I happened to be hosting our networking breakfast in Austin at the Embassy Suites hotel because their sales manager is a member or our business networking group.
To prepare for our meeting I made sure to arrive early to the hotel and noticed several things about the Embassy Suites that blew my mind, find how what it was!
When I first walked into the lobby of the Embassy Suites at Arboretum I immediately saw a small pond adorned with live beautiful Swans. This captivated my attention so I walked over to investigate the beautiful decoration and watched the swans gracefully move through the water. This really stood out in my mind because I had never seen anything like this in other expensive hotels.
Of course, my mind was still focused on preparing for our networking meeting so I check out the space where our meeting was going to happen and this is when I was shocked by another surprise. I asked about how much the internet access was going to be for our attendees and was told this was a free service! My jaw immediately dropped to the floor as I could hardly believe that a fancy hotel was going to give something like internet access away for free.
After all other hotels have routinely charge me up to $30 per each guest just to be able to access their internet during out meetings. I have always been gouged by expensive hotels as it seems to me that the more you spend the less you get in value. However, I was going to continue to be shocked as I discovered more and more value at this hotel.
Next I noticed a wonderful breakfast buffet and decided it look so good that I would fork out the money for a fancy breakfast. When I got in line I asked the attendant how much the breakfast cost and was again shocked by her answer, FREE! I was sure there was some mistake as I was not staying in the hotel, so I tried to clarify by replying that I was not a guest in the hotel. Then she asked me why I was in the Hotel that morning to which I pointed over to the conference rooms and said I was there for a meeting. Then she cracked a smile on her face and said that it was STILL FREE! Wow, I had to pinch myself to see if this was all true but I still hadn’t peeled back all the layers of the amazing value from staying at the Embassy suites.
After our event had finished smoothly I was thanking the general manager for hosting our networking breakfast and then mentioned the things about their hotel that had impressed me. The hotel manger then told me that if I was impressed with that then I would be blow away with the fact that at 5:00 PM guest can get FREE Beer at their bar.
The takeaway from my experience is that we should first all book next business stay or vacation at an embassy suites but if you happen to be in the Austin area then make sure you book at the arboretum. The second thing we should all do is take a look at our own value proposition and make sure we have stacked it with enough value points just like Embassy Suites.