Podcast host Ryan Embree welcomes the newest addition to the TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series, Mauri Berry, Vice President of Marketing & Digital Strategy at Remington Hospitality! 

During this episode, listeners can expect to learn a plethora of valuable and exciting insights and takeaways that encompass current trends in the hotel industry, such as technology advancement, effective digital touchpoints for guests, and hotel rebranding.

Ryan Embree:
Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is Travel Media Group Marketing Director and host of the Suite Spot, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer series. We’re heating up a very, very busy summer season, but I am very excited about our guest because she’s got some exciting news about a chapter for definitely a hospitality trailblazer management company out there, Remington Hospitality. So, without further ado, I will go ahead and bring in Mauri Berry, Vice President of Marketing and Digital Strategy at Remington Hospitality. Welcome to the Suite Spot, Mauri, this is your first time.

Mauri Berry:
Yeah, thanks Ryan. So happy to be here. I’m honored to have been invited and talk a little bit more about what we’ve got going on.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, certainly have a lot going on, but we always like to start these episodes, just because our industry is so unique in the sense of, you know, some people find hospitality just through maybe a side job or gig here and there. Some people were born into it, some people went to school for it now, we’re seeing that more and more often. So with every new guest we kind of like to ask your hospitality journey and tell us a little bit about your background. What led your hospitality path to Remington.

Mauri Berry:
Yeah, sure. So I’ve been around longer than I care to admit, primarily in our industry from even before I graduated from college. You know, I’ve been around for a while. My background, I started in PR as a PR major straight out of college and worked for a major attraction in Atlanta. And then sort of over the course of the years evolved and adapt my career all within the hospitality space. You know, I’ve worked in agency environments in PR and integrated marketing for hospitality and tourism companies. I’ve worked at Lakeside Resorts, I worked for Marriott where I spent most of my career is in field marketing at Marriott International for about 14 years. So, have really, like I said, been around longer than I care to admit. I did leave Marriott after almost 14 years and went to a hotel management company. I knew that in order to really grow and expand my career, I needed to maybe step outside of the Marriott bubble, expand my horizons a bit into other brands, other hotel types, other ways of doing business. So jumped into hotel management space and have never looked back. I’ve been, as you mentioned, with Remington Hospitality for about two years and you know, it’s been nonstop adventure from day one with a number of different updates and corporate and company pivots and new exciting updates. So, you know, I don’t see myself going anywhere for a while, if the excitement continues the way it has since I’ve been here.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, certainly a lot of exciting things to share, some of which we’re gonna talk about on this episode a little bit later, but it’s just so fascinating to hear. I love in this Hospitality Trailblazer series kind of hearing where people jump from, you know, you got people on the brand side that have jumped to the management company side and vice versa but it all kind of makes up that, that DNA and having that kind of PR background, I’m sure is super unique to the industry because we’re always looking for ways to promote our property, but it’s different doing it from the brand level and sometimes from the management company level, even though they have to align. So we’ll talk about a little bit more about that being that, that this is a digital marketing podcast. But before we talk about all the exciting stuff moving forward, I wanna take a step back because we’ve really explored in this series unique perspective of digital marketing and strategy during the pandemic and how the guest experiences really changed over these past couple years. How critical was it during that time or is it now to really pre-stay set guest expectations? Cause we talk about this all the time because now we’re in a place where guests don’t know if when they come on property, if they have to request housekeeping. They’ve never had to do that before, right? That’s always been a part of the guest experience from mobile check-in to what can they expect from breakfast now, you know, so what are some ways we can connect with our guests digitally and what are some things that Remington does online to connect with this guest?

