The Wedding Cake Story

innfreehotels on October 30, 2015

By Harlan Butler, Past President, Innisfree Hotels

Back in Topeka, at the hotel where I was working for Innisfree, we had the best venue for wedding receptions of anyone in town. It was beautiful. The owner of the TV station’s daughter was getting married, and, as you can imagine, all the press was going to be there. We had booked the ‘Wedding of the Decade’.

To give you an idea of just how fancy an affair this was, the couple was getting married in a Presbyterian cathedral that had original Tiffany windows. Everything had to come from Kansas City. That’s 75 miles away, but it was the only place they felt was good enough. They had hired an orchestra and rented seven Rolls-Royces (all white) to bring the wedding party from downtown to our hotel. They had also hired a woman from a special bakery in Kansas City to make the wedding cake. The flowers had to come from Kansas City, too.

So the wedding day is upon us, and I’m walking around the hotel inspecting the room. The first thing I look at is the flowers … I see the orchestra setting up … I check the gift table. The lady from Kansas City is finishing the cake display, and it’s one of those $2,000 cakes. You know the type. I look at the rest of the room. Everyone is finished and leaving. The orchestra is ready to begin.

I look at the bar. We have two bars, and one of the bartenders is sitting down. That’s against the rules!

I walk over to tell him to stand up, and I say, “What are you doing sitting down?”

And he looks up and says, “I’m eating.”

He’s holding a huge chunk of white cake. My head spins around, and I look at the wedding cake … and he has cut a big slice RIGHT. OUT. OF. THE. FRONT.

I put out a 911 and bring everyone, all of the department heads here now. Just as I do this, the phone rings on the wall behind the wedding cake. The banquet captain answers, says “OK,” and hangs up.

THE WEDDING PARTY HAS LEFT THE CATHEDRAL.

Now the chef comes, and maintenance and the head housekeeper. We’re all standing there looking at this wedding cake.

I say, “What are we going to do?”

And the chef says, “Well … I’ve got some lard.”

So I say get it. He runs to the kitchen and gets his Crisco, and stuffs the Crisco in that hole. We spin the cake around, and later we spin the bride and groom around.

I say “Fire that bartender. You personally escort him out.”

So now we’re down a bartender.

We improvised. I told the banquet captain, when they take that traditional picture of the couple with the cake, “Don’t cut the cake, butcher it.”

The bride and the groom and the mother, they never knew.

And that’s how you have to improvise in the hotel industry in a crisis.

###

ABOUT ‘BACK IN TOPEKA’
In order to have a great future, we must celebrate and learn from our incredible past. The Innisfree Hotels story began in Topeka, Kansas. So when the folks who were around back then start a story with ‘Back in Topeka,’ we know it’s time to listen. These are tales of the challenges, of the laughter and tears that come with building a company like ours. That’s the sentiment behind this blog series, a chronicle of days gone by at Innisfree Hotels – and a map to get us where we’re going.

‘Back in Topeka’, President Mike Nixon

innfreehotels on October 15, 2015

Reflections from Innisfree Hotels‘ President Mike Nixon

It’s universal that young people barely hear advice on aging or dating or financial responsibility. ‘In one ear and out the other’ perfectly describes this phenomenon. It sounds a lot like “blah, blah, blah” to the ears of youth.

When you are a young man in the South, you understand there is wisdom that comes from those who are your elders. You know they have already done what you are trying to do, and you learn quickly they have simplified the process. So that wisdom is different from advice on living. Boys want to know how to bait a hook so the worm doesn’t fall off. They want to know the process of changing their own oil so they can do it themselves. Southern boys are happy to sit for hours to glean these ‘nuggets of truth’ from Dads or Grandpas or any other someone-over-the-age-of-35 who seems to have the answers to most of life’s mysteries.

Lessons from Southern men often begin with declarations of origin.

“Back in the War, we would …”

“When I was your age … ”

Growing up, we understood these declarations were a predecessor for knowledge and they made our ears perk up and our mouths salivate.

Fast forward to 1994. I started working for Innisfree Hotels and was excited about working for a company that appreciated me and would allow me to become a master of my trade.

