Find Hospitality Courses & Degrees

Brand planning is the process of devising the specific actions needed to enable the brand to attain brand performance goals.The process of developing the brand plan helps to identify opportunities to grow and create value for your brand. In this course, you will refine your ability to create a brand plan by investigating each step of the process and developing a plan for an existing brand of your choice. You will start by completing a situation analysis for your chosen brand. You will then draw conclusions from the analysis and determine objectives and strategies for the brand. Finally, you will develop an executional roadmap to deliver on at least one of your identified strategic directions for your brand.

In this course, you will focus on how to optimize a brand's strategy approach to the market. By identifying opportunities and threats to a brand using Porter's Five Forces model, you will analyze how you can strengthen a brand's position. You will then take this analysis a step further with “Z-SWOT”, where you will identify the brand's opportunities and threats in relation to its strengths and weaknesses. You will then create an action plan where you will prioritize strategies that can enable the brand performance to be maximized. By the end of this course, you will have clear strategies on how a brand can best capitalize on its position in the market.

Services marketing is often viewed in terms of outcomes, but services marketing is also an ongoing analytic process. In this course, you will learn how to properly analyze frameworks, tools, channels, data sets, customer behavioral data, decision-making factors, and strategies that support broader marketing decisions. Authored by Robert Kwortnik from Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, this course will teach you how to review the way marketing works in your organization and how to create and apply a services marketing process.

Hospitality marketing is fast shifting from traditional media to digital forms (e.g., social media, video, website and search, plus mobile applications). New-media technologies have changed the ways consumers experience and value a product or service. So how can you draw on these technologies to enhance your operations and provide distinct customer value? And how can you be sure your efforts in new media are producing tangible returns?

In this course, you will see that brand activation is much more than clever communications or perfectly placed messages. You will begin developing your skills in brand activation by identifying and analyzing a brand target market and determining consumer insights that will prepare you to create an activation plan. You will then define the brand values, personality, and purpose, and craft a brand positioning statement for your selected brand. These elements help ensure the activation plan aligns with the brand. You will also write key elements of a communication brief to ensure that all messaging and communication pieces align with the brand and with each other. Finally, you will outline a marketing communications approach specific to your brand and your target market that will lend itself to successful brand activation.

Experience Design has become as much a business art as product design and process design. Experience Design is an interdisciplinary practice that emphasizes the centrality of each guest and the guest experience in service innovation. Today’s global customer who has experienced service in culturally diverse environments is demanding personalized and memorable experiences. An innovative experience design strategy can differentiate one service provider from another and ensure differentiation and greater profit in the experience economy.

Explore international hospitality and tourism management

Segmenting your customer base is critical to developing a variable pricing scheme. By identifying core groups of customers and their purchasing habits, you can target them accordingly by setting prices that will help you win their business over your competition. Without proper segmentation, however, dynamic pricing can backfire, which can alienate consumers and turn them into perpetual deal-seekers.

Group events, conferences and negotiated business bookings frequently account for over 50% of hotel room reservations. This course will prepare you to develop your own data-driven, systematic approach to group pricing.

Pricing strategy is the central component in your overall profit performance. This online course prepares you to anticipate the impact certain pricing decisions will have on consumer demand and thrive in a highly competitive environment.

Digital marketing is fast becoming the primary means for hospitality and related service firms to reach, engage, and transact with consumers across their multiple devices. Consumer planning, shopping, experience, and sharing through digital media is quickly changing how marketing is done, as well as how marketing effectiveness is measured. Owners and managers must be able to make effective, data-driven, analytical, and integrated decisions related to digital marketing using the right metrics and reports. These decision support tools may be generated internally and/or by vendors, like digital or social media marketing agencies. Managers must be able to understand, evaluate, and communicate recommendations in line with the firm's overall business and marketing strategies. This course provides managers with the insight and tools to do the job. This course provides managers with the insight and tools to do the job.

A smart pricing strategy is the best way to increase revenue. This course teaches you how to set prices, develop rate fences (differentiate prices by customer type), and use multiple distribution channels to manage price more effectively. You'll also learn about the impact of variable pricing and discounting on revenue management in the context of price elasticity, optimal price mix, perceived fairness, and congruence with positioning and sales strategies.

Technology- and Internet-savvy consumer behaviors have fundamentally changed the way in which revenue is managed. This online course encourages those schooled or experienced in traditional revenue management to elevate and fine-tune their approach to price manipulation, length of stay, and demand and availability control. This curriculum will prepare students to succeed in this new, highly competitive hospitality landscape.

Today's consumers rely less upon traditional travel agents and more on web-based research when booking travel. In this online course you'll learn to develop online strategies designed to improve your standing in Internet search results, called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and increase your visibility to target customers.