News Briefs

Knowland, the world’s leading provider of data-as-a-service insights on meetings and events for hospitality, released the quarterly update to its U.S. Meetings Recovery Forecast (MRF) and associated Top 25 U.S. Meetings Recovery Forecast (MRF25) realizing strong performance ending 2022 on a high note and shifting 2023 higher than the Q3 forecast. Click here to view the most current forecasts.

Kristi White, chief product officer, Knowland, said: “The fourth quarter outperformed the Knowland forecast by 8.4 percent, driven by top market growth. Additionally, both November and December exceeded 2019 numbers. This is the first time this has happened since the pandemic began. 2023 is poised to be a growth year, and hotels should be focused on optimizing demand and profitability.”

Knowland’s forecasts provide an overview of how the U.S. as a whole and the Top 25 Markets, specifically, will move through recovery. A breakdown of the details is below:

• U.S. Markets Recovery Forecast update – 2022 outperformed in Q4, raising the year-end capture to 77.8 percent from the October 2022 forecast of 73.1 percent recovery. Compared to 2019, the updated 2023 and 2024 forecasts are:
  • 2023 Recovery Forecast: 110.2 percent (106.4 percent in October forecast)
  • 2024 Recovery Forecast: 133.3 percent (129.2 percent in October forecast)
• Top 25 Markets Recovery Forecast update – Four markets (Dallas, Nashville, Phoenix, and Tampa) ended 2022 fully recovered to 2019 levels. Twelve markets outperformed the October forecast, including Anaheim, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oahu Island, Orlando, San Diego, Seattle, and St. Louis.
  • Recovery by the end of 2023: Thirteen markets are forecasted to achieve full recovery: Anaheim, Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oahu Island, Orlando, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Louis. Four markets (Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York) will end the year between 90 and 100 percent. The remaining four markets (Chicago, Las Vegas Philadelphia, and Washington, DC) will be under 90 percent.
  • Back to normal in 2024: All but two markets (Boston and Chicago) will be back to normal growth.
     

Knowland hosts a webinar featuring the final roll-up of 2022 recovery data as well as the forecast for 2023 today at 1:00PM ET. Register here.

Knowland will continue to host quarterly webinars reporting on the state of the industry, highlighting regional trends and booking disruptors. 

About the MRF and associated MRF25: The MRF demonstrates projected industry recovery patterns and is based on Knowland’s proprietary data and regression models leveraging almost 20 million global events over the last 15 years. The MRF25 was added in February 2022 to provide the capability to search industry recovery patterns for the Top 25 U.S. Markets. The forecast uses a natural recovery model, assuming historic seasonal patterns without major market disruption, to index the recapture of meeting activity compared to baseline levels from 2019. By comparing past data to evolving data trends, hoteliers can better understand market-relevant changes–and their implications–as individual markets move into 2022 and beyond.

 

Top 25 Markets: Anaheim, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Oahu Island, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington DC.

Focus Brands says dual branding is the future of QSR, and the parent company of Auntie Anne’s®, Carvel, Cinnabon, Jamba, McAlister’s Deli, Moe’s Southwest Grill, and Schlotzsky’s, is leading the charge. Today, the Focus Brands portfolio boasts 175-plus open dual branded units with at least 65 more in various stages of development across the country. 

Drive-Thru Convenience

The Focus Brands portfolio brands have signed agreements to open more than 50 dual and tri-brand locations in the coming year, many of which include drive-thrus for added convenience as interest in dual branded franchise opportunities continues to surge.

Flexible Store Formats

Focus Brands is among the brands introducing new store formats, including Krystal, Jack-in-the-Box and Panera Bread, which opened its Panera To Go, solely offering Rapid Pick-Up and Delivery shelves where guests and delivery drivers can easily pick up orders.  

Focus Brands has long pioneered the concept of dual branding, predominately in malls and non-traditional locations with Auntie Anne’s and Cinnabon. Now, the company’s portfolio brands have found new opportunities with streetside dual branded units, which is paving the way for immense franchise growth. 

“Dual branding is the future of our brands, especially on the specialty side of the business,” said Brian Krause, Chief Development Officer at Focus Brands. “There will always be a place in malls, but there is an immense amount of growth opportunity in streetside venues, and, by dual branding, there is more opportunity for enhanced revenue.”

