49NL Year 3 Creativity assignment

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Invest in Innovation

Building the brand of your hotel while staying agile and adaptable to increasing market demands and evolving customer behavior requires ongoing investments.

Mind, digitalization is already carving its way into hospitality and changing consumer expectations, with media innovations such as Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and robots paving the way to the future of hotels. In this assignment, you are asked by Ms. Jandal to prepare two investment proposals.

Situation

You have been running the hotel for some years now. You are familiar with its qualities, but also with its shortcomings. Where does the hotel need an extra push? What observations or opportunities - both inside and outside your hotel - do you want to act upon? Now is the time to decide on innovation and invest in the future.

Goal

Elevate the hotel to the next level in such a way that the investment pays off.

Task, deliverable

You are required to draw up an Investment Proposal, based on an innovation - either in services, operations, sustainability solutions (not features), or in the actual product (the new physical property site). Investors typically like it if they have something to choose from, and the Bergmans also expect a “Plan B”: an alternative investment, and the reasons for you proposing plan A over B.

Assessed elements

• Is the need explained, demonstrated?
• Does the innovation show originality? Does it build on new trends and developments?
• Is Plan B also a plausible investment, and how solid is your suggestion that Plan A should be prioritized to plan B?
• Substantiation of the amounts (ballpark figures suffice); for Plan B you can be slightly less critical than for plan A, but make sure the family gets an overall idea of how A and B compare in financial terms
• Last but most certainly not least: what if the family makes the investment? “Show them the money!,” including the impact on operating and financial results

Handing in

Hand in your material by uploading it in the right folder in the Capstone Course in LMS.

• A description of the observations and opportunities that lead to the innovation to invest. Consider e.g., our core courses at BUas. Is it your priority to invest in marketing? Or in hotel staff somehow (OB, Operations Management)? Systems (MIS)? Sustainability (BL&E)? Guest experience? Product innovation?
• Provide “ballpark” figures for the amounts of money involved. Do not go too much in-depth here, nobody expects you to ask companies for quotes for how much it would cost to buy new dustbins 😉. But say you propose to do some kind of upgrade of the guest rooms, we do expect you to give us an indication of how much such an investment would come down to.
• The impact on depreciation and hotel profit in the future 5 years.

Additional information

• Key metrics
• Operating review, all revenues
• Hotel costs estimating guide
• Construction costs of renovations.
• [do the facilities look like, on taking over the hotel?]

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