Harlan Butler was (and is) a fountain of knowledge. His education in the hotel business was hard won. He oversaw the operation of several full-service hotels in the Midwest, America’s Heartland. Harlan’s stories often followed a failure on my part in some aspect of what I was doing. Or sometimes his stories were preemptive in nature and designed to allow me to avoid a failure.

He would tell me about collecting accounts receivables, how to balance the audit, how to set up banquet rooms for dignitaries, how to prepare for a VIP stay at the hotel, how to keep vendors honest and my bottom line profitable. Almost anything I was facing, Harlan had already done it and could often predict the outcome based on his experience.

Harlan was always available for consultation or consolation and, often, the stories he used to impart wisdom were hilarious. Gut-wrenching, jaw-dropping, rolling-on-the-floor hilarious. And not always – but often enough – his stories about hotel operations started with what I have coined, and much of Innisfree has adopted, as our own personal declaration of origin:

“Back in Topeka … ”

So when you hear this declaration, you’ll want to listen.

###

ABOUT ‘BACK IN TOPEKA’
In order to have a great future, we must celebrate and learn from our incredible past. The Innisfree Hotels story began in Topeka, Kansas. So when the folks who were around back then start a story with ‘Back in Topeka,’ we know it’s time to listen. These are tales of the challenges, of the laughter and tears that come with building a company like ours. That’s the sentiment behind this blog series, a chronicle of days gone by at Innisfree Hotels – and a map to get us where we’re going.

Innisfree Hotels Wins IHG Newcomer

innfreehotels on October 5, 2015

PENSACOLA, FLA. – Oct. 5, 2015 – Innisfree Hotels was recognized with a 2015 Newcomer Award from InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) for the Holiday Inn Resort Fort Walton Beach.

The Newcomer Award is presented only to the best hotels to enter the IHG family each year, recognizing the tremendous effort of Innisfree Hotels and the dedicated team at the Holiday Inn Resort. In addition to other requirements, the new development must maintain a high 12-month rolling Overall Satisfaction score and be in compliance with all brand standards.

The Holiday Inn Resort opened in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., in May 2014 and has exceeded expectations as the best new family resort on the Gulf Coast.

At the time of the beachfront hotel’s opening, Innisfree Director of Development Rich Chism said, “We strive to deliver a ‘wow’ factor and help families create memories together.” In response to the win, he stated, “This resort was designed with its specific Gulf Front location in mind, focusing on the guest experience and incorporating operational requirements into the design.”

The Holiday Inn Resort Fort Walton Beach was honored with the Newcomer Award during the annual IHG Americas Owners Conference, held Sept. 30 – Oct. 2, 2015 at Moscone Convention Center West in San Francisco, Calif.

“The team that operates the resort was carefully selected to be hospitable first and administrative second,” said Vice President of Hotel Operations Jason Nicholson. “They operate by the mantra, ‘Service leads and success follows.’”

He adds that the property is and always will be in a constant state of evolution to remain on trend with expectations, ensuring guests never look elsewhere for an authentic Florida beach experience.

Located at 1299 Miracle Strip Parkway SE in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., the Holiday Inn Resort offers beachfront event space and the finest pool in the area, just minutes from local restaurants, attractions and upscale shopping. Amenities include family suites; seasonal supervised children’s activities, ‘Dive-Inn’ movies; interactive pirate and mermaid shows; Riptides Grill & Beachfront Tiki Bar; and 24-hour fitness and business centers.

The only resort of its kind between Pensacola and Panama City, Fla., the new property was developed by Innisfree Hotels, and made possible via the United States Air Force Enhanced Use Lease (EUL) program, which provides funds through the lease of government land to improve morale of local airmen.

“Our focus on developing hotels that meet and exceed current guests satisfiers are primary to our operating model. Once that is created, we become highly focused on building person-to-person relationships, such that our guests become friends,” Nicholson says. “At the end of the day, our job is to make friends and build lifelong, positive experiences in which we can share and celebrate with those friends.”

ABOUT HOLIDAY INN RESORTS

Since 1952, Holiday Inn Hotels and Resorts have provided the services business travelers need, while also offering leisure travelers a comfortable, casual atmosphere where they can relax and enjoy amenities such as restaurants, room service, swimming pools, fitness centers and comfortable lounges.

