The coronavirus pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of business. Consumer buying habits are no exception as more sales than ever have shifted online.

Omnisend reported that in the first quarter of this year digital shoppers increased their number of unique page views by 15 percent and online orders by 21 percent from the same quarter a year before.

That’s a noteworthy uptick. But it’s nothing compared to April when page views jumped by 96 percent and orders skyrocketed by 88 percent year over year.

A lot of the online buying growth is the result of merchants’ email campaigns, which reveal consumers are more responsive to email marketing these days.

The hospitality industry can take a page from retailers’ email-marketing playbook as hotels and other accommodations brainstorm for creative ways to reach out to a captive audience of travel consumers.

In this episode of Lodging Leaders podcast, we explore how hotels can use email to connect with both loyal and prospective guests as the lodging industry prepares to emerge from its COVID-19 quarantine.

Featured are Mike Medsker, co-founder and president of Focal Revenue Solutions in Denver, Colorado, and Mike Schmitt, owner and CEO of Clairvoyix in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Like the extended-stay hotel sector, the short-term rental business has held its own since the coronavirus pandemic struck the U.S. in mid-March.

Longer stays have buoyed the short-term rental sector, which experienced an average 5 percent decline in demand from April 2019 to April 2020 while transient hotel demand dropped by an average 29 percent in the same time period, according to a joint report by The Highland Group and All The Rooms.

Such demand is also supporting apartment-hotels. The category includes serviced apartments; lodging accommodations with a mix of hotel rooms and serviced apartments; and privately owned condominiums that are part of a hotel complex’s short-term rental inventory.

In this episode, Lodging Leaders explores the emerging trend of apartment-hotels and how COVID-19 has given the sector a new shine as travelers seek safety and their own place to live, work and play, whether it’s for a few days or a few months. We feature Brian Quinn, chief development officer at Domio, a technology-driven apartment-hotel brand; Mimi Oliver, CEO at WaterWalk International, a serviced-apartment franchise; and Larry Spelts, president of lodging at The Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which is involved in a condominium-hotel development project in Naples, Florida.

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing the lodging industry to rethink health and wellness. Designers like Blanche Garcia of B. Garcia Designs see this as an opportunity for hotels to revise their messaging beyond clean and safe by introducing wellness products and programs they can market to attract guests who want to feel good during their stay and return home feeling better than when they left.

Episode 295 of Lodging Leaders podcast explores how implementing elements of wellness can be a cure for hotel businesses struggling to survive. This report is part of Long Live Lodging’s ongoing coverage of the coronavirus crisis and its impact on the hotel industry.

She Has a Deal, a program that promotes women as hotel owners, last month minted several new investors through its inaugural pitch competition.

Episode 294 of Lodging Leaders podcast examines what it took for the three women who make up the team called Datcher to win the top prize of $50,000 in equity in an investment fund that would include financing toward its $27-million project proposed for downtown Detroit. What we found out can help prospective hotel developers find capital and guide would-be investors on where to risk their money when the lodging industry begins to shift from survival to comeback mode.

General managers of hotels throughout the U.S. are redefining their job descriptions as they make beds, do laundry, vacuum lobbies and patrol parking lots – all jobs once done by employees they’ve had to lay off when the coronavirus pandemic struck in March. GMs also are charged with cutting costs and finding ways to maintain asset values amid a steep downturn in business.

In Episode 293 of Lodging Leaders podcast, general managers talk about what it’s like to run a hotel amid a global health pandemic. This report is part of Long Live Lodging’s ongoing coverage of the coronavirus crisis and its impact on the hotel industry.

For many hotel owners and operators, the term “influencer marketing” conjures up an image of a selfie-obsessed millennial who wants free room nights in exchange for some positive social media posts about her stay experience.

Hoteliers often felt the so-called influencer took advantage of their hospitality and provided little return on the hotel’s in-kind investment.

In the COVID-19 age, those days are over.

To be sure, influencers are not going away. In fact, their numbers and significance are growing as influencers become mainstream in the marketing world.

Digitally savvy brand ambassadors can now be an important part of a hotel’s strategic marketing campaign that seeks new ways to spread the message that the hotel is open, safe and ready to serve.

In this episode, Lodging Leaders podcast peeks into the world of travel influencers and how they generate online content that promotes people, places and things to audiences traditional marketing might never reach.

We feature Netanya Trimboli, founder and CEO of Travel Influencer Expert; Carol Cain, founder and CEO of Brave World Media, a branding agency, and founder of Girl Gone Travel, a travel influencer blog. And we speak to Brian King, global officer at Marriott International who is co-chairing a domestic travel campaign by the U.S. Travel Association called Let’s Go There.

The U.S. hotel industry is hanging on by a thread.

According to research from the American Hotel & Lodging Association, two thirds of the nation’s 57,000 hotels will close without federal government relief.

Experts Lodging Leaders interviewed say hotel businesses are on the precipice of failure, and if they fall they’re taking more than 5 million jobs with them.

In this episode of Lodging Leaders we talk to Cecil Staton, president and CEO of AAHOA in Atlanta, Georgia, and Chip Rogers, president and CEO of AHLA in Washington, D.C., who update the associations’ efforts to save hotels from rack and ruin as a result of the business downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

We also hear from Girish Patel, principal and managing director at NewGen Worldwide, a commercial real estate organization in Phoenix, Arizona, that has been spearheading advocacy efforts in Washington, D.C., on behalf of owners and investors.

With hotel occupancies hovering around an average of 50 percent, owners and operators are seeking new ways to generate revenue beyond traditional overnight stays.

One solution in the works is day use of hotel rooms. Hotel companies Accor and Hilton are promoting the practice and individual hotels are also accommodating work-from-hotel concepts to boost business performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode, Lodging Leaders explores the practice of day use in the hotel industry. We feature Yannis Moati, founder of Hotels by Day in New York City, a booking platform; Raj Chudasama of Kriya Hotels in Dallas, Texas, which owns a co-working franchise and also rents hotel rooms for day use; and Andrew Alexander, president of Red Roof in Columbus, Ohio, which promoted the work-from-hotel idea at the peak of the coronavirus crisis.

Marlene Reyes is 34 years old with an MBA from Cornell University. Her teammate is Nancy Guzman, also an alum of Cornell. They learned about She Has a Deal from an email shared among Cornell alumni.

Viviana Wilkins is a 27-year-old master’s student at San Diego State University and leader of the three-woman team named Fernweh Partners. Her cohorts are Meaghan Carfrey, 35, a fellow student, and Nikki Gonzales, 22 and a graduate of the university.

Viviana said it was Carl Winston, director of SDSU’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, who told them about She Has a Deal.