The company invested heavily in consumer research to identify how to create combinations of its iconic brands to resonate with consumers and meet them where they want to be met.

Focus Brands has identified four dual-brand concepts:

• Auntie Anne’s/Cinnabon
• Auntie Anne’s/Cinnabon/Carvel
• Auntie Anne’s/Jamba
• Cinnabon/Carvel – Cinnabon Swirl. 

While key consumer benefits vary by dual-brand combination, one consistent benefit has been convenience. Having these brands together in one location makes them far more accessible than they are individually. This convenience also creates opportunity for franchisees, as co-branding leads to an expansive menu that drives enhanced unit-level volume. 

 

Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux is making its largest technological investment in brand history.

Walk-On’s is implementing a systemwide aggregator to consolidate third party orders, partnering with Lunchbox to upgrade its online ordering platform and guest loyalty program, and introducing a partnership with Toast to level up its POS management system.

71% say the ability to integrate with other systems is driving their POS purchase decisions, according to HT’s2 2023 POS Software Trends Report.

Walk-On’s new loyalty program and app, designed by Lunchbox, are scheduled to launch in the first half of 2023 with an improved interface and back-end integration that will create a more seamless user experience for guests and operators alike. 

Continuing with marked enhancements to the guest experience, Walk-On’s is also partnering with BOWEN to modernize the brand’s website presence and streamline the online ordering experience. 

In addition to the upgraded Toast POS system, Walk-On’s is installing Toast Kitchen Display System, and rolling out Toast Go 2 mobile handheld POS devices for tableside and curbside use at current and future locations. 

Walk-On’s will implement a phased rollout across all current locations throughout 2023 and begin immediate implementation at all new restaurants in their development pipeline. 

Quantum Metric, the Continuous Product Design platform for customer-driven digital experiences, announced the launch of Atlas, a first-to-market structured and accelerated solution to answering the most critical business questions about an organization's digital experiences. Powered by proprietary machine intelligence and mapping learnings from hundreds of leading brands and digital teams, Atlas provides outcome-driven insight that enables anyone to easily identify and respond to digital customer needs from day one.

"Atlas completely reimagines what we know about building and optimizing digital experiences today," said Mario Ciabarra, CEO of Quantum Metric. "Organizations consistently struggle to know if their teams are asking the right business questions and working hard to drive their experience forward to the benefit of both their business and their customer. With Atlas, we are empowering every member of digital teams to focus on what matters most, winning the hearts of their customers. This is a defining day for Quantum Metric that sets a new standard for the type of value our current and future customers can expect from our platform." 

Atlas is a comprehensive library of pre-built industry guides within the Quantum Metric platform, providing a step-by-step approach to improving critical digital use cases through a tailored set of dashboards, metrics, anomaly detection, and alerts. A proven and structured approach to analysis, Atlas introduces the next evolution in the practices of Continuous Product Design. Digital teams can confidently define customer needs across any digital journey faster, regardless of their past experience with the Quantum Metric platform.

As digital becomes a primary driver of business sales and revenue, organizations are facing major hurdles in decreasing the time between identifying digital opportunities and taking action. Added to this are teams' limited ability to capture every customer frustration, including small customer touchpoints that when added together can have a massive effect on the customer experience. These challenges have an immediate impact on digital ROI. According to Quantum Metric, the average enterprise leaves up to $220M on the table per year in inefficiencies, with digital teams taking up to four weeks to resolve digital issues or optimize experiences. With Atlas' simplified approach, organizations can improve their efficiency by up to 90%, resolving issues in one to two days.

"The hospitality industry has seen significant digital acceleration over the past few years as they’ve raced to keep up with customer expectations and desires to engage with brands digitally," says Danielle Harvey, vice president, travel & hospitality strategy at Quantum Metric. "From booking and online-ordering to mobile check-in and curbside pick-up, there are more technology touchpoints than ever before — which means more possibilities for customers to experience barriers or friction in their journey, if not fully optimized.

"Through Atlas’ travel and hospitality guides, brands can quickly and easily understand performance across key experiences like booking, in-stay, order fulfillment, and loyalty in real-time," Harvey continues. "Atlas provides hospitality companies with a more structured way to proactively identify guest-facing friction points that are driving poor customer experiences, including those experiences that may have not made it to the call center or a customer survey, but are having a profound impact on the customer and the business. It’s about helping lean teams throughout the industry better understand their core customers, and proactively focus on what matters most to improve customer satisfaction and their business' bottom line."

