February 10, 2025 • 32 mins
How can leveraging technology transform the guest experience and streamline hotel operations? In this episode, Jose Suarez, the IT Director for The Capital Hotel Group, reveals how his team is redefining the hospitality landscape through innovative tech solutions.
Key Takeaways:
- Discover how The Capital Hotel Group built a hybrid system by integrating custom features into an off-the-shelf Property Management System (PMS), enhancing operational efficiency and guest engagement.
- Learn about the importance of data orchestration in personalizing guest experiences, from booking to post-stay communication, and how it can lead to higher satisfaction rates.
- Explore the role of AI in automating guest reviews and generating actionable insights, allowing hotel staff to focus on delivering exceptional service.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We also took that guest review data, and using
this toolset, Geoffrey, thiswill do that we built front end
there. We've now fed all thisguest information inside of of
this unit. And what it does dois it tells us all of what
Adrian's experiences have beenwith us. And it's using all the
information from TripAdvisor,Booking dot com, everything.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider,
a show about the future ofhotels and the technology that
powers them.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Today, we get to hear from Jose Suarez, the director
of IT for The Capital, a SouthAfrican company which operates
hotels, apartments, and resorts.And in our conversation, he
shares how his softwaredevelopment team builds their
own functionality on top of anoff the shelf PMS. After
listening to this episode,you'll be inspired to rethink
(00:49):
how your hotel uses data and howAI can enhance your guest
experience. Experience. Well,thanks so much for being here,
Jose.
Great to have you on thepodcast. Really appreciate you
taking time out of your day tospeak with me. To start us off,
I would love to hear a bit aboutwhat you do and about your
organization.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Well, first off, thanks, Adrian, for having me on
the podcast. It's really,honored to chat about what we've
been doing. I'm Jose Suarez. I'mthe IT director for the Capital
Hotel Group situated in SouthAfrica. We're a chain of hotels,
apartments, and resorts locatedacross the nation.
My principal role is basicallyto look after well, at least by
(01:31):
my colleague's standards, is tolook after absolutely everything
that has an electrical currentgoing through it. So from the
computer sometimes down to thetoasters. But really, it's
leading and driving innovationand change with the group. I'm
not a hotelier by trade. Neverintended on being in the
hospitality space, but I foundmyself here.
And I found quite an explosiveand immersive technology rich
(01:56):
environment. So it's been a heckof a journey and a good
experience coming into the spaceof really coming into a group
that allows the capacity to doand explore things and fail and
succeed at the same time. We'vegot quite a dynamic group. We
cater to a very corporateclientele or client base,
(02:18):
offering packages for longstays, a lot of conferencing, a
lot of eventing. So you couldimagine these sort of spaces
that are bustling with four,five hundred people,
conferencing, video streaming.
Then it's got the play aspectsfrom the resort side for
families, you know, going upinto their rooms, experiencing
TV entertainment, musicians. Andyou can understand, as we do in
(02:42):
that space, you've got to doeverything there from a
technological perspective to beable to provide what people
expect and then what they don'texpect. You know? The things
that surprise them and go, wow.That's incredible, and that's
amazing.
And I think we're seeing a lotof those, you know, with the way
technology shifting in thespace, we're starting to have
the opportunity to explore thosemoments more so at least than in
(03:06):
the past.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
What would you say is the most critical technology
partner that you work with rightnow?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
It's such a difficult question to answer because
there's a critical path throughthe business, right? And that
really is find the customer,serve the customer, and find out
what happened. So to corner itdown to one, I really, really
struggled. And, ultimately, Imean and I think, at least for
(03:34):
me, the PMS, you know, it playssuch a pivotal role. And, you
know, obviously, it goes withoutsaying that without it, no one
you you can't manage yourbookings.
You can't manage your operation.You can't, you know, do what it
is that the business needs todo. But, really, it's the
cornerstone of absolutelyeverything. It's one of the
(03:56):
pieces that I must say, as Icame into this space, I battled
with understanding why a lot ofthe PMS seemed to be where they
were from a legacy perspective.You know, I came from FinTech,
and we were over here and doingthings over there.
And then all of a sudden, Iarrived, and I'm like, but guys,
we've moved past this. We don'tinstall things on premises, and
(04:17):
we don't, you know, have thingsplugging into things. And that
was a big shift in, obviously,making sure that we made changes
and moved into cloud. So for me,really, the previous's ability
to function on basic operationallevels. Right?
Basic operational levels beingrun smoothly, capture the guest
information, at least amount offriction, be able to have the
(04:39):
insight and to see what'shappening from the day, and then
be able to manage my rooms andsell them. Without it,
everything else everything elsefails. Everything else becomes a
moot point because you can havethe most elaborate RMS. You can
have the most wonderful bookingengine. We all know all roads
lead back into Rome, which meansif that's failing, you're done
(05:01):
and varied.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
I liked how you broke down the guest journey there,
like the booking phase, the prearrival phase, checking the
guest in, and then figuring outwhat happens after the stay. Can
you walk me through how you usetechnology in each stage?
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Absolutely. This was my favorite thing. So for me and
really coming into everything isabout, obviously, the guests and
what the guest experiences. Andwhen I came in, we didn't have
much that engaged with the guestupon this journey. And we looked
at a couple of bespoke solutionsand integrating.
And the conversation, theargument we had and said, guys,
(05:38):
you know, let's let's let'scontrol this narrative. You
know? Let's not go now and get athird party because they're
gonna do it the way that they doit for everybody else. And that
because one true doesn't fit allscenario, it really applies. So
for us, we built this guestlayout of our own, and we built
it from the ground up.
(05:59):
We built a day orchestrationlayer and plugged on top.
Something that would allow us toobviously gauge with the guest
throughout the journey. So, youknow, coming in, you're making a
booking. We're communicating.We're communicating with you
there.
We actually start thecommunication link when you
arrive on any of our digitalassets like the website. So
there's already a chat componentgoing through that. You arrive.
(06:20):
You make your reservation. Westart to communicate with you.
You come to your digitalregistration, the reg cards
capturing the ID documentation.That gets pushed into,
obviously, our system. And keythere was obviously, you know,
talking back to what I wassaying to you, right, about the
PMS and the data. And I thinkwe'll maybe get an opportunity
(06:40):
to touch on a little bit laterbecause I think no one can say
it enough. Really, what'shappening in that central hub
there and the purity of thatinformation when the PMS needs
to be that player is critical.
So having that component that'sset above and helps, a, the
guests bring in theirinformation, and, two, the
(07:02):
staff, front desk, back office,be able to extract that
information was vital. And thatwill go through the entire
journey. And key to that,obviously, is that, obviously,
will look at you through yourjourney. We'll communicate with
you through your journey beforeyour arrival, during your stay,
after your stay, for anopportunity to understand what's
happening and for us toobviously be able to communicate
(07:22):
to you, upsell to you, etcetera,find out how your stay was. But
vital to that was not havinganother system.
This was the magic ingredientwas we actually decided to kind
of build it into the PMS. So wehijacked our PMS, and we brought
it actually in like a Trojanhorse. The staff are sitting
(07:43):
there having this richengagement layer, and that's the
most you know, the magicingredient there, which creates
the super interactive journeyfor the guests and the staff.
