The Trends slide is really about highlighting the tailwinds in the industry; the reasons why the target company has macro factor help and will succeed, regardless of their own relative stand-alone out-performance relative to the competition. The kinds of things to discuss here include positive shifts in buyer behaviour, the retirement of legacy solutions, and other broader secular trends that point in the overall direction of sustained growth. It's often helpful to find those trends that are empirically proven and clearly manifest in the company's income statement, thus proving directionality, but still relatively early in the customer adoption cycle (with significant room for further growth).

Some of the points raised on this slide are:

• Content Quality - Customer expectations have gone up, and the hoteliers must catch up with an email marketing solution like the one provided by Target, in order to stay in the share-of-voice game;

• Pre-arrival: The concierge experience is going digital, and it's moving to the pre-arrival phase of the customer journey, when the guest is first ready to start planning their trip;

• Survey Juice: Survey results are the 'SEO juice' of the OTA (Online Travel Agency) booking universe, and hoteliers that don't have a means to drive reviews will lose on occupancy and revenue;

• Channel re-direction: OTAs can cost hoteliers upwards 30% of their revenue, and for every dollar of re-directed channel books, the hotelier is keeping 30% more in pure margin; there are many dollars to be saved, here;

• Personalization: the system must be able to anticipate the guest need before they ask.

• Data Consolidation: there must be a single, unified view of the guest.

Stay tuned for the next in this series: the Industry Tech Solutions Stack.