We had the honor and privilege of organizing a conference at the prestigious Vatel Marrakech school in December 2017. This project is the result of a joint initiative aiming to bring together hospitality management training and the digital hotel industry.

Vatel Marrakech is part of the Vatel group, which boasts more than 40 campuses worldwide. The group has recently been named "Best Hospitality School" during the 17th edition of the Worldwide Hospitality Awards (2016). Their program strives to include a practical dimension and a close collaboration with hotel establishments through internships, simulation workshops, case studies, or conferences facilitated by sector professionals.

In this light, Vatel Marrakech has organized the "Hotels and Resorts: The Keys to an Efficient Online Strategy" conference and has kindly invited us to share our expertise. Our founders Hicham Benyebdri and Assil Bernossi did the presentation.

Students of all levels were present, as were students of other branches at the “Université Privée de Marrakech”, such as management and computer science. The main goal was to demonstrate the importance of digital for hotel revenue. We began by covering the basics of the sector as well as key figures. We then presented the principal traffic acquisition platforms, such as paid listings, display network, or even remarketing. Next, we addressed the well-known issue of OTA bookings, and how to rebalance the scale. Finally, before concluding with the emerging trends of the sector, we discussed the major levers for optimizing web performance, such as video and website.

We are pleased to find students showing an interest in these new technologies. They seem well aware that they are a priority in effective hotel management. Swell’s core mission is to connect hotels with new technologies, and in this spirit, we wish to educate the future decision-makers of the hotel industry as early as possible.