And being able to attachinformation in between and talk
between and share betweendepartments is really, really,
really cool. And and we've evenstarted to bake in payments and
(08:04):
being able to preauthorize anddo a lot of fancy stuff on top.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
So it sounds like you've done a really interesting
thing, which is not solely usinga vendor and not solely building
something from scratch yourself.You've taken a PMS off the shelf
and built something around it,so it's like this hybrid system.
Am I understanding thatcorrectly?
Speaker 1 (08:26):
It's a nasty word is like a Trojan horse. So we took
a solid PMS, and then we builtsomething in because I found
that look. We still use it. Westill use it. I mean, if I took
around the systems, I mean,we've got up to you know, our
stack is about 30 differentsoftware applications at
vendors, ten of which we builtourselves.
And all of this has been woventogether. So you still have the
(08:48):
PMS, and you still have thiscomponent talking to everything
around. So we didn't buildeverything. You know? We can't
reinvent the wheel.
All I really found was that thehot switching between you know,
whether you're on a bunch ofSaaS platforms and switching
between tabs, as soon as youstart doing that, the staff
don't want to do it. They'rereluctant. They wanna stay
(09:09):
inside the PMS and be able to doeverything inside of the PMS.
And that was, I feel, a pivotalmoment is, let's keep them in
there and suck all that stuff inthere and literally, you know,
make the PMS perfect. Make thePMS do what it needs to do and
help you engage with the guest,feed that information back.
And then we even started to feedit into it, suggestive narrative
(09:31):
from, obviously, artificialintelligence, which is reading
from a bunch of inputs andsuggesting those things back to
the staff, which is really,really cool.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
I'm curious. How do you decide which features to
build versus which features doyou lean on a vendor to provide?
Like payment processing, forinstance, or upsells. How do you
decide what to build fromscratch versus what products to
use off the shelf?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So that's a good question. And and one that I'm
gonna be honest with you, and myexecutive will kind of support
the statement, is that I'm quitenaughty in that sometimes what
I'll tend to do is, one, tobuild it myself because I'm
quite excited, and I think I cansometimes do a better job. But
most times, what typicallyhappens is we try. We will pull
something off the shelf. We'lltry, and we'll try to get it to
(10:19):
work.
And where it fails, again, thisis exactly where I'm talking
about this one, We're playing inthe gap. So So we're looking.
We're going, there's a gap here.It's not fulfilling what we need
to do. So it's gonna be easier.
Ironically, and most people say,no. It's not really because now
you've built something. You haveto maintain that. You have to
keep innovating in it, and thatbecomes expensive. But in
(10:39):
certain areas, and again, comingfrom that software development
background, it just felt a loteasier, and it has been a lot
easier for us.
We've had a lot more success inbuilding those areas ourselves.
So to answer your question, iswhen do we decide is when what
we're after isn't exactly whatwe need. And I think that tends
to be a lot of the problem evenwhen it comes to PMS. So much
(11:02):
functionality inside of there,and it's really too much
sometimes and not enough of whatyou often need. And I always I
always compare it, and I alwaysused to have this analogy to
Microsoft Word.
And I always say to everybody,you know, everybody uses
Microsoft Word, but I bet youthat most of us use maybe 10% of
what it's capable of doing. Bolda few things, underline a few
(11:23):
things, and write a couple ofsentences. And that's the same
thing. So I'd rather buildsomething rich with features
that'll work very well andstreamline the business.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Can you tell me a bit about your team structure? Do
you have a team of full timeengineers building these
products and maintaining themfor you? Do you use contractors?
What does that setup look like?
Speaker 1 (11:46):
So we do when I started, it was myself and one
you know how the story goes.It's me and one guy. You know?
We went on a mission and westarted building one thing and
then another thing. And theneventually, the team built out
and built out and built out andbuilt out.
What we didn't do was geteverybody local. So we've
offshored and built the team.Offshore was more viable for us.
And now we've started to buildsome key members of that
(12:08):
development team locally inSouth Africa, just purely from a
risk perspective. So the team isfull time, our software team,
and the structure is prettyflat.
And in fact, it's not just aboutthe IT department development.
The business itself is very mucharound a flat structure. You
know, we aren't into havingmanagers. You manage, you
manage, you manage, you manage,you manage, you know, because it
(12:30):
becomes inefficient scenario. Soit's really is a flat structure.
And the same thing gets echoedout when it comes to the
development. We've kept to atight bunch of guys and girls
and everybody. And we've beenable to, because of that small
unity pump up quite a bit ofsoftware, then a large
organization would be you know,my previous company, we had 250
(12:53):
developers. And sometimes Ijokingly look at it and I say,
you know, guys, we do more herethan I managed to do in a
business of that size. You know?
So it really is a thin structurewhere let's have a problem.
Let's discuss how we're gonnasolve it. Come up collectively
with it. Go into a rapid processof trying to get an MVP out.
Test it, fine tune it, deployit, and let's go.
(13:17):
Get the feedback. You know,bring operations into the whole
cycle and have that withouthaving the levels of complexity.
And I think the other side of itis unlike a service provider
that has to provide the softwaresolution to multiple hotel
chains across the world, youknow, and work with all the
legalities and issues, we don't.Which means that we're able to
(13:39):
really just hone in on whatneeds to get done and then move
forward. So in some regard insome regard, that puts us at
advantage.
The disadvantage is that we, youknow, the more we build and the
more complex it gets. Now wehave to keep looking over the
shoulder and going, guys, wecan't build that because we've
got, you know, 52 other thingswe need to keep looking after.
(14:01):
That's kind of the trying tofind a balance there so that
we've got harmony betweenbuilding too much into stack,
whereas opposed to we should beworking with other vendors to
enrich the environment and notjust build everything ourselves.
I mean, when I came in, I saidto the guys, I want I wanted to
build a PMS. I was like, what isthis PMS thing?
I'll build one. Let's do it. Soit sounds like the easiest thing
(14:21):
in the world. You know? Notreally.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Could you tell me about one product or feature
that you've built that had areally impactful result on the
business?
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Absolutely. So I've got got a couple. If we go back
to so I've got these very cornynames, I'll warn you. So when it
comes to naming products in thebusiness, we give them corny
names because it just helps usgroup them together. So we've
got this thing called Joffrey,and we lovingly named him after
that Game of Thrones characterbecause it was exactly at the
time that that he was, you know,remember the little blonde
(14:57):
prince.
The introduction of that wasreally what we did was baked it
into the PMS. And what we foundwere two things. We were having
an issue tracking revenue movingthrough and attributing it to
the sales team. So in otherwords, they were corporate
clients, etcetera. And that goesthrough link trades, link
(15:19):
profiles, corporate agreements,etcetera.
And when it gets booked, itobviously needs to follow
specific clients that have to bebooked in a specific conditions
in order to attribute thatrevenue appropriately into the
business and, obviously, thencommissions and the rest of it.
So it becomes quite a complexthing. And the problem is, as
you'll know, I mean, in thespace, is that you rely on so
(15:40):
many components that depends onwhere that booking's coming
from. Right? It's being doneover the phone.
