Mike Deitemeyer doesn’t like to get distracted by all the industry chatter about OTA wars, consolidation and the sharing economy, nor is he one to blindly follow the leaders. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that as the president of Omni Hotels & Resorts, Dallas, he doesn’t have shareholders to satisfy – only the owning Rowling family which, led by patriarch Bob Rowling, holds similar beliefs that help define a company culture that cascades up and down the organization.
“All those distractions just keep coming at you, and there are people out there saying, ‘You’ve got to change or else you’re going to get lost.’ To me, those are time drains,” said Deitemeyer, who has been loyal to Omni for 25 years.
Case in point: The big brands are battling OTAs by offering direct booking discounts, which Deitemeyer called expensive and a move that also “discounts” the product. “We don’t want our brand to be known as one to go to for discounts,” he added. He prefers that consumers come for engagement, great restaurants and to connect with the community and staff.
So instead of discounting, Omni went the value-add and local market leadership route in June, launching “Say Goodnight to Hunger,” a program where, with each direct booking, Omni donates food for a local family of four for a week.
Deitemeyer also prefers to talk about the evolution of the consumer and technology, and how it impacts guest engagement. “Part of my job is to debunk some of the rhetoric around millennials, consolidation and the sharing economy, and let the team know that we think about these things and this is what we think. My final message is curating experiences and great service means business, period.” It’s as simple as that, but it doesn’t mean Omni is not evolving.
Deitemeyer said his team is always curious to understand the differences in its customers – be it by age, income, race and how they use the hotel. For example, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., there’s no social lobby space to hang out and drink coffee, and Deitemeyer simply said that is going to change. “It’s about creating some better spaces for people to come and be active and be seen.”
In Nashville, the brand has had great success with its 2013 opening that has a big local connection with things like hand-painted guitars on a back wall serving as eye candy and a Lucchese boot outfitter. “There’s a fine line between maximizing every potential profit per square foot in a space like that and then also making it unique and interesting enough that people walk away and remember it,” Deitemeyer said.
Road ahead
Omni also continues to disprove the prevailing wisdom that bigger, full-service hotel development is all but dead in the U.S.
It has succeeded with its thoroughly locally curated hotel in Nashville and has big plans for a 600-room hotel in Louisville, where the deal with the city includes the construction of a grocery store – but it won’t be white-labeled. Instead, the Omni team is all in with an upscale grocery complete with a breakfast buffet, seven live hocker stations and even an old food truck going directly inside the store. “We have lots of corporations that just travel with us and are excited about Louisville opening because that’s the next place that they can go because no one really is building these big hotels anymore,” Deitemeyer said. “And they’re fun to be in.”
Omni is also part of the master development that includes a 1,200-room hotel in New Orleans, as well as mixed-use developments near new sports and leisure facilities in Atlanta and Frisco, Texas. Deitemeyer said there are another eight construction projects being reviewed.
“Our goal is to re-deploy money into the space,” he said. “We like the space and the family likes the space. What that means for us really depends on opportunities… I sat in a meeting with Bob [Rowling] the other day and he wants to double our earnings, which means we’re going to continue to be opportunistic.”
At the same time, Omni’s still relatively new Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Sales Peter Strebel has put together a new team and in June introduced a marketing plan that includes the first mass media advertising campaign in a long time for Omni, mainly because after its acquisition of five KSL resort properties in mid-2013 it has many more leisure customers to keep informed. “We have a very high-end customer, so we’re doing a pretty large print marketing campaign with upscale magazines such as Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and Esquire… We are also going heavy into radio through Pandora and Spotify,” Strebel said.
He is also putting more emphasis on social media and user-generated content. With only 60 hotels, Omni must develop a voice that resonates with customers better than distribution. “We have to feed social media, but ultimately we want the actual end-user to do social for us,” Strebel added. “By creating a really unique experience and exposing people to something different, they will be the ones posting all the social content and then it’s much more authentic than if I film a movie and post it.”
Better yet, Strebel said data suggests if consumers look at user-generated content it has the highest conversion rate of anything on the Omni website. “If they’re into those kind of pictures, 23% eventually book a room,” Strebel said, adding that data also shows when businesses respond to what millennials do or post, they become more loyal to that business.
In the meantime, Deitemeyer and his team are sticking to their success plan and taking care of their people who interact with the guests.
While it wasn’t publicized, Deitemeyer saie during a big company anniversary celebration last year, Omni gave out US$6 million to 3,000 associates with at least five years of experience and making less than US$50,000 annually. It was unexpected, he add3e, but that is what you might expect from a company that marches to its own beat.