ABOUT INNISFREE HOTELS

For more than three decades, Innisfree Hotels has expertly managed and developed dozens of hotels in partnership with many of the world’s most recognized hotel brands. Today Innisfree owns or manages over 2000 hotel rooms, and has approximately 1,500 employees.

Innisfree is a triple bottom line company, which means we measure our success not only in profits, but also through our impact on people and the planet. To these ends, Innisfree strives to promote a culture of responsibility and service to humanity. Our value-driven corporate culture enables us to have a deeper understanding of the needs of our guests, partners and clients, and thus deliver service that is synonymous with creating fun and memorable experiences.

For more information contact Jill Thomas, Chief Marketing Officer, Innisfree Hotels, (850) 393-8150, jill@innisfreehotels.com.

 

Meet Our Celebrity Chef Dan Dunn

innfreehotels on September 14, 2015

Pensacola Celebrity Chef Dan Dunn is a casual, easy-going guy and a long time, well-loved Pensacola Beach local. When he’s not working, he’s most likely to be found bumming around the beach or enjoying a casual outdoor feast with his family and the large tribe of lifelong surf buddies.

He launched his culinary career working as a ‘chicken-cutter’ in a local grocery store and decided to become a chef because the evening shifts didn’t interfere with his surfing schedule. Today, he’s the Executive Chef of the biggest and busiest kitchen on Pensacola Beach, which services H20 Cajun Asian Grill, as well as catering hundreds of yearly banquets and weddings.

He’s cooked at one of the most prestigious culinary “performance spaces” in the world – the James Beard House in New York City – with four other local chefs. Being invited to cook at the James Beard House is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity offered only to the best chefs in the country.

This eclectic collective of Gulf Coast cooks struts their stuff in the Big Apple every year. Invited for the first time in the spring of 2011, they served a Southern Gulf Coast inspired menu that included fried seafood, fresh tuna, hand ground grits, collard greens and blackeye pea caviar. It was obviously a huge hit with the New Yorkers.

Dan says, “Our goal the first year was to represent our region after the oil spill. The oil spill was sad. We thought our beaches and lifestyle might be forever ruined. We sent a letter to the James Beard Foundation because we wanted to get the word out that things were okay here and that people should come visit. The fact that we got invited a second and third time is insane. The first year I was really nervous.”

Dan’s culinary style and southern beach lifestyle are inextricably intertwined. Southern hospitality and outdoor cookouts are the focal points of both his work and the time he spends with family and friends. He reigns like a benevolent dictator over countless communal meals at work, at home and on the beach. Most days, he cooks breakfast for his kitchen crew at the Hilton – usually tacos or chicken fried biscuits dipped in honey butter. It’s not unusual to see him grilling up a feast on the beach with dozens of friends after an evening paddle. He is as likely to invite twenty people to his house for dinner as he is two.

He glides through a kitchen like he’s executing a well-choreographed dance, giving the impression that throwing on a gourmet scratch-made meal for thirty is a quotidian endeavor.

It’s not surprising that friends and neighbors are attracted to him like bees to honey and drop by for meals by the dozen. Dan and his wife Dione are true Southern hosts and create an addictive home-like ambiance resplendent with kids, dogs, and satiated friends.

Dan says, “I think it is always good to start and end the day with everyone eating together. I grew up in a home where we sat down for dinner together every night. It is a tradition I’ve carried on with my family. People open up and relax when they gather around a table filled with good food. Hospitality and entertaining are important to me.”

Dan’s menus are inspired by regional dishes and locally sourced ingredients. He says, “We use a ton of local food at the Hilton including fresh tomatoes and spring peas. Almost all the fish we serve is from the Gulf of Mexico. I also love cooking collard greens and fresh ground grits. I think there is an art to cooking collard greens. You need a big old’ ham hock, and it takes lots of time.”

At H2O, he artfully meshes Southern tradition, fresh local ingredients, and international flavor. One of his signature dishes is jumbo Gulf Coast shrimp wrapped in bacon, stuffed with Gouda cheese and topped with an Asian inspired mango BBQ sauce.

