Weekly Briefing

Hello. This week, I’m excited to share two new stories with you:

• What Scott Curran has learned about technology as Chief Operating Officer at a hotel ownership group

• How Reneson Hotels turned around the Hilton Garden Inn Napa in 6 months

Enjoy!

- Josiah Mackenzie, Publisher

This weekly briefing is brought to you by Hospitality Daily

Hospitality Daily provides inspiration from the best in the business for serving your teams, guests, and communities. In case you missed them, here are the ideas from the past week:

• Why I moved from tech to hospitality...and stayed - Jeremy Wells

• Many try to be like Ace Hotel, and fail. Here’s why. - Jeremy Wells

• Hospitality was this conversation - Eleanor Erickson

• What I’ve learned about supporting my teams - Scott Curran

• Create a culture of safety for your team - Thalia Manzo

Listen to these 3-minute episodes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Technology must be easy: What Scott Curran has learned as Chief Operating Officer

Scott Curran grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley, the son of an early employee of Intel. Today, he’s Chief Operating Officer for Reneson Hotels, an owner-operator of branded and independent hotels in California.

Reneson Hotels consistently tops guest satisfaction charts, with their Best Western property #2 of more than 2,000 in the system, and their IHG and Hilton properties all in the top 10% of those brands.

He and I recently sat down to talk about technology, something he has a unique perspective on as both COO of Reneson and co-founder of GuestEQ, a hotel operations technology platform.

In this article, we cover:

• Barriers to technology use in hotels today

• Why hotel tech must be easy

• Automating hotel operations (instead of guest interactions)

• Digitizing operations for visibility and accountability

• How "lightweight tech" can speed up digitization

• The role of hardware in digitizing operations

• What Scott would like to see from hotel brands as an owner

Read the story here

How Reneson Hotels turned around the Hilton Garden Inn Napa in 6 months

Scott Curran shares the story of how he and his team turned around guest satisfaction for the Hilton Garden Inn Napa, which went from nearly being kicked out of the brand to now being in the top 10% of guest satisfaction of all hotels in the Hilton system.

“You have six months to turn this hotel around”

“Soon after we took over this property, I was at a brand conference at the Beverly Hilton and was speaking with Chris Wilroy, one of their senior vice presidents,” Scott recalled. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘You have six months to figure out how to get this hotel turned around or you’re out of the brand.’

Read what Scott did to turn around the hotel