The hospitality industry continues to evolve as consumers needs change. The profiles of hotel guests are increasingly diversified, from business travelers to leisure tourists and from families to individual travelers. Meanwhile, technological innovations are also transforming the ways hotels communicate with their guests.

How should hoteliers broaden their portfolios to include more than just basic accommodation and provide their guests with richer and more differentiated services? How do they reshape the future of guest experience?    

China's hospitality sector has shown signs of recovery after bottoming out. But the industry still has to grapple with problems brought by prolonged slump in occupancy, over-supply, homogenization and high rental costs. The market also has massive inventory to be digested, and upgrading hotel offerings remains a challenge.

Let's dissect China's hotel operation data and examine how the industry can evolve and integrate with the diversifying range of alternative accommodation options in the future? 

The landscape of China's accommodation industry is going through revolutionary development. In view of upgrading needs and the emerging new generation of consumers, hotels need to consider the experience and lifestyle elements in their offerings, other than just serving the basic lodging function. New forms of accommodation such as homestay, hostels and boutique hotels are springing up, and the traditional hotel industry is impacted by sharing accommodations.

How can hotels integrate and connect their offerings to customers in a market exploding with such huge and diversified inventories? How will the traditional hotels and alternative accommodations learn from and complement each other? And what opportunities and challenges will they face while extending their presence from hotel lodging to segments such as short-term rentals, long stays and co-working spaces? 

A new generation of consumers are subtly changing traditional accommodations. Data show that the millennial generation will become the largest travel consumer group by 2020.

Future global hotel development will be guided by 10 major trends, namely sharing in everything, hotel design, experience beyond hotel, change in loyalty, humanity, reassessment of localization, innovative luxury, smart hotels, brand crossover and data intelligence. 

So, how should the industry ride on the trends and develop a unique experience for the new generation of guests?

International hotel brands are stepping up partnerships with local Chinese hotel groups - the alliance of AccorHotels with Huazhu, Plateno with Hilton, and Dossen Hotel with Marriott are some prominent examples.

How should partners leverage each other's strengths? How can the international brands better satisfy the localized and personalized needs of the Chinese consumers while maintaining their own brand propositions?

How did Asia Pacific hotels perform in the past years? China hotels' performance was heavily impacted since 2013. Driven by rational consumption, performance decrease, revival and stabilization, is it back to optimal increase now? What is hot, and where are the challenges?

Based on first hand fresh data, STR reports the hotel performance trend by different region and different classes, for your better business decisions. 

The rapid development of leisure travel in China has underscored the role of holiday resorts not only as places to stay but also as destinations in their own right. How should resorts design their products to blend in with local culture and characteristics to make guest "Travel Like a Local"? How should resorts tell their "story" in destination marketing to convert interest into bookings?

The hierarchy of China's lodging industry is becoming more and more manifest in terms of economy and consumption, so the multi-tiered market segment has been increasingly ripe, thus leading to diverse types of operation. Good opportunities are presented for the small-but-beautiful homestay, cultural theme, boutique design and urban homestay. Meanwhile, the development of urban cultural block, cultural tourism towns and specialized towns spotted a niche for the development of small lodging. SSAW Boutique Hotel worked out a plan for building a cluster of small boutique hotels near Nanjing Confucian Temple and came up with a solution to the lodging development in perfect combination with the cultural tourism block.

Based on Alibaba's ecosystem data with 400 million active users, Fliggy Future Hotel builds a credit system in tourism industry. With the credit system, Fliggy equips qualified users to dining, living, touring, shopping and entertainment in hotels with no need to pay in cash, but only with credit. Fliggy equips hotels with self-operation tools based on big data. Runing by themselves on platform, hotels have more control over their resources and also enhance their profitability. At the same time, customers will enjoy various travel products with supreme experience.

The rise of sharing accommodation has led to the innovation and transformation of hotels, with mid- and long-term apartments becoming a new hot spot in the market. At the same time, with the rapid development of leisure tourism, the travel patterns and demands of tourists have undergone tremendous changes. How should sharing accommodation keeps pace with the habits and characteristics of mid- and long-term apartment users, delivers innovative services other than traditional hotel services, in order to build an innovative guest experience.

The choices of new accommodation modes are getting richer as customer needs are diversifying in an era of individual travel and heightened consumption where products and experiences are paramount. 