He is a passionate and busy guy.  He runs a kitchen that on some days caters as many as five weddings and multiple large corporate meetings while always pumping out three meals worth of excellent food in a busy restaurant. He still finds time to cook for his friends and family, go surfing and produce a prolific number of paintings. Dan has an art studio in his garage and recently sold his first piece at a local Gallery Night.

He attributes his success to a sincere passion for what he does. He says, “I love my job. I love where I work and the people that I work for and with.”

This drives him to be one of the hardest working chefs in town. Dan says, “I have a good work ethic, and I think that is the basis for being a good chef. My first advice for young cooks is don’t be afraid to work eighteen hours a day and never complain.”

Giving Guests a Voice in our Operations

innfreehotels on August 24, 2015

Innisfree is a hotel company, but we are in the hospitality business. What’s the difference, you ask? A hotel company sells rooms. A hospitality business transforms this simple financial transaction into an experience. Innisfree’s reputation management program is a robust tool our operations, marketing and development teams use to improve guest experiences and live up to our corporate tagline of ‘creating fun and memorable experiences’ every day.

Guest satisfaction has been at the forefront of successful hotel operations since the first hotel opened its doors. However, in the last decade, the popularity of review sites, social media and online travel agencies such as Hotels.com and Expedia has skyrocketed. These websites have made large numbers of guest opinions publicly visible. It is not surprising that research has proven the link between guest reviews and revenue.

According to a 2012 Cornell University study, a one-point increase in a property’s average positive online review scores can lead to a possible:

  • 0.89% increase in price (ADR).
  • 0.54% increase in occupancy.
  • 1.42% increase in RevPAR.

Online content created by our guests about our properties is called User Generated Content (UGC). Today, UGC makes up the large majority of the information available to consumers about our hotels. The volume of UGC on the Internet increases every day.

In 2014, our prospective guests looked at an average of 27 review and social media websites before choosing a hotel. According to TripAdvisor, 93 percent of travelers consult online reviews before booking a hotel.

At Innisfree, property managers use reviews to create training scenarios and to exemplify and reward team members for customer service excellence. Corporate managers use guest sentiments to quickly identify departments in need of improvement and to prioritize capital improvement investments. Our development team uses it to design hotels we know our guests will love.

The goals of Innisfree reputation management program are to:

  • Use online sentiment data to improve guest experiences
  • Encouraging guests to leave more online reviews
  • Having managers respond to reviews in a timely and appropriate manner; and
  • Extracting actionable data from guest feedback and to improve operations and physical attributes of our properties.

The volume of reviews we need to read, analyze and respond to is overwhelming. Hotel managers work hard to juggle multiple departments and guest concerns every moment of every day. From reservations to check-ins, housekeeping, revenue management and the well-being of guests, they are under a lot of pressure to ensure the property is performing at peak service levels. Maintaining a consistent focus on smooth hotel operations makes it difficult to spend time identifying where you are excelling or falling short.

At Innisfree, we use a cloud-based platform called Revinate to efficiently glean insights from the massive number of online reviews. Revinate aggregates data generated from many online guest reviews into an easy-to-use digital dashboard. It makes it fast and simple for our managers to dive in to ‘Guest Intelligence’ data and identify opportunities to improve guest experiences.

It also gives us the ability to isolate and interpret data in the numerous topics being addressed in a hotel’s reviews, such as front desk, elevators, restaurant, bathrooms, noise and so on. Our digital team produces monthly reputation reports for all properties so we can track our progress enterprise-wide and identify trends.

While it’s important to get as much guest feedback as possible, at Innisfree we think it is much more important to listen to our guests and incorporate their feedback into our day-to-day operations. Improving guest experience by inserting the ‘voice of our customers’ into our hotels is the ultimate goal of our reputation management program.

That’s why when our guests choose an Innisfree Hotel, they can rest assured – on a great pillow, to boot – they’ll have a fun and memorable stay.

Time Management Tricks For Busy Bees

innfreehotels on August 9, 2015

Innisfree Hotels is proud to employ an in-house digital marketing agency, a team of tireless and creative professionals who work hard and have fun telling the story of our company, our guest experience and our philanthropic efforts in the communities we serve. For those of you – like us – who need help managing your workload, we recently devised this go-to list.

