The true impact of the sharing economy and alternate lodging providers, as led by Airbnb, has yet to be truly felt. While we’ve had a pretty good last couple of years from a RevPAR and occupancy growth standpoint, rest assured that these numbers have been buoyed by the healthy economy of the times and that we may suffer if there is another forthcoming downturn.

Rather than be an unwavering harbinger of doom for our hospitality industry, I always try to take a proactive approach to any new entrant or competitor. Now that these alternate lodging providers have started to push into other market segments – such as Airbnb for Work making significant headway into the corporate travel world – it is time to emulate these disruptors in order to build modern hotel products that can compete on more than just price.

Specifically, one of the reasons why the sharing economy has grown in leaps and bounds over the past decade is that operators on these digital platforms are able to provide guests with experiences that hotels have yet to properly facilitate. Travelers want to be embedded in the community and live like locals. They want interesting spaces. They want access to great food. They want to visit places and interact with their environments in bold and interesting ways. They want memories.

Where traditional hotels have an insurmountable advantage over any bed and breakfast is in our ability to wield capital for new projects and improvements that work towards delivering upon these abovementioned guest desires. While single-unit operators may be more agile insofar as guestroom upgrades or other tactical executions, they will never be able to implement new features or amenities outside of their immediate cashflow.

Taking this principle to heart, where hotels can disrupt the travel landscape is through the offering of truly unique experiences for their guests. Give consumers something they will not find anywhere else and make it easy for these customers to purchase.

A good start to this is in the bundling of room nights with onsite F&B, spa, gifts, tours or any other activities you already have. It’s this last point that requires a bit more elucidation because guests the world over are looking for fun and memorable things to do. Moreover, your guests’ daily lives are already busy enough so they’ll reward the hotel that’s able to make their jobs easy – that is, letting the property handle all the specific arrangements. After all, you’re the local expert, not them.

In devising what to actually offer your guests as activities or experiences, it is always best to start small and focus on the one or two core experiences that have an authentic precedent with your property and your surrounding area. Every property is different, which makes this exercise both very exhaustive and also rewarding.

Once you have an enticing slate of packages with unique experiences inscribed therein, the next step is how you present them to your prospective customers. Ideally, you want your website to handle the bulk of your bookings as it reduces the workload of your reservation agents while preventing any reductions to your margins from external commissions. For this, a simple, straightforward and mobile-first presentation will suffice.

Beyond this, you are now getting into how you manage all your channel partners, which is the subject of those voluminous marketing plans written every fall. But if think in terms of how you can learn from these new age disruptors in terms of what experiences you provide for your guests then your hotel will have a very healthy future.