The introduction of Atlas will transform other areas of the Quantum Metric platform, such as:

• Provide guided analysis on-site with Visible: Enable team members with Atlas insight with an intuitive entry point via Visible, which shows data in line with the site experience.
• Use-case-driven navigation: Enhancing platform accessibility by organizing the Atlas guide library by top use case categories and focus areas.
• Automated segmentation for deeper analysis: Connecting users to deeper and more personalized analysis that supports outcome-driven results.

According to a recent report from Forrester, authored by senior analyst, Zhi-Ying Barry, "Forrester's research shows that advanced insights-driven firms are five times as likely to grow revenue by 20% or more. This depends on firms' ability to harness and apply data and analytics at every opportunity and base operating models on insights that lead to clear action embedded in software."

At launch, Quantum Metric's Atlas library offers 90 guides, with customized use cases for consumer banking, travel, retail, insurance, and telecommunications. Cross-industry guides will also be offered for common use cases faced by digital organizations today, regardless of their industry. 

For more information about Atlas, visit: quantummetric.com/atlas

Rad Technologies, Inc., doing business as Rad Intelligence, an artificial intelligence company that automates ROI-based creative intelligence, announced today that they have signed Jurny, a leading hospitality-tech company, as a client.

Founded in 2017, Jurny is the fastest-growing vertically integrated hospitality platform powered by AI and connectivity. Through their fully integrated Management Operating System (MOS), they automate operations and guest experiences for some of the world’s most exceptional hotel brands, vacation and short-term rental (STR) properties. The system’s recent integration with AI has allowed Jurny to fully automate guest communications and tech support, at a rate of 10 times human output, and they have now partnered with RAD AI to fuel their growth with influencer marketing strategies.

With the adoption of ChatGPT, marketers have increased their attention to artificial intelligence solutions. In recent months, RAD AI has seen a recent spike in commercial adoption across industries such as hospitality, entertainment, education, healthcare and gaming. Adding Jurny to their client portfolio further validates their expert utilization of AI and position as the leader in creative intelligence for influencer marketing.

RAD AI CEO, Jeremy Barnett, added, “We are always excited to work with key industry players with bleeding edge technologies.” Barnett continued, “Jurny is no different. What they’ve been able to accomplish with their best-in-class solution for hospitality—through the integration of AI—is something that really hits home for us. We are excited to be apart of their growth story as they continue to establish themselves as the leader in the hospitality technology space for years to come”

Jurny’s CEO, Luca Zambello, commented, "We are thrilled to be working with RAD AI to take our marketing efforts to the next level. It is very rewarding to work with another cutting edge company that understands how to best leverage AI within their field. Their expertise in AI further verifies our own capabilities, which is why we've decided to work with them as we team up to drive commercial adoption of our suite of AI-enabled hospitality products.”

VROMO announced a new delivery partnership with Uber Direct.   

VROMO’s partnership with Uber will help U.S. restaurants meet demand for delivery by strengthening their delivery capabilities through greater coverage and lower rates. The VROMO solution provides restaurant operators with the opportunity to access anetwork of independent couriers for all delivery orders, or to supplement the efforts of the in-house delivery staff. According to Vromo, restaurants will not only be able to increase their delivery capacity, but also cut down on costs by up to 24 percent. In addition, it will provide restaurant brands with better control over the customer journey, with order tracking links enabling them to interact and engage with consumers while they wait for their food.

Delivery Matters

“Throughout 2023, we expect to see even more restaurant brands strengthening their delivery capability," said VROMO Chief Executive Officer, Brian Hickey, pictured.  "Our partnership with Uber Eats will help restaurants to increase their delivery fulfillment and drive down their operational costs. VROMO was created to make delivery more profitable for restaurant brands and in doing so, help the sustainability of the sector at a time when market conditions are particularly challenging.”

Integrating with third-party delivery systems is impacting POS purchase decisions for 29% of restaurants, according to HT’s2 2023 POS Software Trends Report.

Integrated with several POS solutions and order aggregators, VROMO’s software platform makes the entire restaurant-to-door process more efficient for restaurants and allows them to monitor the progress of each order.