TIP #1 – FIND YOUR FLOW
Find focus. Carve out four (4) hours each day for thoughtful work. Wear headphones and tell your colleagues not to interrupt you during flow time. Schedule time for ‘no meetings’ on your calendar and clump your meetings together. Turn off notifications and hide your phone. Plan brain breaks. Set a focus timer. Respect extended quiet times in the office.

TIP #2 – CLEAR YOUR HEAD
Keep a notepad beside you while you work, so if an idea pops in your head you can write it down and stay focused on the task at hand. At the end of each day, process your scribbled notes into a digital task list. Keep a draft email open with all questions you need to ask your boss or teammates, and send at the end of the day.

TIP #3 – DON’T SWITCH TASK
Multitasking is a myth. Every time you switch tasks, you lose time and focus. So do one thing at a time. Talk to one person at a time. Choose a task from your list and work on it until it is done.

TIP #4 – EAT THE FROG
Do hard tasks first. Attach emotions to the tasks on your list, and do the ones that will make you feel the happiest when you check them off.

TIP #5 – PROCESS DAILY AT A SET TIME
Set a time and place to process your tasks every day and wait until that scheduled time.  Process all paper, emails and phone messages. Touch everything only once. Take action by either creating a task on your list, discarding or delegating. Empty your email box every day. Use archive and search functions.

TIP #6 – DO IT NOW
Do it now. Not later. Now. Push hard to finish today’s tasks today.

TIP #7 – USE ALL THE MINUTES
Don’t underestimate the value of small chunks of time. Starting a big task at 4:30? Yes!

TIP #8 – AVOID THE URGENT TYRANT
The tyranny of the urgent refers to the tendency of little things that have to be done right now to get in the way of what really matters. Urgent actions often feel important, but have little impact. If you succumb to the tyranny, you can find yourself going days – or even weeks – without touching the important stuff. Productive people are good at spotting the urgent tyrant. They’re willing to ignore or delegate the things that get in the way of important forward momentum.

TIP #9 – DECREASE YOUR GATHERING POINTS
A gathering point is any place where information or tasks accumulate that you need to check and process. This may include your email inbox, spam box, voicemail, Facebook messages, Twitter, your assistant, text messages, Gmail chat, Basecamp, your car, your corporate inbox and your desk. (The average person has 12. Effective people have 6.) Review your gathering points, and remove them where possible.

TIP #10 – USE A PHYSICAL INBOX
Put a box on your desk, and place everything that needs to be processed in it. Everything goes in there as it comes to you. Process it daily.

TIP #11 – GET RID OF CLUTTER
When you come to your office every day and see piles on your desk or office floor, it’s stressful and draining. Cultivate the habit of never putting anything unprocessed anywhere other than your inbox. Be ruthless. Sort everything in your office so everything has a home.  Pens go with pens, staples with staples. Everything is in its home when you leave at night.

TIP #12 – PLAN YOUR WEEK
Create a digital task list (in a cloud) with a product like Basecamp, that you can access from all your devices. Review it on Monday morning and note which tasks you will do on which days. Hold yourself accountable. Be proactive in resolving obstacles. If your task is part of a large project, then touch base with your collaborators and reiterate what you need from them and when. Don’t overestimate what you can do in a day.

TIP #13 – PLAN TOMORROW
The last thing you do every day should be to review your task list and calendar for the following day. Make adjustments as necessary, and remind your teammates what you need from them to remove obstacles. Note what you need to be prepared to execute your schedule smoothly.

TIP #14 – USE YOUR CALENDAR
Make sure every appointment is on your calendar and never double-book. Check and update your calendar daily, and sync your calendar to your phone.

TIP #15 – KEEP AN ‘INSPIRATION’ GATHERING PLACE
Keep a gathering place like Evernote for inspiration and ideas. Schedule a monthly time to clear it out.

BONUS TIP – GET WORK DONE AT WORK
Establish firm boundaries between work and personal time and use these boundaries to force yourself to be productive at work. Give yourself a time budget for tasks and adhere to it.

