05- Boomer Trends & Their Impact On Hotels | Tech Concierge Interview With Adam Mogelonsky

www.Technology4Hotels.com.au
Adam, we talked to obviously just about Boomers and Millennials that brings us I think to the next discussion point and that is Boomer travel and what we're likely to see over the next couple of years in that market and it's obviously it impact on the hospitality industry?
The Aging of the Boomers is the trend of all Trends. It is influencing the world in so many ways both obvious and non-obvious.
So, right now what we're seeing is the Boomers have the wealth and simultaneously they're “entering retirement” and I say that in quotations because the idea of retirement is changing as well where it's not hard set at 65 and more. People, they enter retirement for a few years and they're like “yeah I'm bored I want to do something else I want to give meaning to my life.”
So, if you think about what that term's meaning can be? Like it can be a post-retirement Emeritus involvement, they might decide to go back into part-time employment. It could also mean things like volunteerism where they're visiting hotels around the world and volunteering while they go as an experience or volunteering their time with a local high school. It really is an incredible thing we're witnessing also as Boomers get old, they don't really have the energy for putting up with the agony of travel, so you think about what's involved with visiting multiple cities multiple hotels.
So, you book airfare, then you book one hotel, then you got to figure out transportation to that next city be it Planes Trains automobiles then you got to book that second Hotel then more Planes Trains automobiles. So, you see where this is going whereas Boomers get older they want more convenience as we said but they still want to maintain that luxury. Filling that voids our cruise lines where we're already seeing a huge growth and it's going to keep growing as Boomers take advantage of the convenience of only unpacking once at their room be it a hotel room on land or a hotel room on water.
Yeah.
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Similarly, the multi-generational packages work just as well for people traveling with young kids and maybe they want a second room adjoining for their kids or whatever, but multi-generational travel is going to happen. The next site is the caregiver side, which is another problem on the labor front, because now you have what's a caregiver which is as we say a high touch, low-skilled job, that is a direct competitor for housekeeping jobs.
Yes.
So, a housekeeper who's earning 35 dollars an hour changing beds and cleaning rooms, now looks and goes “Well, I can do this I can change Beds which is very high physical exertion, or I can go around and clean bed pans and change an elderly dependent out of their clothes and get ninety dollars an hour”. So, that can be a potentially a further drain on labor for hotels and it's something that people have to understand working in hotels because this labor crisis is not going away, ever.
I agree.
It is going to keep going and be a consummate topic for the next decade as the Boomers and to retirement they exit the workforce and as they reach the point where end stage disease set in, In which case they become dependents and drives demand for caregivers.
That's a couple of great points there Adam I can't think of a hotel I've ever seen that actually has, as you said an accessible room adjoining to a normal room, at all.
Yeah, I mean opportunities for hotel conversions right there we put forward an article a while back saying what if you were to convert your hotel into Extended Stay all accessible rooms and that could be a great way to serve this emerging niche of the market or it doesn't necessarily need to be a joining room as it could be you have attribute based sales for an accessible room as part of a package and then the other person who is an independent can have a room nearby.
Yeah.
So, there's ways to do it again it all hinges on how your systems are built in order to allow for those packages to occur the key thing right now is again process. You got to start thinking about these things if you see an article tomorrow in the New York Times that talks about this, you have to have an internal company board where you can share it and say read this here's why it's important what can we put on the roadmap for the next quarterly meeting to discuss and figure out a plan to capitalize on this opportunity or defend ourselves against competitors who are doing something in this regard.
Yeah, great points.
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