In The Big Chair - Jeff Bzdawka of Knowland

Jeff Bzdawka, CEO

Jeff Bzdawka joined hotel and meetings market intelligence data platform Knowland as CEO in June 2021, following a combined 20 years at Hyatt.

With stints also at TravelClick and Pegasus, Bzdawka most recently served as senior vice president of global hotel technology at the hotel chain.

You joined Knowland from Hyatt in June 2021. What has most surprised you about the job? What has been the most challenging?

The easy way out of the question is to say there really were no surprises. While the role was new to me at Knowland, my entire professional career I've had the opportunity to be both on the hotel side, as well as the hospitality technology provider side. What this has done is it enabled me to come into the role kind of eyes wide open. In addition to knowing the industry and having been through the whiplash that's been created by the pandemic, and having recently been on the customer side, I'm very much aware and appreciate the operating environment of the industry, for our customers especially, and the challenges then that were faced by the Knowland team as I came onboard.

Now, I'm happy to say our industry continues to prove its resiliency, and now is no different. There are green shoots of hope; they're not green weeds.

I have left a phenomenal team behind at Hyatt. I miss them. I consider myself truly lucky to have the opportunity to join the Knowland team. Maybe a surprise would be just how positive and optimistic an outlook they have having been through the last two years, being in the hospitality industry and being in an area that caters to and helps hotels and meetings and events. That is an area that maybe took a disproportionate hit, and just the general sense of teamwork and passion for the business really excited me.

A concern I had when I joined Knowland was relevancy of the data set. One thing that makes us unique is we have information on over 20 million actualized meetings and events, and we use this data to create actionable insights for our customers, helping them to sell differently. In the early days of COVID, a lot of discussion in the industry was about the relevancy of historical data, especially in the case of revenue management, and did historical data mean anything anymore. I'm really happy to say that my views, as well as the views of the industry, are changing and evolving there.

Candidly in the early days, the industry was probably wrong. As business emerges from our slumber, historical data is vital in creating new operating models. So the models have changed, and the models will continue to evolve and change, but the relevancy of the data is probably even more important now as the industry rebuilds than it ever was.

What learnings from Hyatt have you brought to the role as CEO?

I am who I am largely because of Hyatt. I started working with Hyatt my senior year of high school. I've had two very great runs at Hyatt - just over 20 years of service having the opportunity at both a property level as well as chain level. Because of that, I consider myself an operator person foremost, or often being able to look through the lens of our customers, because ultimately what we're trying to do are bring experiences to life on property.

You really need to have a view from the outside in, is what I think I learned from Hyatt and want to bring to my role at Knowland. In my formative years, Hyatt truly helped me as a person to learn the importance of taking care of people. Our business, hospitality, is all about people. Whether members of the team or customers or guests, the pure essence of hospitality is caring for people so they can be their best.

Can you explain further the role of data in helping hotels recover?

Data is in fact critical to recovery. But I would go as far as suggesting it's more about actionable insights and the information we're able to produce from the data than the data itself. We have arguably too much data available to us and it's so easy to get bogged down in data or metrics. It's really, what does that data tell you? As hotel operators, they don't have the time to go through reams of reports or multiple dashboards. They need actionable insights. They need insight into the things that matter.

As the sales teams are coming back, they're being structured differently, they need different data to do their job and they need to be able to identify opportunities. They need to be able to take action against the data.

[With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning], we're seeing a transformation away from data to more actionable insights, more companies such as Knowland providing data as a service, which is really providing a head and heart on top of the data set. Why does it matter? Don't make me go searching for the goal, bring that to the surface. Our role is to unlock the value in the data itself.

What is the landscape of meetings and events looking like now?

It's looking better each and every day. We view 2022 very much as a bridge year for the industry. Many markets are coming back stronger than others for obvious reasons. We're seeing businesses coming back to a degree the way it looked pre-pandemic. I hate to keep referencing pandemic. I'd like to eventually get this behind us.

Providing data as a service is really providing a head and heart on top of the data set.