It's being done by an email.It's being done at the front
desk. It's being doneelectronically. That data needs
to all flow through one placeand then be able to report onto
it. So what this the draw freecomponent allows us to do is to
actually build in SOP logicstraight in natively to the PMS
(16:02):
so that whilst this informationis flowing in, it's actually
suggesting steps to the staff tocorrect it back to what it
should be so that the trackingof the revenue can go into a
real time phase.
You know? And that whole processof being able to do the
production reports for thatsales for that revenue for the
sales team typically takesanywhere from a full month, you
(16:25):
know, sometimes even further ifthere's been problems. And we've
been getting quite good at itnow, shaving it down to almost
being done within a week to acouple of days. So that makes a
massive impact. And the flipside of it as well is that when
we look at bad profiles, right,we went from having a 20 to 30%
accuracy to a 92% accuracy onthe profile information coming
(16:47):
in.
Because purely what it's doingis it's not allowing you to make
duplicates, not allowing you toenter in false information.
Simple steps, But, again, youknow, having that uniqueness
having that uniqueness that wecan offer and build it
specifically for our SOPs meansthat it doesn't have all these
other rules that has to caterfor every other hotel group,
(17:09):
just ours. And it speaks alanguage. And when it doesn't
when it doesn't work, and Ithink this is what people have
loved, when it doesn't work andyou were asking me, how do we
get the feedback from the teams?WhatsApp.
So you've got these guysliterally saying that we've
created these WhatsApp groups,and this feedback's a little bit
chaotic, but, you know, I getnow how our hotel staff work. I
(17:30):
get our hotel people work. Youknow, they don't have the time
to go and draft you an email andtake you screenshots and tell
you what happened here andrecord you a screencast. They'll
jump on their phones. They'lltake me two or three photos.
They'll put it in the group.It'll go to the team. Tickets
get created. We solve theproblem. Two days later, it's
working.
Not three months. Not sixmonths. You know? And that's, I
think, hugely the advantage thatwe have in that area there. So
(17:53):
that's been one real big successwin there for us.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
What are you doing with AI?
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Uh-huh. So that's the next that's the next exciting
that's the next exciting thing.So we've got these really cool
vendors that we work with, oneof them being guest review. And
one of the components that we'vewe've baked in there well,
there's two sides. There's twoaspects that I that I really
love that we've done with this.
K? First one's on the guest onthe review side. So what we
(18:21):
fundamentally done is we'vetaken the guest review
information that comes from thebusiness. And what I found was
there sometimes is a lot ofinformation that got a
phenomenal toolset. But whatwe're trying to do from let's
take it from an IT perspective,is be able to tear through
thousands of reviews.
So if I take just the Decemberperiod we went peak, I had, you
(18:42):
know, four to 5,000 reviews, youknow, in a couple of weeks that
I had to sit and go through. Andas you can imagine, I probably
didn't do a very good job.Right? I'm a human being, and I
probably didn't do a very goodjob, and I did my best effort.
And so so we've done two thingswith it.
One, we've created a model thatgoes through all the reviews,
learns from all the reviews, andlearns from all the data. It it
(19:03):
focuses because we've built itfor our POC just for the IT team
to start with, and it drillsdown through all the reviews,
looks at problems, and it startsto create tickets, and it starts
to funnel them. But the nicepart is it takes all the
information from the PMS. So allof a sudden, an IT team gets a
ticket to say this guest on thisdate in this room experienced
(19:23):
the following problem. Ticketgets generated.
So now what you've done isyou've passed, you know, the
4,000 emails, and you've honedin the ones that you need to,
and you've already sent them outbefore you know, the moment that
ticket has landed in themailbox, which is very cool. So
we're running with a green lightteam, and, obviously, the
natural next step is we're gonnastart feeding into housekeeping,
into facilities, into the restof it. K? The other side of that
(19:46):
is then we also took that guestreview data. And using this
toolset, Joffrey, this old dudethat we've built in front end
there, we've now fed all thisguest information inside of of
this unit.
And what it does do is it tellsus all of what Adrian's
experiences have been with us.And it's using all the
information from Tripadvisor,Booking dot com, everything.
(20:06):
It's feeding all of us andsaying, what were your last
couple of experiences with thecapital? What were the elements?
And it doesn't make you sitthere and go through all the
information.
It's actually just telling youspecific things that you need to
hone in to make Adrian'sexperience that much more
enjoyable. It also looks at theroom that you're going to be
placed into, and it looks atprevious past experiences and
(20:27):
also tells you what other peopledid or did not like and what you
should then obviously combinethat into. We inject that
straight in to the PMS. Sowhilst you're sitting there
literally looking at this andyou're walking to the front
desk, it's really prompting you.That was something we thought
very cool.
Okay? And it's all happening ata relatively real time native
experience inside of the PMS.Okay. And that's on the guest
(20:49):
review side. And as you canimagine, we explore a lot of
different models, lot oftransfer learning, and there was
a lot of computation on it, butnot as bad as the other project.
So our other project was lookingat phone calls coming into
central reservations. And there,what we did is we hooked them to
the PABX and started to processthe audio phone calls coming in
(21:14):
and churn that into actualinformation. That information
then gets broken up into wholebunch of categorical data. That
categorical data then gets fedback into the central
reservations team so that theycan actually see who's
performing from a reservationsperspective, who's not
performing, how are theyadhering to scripts, etcetera.
(21:38):
And more importantly, it startsto actually suggest and tell you
where are your missingopportunities.
People are asking for this.There's more conversations
around that. You know? So that'sanother little tidbit there
that's quite cool. And then thenext step there is obviously
being able to take thoseconversations and then mix it in
with historical information thatwe might have on a guest and be
(21:59):
able to then real time promptthat back to the central res
team whilst they're taking aphone call.
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Another theme that I hear from other hoteliers is
using data to create morepersonalized experiences. What
does personalization look likeduring the stay experience for
you?
Speaker 1 (22:19):
I suppose it goes beyond knowing someone's name, I
think, is always a great start.The next component that we've
even battled with a little bitis language. You know, language,
I think, is probably one of themost key ingredients to
personalizing someone's stay.When you live in a country
that's got 11, I think it's 12official languages now because
(22:41):
sign language became an officiallanguage, that's something that
we forced me to get into thefray. You know, we've been very
hyper focused on.
We do service an internationalmarket. It'd be easier for us to
obviously talk mostly inEnglish. But personalization,
you know, it's understanding theguest. It's understanding the
guest and not just understandingthe name or understanding the
language, but understanding thestay, understanding what they
(23:04):
want. That's really crazy.
It's nice if you rocked up thereand yeah. I'm Portuguese by
descent. Yeah. So if you spoketo me in Portuguese, probably a
miss because I was born in SouthAfrica, and I'm an English
speaking first. But youunderstand someone who does
speak it, addressing him andmost things.
But understanding what theyenjoy out of a stay. You know,
so if it goes to talking to theguest review component, it's
(23:27):
understanding what they drinklike, and not necessarily
focusing on it and saying, oh, Iknow last time the Wi Fi was
horrible, so we've really, youknow, improved them. But moving
them in a way that they couldsee, I prefer it that way. It's
not obvious in your face thatwe're trying to do these things.
