This activity can be under the responsibility of a hotel brand, but
also of local, national, or global hotel operators such as Interstate Hotels and
Resorts.
These companies specialize in the running of hotels and may or
may not carry a brand name.
The third and lesser known activity relates to the ownership of the property.
I term this activity the owners.
This group is diverse and includes private equity funds, reads,
private wealthy investors, hotel groups and other types of investors.
Corporations like the Blackstone Group host hotels and resorts.
Felco Lodging Trust are an example of the players in this field.
This activity generally involves some kind of asset and financial management tasks.
The fourth and last value ending activity to date is the distribution
including sales and marketing activities.
The tasks involved here all aim at bringing heads in the beds,
as is commonly said.
Companies involved in this activity include hotel chains,
membership affiliations, off and online travel agents,
such as the Priceline Group or Expedia, and many others.
The emergence of companies in the distribution space driven by
digital revolution has significantly affected the relationship between
all of the players within the value chain.
Their emergence has been key to the current environment of
the hospitality industry.
The next modules of this MOOC will uncover the keys to this new environments.
And provide you with deeper understanding of distribution and demand management.
The exponential growth of hotel business that started in the late
70s has profoundly changed the degree of integration of
the four activities within the value chain.
Several terms have been employed to discuss this evolution.
Ranging from the separation of the bricks from the brains, or the pursuit for
an asset light strategy or even the disintegration of the value chain.
What this terms mean is that, companies involved in the industry started to
specialize on the few sets of activities within the traditional value chain.
For instance, most of the traditional branded hotel chains seem to be
concentrating primarily on the branding and distribution functions.
In doing so, they essentially outsource ownership, and
even operations to some extent, by means of franchising.
At times, mostly for large upscale hotels,
they maintain control over the operations through the use of management contracts.