November 18, 2024 • 32 mins
Is the hospitality industry truly ready for a technology revolution? In this episode, Adam Harris, co-founder and CEO of Cloudbeds, reveals how innovative tech solutions are reshaping the guest experience and operational efficiency in hotels worldwide.
Key Takeaways:
- Discover how Cloudbeds' multimodal AI is transforming data into actionable insights, enabling hoteliers to optimize revenue and enhance guest journeys.
- Learn about the five essential pillars of hotel operations that can streamline processes and improve staff efficiency, from guest acquisition to operational intelligence.
- Understand the surprising gap in customer engagement within the hospitality sector, as Adam shares his personal experience of receiving minimal birthday greetings from hotel brands, highlighting the industry's need for better personalization.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We as hoteliers, we as technologists, can make this
journey frictionless. Right? Wecan do better. It doesn't mean I
need to give you a digital keyto check-in. It just means that
I need to be aware of firstimpressions, the coordination,
the communication, the process,all the above.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider,
a show about the future ofhotels and the technology that
powers them.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Today on the show, we have Adam Harris,
Speaker 2 (00:29):
the co founder and CEO of Cloudbeds. One of the
fastest growing companies inhospitality that's raised over
$250,000,000 from leadinginvestors like SoftBank and
Viking. In this conversation, wecover some of the really cool
innovations happening atCloudbeds like their recently
launched multimodal AI that'sable to look across Cloudbeds'
data architecture for all of itshotel clients and make
actionable, automatic, and easyto use recommendations to grow
(00:52):
NOI for hotel owners andoperators.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show today.
How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Doing well. Good to see you.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Let's start by talking a little bit about take
us back what? Is Coven's 10years old at this point?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
I think we turned 12 in October.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Wow. Okay. So 12 years ago, you and Richard, I
think from from what I know,were in Brazil and had a spark
of an idea for a business. Talkme through that.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
You know, it was a couple of catalysts, but, yeah,
your story is not too far off.Rich was traveling through
Brazil. We were doing some workfor some hotel brands at the
same time with our technologyconsulting firm. And what we
ultimately realized was thesehoteliers were not seeing the
(01:38):
whole picture. They were theyhad tools that might help them
with one element of their day today operations.
They may rely on directreservations or working with
just one distribution partner.It was very old school. It was
actually, like, surprisinglychallenging. And what happened
was Rich was trying to book a ahotel, a 40 room hotel, which is
(02:02):
right smack in our sweet spotfor Cloudbeds these days. But
what was interesting about thisboutique hotel, it was in
Bujios, which is a small beachtown north of Rio, couple hours
outside of it, and it's justlittered with these 40 room
hotels, 100 room hotels, thatsort of boutique ish 5.
Now Rich sent an email to all ofthem, like, all the top rated
(02:24):
one. Now remember the day whereyou'd go on a road trip with
your family and you'd go totriple a and you get, like, the
state triple a guide, and thatwas kind of your, like, way of
of knowing what was in themarket, what the hotels were,
etcetera, etcetera. Well, that'skinda what was happening in
Brazil. And so Rich sent, like,27 emails, and no one called him
back. No one emailed him back.
(02:44):
And he was like, god damn it.How am I gonna book a hotel?
Well, anyway, long story short,someone finally, a Brazilian
man, called his cell phone andsaid, hello. You know? Yes.
I have rooms. You can book 1.What I need you to do is go to
Santander Bank, which is one ofthe national Brazilian banks,
and deposit money into thischecking and routing number. And
(03:07):
then once you're done, email me.I'll go to my bank and confirm
that I got your deposit, andthen I'll confirm your hotel
room.
And, like, Rich called me andsaid, dude, some guy that I've
never met wants me to go to alocal bank, deposit money just
for a hotel room. This is crazy.And so we started with just
ecommerce. Cloudbeds was abouthow do we make the ecommerce
(03:29):
journey a little bit simpler,and then, obviously, it's
expanded from there. But thatwas kind of the route in
parallel that Rich was inBrazil.
I was doing some work with a agroup in Costa Rica and other
parts of LatAm, and it justhappened to be the same
circumstances. They had anecommerce presence, but their
(03:49):
data was not intertwined. Sothey had a resort. They had 2
boutique hotels. They had abunch of vacation rentals, and
they also had some sort ofhybrid concepts, like glamping,
but none of it was sold throughone central booking engine.
You had to go to each one ofthose individual concepts. And
so for those who are joining orwanting to go visit this master
(04:11):
build, didn't know how to tounderstand it. Like, take Punta
Mita, for example. Right? Youhave the Four Seasons.
You have the Conrad. You havethe Westin. You have the Saint
Regis. It's not like I go andbook Punta Mita, and I see all
those options. I have toindividually go to try to to do
one of them.
Well, we took a Punta Mita likemaster development, and we
(04:34):
centralized it all into oneplace. It was a beautifully well
done ecosystem. We were workingwith HomeAway software. We were
working with Saver Software,Oracle PMS, and we basically
created this master inventorylayer and then connect it out.
We built a CRS for this brand.
That's literally what we didwithout knowing what we would
(04:54):
call it at the time becausewe're outside of industry. But,
anyway, I love this space. I'vebeen to 57 different countries
in my lifetime and adding a fewmore next year, and it's just in
my DNA. Like, I love to travel.I love to experience, but, guys,
like, it's broken.
Like, the experience is brokenin many shapes and form, and I
(05:15):
think at the end of the day,it's because of the ecosystem.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
And so how did you guys get from that kind of
Brazilian ecommerce experienceto full blown PMS that Cloudbeds
is today? Like, what did thatevolution look like?
Speaker 1 (05:29):
You know, from day 1, we were really quick to put our
hands up in the air and say, wedon't know the answer here.
That's the beauty of being anoutsider. I have very little
hotel experience. Maybe I'llshare the one experience that
I've had in running a hotel inmy life. That's funny.
You'll appreciate it too. Butwhat we realized was if we're a
(05:50):
partner, like, a deep valuepartner to our customers and
actually, like, listen and havea community of them coming to us
and telling us what they neednext, doing tons of Qualtrics
surveying. We love serving ourcustomers. We have such an
incredible read given all thedata that we feed back. You
know, Passport was our morning.
(06:12):
Today was a an amalgamation ofall all the time and energy and
work collecting feedback fromour customers, launching some
things today at Passport, and wewere able to do that in front of
4,000 live registrants. Like,that's a pretty powerful
ecosystem to know that we canbring on 4,000 customers across
(06:32):
a 150 markets. They tune inbecause they're excited about
what we're bringing next,because they know they have been
intimately involved with tellingus what is coming next. And that
symbiotic relationship is whatwe're all about. We love our
customers.
We really, really do. We'retrying to do more for them.
We're trying to be a partner.We're trying to differentiate
(06:55):
our style of service. And do wefumble at times?
Yeah. A 100%. Do we fumble theball less than our competitors?
Yes. At an nth degree.