But we understand who you are asan individual either based on a
(23:47):
positive experience or based ona negative experience, and we
keep pushing you towards thatbetter, better, better
experience.
That's really whatpersonalization for me looks
like. You know? And I thinkwhere it really becomes super
efficient for somebody or for astay for a guest. Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
I would love to hear if there's anything on your road
map that you haven'timplemented, but maybe it's
something you're interested indoing in the future or perhaps a
really exciting product thatyou've seen in the market that
is on your wish list.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
We're talking about PMSs. Right? And I came out of
the banking space. And thebanking space really suffered
from a very similar problem. Andthat was you've got a super
hyper technical environmentbuilt on a somewhat old
foundation.
You know? And I've beenfollowing one particular PMS,
(24:44):
which is Cloudbeds, and I reallylove what they've been doing
because the one component that Ifind to be the wrong way of
doing it purely because of theoverhead that it creates is the
guest data. So every singlevendor that hops on has this
galactic battle over who's goingto manage, you know? Is that
(25:07):
eCRM? Is it due PMS?
Or is it the upsell tool? Who'sgoing to manage that guest data?
And fundamentally, it should bethere. There should be one
originator. Know, when you lookat an ERP, same concept.
When it comes to your financialdata, it sits in one location,
and it should sit in onelocation. The same should speak,
(25:28):
you know, about your PMS. So,really, I love what they're
doing there by bringing that CRMcomponent natively inside. You
know, being able to provide youknow, not leaving the PMS to go
and do functions, I think, iswhere the secret sauce comes in.
The only failing that I've seenin that movie before is when
(25:50):
vendors try to become the masterof everything, you know, the
jack of all.
Very rarely do they excel inthose areas. And CRM is, you
know, it's not just I know mostlook at them and go, you know,
CRM is just a database. It's notjust a database. There's so many
layers of complexity to it, andthere's so many aspects to it
when you bake in the marketingcomponents, the sales
(26:11):
activities, etcetera. But I dolove that concept.
So for me, it's really the PMSacknowledging that I've really
gotta be good at getting thatdata, holding that data, and
exposing that data in a secureoffice manner because there's
the next complexity, and wedidn't even touch on the
security side of things. And,you know, that's a whole another
(26:32):
conversation for a whole anotherpodcast. But I would really love
to explore along those lines. Iwould really love myself even to
see if we bring in some of thoseareas. You know?
The smartness of having a guestinside of there and being able
to look at pattern and look atthose experiences that a guest,
you know, shows as an example, aValentine's or an anniversary,
(26:54):
etcetera. The The PMSunderstanding at BAM will use
generative AI to create somekind of marketing message that
immediately fires off withoutyou having to layer in all of
these things on top from othersystems. That is very efficient.
That is very, very cool. Or justbeing so good at at holding that
data that the tool that you'reusing to manage your marketing
(27:16):
doesn't own the CRM data.
You understand? It doesn't ownthe time data. It merely speaks
to what's in here because it'sso solid. And I haven't seen
that yet because it's alwaysbeen about this exchange here.
It's either a one way exchangeor a two way exchange.
And whenever you have that,there's this level of disparity
that creeps in. I mean, we'vedone it. We built our middleware
to be able to talk to all thesecomponents. So when I was
(27:38):
talking about that integratedecosystem, we've got 30
platforms. That was one of thevital pieces here, is keeping
inside of this.
So I'd like to see it become thePMS becomes a really good
custodian of that informationand really helps shape with
intelligence. You know, shapethat data and have very sharp
two way interfaces between theplatform. All themselves bring
(28:00):
it in, but we even went andshopped for a different CRM. We
didn't go for anything inside ofthe hospitality sphere. We went
and shopped and played aroundwith Freshworks and HubSpot and
the rest of it because we justfelt that those products were
just so much more mature inthose areas, and they're not
purpose built for hospitality,but you could tweak them so
nicely.
And they had such accessibilityfrom APIs and all the elements
(28:22):
that you could latch up. Sothat's really, I think, another
component there. It's just I'dlove to play around, and maybe
there's a PMS shift in thefuture. I don't know. You know,
when anybody in an IT role at ahotel group or an hotel talks
about shifting a PMS, they getmore gray hair.
I'm actually only 21, you know,this gray hair from one year
(28:44):
working in.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Last question. I always like to leave a
contentious one for the end.What would you say is one thing
you believe about technologythat your peers or competitors
might disagree with?
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I still feel that we are fighting the past. That's
the biggest we're building, andmaybe it's I haven't felt enough
from sufficient hotel groups togive a much broader opinion, but
I still feel that we are in thisprocess of trying to build
(29:20):
technology. Not everybody, butmostly trying to build
technology that was designed tosatisfy very old ways of doing
things. And as much as weadvance them, we're adding all
these layers of complexity ontoa process that needs to, at its
core, be relooked at. And you'vegot your disruptors who come in,
(29:44):
Okay?
And they change the status quo,and the reaction that the
hospitality staff gets is, thisis great because it's not the
way that you know, this doesn'twork. The thinking and the way
that it gets approached with isthis is the way we've always
done it. I can't remember whereI heard it, but I was at a talk
once, and someone was comparingthere was this old story of a
(30:09):
mother and a daughter, and theywere talking about it was a
roast turkey or a roast lamb orsomething. And they keep cutting
the sides of this roast to getit into the oven. Right?
And the daughter asked the mom,why do you keep cutting the
sides off? And she goes, well, Idon't know. It's your mother did
it. Your your your grandmotherdid it. So I did it.
So then she goes to thegrandmother and asks the
(30:30):
grandmother, you know, why doyou cut the sides off? And the
grandmother says, well, yourgreat granny did it. You know?
And then she, they get ananswer, she goes, well, back
then, the oven was this size.You know, so we had to cut the
sides off.
You know? And I and I kind offeel the same thing sometimes,
you know? It's we did it thisway, we've always done it this
way. And what we're trying to dois build incredible technology
to do the same thing. Now youasked me to give you something.
(30:53):
Now I don't think that holdstrue for everybody, but I do
think it is a component thatplays a role in taking us
forward. And when it comes downto building, you know, and I'm
not picking on PMSs. I I lovePMSs. I think there there's a
lot of them out there that arephenomenal. But I think the
overhead of building a PMS istripped up in the fact that it's
(31:16):
gonna come in with all thesefeatures.
And let's go back to thatstatement I made to you about
Microsoft Word, where all I needto do is write a couple of
lines, bold something,underline, and click save.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Well, thank you so much, Jose. It was really great
talking with you. I'm excitedfor all of our listeners to hear
your episode. Thanks so much.Enjoy the rest of your day.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
You too. You too.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
That's all for today's episode. Episode. Thanks
for listening to Hotel TechInsider produced by
HotelTechReport.com. Our goalwith this podcast is to show you
how the best in the business areleveraging technology to grow
their properties and outperformthe concept by using innovative
digital tools and strategies. Iencourage all of our listeners
to go try at least one of thesestrategies or tools that you
(32:03):
learned from today's episode.