Jeff Bzdawka

Share this quote

The good news is we're seeing seasonality curves starting to return in groups and events. Meetings and events are starting to come back the way they looked in 2019, and the same types of meetings and events are coming back. Talking to some of our larger customers, they're telling us that demand through the end of this year, 70 to 85% of the requests coming in look exactly like they did back in 2018 and 2019. Although some of the larger meetings are getting smaller, meaning they're getting broken up into multiple meetings and distributed, we're seeing smaller meetings actually getting a bit larger as people want to get back to that personal connection.

At Knowland we recently introduced our Meetings Recovery Forecast last year [and it's predicted that] by the end of this year across the U.S. we'll be close to 60% recovery as far as number of meetings and events. By the end of next year, we expect in total closer to 90%, but in the August, September timeframe of next year, we are going to see us above and beyond the actualized groups and events that we had back in 2019. So demand is returning.

In addition to the Meetings Recovery Forecast, what other tools has Knowland introduced to help hotels recover from the pandemic?

As technology providers, we need to do a much better job enabling our community, our customers, to be able to use our tools to get the end results. At Knowland, in addition to introducing new tools, like the Meetings Recovery Forecast or the Estimated Revenue Calculator, we are also looking at how the industry is rebuilding. The industry is bringing in new people. So it's not just the tools, but it's the training as well. We see part of the retooling is helping and partnering with our customers to help support them as they learn to sell differently. In some cases just flat out learn how to sell in hospitality.

I often joked when I was at Hyatt, and there's some truth behind it, that we should stop introducing new technology and just take the time to reintroduce the old technology that was being underutilized.

When I think about a new tool, it's not just introducing the tool and moving on to sell to the next customer; it's staying with the customer so they can understand it, how to use it, because there's so much more value they can get from the tool itself. As a vendor community, we need to do a better job of caring for our customers, in helping them along, and not view them as just a one-time sale. We're not successful unless our customers are successful.

What long-term impact will COVID have on the hotel sector and how it conducts group business?

I think if anything, the pandemic has made the hospitality industry accelerate the acceptance in activation of technology itself. If you look at something as simple as the contactless journey, and generally I don't like the phrase "contactless journey" because it devalues hospitality, it's more about the enablement of choice. When I'm traveling by myself, I might be perfectly fine to avoid the front desk and go straight to the room. When I'm traveling with my family, I may need advice on where to go to dinner. So again, it's enablement of choice.

The early days of the pandemic, contactless was all the industry was talking about. We should have been talking about contactless as more enablement choice well before the pandemic, but the pandemic has accelerated that focus.

What are Knowland’s top priorities for 2022?

It's actually quite simple. They're not easy, but they're simple, and it's all built around helping the industry rebuild. I'm truly passionate about the industry. I care about the industry, and the industry will truly not recover until meetings and events are back in a material way.

At Knowland, this is our opportunity to really help the industry in rebuilding. It's all about getting our customers reboarded as they awake from slumber, getting them retrained retooled, so they can of maximize what their goals and objectives are.

What would you say are your biggest strengths and weaknesses as a leader?

My biggest strengths are, I understand the industry; hospitality is who I am. When I was global head of hotel technology at Hyatt, in essence, I had one very large customer, or you could look at it as 1,100 different customers. So the experience I bring is the ability to empathize. I very strongly believe in both servant and situational leadership. My job is to help create an environment and a culture where people can thrive. We're really not a great company unless we have great individuals who are properly positioned to do great things.

What advice would you give to someone interested in a career in hospitality?

Don't be afraid to come into the hospitality industry. Don't be afraid to take a career in hospitality. There is tremendous growth opportunity as the industry rebuilds, and while it's scary at times, the industry itself has proven its resiliency time and time again. It's a great industry to be part of.

Also, don't be a passive participant. Bring your thoughts and your ideas, challenge the old way of thinking. I've told my teams in the past, I will never get upset for a person making a mistake or failing, unless it is a repetitive mistake or just flat-out careless. If we are not running hard, trying new things, testing and failing, we're not doing what we can for our shareholders, as well as for our customers. Embrace hospitality, there are great opportunities for personal growth, personal enrichment.