Mauri Berry:
So engaging with the guest pre pandemic certainly was very important, but it sort of became more critical and more of a table stake sort of play during the pandemic to really, manage expectations, set expectations, communicate to the guest, you know, the safety protocols and things like that were in place during the pandemic. But then post Covid, we also continue to leverage the learnings and best practices that we learned during the Covid timeframe and are sort of adapting and evolving those best practices to the current state. So for example, obviously we use guest messaging tools and platforms to communicate with our guests before, during, and after the stay, just to ensure that they know what to expect to communicate things like local area, you know, it was important before, we used it exceedingly during and then we were sort of continuing to adapt and evolve based on customer expectations now. It’s not changing fundamentally, it’s just the way that we leverage the tools are changing. In addition to the guest messaging platforms during the pandemic, we also developed an email strategy that took transactional emails a step further for our hotel guests. So what we would do is we would send customized and personalized emails to our guests from the general manager before, during, and after the stay. And they communicated things like amenities service or facility updates on property during the pandemic. They also talked about safety protocols, what’s happening in the local area. And we really got amazing feedback not only from the guests, which is you know, what we were really trying to focus on, but also the general managers felt like it was a really great additional touchpoint to build those relationships with our guests. So as we’ve come out of the pandemic, we are looking for ways, especially for our branded hotels, to sort of adapt and evolve that strategy so that we stay within brand guidelines but also, you know, keep that communication open with the guest to continue to manage and exceed expectations.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, I love that. That’s such a unique perspective cause we always think about it from the guest side, but from the employee and general manager side, you think about it, technology has really made it more possible to lessen those touch points, right? We talk about sometimes mobile check-in being this great advantage for, for the customer experience. They can just go right past the front desk and leave whenever they please. But the general managers who are looking to improve the guest experience or looking to see that sentiment from guests, now all of a sudden that’s a touchpoint that’s been removed. So I love that fact that you’re trying to implement more of these digital touchpoints because that’s the way that we’re communicating, right? Everyone’s on their phone and the long and short of it is our guests might feel more comfortable now texting or emailing behind a phone than they would be to come to the front desk to ask for something. So super, super smart. Love to see that. And it just speaks to again, how critical your online presence is in having a digital listening ear out there for your guests because they’re wanting to communicate with you. They might not be able to do it physically anymore, but they have a lot of digital channels where you can listen. Now I wanna fast forward to this summer, right? And we recently just released our annual TMG Spring Guest Sentiment Report. It had some incredible numbers on there, over 1.7 million reviews, 7.5 million pieces of guest sentiment feedback. This was all during the spring. We’re expecting an even bigger summer. That’s our busiest time to respond to, to hotel partners, reviews. Everything that I’m seeing, including STR data is saying that it is going to be a huge summer for the hoteliers out there, which I’m sure a lot of people love to hear. What are you expecting and, and how is your team preparing for this busy travel season?

Mauri Berry:
Yeah, so we are expecting a really busy summer across the organization. We are preparing across every discipline, right? So we have a number of initiatives in place to support the summer season like everyone else in the industry. We continue to prioritize recruitment and retention of top talent because those are the people who deliver on that exceptional guest service and create those memorable experience. So obviously talent is priority number one. But then training that talent. So we have a dedicated brand performance team who work directly with the hotel teams to onboard train and support service delivery at the hotel level. So really proactively preparing the team members to put themselves in the shoes of the traveler to really anticipate and prepare for those guest needs and then to proactively deliver on those touchpoints. So operations, recruiting, hr, big, big, big focus, on the marketing and digital front. One thing that we focused on well before the summer months, we launched our very first what we call spring cleaning week. And it’s not spring cleaning in the typical sense that you would think of it’s spring cleaning as it relates to our online content. So we had a dedicated week where every single hotel would review their online content from across channels to really review, cleanse, and update our content online to ensure that everything was accurate, that we were promoting and communicating super compelling messages that we were highlighting our differentiators to really help set the expectation for the hotel experience for the summer. That was a huge initiative for us back in April. We are also working to really focus on demand generation and capturing demand and occupancy as it sort of stabilizes and resets to a degree. We’ve also developed a portfolio wide summer promotion strategy. It’s not a one size fits all approach for our hotels. What we’re doing is we’re rolling out optional offer and promotional offerings for the guests that are really catered to the unique and individual needs of the hotel. So for example, you know, we may have some hotels that summertime is their peak travel time and it’s their peak occupancy months. But then some hotels summer may be they’re low occupancy season. So really offering up the hotel’s options for promotions that best meet their unique business needs while also providing an experience for the customer. So that’s another way that we’re really gearing up for summer.

Ryan Embree:
That is so awesome. I love that spring cleaning initiative. And it speaks to a point Mauri, that we talk about on this podcast all the time of different seasons could mean different things for your hotels. You know, right now maybe putting a promotion out on social media in the summer, you don’t need that promotion because you’re already getting those bookings. What you should be doing is instead trying to build advocacy online, build that audience engagement, trying to get more followers for maybe your winter season where you’re not seeing as much demand, going in there and starting to put those promotions. So it’s such a smart idea. The spring cleaning, I love that. That’s, that’s doing a great job of setting the expectations like we just talked about a second ago because I’ve been on multiple social media profiles, even websites for hotels sometimes and we’re still referencing some things that maybe were relevant during the pandemic, you know, so making sure that that stuff is up to date because that’s the first impression that your guests are getting. The demand is out there, it’s about capturing it, which is key, which you mentioned. So in some demand that we’ve seen and heard is coming back is this business travel, right? That’s what we’ve been kind of waiting for this to catch up to leisure it has, it’s not there yet, but in this series I’ve really been doing kind of this tallying personal poll of predictions of, of what industry leaders are thinking about business travel over the next couple years. And I’ve seen it on the wide spectrum. Some are very, very bullish about business travel coming back. Others a little bit more like we’re never gonna see those levels again. So what are you seeing on your end and from a marketing standpoint, how do we target this new business travel? Cause we’ve heard all the keywords, right? The bleisure trying to target these work from home employees. So what are we doing on our marketing side to try to reach ’em as well?

