Wednesday, April 8, 2009

How hotels can earn thousands in incremental revenue: Free "rock star" faculty!

How many of us would have loved to have taken courses from leading scholars at Universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Stanford or MIT? Now hotels can promote weekly courses to hotel guests and the local market, free of charge. Imagine broadcasting on your big-screen TV lectures by Stanford’s Guy Kawasaki “The Career Path to Becoming a Venture Capitalist or an Entrepreneur”; or JetBlue’s former CEO, David Neeleman, discussing “Seeing Failure as an Opportunity?” The dizzying myriad of courses and rock-star lecturers include Carly Fiorina, addressing “The Dynamics of Change and Fear,” Michael Dell, explaining “Overcoming Some of the Early Mistakes of Dell, Inc.”, or hearing about “Financial Markets” at Yale, by financier Carl Icahn.

Academic Earth offers 1,500 video lectures from hundreds of the world’s top scholars covering economics, entrepreneurship, history, law, medicine, religion and the sciences, among many other topics. And they’re all free.

So think about how you can get local groups to participate in weekly “courses” of mutual interest – and spend money in your bars and restaurants, while attending these educational forums. If this takes off, you could end up hosting a different group every night of the week! Now that’s incremental revenue!

Website: www.academicearth.org
Contact: hello@academicearth.org

2 comments:

Dennis Schaal said...

Sounds like it might work for a particular audience. I've heard Carl Icahn at a travel conference. He takes no prisoners. Some of these pieces could be pretty cool.

Unknown said...

Great idea Susan. I have been at couple of hotels who tried to start their own events for revenue generation in the past, but there is so much cost associated. This could be a very low cost alternative. I am going to share the idea with our properties.