Successful digitaltransformation is all about
consistent small experimentsover a long period of time, so
don't wait until tomorrow to trysomething new. Do you know a
hotelier who would be great tofeature on this show, or do you
think that your story wouldbring a lot of value to our
audience? Reach out to medirectly on LinkedIn by
searching for Jordan Hollander.For more episodes like this,
(32:27):
follow Hotel Tech Insider on allmajor streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple Music.
We also took that guest review data, and using
this toolset, Geoffrey, thiswill do that we built front end
there. We've now fed all thisguest information inside of of
this unit. And what it does dois it tells us all of what
Adrian's experiences have beenwith us. And it's using all the
information from TripAdvisor,Booking dot com, everything.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider,
a show about the future ofhotels and the technology that
powers them.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Today, we get to hear from Jose Suarez, the director
of IT for The Capital, a SouthAfrican company which operates
hotels, apartments, and resorts.And in our conversation, he
shares how his softwaredevelopment team builds their
own functionality on top of anoff the shelf PMS. After
listening to this episode,you'll be inspired to rethink
(00:49):
how your hotel uses data and howAI can enhance your guest
experience. Experience. Well,thanks so much for being here,
Jose.
Great to have you on thepodcast. Really appreciate you
taking time out of your day tospeak with me. To start us off,
I would love to hear a bit aboutwhat you do and about your
organization.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Well, first off, thanks, Adrian, for having me on
the podcast. It's really,honored to chat about what we've
been doing. I'm Jose Suarez. I'mthe IT director for the Capital
Hotel Group situated in SouthAfrica. We're a chain of hotels,
apartments, and resorts locatedacross the nation.
My principal role is basicallyto look after well, at least by
(01:31):
my colleague's standards, is tolook after absolutely everything
that has an electrical currentgoing through it. So from the
computer sometimes down to thetoasters. But really, it's
leading and driving innovationand change with the group. I'm
not a hotelier by trade. Neverintended on being in the
hospitality space, but I foundmyself here.
And I found quite an explosiveand immersive technology rich
(01:56):
environment. So it's been a heckof a journey and a good
experience coming into the spaceof really coming into a group
that allows the capacity to doand explore things and fail and
succeed at the same time. We'vegot quite a dynamic group. We
cater to a very corporateclientele or client base,
(02:18):
offering packages for longstays, a lot of conferencing, a
lot of eventing. So you couldimagine these sort of spaces
that are bustling with four,five hundred people,
conferencing, video streaming.
Then it's got the play aspectsfrom the resort side for
families, you know, going upinto their rooms, experiencing
TV entertainment, musicians. Andyou can understand, as we do in
(02:42):
that space, you've got to doeverything there from a
technological perspective to beable to provide what people
expect and then what they don'texpect. You know? The things
that surprise them and go, wow.That's incredible, and that's
amazing.
And I think we're seeing a lotof those, you know, with the way
technology shifting in thespace, we're starting to have
the opportunity to explore thosemoments more so at least than in
(03:06):
the past.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
What would you say is the most critical technology
partner that you work with rightnow?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
It's such a difficult question to answer because
there's a critical path throughthe business, right? And that
really is find the customer,serve the customer, and find out
what happened. So to corner itdown to one, I really, really
struggled. And, ultimately, Imean and I think, at least for
(03:34):
me, the PMS, you know, it playssuch a pivotal role. And, you
know, obviously, it goes withoutsaying that without it, no one
you you can't manage yourbookings.
You can't manage your operation.You can't, you know, do what it
is that the business needs todo. But, really, it's the
cornerstone of absolutelyeverything. It's one of the
(03:56):
pieces that I must say, as Icame into this space, I battled
with understanding why a lot ofthe PMS seemed to be where they
were from a legacy perspective.You know, I came from FinTech,
and we were over here and doingthings over there.
And then all of a sudden, Iarrived, and I'm like, but guys,
we've moved past this. We don'tinstall things on premises, and
(04:17):
we don't, you know, have thingsplugging into things. And that
was a big shift in, obviously,making sure that we made changes
and moved into cloud. So for me,really, the previous's ability
to function on basic operationallevels. Right?
Basic operational levels beingrun smoothly, capture the guest
information, at least amount offriction, be able to have the
(04:39):
insight and to see what'shappening from the day, and then
be able to manage my rooms andsell them. Without it,
everything else everything elsefails. Everything else becomes a
moot point because you can havethe most elaborate RMS. You can
have the most wonderful bookingengine. We all know all roads
lead back into Rome, which meansif that's failing, you're done
(05:01):
and varied.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
I liked how you broke down the guest journey there,
like the booking phase, the prearrival phase, checking the
guest in, and then figuring outwhat happens after the stay. Can
you walk me through how you usetechnology in each stage?
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Absolutely. This was my favorite thing. So for me and
really coming into everything isabout, obviously, the guests and
what the guest experiences. Andwhen I came in, we didn't have
much that engaged with the guestupon this journey. And we looked
at a couple of bespoke solutionsand integrating.
And the conversation, theargument we had and said, guys,
(05:38):
you know, let's let's let'scontrol this narrative. You
know? Let's not go now and get athird party because they're
gonna do it the way that they doit for everybody else. And that
because one true doesn't fit allscenario, it really applies. So
for us, we built this guestlayout of our own, and we built
it from the ground up.
(05:59):
We built a day orchestrationlayer and plugged on top.
Something that would allow us toobviously gauge with the guest
throughout the journey. So, youknow, coming in, you're making a
booking. We're communicating.We're communicating with you
there.
We actually start thecommunication link when you
arrive on any of our digitalassets like the website. So
there's already a chat componentgoing through that. You arrive.
(06:20):
You make your reservation. Westart to communicate with you.
You come to your digitalregistration, the reg cards
capturing the ID documentation.That gets pushed into,
obviously, our system. And keythere was obviously, you know,
talking back to what I wassaying to you, right, about the
PMS and the data. And I thinkwe'll maybe get an opportunity
(06:40):
to touch on a little bit laterbecause I think no one can say
it enough. Really, what'shappening in that central hub
there and the purity of thatinformation when the PMS needs
to be that player is critical.
So having that component that'sset above and helps, a, the
guests bring in theirinformation, and, two, the
(07:02):
staff, front desk, back office,be able to extract that
information was vital. And thatwill go through the entire
journey. And key to that,obviously, is that, obviously,
will look at you through yourjourney. We'll communicate with
you through your journey beforeyour arrival, during your stay,
after your stay, for anopportunity to understand what's
happening and for us toobviously be able to communicate
(07:22):
to you, upsell to you, etcetera,find out how your stay was. But
vital to that was not havinganother system.
This was the magic ingredientwas we actually decided to kind
of build it into the PMS. So wehijacked our PMS, and we brought
it actually in like a Trojanhorse. The staff are sitting
(07:43):
there having this richengagement layer, and that's the
most you know, the magicingredient there, which creates
the super interactive journeyfor the guests and the staff.
And being able to attachinformation in between and talk
between and share betweendepartments is really, really,
really cool. And and we've evenstarted to bake in payments and
(08:04):
being able to preauthorize anddo a lot of fancy stuff on top.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
So it sounds like you've done a really interesting
thing, which is not solely usinga vendor and not solely building
something from scratch yourself.You've taken a PMS off the shelf
and built something around it,so it's like this hybrid system.