Protect your most valuable activities – like family, friends, exercise and sunsets.

Beach. Love. Happiness. Guest Engagement Campaign

innfreehotels on June 28, 2015

It was the summer of ’14, and we wanted to get out of our sandbox. So instead of simply selling ourselves as another beachfront hotel, we dug deeper to design our ‘Beach. Love. Happiness.’ campaign guest engagement campaign– a ‘surprise and delight’ effort geared toward delivering exceptional guest experiences by sharing genuine local knowledge.

To set our beachfront properties apart in their markets, while improving online reputation, we hired a dozen young and energetic Local Hosts, who circulated six hours each day during peak times engaging our guests. They played games with visiting children, hosted fun activities and performed service recovery when necessary. In one shining moment, a Local Host who witnessed a seaside marriage proposal offered to take photos, then surprised the happy couple with champagne and rose petals in their room.

In advance of the campaign launch, the marketing team built strategic partnerships with vendors in each destination to provide our guests with coupon books for local experiences including paddle boarding, jet ski rentals, Segway tours, pedicab rides, surfing lessons, scuba diving lessons, snorkeling, helicopter rides, dolphin tours, family portraits, restaurant meals and spa treatments. During conversations with guests, Local Hosts provided ‘in-the-know’ advice and handed out coupons based on their interests.

While helping vacationers make memories, Local Hosts encouraged them to post photos and videos on social media. Our in-house marketing agency tracked user generated content via hashtag, choosing each day’s best posts to brand with the ‘Beach. Love. Happiness.’ logo and share on our hotel Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr pages.

Not only did all the user generated content provide interesting photography and an effortless stream of User Generated Content for social media, it also deepened relationships with our guests, who felt excited that we acknowledged them and shared their work on our hotel digital platforms.

Better yet, people who visited our social media sites enjoyed content from real people sharing relatable moments – which resonates more than the same post from a savvy marketing team. It also taught us a lot about what our guests like, and how they want to spend their time with us.

The ‘Beach. Love. Happiness.’ campaign supported Innisfree Hotels’ company motto of ‘Creating Fun and Memorable Experiences,’ amplifying those experiences on social media to generate brand exposure, build customer loyalty and generate higher traffic to our local websites – increasing our percentage of web direct bookings during the hotel’s busy season.

We saw more guest engagement on-property and online, resulting in greater guest satisfaction and fewer negative reviews.

So we spread a little beach love, and it led to more happiness. It’s as simple as that.

From Mullet Bellies to Multi-Million Dollar Properties

innfreehotels on June 17, 2015

Jason Nicholson’s hospitality career began at the age of 15, when he sat in the heat scrubbing the bellies of a few hundred pounds of mullet with a toothbrush for six hours a day at Rusty’s in Perdido Key, Fla. Today, he is Innisfree’s Vice President of Operations.

Nicholson jockeyed to be promoted to dishwasher, thus beginning a series of promotions that got him where he is today. In May 2015, he became Vice President of Hotel Operations for Innisfree Hotels.

Nicholson’s real passion is food – preparing it, serving it, eating it – that’s his thing. While working toward his associate’s degree at Pensacola State College by day and working full-time in various area restaurants by night, he learned how to run a kitchen line, serve entrees, cut costs, cut beef and shuck oysters really fast. Of course, he burnt himself out.

“To give myself a break, I went into the Marine Corps,” he said. (No wonder this guy is a VP.)

Stationed in Hawaii, Nicholson finished his undergraduate degree at Hawaii Pacific University. When he left the Marines in 1994, he came to Innisfree as a Desk Clerk at the Days Inn in Orange Beach, Ala. He was there only a few weeks when an opening for Assistant General Manager came available at Pensacola’s Beachside Resort and Conference Center. The property opened Memorial Day weekend in 1996.

“I remember laying carpet in the hall on that Friday. This was my indoctrination to management,” he said. “We had 100 rooms. I know I was yelled at 100 times.”

