Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne Students won the IHIF Strategy Prize in Berlin

A team of 4 MHA students from the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) won the 3rd Student Strategic Challenge held at the IHIF in Berlin on 7 March with their project called e-Loyalty. The IHIF is Europe's leading Investment Conference for the hotel industry, attended this year by 1600 senior executives representing owners, CEOs and hotel operators/developers, investors and lenders. The EHL victory in the competition, open to European hotel schools by invitation, was the 3rd in a row.

Launched in 2008, the IHIF Strategy Challenge aims to involve Master students from different hospitality management schools more deeply in the Berlin conference and encourage innovative practice by inviting them to develop a creative and feasible hospitality concept on the theme of holidays destined to attract the 21-30 year-olds and which would provide the basis for the creation of a chain of holiday hotels. This year student participants were asked to address the challenges of recession: namely, they were asked to develop a proposal that a hotel company could implement which could deliver a solid return at low risk. Three teams participated from competing hotel schools: University of Surrey and Oxford Brookes University and EHL.

The Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne Master Students prepared another innovative entry for the 2010 Strategy Challenge and won the prestigious challenge with their project called e-Loyalty.

e-Loyalty: “Now let the guest bring the guests”
On Wednesday, March 10, the EHL students represented by Daisuke Nagaki, Connie Chen, Ratika Sinha and Gianluca Picone presented their concept one last time - to a roomful of potential investors!

The EHL team reached the conclusion that in the current market situation, with limited financing available and a general slowdown in markets, growth for hotels through adding additional units or rooms, is becoming extremely challenging. Instead, hotels need a dose of technology and a little creativity to capitalize on their existing assets.

e-Loyalty is an “increased loyalty programme” for existing cardholders and a means for hotels to start leveraging their existing database of loyal customers. It will allow loyalty cardholders to use their reward points efficiently as well as share their points with friends/family in their social network, through “social points”. Once implemented, the online social networks will carry the hotel brand virtually worldwide including emerging market feeders that are now being targeted by European hotel chains. Taking the example of Facebook with its 400 million active users, hotel companies have the opportunity to increase their brand visibility in this “virtual” third-most-populous country after China and India.

Their original and very creative idea showed how a relatively small investment in software development could help a hotel group to leverage its existing base of loyalty club members (numbering in the millions) and turn them into "room salesmen", sharing special points with their friends and contacts on social networks such as Facebook. The judges agreed that with such a concept, a hotel group could potentially gain hundreds of thousands of additional room nights, all for a small upfront investment. The judges - all development or strategy experts from Horwath, WATG, Wyndham and Taylor Global (a boutique consulting firm) - found the concept "brilliant".

2012 International Hotel Investment Forum (IHIF)

March 5-7, 2012
Hotel Inter-Continental
Berlin, Germany

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