Mauri Berry:
So at Remington we are what I would describe as realistic in our predictions with business travel. So for us, the segment is about 75% recovered to pre pandemic, yet we’re up over 30% to same time last year. So there’s still room to grow, but we’re growing. So our point of view is that we’re not giving up on, on the business transient segment, but we do recognize the fact that it has fundamentally changed. Again, to your point, we think a lot of that has to do with that the phenomenon of leisure and where business travelers are adding leisure components to their business trip or adding business components to their leisure trip. And, and one thing that we’ve recognized is, you know, maybe BT is not as down as we thought. It could just be that they’re booking in other ways. They may not be booking through traditional BT channels. You know, of course they’re booking direct and and that’s what we really want, but we also think that they are booking through more traditional leisure, leisure channels, like OTAs and Triple A. All that being said though we’re not giving up on the business travel segment, you know, we continue to double down and continue to prioritize. We are gearing up now and mobilizing our team for the 2024 BT pricing season, placing a lot of focus, a lot of manpower and emphasis on really supporting that segment and building it for the future.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, I had, another guest on this series, you know, kind of talk about the disguised business travel and I love that term because it’s kind of putting the metrics, we’re kind of, we don’t really know where the field goal, where the end zone is on this because, things have changed so much. So you’re right, it’s hard to kind of gauge where whether we’re ever gonna be to that normal or pre pandemic levels when we could be on a whole new ball field and playing field when it comes to business travel. So I’ll keep your prediction in the, realistic standpoint, but that’s great to hear that, that there has been significant recovery there because you know, when we, we, even when we started the series, we were really hoping for those numbers and now’s starting to see some, some more signals of it coming. Let’s talk about Remington a little bit cause it, it has such an impressive portfolio, right? Key West of California, you guys are over a hundred hotels. You mentioned this about how you have to kind of, with the promotions that you’re doing for the summer, you can’t just blanket and and put it across the portfolio. You have to be kind of targeted and specific in your marketing. And I’m wondering from your standpoint, how do you do that with such a vast portfolio, you know, making sure that there’s targeted marketing at a property level, but also staying true to the corporate side and, and what you’re trying to accomplish maybe from Remington Hospitality standpoint.