And so but look. What I'm soappreciative of this industry is
we are making strides towardsthe right direction of improving
(07:16):
both sides of the relationship,the staffing side and how they
take care of a guest, and thenthe guest side and how they
experience that hospitality. Andso we're making strides as an
industry.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
And I'm guessing back in those early days of the
Brazilian experience that youand Richard had or Richard had
in the Costa Rican parallelexperience, the US was a little
further along, obviously, atthat time. How have you seen the
market evolve, number 1, inmarkets I mean, it's almost it's
pretty clear that you guys havebeen in a really integral role
in markets like that. I've hadfriends go backpacking in
(07:48):
Vietnam and send me cloud beds,booking engines. And you guys
have taken these markets thattraditionally have been behind
on technology and that they'remaybe a third world country or
they're not a hotel chain, andthey don't have access to
actually giving them acompetitive advantage over some
of those tier one markets earlyon. How have you seen those
markets evolve?
(08:08):
And then as you guys havescaled, you've moved into these
tier one markets like the US,Western Europe, etcetera. How
have you seen those marketsevolve? And is there more parity
than there used to be betweenthose 2?
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Okay. That's a lot. That's a big question. Let me
challenge you a little bit withjust an observation. So I had a
really crummy birthday.
This past couple weeks, I hadsurgery, and then I got COVID
from the hospital, and thenrecovery birthday went in the
toilet bowl. But in myreflection of that, I was
(08:42):
carefully watching brands, hotelbrands, airline brands, and all
the brands that I interact witharound my birthday. And this was
not a selfish desire. This waspurely what are brands doing
around an event to engage withme. Now I am a member of f y
(09:03):
Delta and obviously the otherairlines, but I'm predominantly
Delta.
I obviously stay at all thebrands, mostly independents
because of my role at exitproperties. But then I'm also a
big user of Marriott and Hiltonand things like that for
convenience. And out of all ofthe hospitality brands, one, one
Jordan sent me a note on mybirthday. 1. Out of all brands
(09:28):
across all industries, 2 sent mea birthday reminder.
And yet in this day and age withgenerative AI and all the data
intelligence and all thereporting and all the automation
that we live in, Delta wished mea happy birthday and had some
curated ideas on where I couldgo with them in my medical
(09:50):
provider. UCSD Medicine sent mea happy birthday and wishing a
really well well, which wasfunny because I was just there.
But, like, those were the twoexamples. Not a hotel brand, not
another airline. They all havemy birthday.
They all know my birthdaybecause I've checked in with an
idea a 100 times. Right? How isthat possible? So when you ask
(10:11):
me the question, is there paritytoday, or was there lack of
parity before? I would argue allhospitality players still have a
lot of work to do to bring tomodern capabilities that exist
in the ecosystem of tech thesedays.
And so, yeah, the answer was theproblems were there in both
(10:32):
markets. It was just different.Right? Like, the Vietnam's of
the world, to use your example,they had a lot more that had to
get modernized to bring them toa standard to compete with a
national or international chain.The domestic markets were still
struggling to accommodate allthis new tech that might have
been more readily available, butthey might be dealing with
(10:53):
something that was a little lessinnovative.
It was a little bit moreoutdated from a UI perspective.
And so even in those samestruggles, albeit different,
they weren't quite caught up. Ilook at, you know, Marriott
adopting a guest journeyplatform. Right? Recent news.
Was that because their guestjourney is friction
Speaker 3 (11:13):
full,
Speaker 1 (11:14):
or was it they wanna do digital tipping better? And
the answer is probably a littlebit of both, but it's probably
the latter more. So how do wetake care of our staff in a
digital tipping format? AndCanary does it really, really
well. Like, they're great at it.
But to check-in easier, man,Marriott's been trying to do
check-in easier for many, manyyears, and Canary doesn't solve
(11:35):
that. Nope. Nothing solves that.That's hardware, process,
systems, training. It's a lot.
And so nothing against Canary. Iwanted to highlight that one
example. And so when I look atwhere we are, like, 13% of door
locks in 2024, almost 2025, aredigital. K? Like, the number one
(11:57):
integrator is still serializedcabling.
Right? Like, using offline, noHTTP, no API forward. And so,
like, ASSA, BLO, all of thosedoor lock companies, SALTO, are
coming out with brand newecosystems. The problem is
that's, like, a line in the sandforward with their new lock
(12:19):
technology. Everything in thepast is still offline.
Like, I can't give you acheck-in experience that I've
become accustomed to whenstaying at an Airbnb because I
can just go buy Latch or one ofthe Home Depot locks that
communicates to my Wi Fi througha code, and I can text that to
(12:39):
my guest, and I can log in.Well, there's standards. There's
security requirements. Like, NewYork is about to pass that you
have to be a licensed hotel andthat everyone needs a panic
button as a staff member. Oh,jeez Louise.
Like, that's a very different,like, requirement list than,
hey. Go pick a Home Depot lockand, like, you're safe at an
(13:02):
Airbnb. And, like and and I readall the horror stories around,
you know, my door lock didn'tmeet the right standard. Someone
kicked through it, or there'scameras hidden in the room.
Like, I really don't worry aboutthat when I check into my hotel,
but I swear to god, I've stayedin hotels.
And I've stayed in Airbnbs whereI actually pulled out the Wi Fi
(13:23):
sniffer. And, like, I was kindacurious. I'm like, what's around
here? What IoT devices am I notaware of that is taking place?
And I was actually pleasantlysurprised.
Like, in one case, I found acamera. Like, it was weird.
There was no need for the camerain the hallway. In the other
case, in the hotel, I found somesensors that I didn't think this
hotel was using, and it wasdetect environment. And I was
(13:46):
like, that's really cool.
Like, I'm glad to see some smartintelligence around, you know,
HVAC and whatnot to reduce theamount of energy waste that was
going to create temperaturecontrol. So those are two sides
of the story. But, man, Jordan,like, we got a long way to go as
an industry to make this easierfor both sides of the equation.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Are there hotel groups that you guys work with
or specific hotels that youthink are doing it particularly
well? Because I feel likethere's always on the product
adoption curve. There's thoseMavens who are out there. You
know, we've had the CTO ofoutside who's a customer of
yours, I'm pretty sure, on thisshow. What are the hotel groups
that you think are within yourcustomer base that are doing a
really good job, and what arethey doing that's different than
(14:30):
the CloudBeds customer who'skind of lagging behind?
And you're trying to help themget there, but they're not quite
there yet.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Oh, man. There's probably too many to mention, to
be honest with you. But tosingle out a single one, I think
the ones that are implementingCloudBeds in a way with our
partner ecosystem, that ismindful of 5 pillars that we
think are the most importantpillars to any hotel operation.
(14:58):
So if you will give me a moment,I'll share with those, but you
can stop me and say, this isboring. Let's move on.
Also, I will respect that. Ireally truly believe that every
hotel operation should bemindful of 5 pillars. One is,
how do I go find my next guest,and how do I retain guests going
forward? Right? Going andconstantly getting a new 1,000
(15:22):
guests per year is reallychallenging.