Am I understanding thatcorrectly?
Speaker 1 (08:26):
It's a nasty word is like a Trojan horse. So we took
a solid PMS, and then we builtsomething in because I found
that look. We still use it. Westill use it. I mean, if I took
around the systems, I mean,we've got up to you know, our
stack is about 30 differentsoftware applications at
vendors, ten of which we builtourselves.
And all of this has been woventogether. So you still have the
(08:48):
PMS, and you still have thiscomponent talking to everything
around. So we didn't buildeverything. You know? We can't
reinvent the wheel.
All I really found was that thehot switching between you know,
whether you're on a bunch ofSaaS platforms and switching
between tabs, as soon as youstart doing that, the staff
don't want to do it. They'rereluctant. They wanna stay
(09:09):
inside the PMS and be able to doeverything inside of the PMS.
And that was, I feel, a pivotalmoment is, let's keep them in
there and suck all that stuff inthere and literally, you know,
make the PMS perfect. Make thePMS do what it needs to do and
help you engage with the guest,feed that information back.
And then we even started to feedit into it, suggestive narrative
(09:31):
from, obviously, artificialintelligence, which is reading
from a bunch of inputs andsuggesting those things back to
the staff, which is really,really cool.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
I'm curious. How do you decide which features to
build versus which features doyou lean on a vendor to provide?
Like payment processing, forinstance, or upsells. How do you
decide what to build fromscratch versus what products to
use off the shelf?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So that's a good question. And and one that I'm
gonna be honest with you, and myexecutive will kind of support
the statement, is that I'm quitenaughty in that sometimes what
I'll tend to do is, one, tobuild it myself because I'm
quite excited, and I think I cansometimes do a better job. But
most times, what typicallyhappens is we try. We will pull
something off the shelf. We'lltry, and we'll try to get it to
(10:19):
work.
And where it fails, again, thisis exactly where I'm talking
about this one, We're playing inthe gap. So So we're looking.
We're going, there's a gap here.It's not fulfilling what we need
to do. So it's gonna be easier.
Ironically, and most people say,no. It's not really because now
you've built something. You haveto maintain that. You have to
keep innovating in it, and thatbecomes expensive. But in
(10:39):
certain areas, and again, comingfrom that software development
background, it just felt a loteasier, and it has been a lot
easier for us.
We've had a lot more success inbuilding those areas ourselves.
So to answer your question, iswhen do we decide is when what
we're after isn't exactly whatwe need. And I think that tends
to be a lot of the problem evenwhen it comes to PMS. So much
(11:02):
functionality inside of there,and it's really too much
sometimes and not enough of whatyou often need. And I always I
always compare it, and I alwaysused to have this analogy to
Microsoft Word.
And I always say to everybody,you know, everybody uses
Microsoft Word, but I bet youthat most of us use maybe 10% of
what it's capable of doing. Bolda few things, underline a few
(11:23):
things, and write a couple ofsentences. And that's the same
thing. So I'd rather buildsomething rich with features
that'll work very well andstreamline the business.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Can you tell me a bit about your team structure? Do
you have a team of full timeengineers building these
products and maintaining themfor you? Do you use contractors?
What does that setup look like?
Speaker 1 (11:46):
So we do when I started, it was myself and one
you know how the story goes.It's me and one guy. You know?
We went on a mission and westarted building one thing and
then another thing. And theneventually, the team built out
and built out and built out andbuilt out.
What we didn't do was geteverybody local. So we've
offshored and built the team.Offshore was more viable for us.
And now we've started to buildsome key members of that
(12:08):
development team locally inSouth Africa, just purely from a
risk perspective. So the team isfull time, our software team,
and the structure is prettyflat.
And in fact, it's not just aboutthe IT department development.
The business itself is very mucharound a flat structure. You
know, we aren't into havingmanagers. You manage, you
manage, you manage, you manage,you manage, you know, because it
(12:30):
becomes inefficient scenario. Soit's really is a flat structure.
And the same thing gets echoedout when it comes to the
development. We've kept to atight bunch of guys and girls
and everybody. And we've beenable to, because of that small
unity pump up quite a bit ofsoftware, then a large
organization would be you know,my previous company, we had 250
(12:53):
developers. And sometimes Ijokingly look at it and I say,
you know, guys, we do more herethan I managed to do in a
business of that size. You know?
So it really is a thin structurewhere let's have a problem.
Let's discuss how we're gonnasolve it. Come up collectively
with it. Go into a rapid processof trying to get an MVP out.
Test it, fine tune it, deployit, and let's go.
(13:17):
Get the feedback. You know,bring operations into the whole
cycle and have that withouthaving the levels of complexity.
And I think the other side of itis unlike a service provider
that has to provide the softwaresolution to multiple hotel
chains across the world, youknow, and work with all the
legalities and issues, we don't.Which means that we're able to
(13:39):
really just hone in on whatneeds to get done and then move
forward. So in some regard insome regard, that puts us at
advantage.
The disadvantage is that we, youknow, the more we build and the
more complex it gets. Now wehave to keep looking over the
shoulder and going, guys, wecan't build that because we've
got, you know, 52 other thingswe need to keep looking after.
(14:01):
That's kind of the trying tofind a balance there so that
we've got harmony betweenbuilding too much into stack,
whereas opposed to we should beworking with other vendors to
enrich the environment and notjust build everything ourselves.
I mean, when I came in, I saidto the guys, I want I wanted to
build a PMS. I was like, what isthis PMS thing?
I'll build one. Let's do it. Soit sounds like the easiest thing
(14:21):
in the world. You know? Notreally.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Could you tell me about one product or feature
that you've built that had areally impactful result on the
business?
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Absolutely. So I've got got a couple. If we go back
to so I've got these very cornynames, I'll warn you. So when it
comes to naming products in thebusiness, we give them corny
names because it just helps usgroup them together. So we've
got this thing called Joffrey,and we lovingly named him after
that Game of Thrones characterbecause it was exactly at the
time that that he was, you know,remember the little blonde
(14:57):
prince.
The introduction of that wasreally what we did was baked it
into the PMS. And what we foundwere two things. We were having
an issue tracking revenue movingthrough and attributing it to
the sales team. So in otherwords, they were corporate
clients, etcetera. And that goesthrough link trades, link
(15:19):
profiles, corporate agreements,etcetera.
And when it gets booked, itobviously needs to follow
specific clients that have to bebooked in a specific conditions
in order to attribute thatrevenue appropriately into the
business and, obviously, thencommissions and the rest of it.
So it becomes quite a complexthing. And the problem is, as
you'll know, I mean, in thespace, is that you rely on so
(15:40):
many components that depends onwhere that booking's coming
from. Right? It's being doneover the phone.
It's being done by an email.It's being done at the front
desk. It's being doneelectronically. That data needs
to all flow through one placeand then be able to report onto
it. So what this the draw freecomponent allows us to do is to
actually build in SOP logicstraight in natively to the PMS
(16:02):
so that whilst this informationis flowing in, it's actually
suggesting steps to the staff tocorrect it back to what it
should be so that the trackingof the revenue can go into a
real time phase.