Will new accommodations such as tented resorts, recreational vehicles, container rooms, capsule hotels and urban home-share challenge traditional hotels, or are they complementary alternatives?

While changing consumer need is the ultimate driving force of hotel industry reform, data is a premium resource in the Information Age. Thanks to its data accumulated over the past 18 years, Tencent boasts comprehensive and in-depth insight on hotel consumers. As China's tourism and hospitality sectors are being reshaped by the Internet, Tencent MIND has inaugurated All-scene Marketing to address the pain points of tourism and hotel marketers, helping them identify target audience and increase conversions.

Customer reservation has shifted to mobile devices from offline channels and PC terminals. As a result, technology operation will become a brand-new direction to push the transformation of hotels. How will the mobile PMS promote hotels' working efficiency? What will mobile payment, intelligent appliances, and member integration create new tasting scenes? Are there some methods for e-commerce platform to increase online reservation?

Strengthening the connection between people and service is a crucial part in reshaping customer experience. So how does Baidu, a leading technical company in China, help with it? With Baidu's immersive ads and AR technology, consumers can know every detail of the hotel room even before check-in; while with Baidu AI, consumers can experience intelligent hotel during their stay. All in all, with its data and technology, Baidu can help in enhancing hotel customer experience and further boosting your business.

The new generation of guests have higher demand for digital and personalized experiences of hotels. With the rapid development of mobile internet, the guests are making faster decisions for hotel-booking. How will hotels improve their convenience and create personalized experiences to win more bookings? How should hotels engage more travelers at different touch points, make their brands more appealing, and improve their customer conversion? 

With the rapid growth of technology, most of the consumer behavior is influenced by their online activities and media consumptions, such as social media, Metasearch websites, and user generated web content. How does hotel acquire those consumers is the big question mark for a lot of hoteliers nowadays. 
 
In order to obtain those consumers, hotels have to have higher visibility online where the nowadays online consumers usually go, such as Google, Facebook, and TripAdvisor etc. But how? Let’s us share the 3 Must-Known Metasearch Marketing Tactics for Hotels...

The concept of growth is familiar to the Internet, in the face of today's stock era, in the face of the millennial generation in the shared economy and digital intelligence under the diverse structure, how the hotel industry enhances the guest experience to stimulate the growth of users and income? How do you improve your conversion rate by improving your guest experience? How to track through the fine channel from the source and behavior to find the key to enhance the guest experience? Goods, products, users, traffic, behavior data tell the final answer.

The profiles of hotel guests are increasingly diversified, from business travelers to leisure tourists and from families to individual travelers. What does this mean to hotel revenue managers? In this session, let's see how revenue performance fits into the transformation of new generation of guest experience in hospitality industry and how hotel operators design revenue performance deployment from strategy to tactics.

For the past few years, hoteliers have gradually come to realize that responding to guest reviews actively can help increase a hotel's total revenue. Hotel executives are increasingly taking care of their customer feedback. How should hotels acquire real-time review data and reply promptly, so as to improve guest experience? How will they rely on technology and reputation to assess and analyze data, set up a benchmark for review tracking, in order to keep optimizing their products and services?

OTAs have been encroaching on the hotel sector, and their competition on accommodation supply has extended from price wars to dipping into supply-side segments such as PMS, reputation management and revenue management.

How should hotels hold their ground and regain control of the game? How can OTAs make use of their big data and innovations to help hotels achieve better customer targeting and market positioning? How can the two sides form healthy partnerships?  

Hotel room rates changed like the price of seafood, luring hoteliers into fear of adjusting their price strategy and losing a considerable amount of revenue.

Let's have a look at how the new generation revenue tools use big data and artificial intelligence to optimize price strategy, to help hoteliers re-establish trust and easily increase revenue-generating.

Brands like Atour Hotel and Airbnb are extending beyond accommodation to enhancing social and lifestyle experiences, the former through expanding its ecosystem with community and "Room+X" content and the latter through its Trips platform that offers more locally integrated experiences.

In exploring additional consumption channels other than accommodation, how do hotels determine what value-added services to add in line with their own brand position and target customers? How should hotels evaluate the demand for such value-added service and cross-sell effectively to grow revenues?   

The 2017 Hotel Innovation Marketing Award aims at recognizing the most innovative hotel marketing case study of the past year. Five contestants shortlisted from the preliminary round will present their innovative marketing case studies and answer questions from the judging panel. The audience will vote on the spot to decide the winner.