Mauri Berry:
So I think that there is sort of an art and a science to supporting such a diverse and widespread portfolio, right? So I would say from the science standpoint, we have a very intentional organizational structure and deployment within the marketing and digital strategy team at Remington. So we have sort of teams within the team, if you will. We have a hotel facing, or what we like to call front of house marketing and digital team where we have strategists that are deployed by hotel type and geography. So for example, we have three mini teams within our front of house team. We have one group that is responsible for supporting our independent and lifestyle hotels. We have one team that, or one group of folks who are deployed to our branded full service hotels. We have another group that’s deployed to our branded select service hotels. And then within that they’re aligned by geography to really hone in on and, and leverage the unique market dynamics and to really become experts in seasonality and market knowledge. But then they also align very closely with our revenue strategy teams. So hotel type deployment, independent lifestyle versus branded by geography in addition to those front of house strategists that really get to know the hotels, the markets and the unique segment priorities and business needs at the hotels. We also have a back of house digital operations team. And that group really supports scaling the strategies and operationalizing and executing on the tactics that the front of house strategy team develops. So that’s part of, of the, the science. Of course there are foundational strategies that we deploy for every hotel. It goes back to what we talked about earlier with content, right? Content is king. Content is where we are going to really win. Also revenue generation through paid media. There’s not a huge difference in the way that we do that across geographies or hotel types. Where the art comes in is we look at every single hotel as unique and individual. We look at their unique business needs, we look at their segment priorities, we look at their position in the market, and then we sort of take an enrichment and an intervention approach for every single hotel. And what I mean by enrichment is for things where the hotel is really firing on all cylinders, they’re killing it in their market space. We really lean into and leverage and, and really accentuate those positive things. But then no hotel is perfect, right? So we also take sort of that intervention approach as it relates to where we might need extra support, where we might need to improve our focus. And so it really, that is really the art side of, of the way that we really customize and specialize our strategies for our diverse portfolio.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, I absolutely love that. And it’s something we preach on this podcast all the time about taking that approach of saying, you know, say what guests love about your property and take it a mile further. And then obviously every everyone knows their opportunities. You know, every hotel knows where they might need a little help or this is a place online where I think makes me vulnerable to losing, market share to my competition. Figure out whether it’s time investment, monetary investment. If you can’t do a, a huge renovation right now, maybe it’s additional training with your staff or at least setting an expectation of location is a great example that we use all the time on this podcast. Nobody’s gonna be able to move their hotel from one location to another. But what you can do is set expectations coming into your hotel of what to expect if parking’s an issue, let people know that, I mean, people want transparency now and, and they’re gonna be more upset if they have something that they didn’t expect rather than saying, oh, I knew parking was gonna be an issue, you know, based on, on what I read online about this property. And being upfront and honest, I mean that, that, that transparency really has made its way into our industry where guests want to know what this experience is gonna be like to the point where some, some hotels even have a virtual tour that you can take. You might have a guest that already knows what your lobby looks in, knows how to get to the room, all that good stuff that we used to have to explain behind the front desk before all that technology. So let’s talk about, as we mentioned before, and, and I think this has been just a case study on, on how important a digital marketing strategy, Remington Hospitality super complex, it’s a lot of layers in support of digital strategy and marketing. What about the individual hotelier? Maybe even like a, a front desk managers just getting started at an individual property, you know, what would be some kind of initial steps that they could take in order to optimize their hotel in their marketing?

Mauri Berry:
I would love to say that there is like a silver bullet or some game changing innovation, that we can leverage. I think that it really boils down to flawless execution of the basics. Whatever the basic is for that individual or for that hotel, right? To your point, as they say in real estate, location, location, location. From a marketing and digital standpoint, I say content, content, content, it goes back to the spring cleaning we talked about. It goes back to flawless execution of reputation management and review response and being really intentional and and thoughtful about that and really prioritizing and focusing on ways that you can sort of pull through your unique differentiators in content online, on your website, even in your review response for reputation management. I think from there it’s really just sort of meeting the guest and the traveler where they are and what they want and need in that moment.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, we talk to hotels all the, all the time about a review response, voice and and tone and even a social voice for your business. If you haven’t already I think a simple exercise is just take the time to write down what your voice is. You know, what do you want to get out there about your hotel? Do you want this to be more of a kind of fun leisure vacation vibe voice, or do you want a more business buttoned up look on on your online presence? Consistency is key there as well. That has to match the content otherwise, again, that inauthenticity comes through on that. And I think in this digital age, guests more than ever are are really good at kind of seeing through that authenticity of, of a business. Now, one of the biggest headwinds that we mentioned before is staffing. AHLA just put out 82% of hoteliers are, are still in some capacity struggling with staffing. It was just an absolutely incredible stat it it really is a crisis right now in our industry. Now checking Remington Hospitality out online and following some of your social media accounts, I continue to see where passionate people thrive. Can you expand a little bit about what that means and how it’s important to have a very defined culture online, especially when it comes to recruiting efforts in today’s staffing shortage?

