My Experience with StayWanderful

Throughout this semester I have been interning for a startup company called StayWanderful.  It is an amazing company and I really enjoy my time working with them.  If someone books through StayWanderful, they automatically have access to various perks and special offers from businesses in the hotel area.  In other words, our goal is to drive a constant stream of high spending tourists to the local establishments. Since tourists have a higher propensity to spend than locals.  When I first started interning over the summer, I obviously started at the bottom by cold calling businesses to see if they would be interested.  I called places like ice cream parlors, restaurants, and various attractions that were around the hotel.  Helping the small business develop their sales promotion (i.e. their perk or special offer) was difficult since they are small businesses.  After doing that for a whole summer, I was promoted!  I now got my own interns and acquired my own city (Maui, Hawaii) and started with 10 hotels.  From there, I dealt directly with the hotels.  While taking Professor Levy’s class and doing this internship, I used a lot of our class material when dealing with my hotels in Maui.  As I acquired more hotels, I learned many things like how to communicate the promotion we bring, as well as, all related aspects to the markets StayWanderful would open them up too.  Market segmentation and target markets was also important when evaluating what guests, depending on how luxurious the hotel was, would be drawn to which local business.  Overall, the material in class really did help me my work with StayWanderful.  

Regan