Nicholson worked directly with Mike Nixon (now President of Hotel Operations for Innisfree) for a year before an opening at the Best Western in Perdido Key, Fla. promoted him to General Manager. After two months in the role, there was an opportunity to run a third-party management property in Camp Verde, Arizona. He later returned to the Gulf Coast, shuffling between the Days Inn in Orange Beach and back to the Best Western in Perdido until he was offered the managerial role of the Holiday Inn Express in Orange Beach. After six years at the helm of that hotel, he became a Regional Manager for Ocala’s Hampton Inn & Suites, while concurrently running the Hilton Garden Inn in Orange Beach. In 2012, Jason was promoted to Regional Director for Innisfree. In 2015, he became our new Vice President.

One of his funniest memories comes from the Best Western in Perdido Key, where he hosted newly commissioned military students, water survival and SEAL teams. The phone call began with, “Jason, we have a problem.” Apparently, fifty guests from Sweden who were visiting to attend the Brownsville Revival had decided to get in the pool. The problem, you say? They were swimming “Swedish style.”

After all his years in the industry, and most of them with Innisfree, Nicholson has seen it all and loved every minute of it.

“It’s different every day, and our job is to create a fun and inviting atmosphere where people can feel most comfortable,” he says. “I love how dynamic it is, stretching from financing and development to culture-building and everything in between … the individual growth of our teammates to the technical side of rebuilding a commercial washer. It really covers everything. I like how stimulating and diverse and complex it is.”

Plus, he doesn’t have to sit at a desk.

“I’m really proud of the organization we have built in my 19 years with Innisfree, where it’s fun to come to work. We are undoubtedly the best at what we do given the scale of what we are in the industry,” Nicholson said. “We’ve built a company that’s the best in the business, and we’ve made sure we’re still going to have fun doing it. We work among friends … not just coworkers who are friendly, but we are genuinely friends.”

Nicholson credits his personal success and that of Innisfree Hotels to its founder and CEO Julian MacQueen and his wife, Kim, who, instead of monetizing the company have decided to reinvest in it and are always willing to do just as much or more than anybody else.

“That sort of leadership resonates with me. We are here today because of Julian’s steadfast focus in developing in the right markets at the right time and not cutting any slack for poor performance in our hotels,” he says. “That is what has gotten us to where we are today, working with a great group of people who follow his great leadership and are very passionate and focused on being the best we can be.”

There’s Something Fishy Going On

innfreehotels on May 27, 2015

Fish Art Fundraiser Supports Innisfree-Sponsored Dixon School of the Arts

If you walk into the gift shop at the Hilton Pensacola Beach, you might notice something fishy. The colorful fish that hang happily on hooks at our beachfront hotel have a story to tell. They were created by 5th through 7th graders at Dixon School of the Arts, the same school their sale will support.

Lisa Puzon and Shaughnessy Johnson serve as Dixon’s annual artists in residence, sponsored by Innisfree Hotels to travel from Atlanta to share their talents. Early in 2015, the duo taught a class using local clay as a medium and means to celebrate the history and habitats of Florida – a theme the school adopted for the year. The masks and fish students created out of clay were displayed at Dixon’s Gallery Night, which Innisfree founder and CEO Julian MacQueen and his wife, Kim, attended.

The fish, in particular, caught the MacQueen’s collective eyes. With an eye for art and a heart for charity, they commissioned a school of clay fish for the Hilton as a fundraiser for Dixon – the school Innisfree Hotels has supported since the time of its original charter.

“The students are aware that the proceeds will support the Visual Arts program in their school,” Puzon said. “This is an excellent way to show the students how to apply the arts in real life.”

Each bold and beautiful fish is named for his or her creator. Angela is a student with a delicate style, but confidence in her craft and colors. Dasya is quiet, yet eager to explore and experiment, which shows in the wide fins her fish possesses. Toni has a simple but sophisticated style, combining plain shapes with complex textures. A meticulous painter, Zuria loves bold design and bright colors. Martavion uses textures and shapes to create a design that is not only visually pleasing, but also makes you want to touch it.

Guided by Puzon and Johnson, and with help from talented student assistants Kalani and Jaylyn, the team of five recreated their designs to be casted and marketed in the Hilton’s gift shop. Funds raised from their purchase will support Dixon’s Visual Arts program to broaden learning and experience, encompassing visits to museums and other art events and venues, scholarships for special art classes outside the school, art materials and more.