You know? And that whole processof being able to do the
production reports for thatsales for that revenue for the
sales team typically takesanywhere from a full month, you
(16:25):
know, sometimes even further ifthere's been problems. And we've
been getting quite good at itnow, shaving it down to almost
being done within a week to acouple of days. So that makes a
massive impact. And the flipside of it as well is that when
we look at bad profiles, right,we went from having a 20 to 30%
accuracy to a 92% accuracy onthe profile information coming
(16:47):
in.
Because purely what it's doingis it's not allowing you to make
duplicates, not allowing you toenter in false information.
Simple steps, But, again, youknow, having that uniqueness
having that uniqueness that wecan offer and build it
specifically for our SOPs meansthat it doesn't have all these
other rules that has to caterfor every other hotel group,
(17:09):
just ours. And it speaks alanguage. And when it doesn't
when it doesn't work, and Ithink this is what people have
loved, when it doesn't work andyou were asking me, how do we
get the feedback from the teams?WhatsApp.
So you've got these guysliterally saying that we've
created these WhatsApp groups,and this feedback's a little bit
chaotic, but, you know, I getnow how our hotel staff work. I
(17:30):
get our hotel people work. Youknow, they don't have the time
to go and draft you an email andtake you screenshots and tell
you what happened here andrecord you a screencast. They'll
jump on their phones. They'lltake me two or three photos.
They'll put it in the group.It'll go to the team. Tickets
get created. We solve theproblem. Two days later, it's
working.
Not three months. Not sixmonths. You know? And that's, I
think, hugely the advantage thatwe have in that area there. So
(17:53):
that's been one real big successwin there for us.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
What are you doing with AI?
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Uh-huh. So that's the next that's the next exciting
that's the next exciting thing.So we've got these really cool
vendors that we work with, oneof them being guest review. And
one of the components that we'vewe've baked in there well,
there's two sides. There's twoaspects that I that I really
love that we've done with this.
K? First one's on the guest onthe review side. So what we
(18:21):
fundamentally done is we'vetaken the guest review
information that comes from thebusiness. And what I found was
there sometimes is a lot ofinformation that got a
phenomenal toolset. But whatwe're trying to do from let's
take it from an IT perspective,is be able to tear through
thousands of reviews.
So if I take just the Decemberperiod we went peak, I had, you
(18:42):
know, four to 5,000 reviews, youknow, in a couple of weeks that
I had to sit and go through. Andas you can imagine, I probably
didn't do a very good job.Right? I'm a human being, and I
probably didn't do a very goodjob, and I did my best effort.
And so so we've done two thingswith it.
One, we've created a model thatgoes through all the reviews,
learns from all the reviews, andlearns from all the data. It it
(19:03):
focuses because we've built itfor our POC just for the IT team
to start with, and it drillsdown through all the reviews,
looks at problems, and it startsto create tickets, and it starts
to funnel them. But the nicepart is it takes all the
information from the PMS. So allof a sudden, an IT team gets a
ticket to say this guest on thisdate in this room experienced
(19:23):
the following problem. Ticketgets generated.
So now what you've done isyou've passed, you know, the
4,000 emails, and you've honedin the ones that you need to,
and you've already sent them outbefore you know, the moment that
ticket has landed in themailbox, which is very cool. So
we're running with a green lightteam, and, obviously, the
natural next step is we're gonnastart feeding into housekeeping,
into facilities, into the restof it. K? The other side of that
(19:46):
is then we also took that guestreview data. And using this
toolset, Joffrey, this old dudethat we've built in front end
there, we've now fed all thisguest information inside of of
this unit.
And what it does do is it tellsus all of what Adrian's
experiences have been with us.And it's using all the
information from Tripadvisor,Booking dot com, everything.
(20:06):
It's feeding all of us andsaying, what were your last
couple of experiences with thecapital? What were the elements?
And it doesn't make you sitthere and go through all the
information.
It's actually just telling youspecific things that you need to
hone in to make Adrian'sexperience that much more
enjoyable. It also looks at theroom that you're going to be
placed into, and it looks atprevious past experiences and
(20:27):
also tells you what other peopledid or did not like and what you
should then obviously combinethat into. We inject that
straight in to the PMS. Sowhilst you're sitting there
literally looking at this andyou're walking to the front
desk, it's really prompting you.That was something we thought
very cool.
Okay? And it's all happening ata relatively real time native
experience inside of the PMS.Okay. And that's on the guest
(20:49):
review side. And as you canimagine, we explore a lot of
different models, lot oftransfer learning, and there was
a lot of computation on it, butnot as bad as the other project.
So our other project was lookingat phone calls coming into
central reservations. And there,what we did is we hooked them to
the PABX and started to processthe audio phone calls coming in
(21:14):
and churn that into actualinformation. That information
then gets broken up into wholebunch of categorical data. That
categorical data then gets fedback into the central
reservations team so that theycan actually see who's
performing from a reservationsperspective, who's not
performing, how are theyadhering to scripts, etcetera.
(21:38):
And more importantly, it startsto actually suggest and tell you
where are your missingopportunities.
People are asking for this.There's more conversations
around that. You know? So that'sanother little tidbit there
that's quite cool. And then thenext step there is obviously
being able to take thoseconversations and then mix it in
with historical information thatwe might have on a guest and be
(21:59):
able to then real time promptthat back to the central res
team whilst they're taking aphone call.
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Another theme that I hear from other hoteliers is
using data to create morepersonalized experiences. What
does personalization look likeduring the stay experience for
you?
Speaker 1 (22:19):
I suppose it goes beyond knowing someone's name, I
think, is always a great start.The next component that we've
even battled with a little bitis language. You know, language,
I think, is probably one of themost key ingredients to
personalizing someone's stay.When you live in a country
that's got 11, I think it's 12official languages now because
(22:41):
sign language became an officiallanguage, that's something that
we forced me to get into thefray. You know, we've been very
hyper focused on.
We do service an internationalmarket. It'd be easier for us to
obviously talk mostly inEnglish. But personalization,
you know, it's understanding theguest. It's understanding the
guest and not just understandingthe name or understanding the
language, but understanding thestay, understanding what they
(23:04):
want. That's really crazy.
It's nice if you rocked up thereand yeah. I'm Portuguese by
descent. Yeah. So if you spoketo me in Portuguese, probably a
miss because I was born in SouthAfrica, and I'm an English
speaking first. But youunderstand someone who does
speak it, addressing him andmost things.
But understanding what theyenjoy out of a stay. You know,
so if it goes to talking to theguest review component, it's
(23:27):
understanding what they drinklike, and not necessarily
focusing on it and saying, oh, Iknow last time the Wi Fi was
horrible, so we've really, youknow, improved them. But moving
them in a way that they couldsee, I prefer it that way. It's
not obvious in your face thatwe're trying to do these things.
But we understand who you are asan individual either based on a
(23:47):
positive experience or based ona negative experience, and we
keep pushing you towards thatbetter, better, better
experience.
