The History of Hotels - Infographic

Gemm Signs Staybridge Hotel as Stand Alone Support Service

Expanding upon an already successful customer support track record, and with the confidence of being able to handle dozens of hotels in the Latin American hospitality market, Gemm is excited to announce the roll out of a stand alone support service. To celebrate this announcement, we also are thankful to have brought on our first client, the Staybridge Hotel located in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. The Staybridge is a luxury business style hotel, which handles some of the most demanding type of clientele from an Internet connectivity perspective. These are clients who are visiting Guadalajara, and their need to have instant and fast connectivity back to their home office, or their clients is not only real, it needs to be world class. The Staybridge hotel felt confident enough in our ability to be able to handle this type of customer based on our existing relationship handling two of their other properties based in Puerto Vallarta and Cancun. Read more

Hotel Marketing: Does your hotel have a free prize inside?

Does your service or product have a free prize inside? 

Tazo's, as explained by Wikipedia, are round or octagonal disks which can be found inside a bag of Frito Lay chips.  The object of the tazo is each one has a score, and players can play each other to win, trade them, or collect the tazos. In Mexico, tazo's are very popular with the school children. How do I know this? Because both of my sons are completely obsessed with collecting these round seemingly worthless pieces of plastic. So much so, that my youngest son will collect money for weeks, and then when he is allowed, go to the local store and buy as many small bags of chips which are so marked as having a tazo inside as he can afford. Once he has them, he'll proceed to open the bags, pretend to eat some of the chips just to access the tazo. When I noticed this, I couldn't help but be impressed by this marketing. Each bag of chips by Frito Lays in Mexico costs between 6 and 8MXN pesos, nearly half of $1 USD. The tazo itself is likely close to nothing if it's mass produced but is the item most valued in the bag by him, and the other children I see playing with them on almost every street corner. My son told me of a child in his class that collected the tazos and had nearly 100. Wikipedia tells of a person that's been collecting tazos for 20 years, and has nearly 2M of them. Excuse me? 2 Million pieces of plastic, a life's work?  Read more

Use Basecamp and the 80/20 Rule to Razor Focus Your Day

At Gemm, we're big fans of 37Signals.com's application Basecamp. We also use their application HighRise to track all of our contacts. To imagine our company without these applications brings back a shudder as customers angrily had to resend reminder emails for the most mundane requests, thank goodness those days are over. While this particular topic may not be quite so pertinent to providing Hotel Internet and servicing the Mexican hospitality sector, I would find it hard to imagine these guidelines not providing some benefit to any Mexican hotelier or IT manager.

The premise behind providing this work habit is based upon the Italian economist's Vilfredo Frederico Damso Pareto's 80/20 principle, otherwise known as "The Vital Few and Trivial Many Rule". This principle was broken down and brought into mainstream marketing by Richard Koch's book, The 80/20 Principle: How To Achieve More With Less, which is a highly recommended read if you're interested in furthering your understanding on the topic. 

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