November 4, 2024 • 31 mins
What if the key to enhancing your hotel’s guest experience lies not just in technology, but in empowering your staff? In this episode, Kariana Fiskvik, Senior Vice President of Technology at Strawberry, reveals how focusing on employee support can revolutionize the hospitality industry.
Key Takeaways:
- Discover how Strawberry is leveraging generative AI to streamline employee training and enhance operational efficiency, ultimately improving guest interactions.
- Learn why prioritizing staff well-being and training can lead to a more authentic and engaging guest experience, challenging the conventional focus on customer journey alone.
- Explore the innovative partnership between Strawberry and Norwegian Air, which aims to consolidate loyalty points and create a seamless experience for travelers.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And then maybe they leave or they shift roles, and
there are new people to trainand train and train. It's an
analyst job. So what they'vedone is that they've built, on
top of Gemini Flash from Google,they built our own generative AI
bot.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider,
a show about the future ofhotels and the technology that
powers them. Today on the show,we're joined by Carrie Anna
Fisbick, senior vice presidentof technology at Strawberry, one
of Europe's largest hotelcompanies. In this conversation,
we dive into Strawberry'sdigital transformation journey,
the state of cybersecurity inhotels, and some fascinating
(00:36):
real world applications ofgenerative AI. Carrieanna also
brings some really compellingcontrarian insights to the
conversation, Like why hotelsneed to focus on staff before
guests and when it's actuallybeneficial to make decisions
based on feeling intuition evenin a data driven world.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Carrieanna, thanks so much for coming on the show
today.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Thank you, Jordan. Nice to be here.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I'd love to start by talking about maybe just give us
a quick background on you, yourbackground in the hotel industry
and the technology space, kindof how those things came
together for you.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Alright. My background is actually mostly
from art, so it's not from myneither hospitality or
technology. So it was kind of anaccident that I stumbled into
technology. Basically,recognizing that there was a
huge potential in makinganything really more efficient
or more innovative, working withnew developments by working with
(01:26):
technology. So my interest sortof came from there, some
curiosity in how to make thingsback.
And then around four and a halfyears ago, I shifted from
fashion, retail that I've beendoing for about 10 years, and
over to hospitality. Timing waspretty terrible because it was
passed to March 2020. I camefrom the safe spot of fashion
retail world straight into thecorona of, the hospitality
(01:49):
industry. Quite rough. Had sortof, you know, start with just
stopping everything that we weredoing and revisiting everything
and what could we actually do inthe time of, complete, well,
lockdown.
Having said that, it's been veryuseful when you look at how you
very, very quickly figure outwhat is actually important and
what's not. So rough butefficient start in hospitality
(02:12):
around four and a half yearsago.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
And I know we already had Spen on the show. Would you
remind our audience the breadthand depth of the strawberry
portfolio, the composition, thehotel property types and
locations?
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Definitely. We are one of the largest hotel or
hospitality providers in theNordics. And part of our
strategy is actually to move outof just being a hospitality
provider to an experiencedprovider. Today, we have around
250 hotels across Sweden,Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and a
(02:46):
couple of other places as well.We have some hotels.
So we operate in the Nordicswith a variety of high brands
and a new one coming in May nextyear. And then we also have
around 50 independent hotels.They're more like spa resort
hotels that sort of have theirown brand in themselves. So we
(03:06):
do multi branding. That's partof our strategy that we want to
be ourselves to be independentand offer different experiences
for both corporate travelers andleisure travelers so that you
can basically, you should beable to find anything that you
want today with us, whetherit's, you know, a cheap budget
hotel for young travelers or ifyou wanna go to a luxury spa
(03:28):
resort hotel with a lovelylittle restaurant and get a
facial treatment as well.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
And when you came into the business in 2020, how
would you describe what you cameinto from in terms of the
maturity of digitaltransformation at Strawberry,
and how has that digitaltransformation journey evolved
to today?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Great. It's an interesting question, Joan,
because it it was a strange mix.Of being a bit surprised that
it's something that I thoughtwould be more digital mature and
at the same time, reallyimpressed at some of the things
that Strawberry had done as arebel in the industry for the
digital guest journey. So Ithink on a very general basis, I
think that the hospitalityindustry has, for years, maybe
(04:11):
been a bit behind ondigitalization in general. And I
think there are quite logicalreasons for that because you
work in a very physicalenvironment.