That's really whatpersonalization for me looks
like. You know? And I thinkwhere it really becomes super
efficient for somebody or for astay for a guest. Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
I would love to hear if there's anything on your road
map that you haven'timplemented, but maybe it's
something you're interested indoing in the future or perhaps a
really exciting product thatyou've seen in the market that
is on your wish list.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
We're talking about PMSs. Right? And I came out of
the banking space. And thebanking space really suffered
from a very similar problem. Andthat was you've got a super
hyper technical environmentbuilt on a somewhat old
foundation.
You know? And I've beenfollowing one particular PMS,
(24:44):
which is Cloudbeds, and I reallylove what they've been doing
because the one component that Ifind to be the wrong way of
doing it purely because of theoverhead that it creates is the
guest data. So every singlevendor that hops on has this
galactic battle over who's goingto manage, you know? Is that
(25:07):
eCRM? Is it due PMS?
Or is it the upsell tool? Who'sgoing to manage that guest data?
And fundamentally, it should bethere. There should be one
originator. Know, when you lookat an ERP, same concept.
When it comes to your financialdata, it sits in one location,
and it should sit in onelocation. The same should speak,
(25:28):
you know, about your PMS. So,really, I love what they're
doing there by bringing that CRMcomponent natively inside. You
know, being able to provide youknow, not leaving the PMS to go
and do functions, I think, iswhere the secret sauce comes in.
The only failing that I've seenin that movie before is when
(25:50):
vendors try to become the masterof everything, you know, the
jack of all.
Very rarely do they excel inthose areas. And CRM is, you
know, it's not just I know mostlook at them and go, you know,
CRM is just a database. It's notjust a database. There's so many
layers of complexity to it, andthere's so many aspects to it
when you bake in the marketingcomponents, the sales
(26:11):
activities, etcetera. But I dolove that concept.
So for me, it's really the PMSacknowledging that I've really
gotta be good at getting thatdata, holding that data, and
exposing that data in a secureoffice manner because there's
the next complexity, and wedidn't even touch on the
security side of things. And,you know, that's a whole another
(26:32):
conversation for a whole anotherpodcast. But I would really love
to explore along those lines. Iwould really love myself even to
see if we bring in some of thoseareas. You know?
The smartness of having a guestinside of there and being able
to look at pattern and look atthose experiences that a guest,
you know, shows as an example, aValentine's or an anniversary,
(26:54):
etcetera. The The PMSunderstanding at BAM will use
generative AI to create somekind of marketing message that
immediately fires off withoutyou having to layer in all of
these things on top from othersystems. That is very efficient.
That is very, very cool. Or justbeing so good at at holding that
data that the tool that you'reusing to manage your marketing
(27:16):
doesn't own the CRM data.
You understand? It doesn't ownthe time data. It merely speaks
to what's in here because it'sso solid. And I haven't seen
that yet because it's alwaysbeen about this exchange here.
It's either a one way exchangeor a two way exchange.
And whenever you have that,there's this level of disparity
that creeps in. I mean, we'vedone it. We built our middleware
to be able to talk to all thesecomponents. So when I was
(27:38):
talking about that integratedecosystem, we've got 30
platforms. That was one of thevital pieces here, is keeping
inside of this.
So I'd like to see it become thePMS becomes a really good
custodian of that informationand really helps shape with
intelligence. You know, shapethat data and have very sharp
two way interfaces between theplatform. All themselves bring
(28:00):
it in, but we even went andshopped for a different CRM. We
didn't go for anything inside ofthe hospitality sphere. We went
and shopped and played aroundwith Freshworks and HubSpot and
the rest of it because we justfelt that those products were
just so much more mature inthose areas, and they're not
purpose built for hospitality,but you could tweak them so
nicely.
And they had such accessibilityfrom APIs and all the elements
(28:22):
that you could latch up. Sothat's really, I think, another
component there. It's just I'dlove to play around, and maybe
there's a PMS shift in thefuture. I don't know. You know,
when anybody in an IT role at ahotel group or an hotel talks
about shifting a PMS, they getmore gray hair.
I'm actually only 21, you know,this gray hair from one year
(28:44):
working in.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Last question. I always like to leave a
contentious one for the end.What would you say is one thing
you believe about technologythat your peers or competitors
might disagree with?
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I still feel that we are fighting the past. That's
the biggest we're building, andmaybe it's I haven't felt enough
from sufficient hotel groups togive a much broader opinion, but
I still feel that we are in thisprocess of trying to build
(29:20):
technology. Not everybody, butmostly trying to build
technology that was designed tosatisfy very old ways of doing
things. And as much as weadvance them, we're adding all
these layers of complexity ontoa process that needs to, at its
core, be relooked at. And you'vegot your disruptors who come in,
(29:44):
Okay?
And they change the status quo,and the reaction that the
hospitality staff gets is, thisis great because it's not the
way that you know, this doesn'twork. The thinking and the way
that it gets approached with isthis is the way we've always
done it. I can't remember whereI heard it, but I was at a talk
once, and someone was comparingthere was this old story of a
(30:09):
mother and a daughter, and theywere talking about it was a
roast turkey or a roast lamb orsomething. And they keep cutting
the sides of this roast to getit into the oven. Right?
And the daughter asked the mom,why do you keep cutting the
sides off? And she goes, well, Idon't know. It's your mother did
it. Your your your grandmotherdid it. So I did it.
So then she goes to thegrandmother and asks the
(30:30):
grandmother, you know, why doyou cut the sides off? And the
grandmother says, well, yourgreat granny did it. You know?
And then she, they get ananswer, she goes, well, back
then, the oven was this size.You know, so we had to cut the
sides off.
You know? And I and I kind offeel the same thing sometimes,
you know? It's we did it thisway, we've always done it this
way. And what we're trying to dois build incredible technology
to do the same thing. Now youasked me to give you something.
(30:53):
Now I don't think that holdstrue for everybody, but I do
think it is a component thatplays a role in taking us
forward. And when it comes downto building, you know, and I'm
not picking on PMSs. I I lovePMSs. I think there there's a
lot of them out there that arephenomenal. But I think the
overhead of building a PMS istripped up in the fact that it's
(31:16):
gonna come in with all thesefeatures.
And let's go back to thatstatement I made to you about
Microsoft Word, where all I needto do is write a couple of
lines, bold something,underline, and click save.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Well, thank you so much, Jose. It was really great
talking with you. I'm excitedfor all of our listeners to hear
your episode. Thanks so much.Enjoy the rest of your day.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
You too. You too.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
That's all for today's episode. Episode. Thanks
for listening to Hotel TechInsider produced by
HotelTechReport.com. Our goalwith this podcast is to show you
how the best in the business areleveraging technology to grow
their properties and outperformthe concept by using innovative
digital tools and strategies. Iencourage all of our listeners
to go try at least one of thesestrategies or tools that you
(32:03):
learned from today's episode.
Successful digitaltransformation is all about
consistent small experimentsover a long period of time, so
don't wait until tomorrow to trysomething new. Do you know a
hotelier who would be great tofeature on this show, or do you
think that your story wouldbring a lot of value to our
audience? Reach out to medirectly on LinkedIn by
searching for Jordan Hollander.For more episodes like this,
(32:27):
follow Hotel Tech Insider on allmajor streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple Music.
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