“You only need to visit for a day to see that all the teachers and staff take pride in their school and are committed to creating a safe and loving environment that is open to learning and flourishing,” Johnson says of Dixon School of the Arts.

The artists in residence hope this fundraiser is only the beginning of support and sponsorship opportunities that will allow Dixon to display its blossoming talents. For Innisfree’s part, the Hilton Pensacola Beach gift shop will provide an ongoing venue to display and sell student artwork.

That’s one special ‘Catch of the Day.’

Google Updates = Big Impacts for Hotel Marketing

innfreehotels on May 19, 2015

Google recently implemented algorithm changes that have the potential to profoundly impact digital marketing strategies for franchised hotels.

Doorway

On May 11, 2015, Google released a ‘ranking adjustment’ to deal with ‘doorway’ pages, noting that this update would have “a broad impact” on sites utilizing doorway campaigns. The purpose of the doorway update is to improve the user experience by eliminating multiple search results for the same business.

Doorways are duplicate websites (or internal pages within a website) created to rank for specific search queries. An example is a house-cleaning business that services different cities and wants to capture ranking for all of them. Businesses in this situation may create several pages on their website (with the same content about its services) optimized for the different locations they serve such as:

/house-cleaning-pensacola
/house-cleaning-gulf shores
/house-cleaning-fort-walton-beach
/house-cleaning-gulf breeze

Google would prefer they create a single page outlining their services and all the areas they serve. Although it is not clear that Google means to penalize franchise businesses (such as hotel chains) that have a brand websites as well as microsites for every location, it’s possible Google will throw these ‘local babies’ out with the bathwater.

Showing multiple links in search engine results is one of the primary reasons why hotels support a local website in addition to their Brand.com property page. Google may argue that this strategy doesn’t promote a good ‘user experience’. For example, if a user searching for ‘hotels pensacola beach’ clicks on a local website result and decides he doesn’t like that hotel, and then clicks on the Brand.com website and finds the same choice, he may find that  frustrating.

Google has remained elusive about how the search engine will determine if a ‘doorway page’ was created for user interest or to generate search traffic. Google’s Brian White says they are targeting sites that “maximize their search footprint without adding clear, unique value.” Clarifications and opinions on algorithm update are evolving in real-time, so it will be a few weeks before we see and feel the full impact of this.

Hilton was the first of our brands to respond to this update. On April 12, Hilton e-commerce officials sent emails to thousands of properties asking them to redirect their local websites to their property Brand.com page. They recognized that many local websites generate significant web direct revenue and so only asked properties with local sites producing less than 20% of their web direct revenue to do this. Initial conversations indicate their initial goal is to eliminate local sites for roadside and smaller properties that are not well optimized.

Innisfree’s strategy is to stay on top of the emergent news from Google while optimizing all property websites to avoid penalties. Now is a good time to review all website content (brand and local) and eliminate duplicate content while ensuring local website content is uniquely useful.

It is our opinion that once the storm dies down, quality local hotel websites will remain unaffected by this change. This update is likely being deployed to clean up websites that offer no unique user content. Innisfree’s local websites are rich with unique content, including guest galleries, local guide blogs, locally focused page content and vibrant locally rooted social media connections.

Innisfree’s strategic foresight in hiring a writer to produce unique and useful local content is going to serve us well.

Mobilegeddon

On April 21, 2015, Google released a significant new mobile-friendly algorithm designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results. The change is so significant that SEO bloggers have dubbed it ‘Mobilegeddon’.

Innisfree is proud to launch responsive mobile websites for all properties in the spring of 2015.  Our goal is to have this project complete by the end of May for our primary beachfront hotels and mid-June for our entire portfolio.

Google is dropping its horizontal Carousel display of local search results in several categories including restaurants, nightlife, entertainment and hotels. It’s being replaced by a ‘3-pack’ of organic listings.

3-Pack

The new 3-Pack will appear below the top AdWords results. Note the 3-Pack results are not ads, but do includes real-time room rates. Also note that users can sort the 3-pack results by ‘review ranking’, highlighting the increasing importance of focused reputation management strategies.