Like, the Pareto argument wouldbe, like, curate. Like, curate a
population of your hotel, bringthem back every single year, and
you have a base that you startfrom. It makes it a little bit
easier. So how do you go findyour next guest? 2, we gotta
remove the friction from theguest journey.
I have taken way too many trips.I have way too many miles on my
(15:46):
back. You as well, because Iknow you're well traveled. I
have had very few enjoyabletravel journeys. Very few.
And it's not whether you flew1st class or not. It's just
every step of the way, is theresomething that goes amuck or
(16:06):
adds friction that puts you inyour worst moment? Right? You're
tired. You just flew 15 hours toget to ITB, and there isn't an
early check-in available eventhough you booked for your
entire company 40 rooms.
Like, really? Like, come on,hotel. Like, we know what's
going on in the market. LuzFonza doing strikes around ITB.
(16:28):
You are impacted by thisrecently.
I might have taken someenjoyment, listening to your
your travel journeys back, Butmy comment around that is, like,
we as hoteliers, we astechnologists, can make this
journey frictionless. Right? Wecan do better. It doesn't mean I
need to give you a digital keyto check-in. It just means that
(16:50):
I need to be aware of firstimpressions, the coordination,
the communication, the process,all the above.
I just checked into a hotel inMarin, got my key. I had to
walk, like, a half a milebecause it was, like, it was,
like, sort of broken out into aforest that was surrounding the
area. I got to my hotel room.Key didn't work. So guess what?
(17:11):
I had to, like, go all the wayback to the hotel room and go
get the key. And I was like, ohmy goodness. I just wasted 10
minutes. Now granted, I love thesteps. I needed it personally.
So I was okay with it, but,like, why did that take place?
Like, what failed there? Thethird is, man, I truly believe
that the unsung heroes of thisindustry are people who work at
(17:34):
a hotel. It's a 247, 365 daygrind. You get people in their
best moments, and you get peoplein their worst.
And I can only think of oneother industry, and that's
health care, where your patronis there in the morning. So you
could royally piss them off thenight before. They're gonna
sleep at your property, andthey'll be there at front of the
(17:55):
front desk in the morning, andyou better have an answer for
them. Her. So that is incrediblystressful.
And so removing some of theoperational friction on behalf
of the staff just means thestaff can come back and do their
moments back towards the gates,and there's a really important
relationship there. The 4th is,jeez, Jordan. We you and I have
(18:17):
had a 1,000 conversations aboutthis, but data's everywhere. If
the average number of systemsthat are powering a hotel is
truly 19 right now in 2024,Okay. Well, that's 19 places
with data.
How do I bring that together andcreate an actionable analytics
platform that can help me makedeterminations? Now this is the
(18:38):
number one pain point for anybusiness in the world, your
business, my business, gettingto decisions quicker, having the
right information around us.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Is that 19 number the average number of connected
integrations amongst CloudBizclients right now?
Speaker 1 (18:52):
No. CloudBiz is much lower because we do a little bit
more capability as a platform,but the average system is 19
right now. That was a bunch ofresearch. Multiple schools have
published that. That is way toomuch.
It was 14 when I started thisindustry. So we've grown. Now
COVID was an accelerator there,so I don't wanna I don't wanna
(19:13):
necessarily say going from 14 to19 is a bad thing. We've just
seen so much sweet accrete. So,like, you have check-in apps
that now do, like, communicationand do a little bit more.
And, like, you've seen a littlebit of these sweets
communication and do a littlebit more. And, like, you've seen
a little bit of these sweetsgrowing, so that's part of the
kicker. Irrespective, too muchdata siloed in too many
different places. And so the 5this intelligence. And it's
(19:36):
intelligence from all of thesignals that are coming from
each of those 4 pillars intowhat I believe is where AI, in
harnessing the correct forms ofAI, just creates superhumans.
Superhuman front desk, betterguests, better guest
experiences, better ways ofreaching guests more
(19:56):
efficiently, making more moneyoff your guests, creating better
better journeys for your gueststhat translates to things that
they want to consume. Right? Sohowever you do that,
intelligence can come in manyforms. It could just come in the
form of how we're doing it,which is trying to layer in
different touch points withinthe application with an AI
(20:19):
engine. It could be helpingwrite reviews.
It could be helping communicatewith a guest, right, in a more
automated fashion. I love anexample of technology. Voice,
for example. Hotels have phonenumbers. Right?
Someone has to answer them. Alot of times, they get sent to
call centers. Well, 85, 86percent of the time, it is
(20:39):
unrelated to revenue. So thosecalls have zero impact on
revenue. They're informational.
What time's check-in? What time?Check out. Do you allow dogs?
What size dogs?
All of that could be done. Andthen if there was a need for a
human, you click it over to ahuman. So I think there's a lot
of sort of motion towards wherewe can go with that intelligence
(21:03):
layer, that 5th pillar. But forright now, we gotta bring those
4 other ones together. That is areally big motion that's trying
to happen in the industry.
And I think there's a few brandsthat have see, like, yeah,
that's really important. I thinkwe're ahead. I really do believe
we're ahead because we've triedto be more vertical than others,
(21:23):
and we've focused onpartnerships second. The reality
is we've never focused onpartnerships second. That's just
what the market thinks.
We have 400 plus partners. Webelieve in partners. We're
growing that that ecosystem asmuch as possible. And we're also
doing that while building outour own capabilities that are
doing different parts of thatecosystem. And and that's gonna
(21:44):
be really exciting forhoteliers, whether they're using
our partner technology or ours.
I think that's where we're allheaded as a space.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Are there 1 or 2 pillars that you think are
particularly top of mind forhoteliers right now in terms of
in the last 6 to 12 months, whatare the biggest pain points that
you have? This huge customerbase who's kind of feeding you
insights, what are the biggestpain points that they're feeling
at this moment in time?
Speaker 1 (22:07):
You know, we always hear that revenue generation or
revenue capture, so figuring outways of being more getting your
reach out there, number 1,always. Capturing it more
efficiently, number 2, always.Right? And that's pretty loaded.
Those two statements are reallyloaded.
Like, that could be a CRScapability. That could be having
(22:30):
better sales and marketingsupport for your catering
business because you do a lot ofweddings. It might mean more OTA
connections. It might mean youstart doing advertising. There's
so many ways of driving morerevenue, and then there's also
ways of maximizing microtransactions during the guest
journey that probably were aremore impactful than just
(22:51):
changing your ratesoccasionally.
At some point, I can't rememberwhere I read it. Forgot. It it
might it might even be my team'sresearch. I don't remember. But
I remember seeing that it wasanywhere from, like, 19 to 27
days a year.
You actually have opportunitiesto price better, smarter. It's
not every day of the week. It'sa few moments where you're
(23:14):
actually saying like, oh, man. Ishould've been, like, a $100
more that night. Like, reallyimpactful nights.
The rest of them are, like, upand down, up and down. And a lot
of times, it's down. Yourpricing is sliding down, and
then you're figuring out ways ofoptimizing Jordan, you're
traveling with your family, yourbeautiful wife, your kid, and
(23:37):
soon to be another. Maybe youwant an early check-in. Well, if
I have the availability and Ihave the room, I'm pretty
confident that if I sent you anupsell through Whistle that
said, hey, Jordan.
