Chantel Amone, Marany Bun, Andrew May, Alex Hodge, and faculty advisor Marc Brown participated in the Smith Travel Research competition. The competition took place November 10-12 in New York City.

“Smith Travel Research is the foremost analytic provider for the hotel industry,” explained Brown. “They’re most well-known for a report called the Smith Travel Accommodations Report. It provides hotels with information about a competitive set that they create, and then it benchmarks their performance against their competitors. They’re a trusted 3^rd party that gathers the data and keeps it anonymous so that individual property data is protected. Around 70 percent of hotels across the US report their data to Smith Travel Research, which is pretty awesome and unique.”

“Because they have this access to the markets, they host a market competition for students to choose a market, study the data, and present their findings in an organized and meaningful way. The judges look at how accurately the students are able to depict what’s happening in the market. Each student on the team took on different sections and discussed them.”

“When I first started teaching full-time, I got interested in offering a certification in Hotel Industry Analytics (CHIA), which is offered by Smith Travel Research. I went to their conferences to train for that. We just started offering the certificate this year. The certification goes over all the metrics that are used in the competition. Because of that experience, I have a pretty strong connection with their educational institute. They sent out a notice for the competition, so we got involved for the first time in 2017, but this was the first year we competed in New York.”

“The team can choose any market in the world, but most of the teams choose their home markets just because they’re most familiar with them. They make you switch markets every other year and so a lot of them do markets around them, but it’s advantageous to pick one in the area. It’s kind of fun if you potentially work in a hotel where you know that market.”

“The team is given a topic and tools to prepare. The tough side to that is that you’re guided by what you’re given, but it’s also a huge opportunity for creativity and innovation in the ways that the team presents. It’s still a fairly new competition as it’s in its fourth year.”

“The judges use pretty generic metrics for ranking teams. Teams give their presentation, and the judges are scoring the introduction, analysis, conclusion, and so on. They’re also scoring how well the data is presented overall, and how well the students are able to articulate answers to questions. They want to see how familiar the students are with the market.”

“We prepared for the competition by meeting every week for eight weeks,” said Marany. “We worked on our individual portions of the presentation before coming together, and then we’d see how our sections fit together. We’d rework some pieces and add things to make sure it was well-rounded.”

“We broke the work down by volume,” Andrew said. “I presented on the trends over the last 13 months. Other members discussed the foundation of the market, the future projections, and key takeaways that the industry can implement. ”

“In New York, the 33 teams were split into three different rooms,” said Brown. “There were twenty-four undergraduate teams competing, and six graduate teams. Each room had a different judging panel, and only the top two teams from each room moved on to the final competition. There’s a bit of luck involved because you don’t know who you’re competing against or which judging panel you’re going to have.”

“Going to New York was a lot of fun,” said Marany. “Being able to spend time in New York was fun, but the competition was cool because we got to put into action the things we’ve done in class and put it to a real world situation. It’s cool to see how it all worked together. I was surprised by how international the competition is because it seems like there was a group from Switzerland, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. And those were just the groups in our room.”

“We were the first to present in our room, and I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing,” said Andrew. “For nerves it definitely was best, but maybe you end up getting a better idea of what questions the judges will ask if you go later. We went in and had no idea what they were going to ask us.”

“They did a great job answering the questions,” said Brown. “They were tough questions. I think the judges were most interested in the development, and specifically the new convention center hotel.”

“And the heat map,” Marany added. “We created a heat map that showed the growth of the market over time geographically instead of just throwing up tables. That had never been done before at this competition.”

“A lot of the questions were focused on specific points of the trending data, such as why things dipped or why it looked really good in certain years,” said Andrew. “The judges have been in the industry for 20+ years so they know exactly what they’re looking at. They were checking to see if we knew.”

“Understanding the judging was a little difficult because it’s a moving target,” said Andrew. “It’s hard to meet the criteria because it’s mostly subjective. You generally know what you’re looking for, but they don’t tell you exactly what they want.”

“The best part of the competition was seeing New York,” said Chantel. “But honestly it was learning about our tracts—our market in this area—and studying and diving into it was very interesting. I look at it very differently now as I drive on I-15 and pass all the hotels.”

“When I was taking the class and interpreting the data, I didn’t really look at it as a graph, but as data on a table,” said Marany. “It’s really cool to put the data in a graph and make it visually easier to understand. I learned so much about the Salt Lake market and what it will look like in the future.”

“Presenting data in a way that doesn’t stick to the standard metrics, but uses a more relational approach improves a listener’s experience,” said Andrew. “This experience was awesome! It was great to take data you learn in class and put it to work in a real-life situation, because it’s what you’re going to do. Revenue managers will use the type of report we created in their forecasting, so this experience helped me prepare for my career.”