The sports and business worlds have a number of lessons each can teach the other, and Vikram Pradhan, global head of revenue management for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, is focused on hockey at the moment.
During a global hotel owners’ session earlier this week, Pradhan cited superstar Wayne Gretzky’s “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” quote as the company’s strategy for progressing through the recovery.
“We're all taking data, information, everything that is going on today—we're trying to make sense of it all and figure out where that puck is going to be,” Pradhan said. “And once we do, we're going to skate toward that. We should start skating now because we have to get prepared.”
The goal of the session was to discuss the current rebounding hospitality landscape and what owners can do to help drive occupancy for their hotels, as well as to share tips owners can implement today to help overcome booking hurdles and get ahead of demand as the industry heads into peak summer travel season. This type of conversation is important because, as Pradhan stressed, the industry can’t thrive in today’s climate using old strategies.
“All of us hoteliers, we have this sort of crisis playbook. We put that on the shelf and every time there's a recession, we just pull it out and we start flipping through it,” he said. “One of the first chapters talks about dropping rate.”
Read more on our our sister publication Hotel Management