You're traveling with kids. Doyou want an early check-in for
$25? You might be like, done.Like, literally, I'm clicking it
10 times because, yes, I've gotcar seats and bags and a nap and
(24:00):
all that wonderful stuff. And sothose types of moments, I think,
need to be way more integrated,like, way, way more integrated.
And so when I think about whatwe're trying to do with finding
your next guest or retainingyour next guest to looking at
what goes down in the guestjourney, it's how do we reach
(24:24):
it? Do we wanna reach it throughthat channel? Do we want to
price x y z? What is my totalrevenue capability with that one
individual on a Thursday? And itmight be different if they join
me on a Wednesday.
It might look different if theyjoin me on a Friday. And trying
to fully understand the causeand effect of having Adam or
(24:44):
Jordan stay at their property iswhere we can then run models. I
might not upgrade you into aroom that doesn't accommodate 2
little kids. Right? I might nothave an upgrade for you.
Well, our multimodal AIcapabilities, we can actually
scan room photos and say, couchequals bed, sink, too high for a
(25:10):
little kid, sharp corners. Like,we can do all those attributes
just using AI. It's amazing, andwe have some really cool stuff
on some of our videos. But whatI get excited about is not so
much the AI. It's more so, like,all the data points that are
coming in.
Some of that's coming in throughpartners. Some of it's our own
dataset set. Some of it'sscraped from the web. For the
(25:34):
very first time that I know of,our hoteliers, once intelligence
fully launches in their area,will have an engine that's
looking at data points at thetune of, like, 5,000,000,000
every minute.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
So the AI is looking at all these 3rd party and first
party data sources and thenmaking recommendations about how
to most effectively drive totalrevenue at that hotel.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Yeah. Or staffing recommendations or supply
recommendations or you name it.So for starters, we're gonna
focus on what our big asks are.Help me optimize my go to market
funnel. Help me optimize myguest journey, then tell my
staff how to be more efficient,and then keep feeding the data
(26:23):
back from all those silos intoan actionable data footprint.
And that's we already have it.It's being used by properties.
The lift is insane, like, insanelift, and we are just starting
with the tip of the iceberg. Sosomeone asked me what was the
biggest moment in Cloudbed'shistory is when we bought our
(26:43):
channel manager when we werereally, really early because it
gave us immediately thiscatalyst to drive more
reservations on behalf of ourhotels to, like, 80 markets, and
it brought us to Europe reallyquickly. This acquisition and
team, you know, talent teamrecruiting and all the work
we've done over the last year isanother one of those moments.
(27:05):
This is a awesome moment for us.We're really excited about it.
I've got a team of 9. They'respectacular, and we're just
giving them snacks and resourcesto just go build and build and
think outside the box. I gotsent a a sample, a used voice,
and used our engine to basicallysend me a voice mail through
(27:29):
whistle that came from the frontdesk.
And it's like, hey, Adam. Youknow, I saw that you're in town
for an extra day. By the way,we've got a walking tour. Would
you like to join us? It's $15per person.
And all you have to do is justcome meet us at the lobby at 3
PM Through the Whistle app, alldigital, came from the front
desk, really didn't come fromthe front desk. It was an AI
(27:51):
engine who had an Englishaccent, but he was smashing. I
was like, wow. Okay. This isn'trocket science.
This is super straightforward.And the reality is is we're just
too busy as humans. Like,someone would have had to pick
up the phone, call me, let themknow, well, I'm not in property.
So I didn't get the voice mail.I probably don't look at the
flashing indicator on the phoneanyway.
(28:13):
So they reached me through mydevice. That's cool, Jordan.
That's really cool. I thinkthat's way cooler than I have a
key issue to me during mycheck-in experience. Right?
I think that is where I'mactually creating, curating to
my concept, and I'm actuallytrying to build hospitality into
my thesis. And from there, youcan really sell a lot around
(28:34):
that.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
So we covered what the revenue generating sales and
marketing facet of intelligencelooks like. Are you guys at the
operational facet of it? How dostaff members on property
interact with this intelligenceengine? Is it feeding them tips
about, if they're a housekeeper,how to optimize their routes or
a front desk agent on differentareas of the business? And what
(28:56):
form factor does that take forthem?
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Yeah. So one of my favorite form factors is just a
simple, hey. We're gonna helpthe marketing team write the ad.
We're gonna help the marketingteam determine what they should
do with their channel mix. We'regonna make the recommendations,
and we're gonna furnish it indifferent ways.
From a staff perspective, hey.Review came in. Well, someone's
gonna write the review. We'regonna write the review, and then
(29:19):
we're gonna say, hey. Send itoff or no?
Reply. Well, I want the team toreply, but we're gonna furnish
it. How do I think about pullingdata down? So we now have a
conversational AI, part of ourdata insights product. You can
just literally type, hey.
I wanna look up what myoccupancy is versus all of my
(29:41):
foreign customers. And it willliterally take that
conversational sentence andwrite the syntax into our report
builder and build out the reportbased on that syntax. So saving
someone who's like, I'm notreally good at joining datasets,
but you can just ask the bot,and the bot will come back with
the answer. And so our goal isto save 5 minutes here, 5
(30:03):
minutes there. And then we havea brand new housekeeping module
that's bringing all of that usedata back into Cloud Biz
Intelligence for another chapterof Cloud Biz Intelligence in the
future.
But, like, look, you gotta startsomewhere, and we're keeping
them super small. We wanna keepthem really tight, very
straightforward, very easy touse because I want them to be
(30:25):
build trust. I want people toactually trust the system
because it should be trustedbecause it's not built on some
whim. It's actually built ontheir data. And that's the
exciting thing is we're notunlike ChatGPT that's taking
data from everywhere, this isring fenced to Cloudbeds.
(30:45):
It's Cloudbeds data. All thedata that we're extracting is
coming into our data lakes.We're keeping it in the data
lakes. We're not sharing it withthird parties. And so we're
building a very proprietaryalgorithm around that individual
property.
Obviously, we're sharing in ourportfolio of all of our hotel,
our dataset, but we're trying tomake this a one to one
(31:06):
relationship too to bring somesecurity.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
I think you go back to that first inflection point
of buying the channel managerand now distribution is
ubiquitous. And now we've laidthe foundation of all these
different data points. We'vebuilt a lot of point solutions,
a lot of platforms, and now allthe data can actually
communicate with the other datafrom other systems and
intersystem. And now we have tobuild those engines like you
guys are working on. So reallyexcited to see what's next for
(31:31):
CloudVets, and thanks for comingon the show.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
My pleasure.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
That's all for today's episode. Thanks for
listening to Hotel Tech Insiderproduced by hoteltechreport.com.
Our goal with this podcast is toshow you how the best in the
business are leveragingtechnology to grow their
properties and outperform theconcept by using innovative
digital tools and strategies. Iencourage all of our listeners
to go try at least one of thesestrategies or tools that you
(31:58):
learned from today's episode.Successful digital
transformation is all aboutconsistent small experiments
over a long period of time, sodon't wait until tomorrow to try
something new.