We deal with people every day.You have people in your house,
your or everything that is sortof it's not as easily
transferred to ecommerce, likeretail, which is very easily
transferred. And also retail hasa very, you know, strict value
(04:34):
chain with logistics andproduction and all of that. So I
think that strawberriessurprised me by a lot of the
cool, you know, like, mobilekeys that we have and different
solutions for app and web thatthey built that was really cool
on the digital journey, reallybold me. And at the same time,
there was a lot of things thatwe needed to work with on more
ground level to get, you know,data flow and integrations and
(04:57):
master data quality and trackingof your purchase orders and
stuff like that that I would dosee from retail, and retail have
come far along with that no onein the hotel industry was
staying.
So I think, on my part, I veryquickly find that a lot of the
sort of hotel technologyconferences didn't really give
me a lot because they werebasically focused on a lot of
(05:21):
things that I knew aboutalready. So what's important, I
think, for us was to them sortof, you know, look a bit broader
out in the market to otherindustries and what we could
learn from them.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
So you guys have thousands of employees, hundreds
of hotels. How do you guysprioritize and say, okay. This
is our list of things that haveto be digitized or moved into a
technological process that ismanual today. Is that coming
from the hotels reporting up toyou? How does the organizational
hierarchy sit so that you canbubble up those ideas and then
(05:53):
prioritize them as a team?
Speaker 1 (05:55):
What is quite unique with Strawberry is that we wanna
be like a rebel in the industry.So a lot of other organizations
have very strict processes forhow they deal with the
innovation and then prioritize,while we have a more
unstructured process for that.We have, like we work a bit with
OKRs, basically, that we wannahave these goals and solidarity
for Grace. We have we wanna havethese many hotels. We wanna have
(06:18):
these many members.
And then there are differentbusiness units working on the
business goals and how to getthere. And then we try from tech
to support them as best we can.Sometimes the idea will come
from a business unit. Sometimesit will come from 1 employee in
the hotel. Sometimes the techdepartment will come with
something.
And then we try, obviously, likeall other industries, to find
(06:40):
the best business cases to workwith the most. But I think on
the tech part, we prioritizedlately a lot of the good old
cloud shift to getting rid ofold on prem technology that
basically gives where thedatabase structure are so so old
that you can't really use themfor anything new and fun. And so
(07:01):
we prioritized that a lot overthe last 18 months, and I think
that is giving us a lot of theresults that we're now seeing in
form of pricing strategies, howto work with the with revenue
and new revenue items anddynamic yielding and everything
that we do towards guests andalso are able to connect all the
(07:21):
new partners that we wanna workwith. We try to identify when
you go traveling, either at thecorporate or a lesser guest,
what are the most importantthings for you when you go
there? What partners can weoffer you good deals on?
And I think, basically, thatthose are sort of we try to
prioritize by finding goodbusiness areas, but we also
like, you know, to try and fail.So sometimes it's not maybe the
(07:44):
main thought through idea, butsomething that everyone has a
lot of energy around. And then,you know, if people have a lot
of energy around something, thatusually means it might get you
very, very much further than abusiness case that no one really
wants to work with. So we try todo a middle of that as well so
that we let people in thecompany be a part of the
innovation and follow gutfeeling as well as numbers.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Are there any specific projects that the team
is really excited about rightnow?
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Definitely. On the commercial side, we're launching
a new partnership with aNorwegian air company. So we are
together building a company thatwe own based on us to join all
our member points in oneprogram. So, basically, the new
company called Spem, they willconsolidate the points that you
(08:33):
earn as a member in Strawberryor in Norwegian Air. So you
have, like, a digital currencythat you can spend, and that's
why we call it Spem because thatmeans spend, across our
different hotels and airlinecompanies.
And we're gonna onboard morepartners for that as well, and
they're launching on the 19thNovember. So not very far away.
(08:54):
So when the, you know, the sortof, you know, thrilling loss,
the test stages whereeverything's probably seems
impossible, but you solve itanyway. We're very excited about
that. So a lot of the teams areworking on that based on loyalty
strategy, partner offerings,building technology, analyzing
data, training our hotel staffin the new loyalty program.
(09:16):
Lot a lot of excitement aroundthat one. And then we're still
excited about, you know I knowyou have Ben on the podcast
earlier, and he spoke about allthese systems that we had rolled
out. We're still very excitedabout that, actually. So we're
tweaking all the, you know, howcan we do this a bit
differently? How we can weconnect this data a bit more?
What can we learn in how wewanna do men's geoengineering
(09:37):
out of the restaurants? Can wetweak that a bit more there?
Reception role, how can that besmarter? Still a lot of work
around that. It's great to seethat the things that you've
implemented actually have animpact.
