Hotel and Restaurant Times catches up with Christopher Kenny: A leader in Hospitality Ecommerce.
A Tourism Marketing graduate from Technological University Dublin, Christopher Kenny is Chief Ecommerce Officer at the Great National Hotels & Resorts Group since October 2022.
The role he’s engaged in is one of those that remains an ill-defined one in the minds of many members of the public. In practice, Christopher admits that it covers a broad range of activities.
“It’s a broad church,” he says. “And it’s even broader in the sense that, one of our unique selling points is our expertise not only in the digital marketing side of things but also in the revenue side of things. I’m bringing both of them together for hotels, with the use of outstanding technology. Technology is there as a vehicle to support this expertise.”
From Hospitality Beginnings to Digital Innovation
Like many school-leavers, Christopher wasn’t sure of what he wanted to do when it came to choosing a career path in 3rd -level education. Pat McCann (former CEO of the Dalata Group) was a family friend and it was he who suggested to Christopher to dip his toes in the world of hospitality. It turned out to be a perfect fit.
“For any kid, I would recommend that this is what to do,” says Christopher. “It’s a great option – don’t just do a business degree or fall into a more general option. In hotel management, you’ll be exposed to French, economics, accountancy… I had to cook for the first time!
There’s marketing and there’s obviously the operational side of things. If you can’t find something you like when you’re doing all of that, you’re really struggling because it is so varied.”
Christopher’s hotel career began in earnest as a sales executive with Moran Hotels – first with the Red Cow Inn before moving to London to help with the sales and marketing function of another property.
After a short spell at Johnstown Estate as Sales & Marketing Manager, Christopher spent another two years as Corporate Sales Manager for the Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn Express in Dublin before a three-year stint at hotel booking engine Net Affinity. This experience was complimented by a return to college to complete a Masters in 2005.
The Evolution of Ecommerce in the Hotel Industry
“Nowadays, hotels need experts in ecommerce – in online marketing,” says Christopher, pointing out that the evolution of the online booking function at hotels created that need within hotels. “And progressing that is the need to have a solid connection and combined strategy with the revenue department for that. You can no longer have your revenue team working on one side of the office on one aspect and your sales & marketing team and digital people on the other. We can bring all that together and fill that gap for a hotel.”
The sector he specialises in is, naturally, a fast-moving one involving keeping up with the rapid speed and changing landscape of the online world: ensuring that you’re as up-do- date with everything as Google is.
“If you don’t look forward to the challenge and you don’t see it as an opportunity, you could get bogged down,” he puts it. One example is the area of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation); a critical part of any online marketing strategy which is a constantly moving target to get up near the top of the search engine rankings and stay there.
“Years ago, you’d be using three or four keywords on a document and repeating them throughout the page… those days are gone. Now it’s more important to ensure that people are interacting with that page and knowing how they’re interacting and staying on the page.”
Standing Out in a Competitive Hospitality Market
The ecommerce role gives a strong overview of the entire marketing, sales and online campaigns, allowing hotel or group management to get a clear handle on what is being spent and what income is being generated from that spend.
In the hotel sector with its myriad options for the client and the many aggregator websites in the field comparing prices in real time, the challenge is how to make your property stand out in the crowd, creating aspiration in the public and promoting brand awareness.
“You can’t stand out with a 2BB1D (half-board) package anymore because everybody’s offering a 2BB1D,” says Christopher.
“You need to come up with ideas such as bringing pizza or wine to their room. If you’re looking at people coming for a break like that to a hotel, you’re looking at a very specific demographic of couples coming to get away from it all with their children. All they want to do is to chill out and de-stress, so this is specifically targeted at them. Even if they don’t book it, getting the offer to stand out creates the aspiration and creates the value for your brand and working with hotels on this kind of specific challenge is hugely important for us.”
Balancing Technology and Human-Centered Hospitality
As for the impact of AI, Christopher feels that this is not necessarily something new: “We’re already being impacted by it from a digital point of view. It’s the way that Google want us to go but the likes of Google and Meta are the ones monitoring most closely the way that AI is going… we’re already dealing with that ‘loss of control’ anyway.”
On the one hand, there is the battle of the rates, and this is an important battle to be ahead of, Christopher says. But in spite the attempts of the many comparison websites and/or AI generators to boil the hotel experience down to pure figures, hospitality will always be something more than that.
At the end of day, Christopher points out, hospitality is something that will always be separate from a “hard-core commodity”; a service involving human interaction that, for the vast majority of people, will always remain so.
“To look at it as a pure commodity, you’re devaluing the effort of the team and the staff,” says Christopher. “If you’re an independent hotelier, you’re putting yourself out there to be judged and now you’re being forced to bring it back to no more than ‘a rate’.”
A Dynamic Career with Global Opportunities
Christopher’s role in grappling with the moving targets and constant challenges of modern- day hospitality ecommerce is one he enjoys immensely. It’s an area of specialisation that he could never have imagined going into when he first dipped his toes in the world of hospitality. But it is that unique multi-faceted nature of the sector that makes it, for him, one that presents endless opportunity.
“The great thing about this industry is that it’s a people industry,” says Christopher, “so the stories and the experiences you will get from being in the hospitality industry are phenomenal. You’ll travel the world with it… there’s no country where hotel management and hospitality skills don’t translate. You speak the language and away you go. There are very few careers like that.”