Do you know a hotelier who wouldbe great to feature on this
show, or do you think that yourstory would bring a lot of value
to our audience? Reach out to medirectly on LinkedIn by
searching for Jordan Hollander.For more episodes like this,
(32:22):
follow Hotel Tech Insider on allmajor streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple Music.
We as hoteliers, we as technologists, can make this
journey frictionless. Right? Wecan do better. It doesn't mean I
need to give you a digital keyto check-in. It just means that
I need to be aware of firstimpressions, the coordination,
the communication, the process,all the above.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider,
a show about the future ofhotels and the technology that
powers them.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Today on the show, we have Adam Harris,
Speaker 2 (00:29):
the co founder and CEO of Cloudbeds. One of the
fastest growing companies inhospitality that's raised over
$250,000,000 from leadinginvestors like SoftBank and
Viking. In this conversation, wecover some of the really cool
innovations happening atCloudbeds like their recently
launched multimodal AI that'sable to look across Cloudbeds'
data architecture for all of itshotel clients and make
actionable, automatic, and easyto use recommendations to grow
(00:52):
NOI for hotel owners andoperators.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show today.
How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Doing well. Good to see you.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Let's start by talking a little bit about take
us back what? Is Coven's 10years old at this point?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
I think we turned 12 in October.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Wow. Okay. So 12 years ago, you and Richard, I
think from from what I know,were in Brazil and had a spark
of an idea for a business. Talkme through that.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
You know, it was a couple of catalysts, but, yeah,
your story is not too far off.Rich was traveling through
Brazil. We were doing some workfor some hotel brands at the
same time with our technologyconsulting firm. And what we
ultimately realized was thesehoteliers were not seeing the
(01:38):
whole picture. They were theyhad tools that might help them
with one element of their day today operations.
They may rely on directreservations or working with
just one distribution partner.It was very old school. It was
actually, like, surprisinglychallenging. And what happened
was Rich was trying to book a ahotel, a 40 room hotel, which is
(02:02):
right smack in our sweet spotfor Cloudbeds these days. But
what was interesting about thisboutique hotel, it was in
Bujios, which is a small beachtown north of Rio, couple hours
outside of it, and it's justlittered with these 40 room
hotels, 100 room hotels, thatsort of boutique ish 5.
Now Rich sent an email to all ofthem, like, all the top rated
(02:24):
one. Now remember the day whereyou'd go on a road trip with
your family and you'd go totriple a and you get, like, the
state triple a guide, and thatwas kind of your, like, way of
of knowing what was in themarket, what the hotels were,
etcetera, etcetera. Well, that'skinda what was happening in
Brazil. And so Rich sent, like,27 emails, and no one called him
back. No one emailed him back.
(02:44):
And he was like, god damn it.How am I gonna book a hotel?
Well, anyway, long story short,someone finally, a Brazilian
man, called his cell phone andsaid, hello. You know? Yes.
I have rooms. You can book 1.What I need you to do is go to
Santander Bank, which is one ofthe national Brazilian banks,
and deposit money into thischecking and routing number. And
(03:07):
then once you're done, email me.I'll go to my bank and confirm
that I got your deposit, andthen I'll confirm your hotel
room.
And, like, Rich called me andsaid, dude, some guy that I've
never met wants me to go to alocal bank, deposit money just
for a hotel room. This is crazy.And so we started with just
ecommerce. Cloudbeds was abouthow do we make the ecommerce
(03:29):
journey a little bit simpler,and then, obviously, it's
expanded from there. But thatwas kind of the route in
parallel that Rich was inBrazil.
I was doing some work with a agroup in Costa Rica and other
parts of LatAm, and it justhappened to be the same
circumstances. They had anecommerce presence, but their
(03:49):
data was not intertwined. Sothey had a resort. They had 2
boutique hotels. They had abunch of vacation rentals, and
they also had some sort ofhybrid concepts, like glamping,
but none of it was sold throughone central booking engine.
You had to go to each one ofthose individual concepts. And
so for those who are joining orwanting to go visit this master
(04:11):
build, didn't know how to tounderstand it. Like, take Punta
Mita, for example. Right? Youhave the Four Seasons.
You have the Conrad. You havethe Westin. You have the Saint
Regis. It's not like I go andbook Punta Mita, and I see all
those options. I have toindividually go to try to to do
one of them.
Well, we took a Punta Mita likemaster development, and we
(04:34):
centralized it all into oneplace. It was a beautifully well
done ecosystem. We were workingwith HomeAway software. We were
working with Saver Software,Oracle PMS, and we basically
created this master inventorylayer and then connect it out.
We built a CRS for this brand.
That's literally what we didwithout knowing what we would
(04:54):
call it at the time becausewe're outside of industry. But,
anyway, I love this space. I'vebeen to 57 different countries
in my lifetime and adding a fewmore next year, and it's just in
my DNA. Like, I love to travel.I love to experience, but, guys,
like, it's broken.
Like, the experience is brokenin many shapes and form, and I
(05:15):
think at the end of the day,it's because of the ecosystem.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
And so how did you guys get from that kind of
Brazilian ecommerce experienceto full blown PMS that Cloudbeds
is today? Like, what did thatevolution look like?
Speaker 1 (05:29):
You know, from day 1, we were really quick to put our
hands up in the air and say, wedon't know the answer here.
That's the beauty of being anoutsider. I have very little
hotel experience. Maybe I'llshare the one experience that
I've had in running a hotel inmy life. That's funny.
You'll appreciate it too. Butwhat we realized was if we're a
(05:50):
partner, like, a deep valuepartner to our customers and
actually, like, listen and havea community of them coming to us
and telling us what they neednext, doing tons of Qualtrics
surveying. We love serving ourcustomers. We have such an
incredible read given all thedata that we feed back. You
know, Passport was our morning.
(06:12):
Today was a an amalgamation ofall all the time and energy and
work collecting feedback fromour customers, launching some
things today at Passport, and wewere able to do that in front of
4,000 live registrants. Like,that's a pretty powerful
ecosystem to know that we canbring on 4,000 customers across
(06:32):
a 150 markets. They tune inbecause they're excited about
what we're bringing next,because they know they have been
intimately involved with tellingus what is coming next. And that
symbiotic relationship is whatwe're all about. We love our
customers.
We really, really do. We'retrying to do more for them.
We're trying to be a partner.We're trying to differentiate
(06:55):
our style of service. And do wefumble at times?
Yeah. A 100%. Do we fumble theball less than our competitors?
Yes. At an nth degree.
And so but look. What I'm soappreciative of this industry is
we are making strides towardsthe right direction of improving
(07:16):
both sides of the relationship,the staffing side and how they
take care of a guest, and thenthe guest side and how they
experience that hospitality. Andso we're making strides as an
industry.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
And I'm guessing back in those early days of the
Brazilian experience that youand Richard had or Richard had
in the Costa Rican parallelexperience, the US was a little
further along, obviously, atthat time. How have you seen the
market evolve, number 1, inmarkets I mean, it's almost it's
pretty clear that you guys havebeen in a really integral role
in markets like that. I've hadfriends go backpacking in
(07:48):
Vietnam and send me cloud beds,booking engines. And you guys
have taken these markets thattraditionally have been behind
on technology and that they'remaybe a third world country or
they're not a hotel chain, andthey don't have access to
actually giving them acompetitive advantage over some
of those tier one markets earlyon. How have you seen those
markets evolve?