Mauri Berry:
Yeah, so where passionate people thrive is really Remington Hospitality’s value proposition. And when we talk about passionate people thriving from our perspective, it’s key stakeholders across our business. Obviously it’s hotel guests, of course we want our hotel guests to thrive when they’re staying with us. We want our owners to thrive with their investments. But really the way that you drive happy guests and the way that you create value for your owners is through thriving associates, through passionate associates who are really dialed in and really aligned on what the overall mission is. And we feel as though being the place where passionate people thrive is really our value proposition across all the segments. But especially with our associates, even before the pandemic, we recognized that the way that we were perceived outside of the company and also inside the company, might not have been all that fabulous. So back in 2019 we underwent sort of a, a cultural shift, if you will. And this is when and, and where we developed the passionate people thrive value proposition. And we have worked tirelessly since then to really reshape the narrative about who Remington Hospitality is, what we stand for, and what an associate can expect from working with us, what an owner can expect. And all the way down the line, we’ve really done an amazing job with this, if I do say so myself. Our current Glassdoor rating, if you check it out today, it’s a 4.3 on Glassdoor. I think that is indicative of the tireless work that we’ve really put into cultivating an environment of passion and thriving and what does thrive mean really in the space. I think it really means stepping up and out of the status quo and really firing on all cylinders and really driving the business above and beyond what meet expectation means to really exceeding expectations. And so, you know, I think that we’ve, we’ve done a, a really good job. Certainly success is never final and there’s always more work that can be done, but you know, we’re really proud of, of the culture that we’ve created and we’ll continue to prioritize being the place where passionate people thrive.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah, that’s awesome. I mean, it’s an incredible story and, and you know, the the fact that there’s a story behind that I think is really, really cool to hear. And you, you know, you mentioned Glassdoor, which in hospitality that’s, that’s an impressive feat. You know, I talk about all the time on this podcast how associates and employees, they also have a look into what a hotel’s like based on your online reviews and with you guys prioritizing your portfolio’s reputation, that’s only going to serve you for recruiting efforts. Because if you ever wanna see, hey, what a day in the life, what, what are guests saying to you behind the front desk? Go to our TripAdvisor, go to our Google and see all the four and five stars, about how we’re making people’s lives and how we’re making people thrive, right? As you, as what you guys are saying. But you know, from one monumental shift to another, let’s talk about this Remington Hospitality rebrand, right? Congratulations to you and your team on this. I’ve been seeing it all over my LinkedIn, all over, publications. Tell us a little bit about what this means for Remington on the horizon here.

Mauri Berry:
Awesome. I’m so glad the strategy worked because we had a very intentional strategy and approach to really communicating and shouting from the mountain tops that Remington is now Remington Hospitality, which really better aligns with our true delivery of product and service. Before we were Remington hotels, now we’re Remington Hospitality, and with the name Remington Hotels, we sort of siloed and pigeonholed ourselves into hotel management, right? But we are so much more than that. We’ve grown so much over the last few years. We’ve expanded our capabilities by recruiting amazing new talent. We’ve expanded our management footprint. We are this close to expanding into the Latin America and Caribbean market. We are expanding into different asset classes by focusing on and managing more wellness inspired properties, more independent and luxury hotels. So really expanding our capabilities and our service beyond just hotels and into hospitality overall. And we just sort of felt like it was staying true to our culture and really being, having that integrity that we’re not just hotels anymore, we are so much more and we’re broadening and we’re owning that space.

Ryan Embree:
Yeah. So what will this rebrand really do to I guess, further distinguish Remington Hospitality now from larger hospitality management companies?

Mauri Berry:
Yeah, so I think it really is indicative and really speaks to, again, the expansion of services and capabilities that we are so proud to have now. So from a beverage and food perspective, our leadership team and our capabilities and, and many of the, the programs and processes and initiatives that we’ve put in place from a B&F standpoint is a game changer in the industry breaking into wellness, travel and what I like to call specialty lodging. So, you know, we have a dedicated and very strategic directive to expand beyond a very traditional hotel support system. We’re looking at glamping projects, we’re looking at ecotourism, especially with our, impending growth in the Caribbean and Latin America. These, what I call specialty lodging products are exploding and we want to really put ourselves out there in that space and that will help us to differentiate ourselves from other hotel management companies.

Ryan Embree:
Absolutely. Well that’s super exciting, Mauri, congratulations again to you and your team. You know, we, we’ve covered a lot on this episode. Any final thoughts on today?

Mauri Berry:
I think that, as I mentioned a moment ago, and to quote Bill Marriott success is never final. And to also sort of go back to what we talked about at the very beginning, Remington has changed and really enhanced itself so much over the past few years that success is never final with Remington. We are rebranding and repositioning ourselves as a hospitality company to really capture the opportunity that’s out there, but also to provide that exceptional operational and commercial success that we’ve accomplished as a company and to expand it beyond to, you know, other, other asset classes, other lodging type assets. So, you know, again, just success is never final and we are so excited to be on this ride.

Ryan Embree:
I love it. Well, the Suite Spot is excited to follow what’s next for Remington Hospitality. Now again, congratulations to you and your team on this. Thank you for all the marketing advice and, and tidbits. It’s so, so important for hoteliers out there to be cognizant of this and to always be looking for ways to improve. I love that little slogan at the end cause it speaks to exactly what, what we preach here at the Suite Spot. So Mauri, thank you so much for joining the Suite Spot.

Mauri Berry:
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Enjoyed it.

Ryan Embree:
Alright. And thank you all for listening. We will talk to you next time on The Suite Spot. To join our loyalty program be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.