb? Being ‘similar’ to the host may…
Linchi Kwok Travel, Hospitality & Event ManagementAirbnb, along with other room-sharing websites, provides a cyber marketplace for innovative entrepreneurs to operate a lodging business without following the strict regulations that usually apply to hotels and hostels. For instance, while room-sharing websites provide pricing tools and guidelines to the hosts who are renting out extra space, it is still up to the hosts to decide what price they want to charge for the service provided and whether they want to adjust the price on a regular basis according to fluctuating demands from the travelers. In fact, the impacts of price positioning and dynamic pricing on a listing’s revenue performance or even on the neighborhood hotels’ revenue performance have been identified.
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Facility managers struggle to see ROI of building management technology
Scott E. Rupp Facilities & GroundsMore than 100 energy and facilities executives were interviewed recently to gauge how their firms are using technology and the challenges they face in realizing value. The research showed some in-depth insights from multiple industry sectors, but the responses came primarily from large enterprises with more than $500 million in annual revenue. The focus was on the direction of their facilities management strategies, what technologies they are deploying to optimize energy and facilities processes, and the top barriers to realizing expected value from these deployments.
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Health systems expect EHR vendors to assist with opioid management
Scott E. Rupp Healthcare AdministrationElectronic health records have promised health systems a lot of things — efficiency, data collation and improved revenue cycles — and even still the majority of health systems say they expect their EHR vendors to assist them in addressing the ever-deadly opioid crisis. This is according to a new KLAS report. While the firm interviewed just a scant 117 clinical and managerial executives from healthcare organizations of various sizes, the point of the researchers’ conversations was to determine how providers track opioid use among patients and implement safer prescribing practices to avoid deadly overdoses and other issues.
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Drive this way: Ride-hailing increases traffic fatalities, working paper…
Seth Sandronsky Transportation Technology & AutomotiveA new working paper from academics at Rice University and the University of Chicago finds that ride-hailing services correlate to a rise in traffic fatalities among passengers and pedestrians. "The increase in accidents appears to persist (and even increase) over time," write Livia Hanyi Yi and Yael V. Hochberg of Rice University and John M. Barrios at the University of Chicago in "The Cost of Convenience: Ridesharing and Traffic Fatalities."
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Stop email from secretly undermining your success
Catherine Iste Business Management, Services & Risk ManagementHow awesome is email? With it, we can work remotely, delegate, share files, manage teams, stay productive while traveling and more. Yet as useful as it is, managing email can also waste time, challenge communication and foster bad habits. Here are a few simple ways to ensure email does not secretly undermine you or your team’s success. For example, with email, we can respond to anyone, anytime and anywhere; presumably, this makes us more efficient.
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Use this checklist before posting holiday ads on social media
Emma Fitzpatrick MarketingBy now, you've likely finished your holiday ads for social media — or perhaps you're putting the final touch on them. Either way, before you mark them done, do a quick check to make sure you’re reaching the right people. If you’re like most businesses, the bulk of your holiday advertising budget is allocated to social media. It’s no small chunk of change either. Marketers are planning to spend 25 percent of their entire annual ad budget to target shoppers just during the Thanksgiving weekend, according to 2018 Nanigans data.
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Skin care product reviews: Reliable or fake news?
Elizabeth Donat RetailOnline reviews are the new word of mouth in today's digital age. They shape how we shop, where we eat, where we lodge and how we dress. In terms of the beauty and spa industries, reviews help us form our decisions regarding which skin care products to purchase and where to go to get our favorite spa procedures. Moreover, if you are a spa, medical spa or salon owner, then positive and negative reviews can make or break your business. Because these reviews play such a critical role in our businesses and our everyday lives it begs the question: Are reviews reliable or the new fake news?
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