(08:08):
And then as you guys havescaled, you've moved into these
tier one markets like the US,Western Europe, etcetera. How
have you seen those marketsevolve? And is there more parity
than there used to be betweenthose 2?
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Okay. That's a lot. That's a big question. Let me
challenge you a little bit withjust an observation. So I had a
really crummy birthday.
This past couple weeks, I hadsurgery, and then I got COVID
from the hospital, and thenrecovery birthday went in the
toilet bowl. But in myreflection of that, I was
(08:42):
carefully watching brands, hotelbrands, airline brands, and all
the brands that I interact witharound my birthday. And this was
not a selfish desire. This waspurely what are brands doing
around an event to engage withme. Now I am a member of f y
(09:03):
Delta and obviously the otherairlines, but I'm predominantly
Delta.
I obviously stay at all thebrands, mostly independents
because of my role at exitproperties. But then I'm also a
big user of Marriott and Hiltonand things like that for
convenience. And out of all ofthe hospitality brands, one, one
Jordan sent me a note on mybirthday. 1. Out of all brands
(09:28):
across all industries, 2 sent mea birthday reminder.
And yet in this day and age withgenerative AI and all the data
intelligence and all thereporting and all the automation
that we live in, Delta wished mea happy birthday and had some
curated ideas on where I couldgo with them in my medical
(09:50):
provider. UCSD Medicine sent mea happy birthday and wishing a
really well well, which wasfunny because I was just there.
But, like, those were the twoexamples. Not a hotel brand, not
another airline. They all havemy birthday.
They all know my birthdaybecause I've checked in with an
idea a 100 times. Right? How isthat possible? So when you ask
(10:11):
me the question, is there paritytoday, or was there lack of
parity before? I would argue allhospitality players still have a
lot of work to do to bring tomodern capabilities that exist
in the ecosystem of tech thesedays.
And so, yeah, the answer was theproblems were there in both
(10:32):
markets. It was just different.Right? Like, the Vietnam's of
the world, to use your example,they had a lot more that had to
get modernized to bring them toa standard to compete with a
national or international chain.The domestic markets were still
struggling to accommodate allthis new tech that might have
been more readily available, butthey might be dealing with
(10:53):
something that was a little lessinnovative.
It was a little bit moreoutdated from a UI perspective.
And so even in those samestruggles, albeit different,
they weren't quite caught up. Ilook at, you know, Marriott
adopting a guest journeyplatform. Right? Recent news.
Was that because their guestjourney is friction
Speaker 3 (11:13):
full,
Speaker 1 (11:14):
or was it they wanna do digital tipping better? And
the answer is probably a littlebit of both, but it's probably
the latter more. So how do wetake care of our staff in a
digital tipping format? AndCanary does it really, really
well. Like, they're great at it.
But to check-in easier, man,Marriott's been trying to do
check-in easier for many, manyyears, and Canary doesn't solve
(11:35):
that. Nope. Nothing solves that.That's hardware, process,
systems, training. It's a lot.
And so nothing against Canary. Iwanted to highlight that one
example. And so when I look atwhere we are, like, 13% of door
locks in 2024, almost 2025, aredigital. K? Like, the number one
(11:57):
integrator is still serializedcabling.
Right? Like, using offline, noHTTP, no API forward. And so,
like, ASSA, BLO, all of thosedoor lock companies, SALTO, are
coming out with brand newecosystems. The problem is
that's, like, a line in the sandforward with their new lock
(12:19):
technology. Everything in thepast is still offline.
Like, I can't give you acheck-in experience that I've
become accustomed to whenstaying at an Airbnb because I
can just go buy Latch or one ofthe Home Depot locks that
communicates to my Wi Fi througha code, and I can text that to
(12:39):
my guest, and I can log in.Well, there's standards. There's
security requirements. Like, NewYork is about to pass that you
have to be a licensed hotel andthat everyone needs a panic
button as a staff member. Oh,jeez Louise.
Like, that's a very different,like, requirement list than,
hey. Go pick a Home Depot lockand, like, you're safe at an
(13:02):
Airbnb. And, like and and I readall the horror stories around,
you know, my door lock didn'tmeet the right standard. Someone
kicked through it, or there'scameras hidden in the room.
Like, I really don't worry aboutthat when I check into my hotel,
but I swear to god, I've stayedin hotels.
And I've stayed in Airbnbs whereI actually pulled out the Wi Fi
(13:23):
sniffer. And, like, I was kindacurious. I'm like, what's around
here? What IoT devices am I notaware of that is taking place?
And I was actually pleasantlysurprised.
Like, in one case, I found acamera. Like, it was weird.
There was no need for the camerain the hallway. In the other
case, in the hotel, I found somesensors that I didn't think this
hotel was using, and it wasdetect environment. And I was
(13:46):
like, that's really cool.
Like, I'm glad to see some smartintelligence around, you know,
HVAC and whatnot to reduce theamount of energy waste that was
going to create temperaturecontrol. So those are two sides
of the story. But, man, Jordan,like, we got a long way to go as
an industry to make this easierfor both sides of the equation.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Are there hotel groups that you guys work with
or specific hotels that youthink are doing it particularly
well? Because I feel likethere's always on the product
adoption curve. There's thoseMavens who are out there. You
know, we've had the CTO ofoutside who's a customer of
yours, I'm pretty sure, on thisshow. What are the hotel groups
that you think are within yourcustomer base that are doing a
really good job, and what arethey doing that's different than
(14:30):
the CloudBeds customer who'skind of lagging behind?
And you're trying to help themget there, but they're not quite
there yet.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Oh, man. There's probably too many to mention, to
be honest with you. But tosingle out a single one, I think
the ones that are implementingCloudBeds in a way with our
partner ecosystem, that ismindful of 5 pillars that we
think are the most importantpillars to any hotel operation.
(14:58):
So if you will give me a moment,I'll share with those, but you
can stop me and say, this isboring. Let's move on.
Also, I will respect that. Ireally truly believe that every
hotel operation should bemindful of 5 pillars. One is,
how do I go find my next guest,and how do I retain guests going
forward? Right? Going andconstantly getting a new 1,000
(15:22):
guests per year is reallychallenging.
Like, the Pareto argument wouldbe, like, curate. Like, curate a
population of your hotel, bringthem back every single year, and
you have a base that you startfrom. It makes it a little bit
easier. So how do you go findyour next guest? 2, we gotta
remove the friction from theguest journey.
I have taken way too many trips.I have way too many miles on my
(15:46):
back. You as well, because Iknow you're well traveled. I
have had very few enjoyabletravel journeys. Very few.
