As anyone who hasn’t been quarantining the way Tom Hanks did in the 2000 movie Cast Away knows all too well, the global pandemic has pushed the hospitality industry to the brink with shelter-in-place orders, travel restrictions and other government mandates that have forced an alarming number of hotels and restaurants to shutter their doors, many of them permanently. As a result, we at Starfleet Media have made the decision, in consultation with our valued company underwriters, to postpone and/or cancel the publication of several Smart Decision Guide titles that had been scheduled for release this quarter.
The Smart Decision Guide titles affected by this decision are: The 2020 Smart Decision Guide to Hotel Property Management Systems (now scheduled for Q3 release), The 2020 Smart Decision Guide to Restaurant Management and POS Systems (now scheduled for Q3 release), The 2020 Smart Decision Guide to Hospitality Revenue Management (cancelled), The 2020 Smart Decision Guide to Hotel Guest Experience Management (cancelled) and The 2020 Smart Decision Guide to Restaurant Guest Experience Management (cancelled).
The postponed Smart Decision Guides will be repositioned to reflect the state of the industry, focusing on how hotels and restaurants are utilizing next-generation technologies to adapt to the new normal — and prepare for a brighter future. Also, all 2020 SDG editions will be relabelled and published as 2020-2021 editions so as to give them a longer shelf life (and, also, our client partners a better opportunity to maximize the value of their investments).
Unfortunately, the publication and promotion of more than a dozen co-branded eBooks and infographics and licensed Benchmark Reports has also been postponed and/or cancelled. In several instances, the current state of the hospitality industry has temporarily rendered obsolete the content focus of several of these content assets (e.g., hotel group sales & catering, hotel bookings and upselling, restaurant guest experience management, etc.). While some of these titles were still in the early stages of development, three co-branded eBooks had just recently been completed. So it goes that, as with many things in life, timing is everything. We can only hope that the hospitality industry will recover sooner rather than later and that all of these content assets will eventually see the light of day.