And it's not whether you flew1st class or not. It's just
every step of the way, is theresomething that goes amuck or
(16:06):
adds friction that puts you inyour worst moment? Right? You're
tired. You just flew 15 hours toget to ITB, and there isn't an
early check-in available eventhough you booked for your
entire company 40 rooms.
Like, really? Like, come on,hotel. Like, we know what's
going on in the market. LuzFonza doing strikes around ITB.
(16:28):
You are impacted by thisrecently.
I might have taken someenjoyment, listening to your
your travel journeys back, Butmy comment around that is, like,
we as hoteliers, we astechnologists, can make this
journey frictionless. Right? Wecan do better. It doesn't mean I
need to give you a digital keyto check-in. It just means that
(16:50):
I need to be aware of firstimpressions, the coordination,
the communication, the process,all the above.
I just checked into a hotel inMarin, got my key. I had to
walk, like, a half a milebecause it was, like, it was,
like, sort of broken out into aforest that was surrounding the
area. I got to my hotel room.Key didn't work. So guess what?
(17:11):
I had to, like, go all the wayback to the hotel room and go
get the key. And I was like, ohmy goodness. I just wasted 10
minutes. Now granted, I love thesteps. I needed it personally.
So I was okay with it, but,like, why did that take place?
Like, what failed there? Thethird is, man, I truly believe
that the unsung heroes of thisindustry are people who work at
(17:34):
a hotel. It's a 247, 365 daygrind. You get people in their
best moments, and you get peoplein their worst.
And I can only think of oneother industry, and that's
health care, where your patronis there in the morning. So you
could royally piss them off thenight before. They're gonna
sleep at your property, andthey'll be there at front of the
(17:55):
front desk in the morning, andyou better have an answer for
them. Her. So that is incrediblystressful.
And so removing some of theoperational friction on behalf
of the staff just means thestaff can come back and do their
moments back towards the gates,and there's a really important
relationship there. The 4th is,jeez, Jordan. We you and I have
(18:17):
had a 1,000 conversations aboutthis, but data's everywhere. If
the average number of systemsthat are powering a hotel is
truly 19 right now in 2024,Okay. Well, that's 19 places
with data.
How do I bring that together andcreate an actionable analytics
platform that can help me makedeterminations? Now this is the
(18:38):
number one pain point for anybusiness in the world, your
business, my business, gettingto decisions quicker, having the
right information around us.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Is that 19 number the average number of connected
integrations amongst CloudBizclients right now?
Speaker 1 (18:52):
No. CloudBiz is much lower because we do a little bit
more capability as a platform,but the average system is 19
right now. That was a bunch ofresearch. Multiple schools have
published that. That is way toomuch.
It was 14 when I started thisindustry. So we've grown. Now
COVID was an accelerator there,so I don't wanna I don't wanna
(19:13):
necessarily say going from 14 to19 is a bad thing. We've just
seen so much sweet accrete. So,like, you have check-in apps
that now do, like, communicationand do a little bit more.
And, like, you've seen a littlebit of these sweets
communication and do a littlebit more. And, like, you've seen
a little bit of these sweetsgrowing, so that's part of the
kicker. Irrespective, too muchdata siloed in too many
different places. And so the 5this intelligence. And it's
(19:36):
intelligence from all of thesignals that are coming from
each of those 4 pillars intowhat I believe is where AI, in
harnessing the correct forms ofAI, just creates superhumans.
Superhuman front desk, betterguests, better guest
experiences, better ways ofreaching guests more
(19:56):
efficiently, making more moneyoff your guests, creating better
better journeys for your gueststhat translates to things that
they want to consume. Right? Sohowever you do that,
intelligence can come in manyforms. It could just come in the
form of how we're doing it,which is trying to layer in
different touch points withinthe application with an AI
(20:19):
engine. It could be helpingwrite reviews.
It could be helping communicatewith a guest, right, in a more
automated fashion. I love anexample of technology. Voice,
for example. Hotels have phonenumbers. Right?
Someone has to answer them. Alot of times, they get sent to
call centers. Well, 85, 86percent of the time, it is
(20:39):
unrelated to revenue. So thosecalls have zero impact on
revenue. They're informational.
What time's check-in? What time?Check out. Do you allow dogs?
What size dogs?
All of that could be done. Andthen if there was a need for a
human, you click it over to ahuman. So I think there's a lot
of sort of motion towards wherewe can go with that intelligence
(21:03):
layer, that 5th pillar. But forright now, we gotta bring those
4 other ones together. That is areally big motion that's trying
to happen in the industry.
And I think there's a few brandsthat have see, like, yeah,
that's really important. I thinkwe're ahead. I really do believe
we're ahead because we've triedto be more vertical than others,
(21:23):
and we've focused onpartnerships second. The reality
is we've never focused onpartnerships second. That's just
what the market thinks.
We have 400 plus partners. Webelieve in partners. We're
growing that that ecosystem asmuch as possible. And we're also
doing that while building outour own capabilities that are
doing different parts of thatecosystem. And and that's gonna
(21:44):
be really exciting forhoteliers, whether they're using
our partner technology or ours.
I think that's where we're allheaded as a space.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Are there 1 or 2 pillars that you think are
particularly top of mind forhoteliers right now in terms of
in the last 6 to 12 months, whatare the biggest pain points that
you have? This huge customerbase who's kind of feeding you
insights, what are the biggestpain points that they're feeling
at this moment in time?
Speaker 1 (22:07):
You know, we always hear that revenue generation or
revenue capture, so figuring outways of being more getting your
reach out there, number 1,always. Capturing it more
efficiently, number 2, always.Right? And that's pretty loaded.
Those two statements are reallyloaded.
Like, that could be a CRScapability. That could be having
(22:30):
better sales and marketingsupport for your catering
business because you do a lot ofweddings. It might mean more OTA
connections. It might mean youstart doing advertising. There's
so many ways of driving morerevenue, and then there's also
ways of maximizing microtransactions during the guest
journey that probably were aremore impactful than just
(22:51):
changing your ratesoccasionally.
At some point, I can't rememberwhere I read it. Forgot. It it
might it might even be my team'sresearch. I don't remember. But
I remember seeing that it wasanywhere from, like, 19 to 27
days a year.
You actually have opportunitiesto price better, smarter. It's
not every day of the week. It'sa few moments where you're
(23:14):
actually saying like, oh, man. Ishould've been, like, a $100
more that night. Like, reallyimpactful nights.
The rest of them are, like, upand down, up and down. And a lot
of times, it's down. Yourpricing is sliding down, and
then you're figuring out ways ofoptimizing Jordan, you're
traveling with your family, yourbeautiful wife, your kid, and
(23:37):
soon to be another. Maybe youwant an early check-in. Well, if
I have the availability and Ihave the room, I'm pretty
confident that if I sent you anupsell through Whistle that
said, hey, Jordan.
You're traveling with kids. Doyou want an early check-in for
$25? You might be like, done.Like, literally, I'm clicking it
10 times because, yes, I've gotcar seats and bags and a nap and
(24:00):
all that wonderful stuff. And sothose types of moments, I think,
need to be way more integrated,like, way, way more integrated.
And so when I think about whatwe're trying to do with finding
your next guest or retainingyour next guest to looking at
what goes down in the guestjourney, it's how do we reach
(24:24):
it? Do we wanna reach it throughthat channel? Do we want to
price x y z? What is my totalrevenue capability with that one
individual on a Thursday? And itmight be different if they join
me on a Wednesday.
It might look different if theyjoin me on a Friday. And trying
to fully understand the causeand effect of having Adam or
(24:44):
Jordan stay at their property iswhere we can then run models. I
might not upgrade you into aroom that doesn't accommodate 2
little kids. Right? I might nothave an upgrade for you.
Well, our multimodal AIcapabilities, we can actually
scan room photos and say, couchequals bed, sink, too high for a
(25:10):
little kid, sharp corners. Like,we can do all those attributes
just using AI. It's amazing, andwe have some really cool stuff
on some of our videos. But whatI get excited about is not so
much the AI. It's more so, like,all the data points that are
coming in.
Some of that's coming in throughpartners. Some of it's our own
dataset set. Some of it'sscraped from the web. For the
(25:34):
very first time that I know of,our hoteliers, once intelligence
fully launches in their area,will have an engine that's
looking at data points at thetune of, like, 5,000,000,000
every minute.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
So the AI is looking at all these 3rd party and first
party data sources and thenmaking recommendations about how
to most effectively drive totalrevenue at that hotel.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Yeah. Or staffing recommendations or supply
recommendations or you name it.So for starters, we're gonna
focus on what our big asks are.Help me optimize my go to market
funnel. Help me optimize myguest journey, then tell my
staff how to be more efficient,and then keep feeding the data
(26:23):
back from all those silos intoan actionable data footprint.
And that's we already have it.It's being used by properties.
The lift is insane, like, insanelift, and we are just starting
with the tip of the iceberg. Sosomeone asked me what was the
biggest moment in Cloudbed'shistory is when we bought our
(26:43):
channel manager when we werereally, really early because it
gave us immediately thiscatalyst to drive more
reservations on behalf of ourhotels to, like, 80 markets, and
it brought us to Europe reallyquickly. This acquisition and
team, you know, talent teamrecruiting and all the work
we've done over the last year isanother one of those moments.
(27:05):
This is a awesome moment for us.We're really excited about it.
I've got a team of 9. They'respectacular, and we're just
giving them snacks and resourcesto just go build and build and
think outside the box. I gotsent a a sample, a used voice,
and used our engine to basicallysend me a voice mail through
(27:29):
whistle that came from the frontdesk.
And it's like, hey, Adam. Youknow, I saw that you're in town
for an extra day. By the way,we've got a walking tour. Would
you like to join us? It's $15per person.
And all you have to do is justcome meet us at the lobby at 3
PM Through the Whistle app, alldigital, came from the front
desk, really didn't come fromthe front desk. It was an AI
(27:51):
engine who had an Englishaccent, but he was smashing. I
was like, wow. Okay. This isn'trocket science.
This is super straightforward.And the reality is is we're just
too busy as humans. Like,someone would have had to pick
up the phone, call me, let themknow, well, I'm not in property.
So I didn't get the voice mail.I probably don't look at the
flashing indicator on the phoneanyway.
(28:13):
So they reached me through mydevice. That's cool, Jordan.
That's really cool. I thinkthat's way cooler than I have a
key issue to me during mycheck-in experience. Right?
I think that is where I'mactually creating, curating to
my concept, and I'm actuallytrying to build hospitality into
my thesis. And from there, youcan really sell a lot around
(28:34):
that.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
So we covered what the revenue generating sales and
marketing facet of intelligencelooks like. Are you guys at the
operational facet of it? How dostaff members on property
interact with this intelligenceengine? Is it feeding them tips
about, if they're a housekeeper,how to optimize their routes or
a front desk agent on differentareas of the business? And what
(28:56):
form factor does that take forthem?
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Yeah. So one of my favorite form factors is just a
simple, hey. We're gonna helpthe marketing team write the ad.
We're gonna help the marketingteam determine what they should
do with their channel mix. We'regonna make the recommendations,
and we're gonna furnish it indifferent ways.
From a staff perspective, hey.Review came in. Well, someone's
gonna write the review. We'regonna write the review, and then
(29:19):
we're gonna say, hey. Send itoff or no?
Reply. Well, I want the team toreply, but we're gonna furnish
it. How do I think about pullingdata down? So we now have a
conversational AI, part of ourdata insights product. You can
just literally type, hey.
I wanna look up what myoccupancy is versus all of my
(29:41):
foreign customers. And it willliterally take that
conversational sentence andwrite the syntax into our report
builder and build out the reportbased on that syntax. So saving
someone who's like, I'm notreally good at joining datasets,
but you can just ask the bot,and the bot will come back with
the answer. And so our goal isto save 5 minutes here, 5
(30:03):
minutes there. And then we havea brand new housekeeping module
that's bringing all of that usedata back into Cloud Biz
Intelligence for another chapterof Cloud Biz Intelligence in the
future.
But, like, look, you gotta startsomewhere, and we're keeping
them super small. We wanna keepthem really tight, very
straightforward, very easy touse because I want them to be
(30:25):
build trust. I want people toactually trust the system
because it should be trustedbecause it's not built on some
whim. It's actually built ontheir data. And that's the
exciting thing is we're notunlike ChatGPT that's taking
data from everywhere, this isring fenced to Cloudbeds.
(30:45):
It's Cloudbeds data. All thedata that we're extracting is
coming into our data lakes.We're keeping it in the data
lakes. We're not sharing it withthird parties. And so we're
building a very proprietaryalgorithm around that individual
property.
Obviously, we're sharing in ourportfolio of all of our hotel,
our dataset, but we're trying tomake this a one to one
(31:06):
relationship too to bring somesecurity.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
I think you go back to that first inflection point
of buying the channel managerand now distribution is
ubiquitous. And now we've laidthe foundation of all these
different data points. We'vebuilt a lot of point solutions,
a lot of platforms, and now allthe data can actually
communicate with the other datafrom other systems and
intersystem. And now we have tobuild those engines like you
guys are working on. So reallyexcited to see what's next for
(31:31):
CloudVets, and thanks for comingon the show.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
My pleasure.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
That's all for today's episode. Thanks for
listening to Hotel Tech Insiderproduced by hoteltechreport.com.
Our goal with this podcast is toshow you how the best in the
business are leveragingtechnology to grow their
properties and outperform theconcept by using innovative
digital tools and strategies. Iencourage all of our listeners
to go try at least one of thesestrategies or tools that you
(31:58):
learned from today's episode.Successful digital
transformation is all aboutconsistent small experiments
over a long period of time, sodon't wait until tomorrow to try
something new.
Do you know a hotelier who wouldbe great to feature on this
show, or do you think that yourstory would bring a lot of value
to our audience? Reach out to medirectly on LinkedIn by
searching for Jordan Hollander.For more episodes like this,
(32:22):
follow Hotel Tech Insider on allmajor streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple Music.
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