And then we have another teamthat has been working sort of in
the background, and everyoneelse has been rolling out all
these new systems with buildingour own generative AI bots, and
(10:00):
we built it initially for ouremployees. You know, we have
around 20,000 employeescurrently in the company, and we
have a turnover out of the inhospitality, and you probably
know this. The turnover out onthe hotels is quite high,
anything from 30 to 50%sometimes. We have a lot of
people that need to be onboardedand a lot of people to be off
(10:21):
boarded or retrained or movingaround departments and
everything. And that's justobviously a huge logistical
operation to train them and getthem to understand your business
or hotel.
How do you do this? How is thisroutine working? What do I say
when this gets asked about that?Everything from where is the
parking to how do I do a refundif someone has paid me the wrong
(10:41):
card, or how do I actually helpsomeone that wants to find a
hairdresser? It could beanything.
Right? And you want youremployees to be on top of that,
everything that the customer isasking them for help about,
which means that basically overyears, you've been building, you
know, manuals to be out of yourhouse, training them, training
them, training them. And thenmaybe they leave or they shift
(11:03):
roles, and there are new peopleto train and train and train.
It's an analyst job. You know?
So what they've done is thatthey've built, on top of Gemini
Flash from Google, they builtour own generative AI bot that
has been secretly learning inthe background for a year now.
They collected the lang chain ontop of several of our systems,
(11:25):
basically. We picked those thatwe thought would be the most
useful, obviously, our GoogleWorkspace and everything that is
in there. And then some of thespecific systems, 1 by 1,
connect to them to that, allvery secure. We we're not
releasing any information thatwe don't want to, but we also
connect to the bot to the thegeneral worldwide Internet so
that basically now our employeescan ask our little bot, which is
(11:48):
called Scout, a little helper,about pretty much anything that
from how's the better going tobe tomorrow to how do I change
the booking in the small system,what kind of menu will our
restaurants have tomorrow, Whereis nearest neighbors?
Anything that they need to know,they can ask, and it's just so
much more efficient way to toshare information. We're super,
(12:11):
super excited about that.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
How did that process work as you guys are rolling out
the LLM Bot Scout? Is there,like, a digital master manual to
everything at the company, orwhere does that data and content
sit today?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
It's a variety of things. I mean, we have an LMS,
obviously, with trainings sothat we release to be a 1,000
headquarter employees. And wehave Google Workspace, so there
are a lot of Google sites withinformation. Then there are all
the colleagues out there thatthey ask every day about how to
do things. Then we have digitaltrainings.
(12:47):
We have, weekly webinars. We'vehad a lot of classroom trainings
before we changed the techstack. We actually had to go out
there and do classroom training,which is also a huge cost, you
know, travel wise and timeconsuming. So I think there's
not, like, one answer to how wedid that, but I think that
across all the departments thatare working on getting
(13:08):
information out to themselves,there's so many hours and so
much documentation that is builtbut never read, never understood
because nobody likes to read amanual. We all hate that.
Nobody even reads the IKEAmanual. You know? That's why
they made it all into picturesbecause, hopefully, someone will
at least wanna look at it andmaybe understand. So by
(13:29):
introducing a Scout now and thistechnology that combines all
these various types and systemand information, And instead of
sitting there reading themanual, or even for the guests,
because we're also connectingthis to the website and for our
guests, you can just ask aboutthe exact thing that you're
wondering about and not navigatefor ages to find information.
(13:51):
And I think it's really, reallygoing to revolutionize how our
employees are trained, whatinformation they have, how they
can help our guests, and alsohow our guests are able to
interact with us.
And then we connect all thatdata, you know, and then when we
see what are the guests actuallyasking about, what are we
training the employees around,what are we offering them, what
(14:11):
do we see the guests wanna buyor find, what partnership should
we have. It's like an ocean ofinformation that we haven't had
access to before. So I thinkit's one of the coolest data and
insight projects that we areactually in the midst of.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
So the hotel employees, they access this
through, like, a web portal thathas, like, a chat gpt vibe.
Well, obviously, it's on Google,so the Gemini version. But
there's, like, an interfacewhere they can query all these
different disparate datasets andpieces of content?
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Actually, what we've done, and I think that is also
part of that what the success isbuilt into Google Workspace. So
it's like, you know, where youcan chat with all your
colleagues when you're in GoogleWorkspace. Like, I can send a
chat to Jordan or I can send achat to Sun. Scout is one of the
chatbots in there, so you canchat with Scout. So you can just
pin it in your your mail whereyou are on your phone or in your
(15:05):
computer or in your pad.
Wherever you go, basically, youhave your Gmail accounts
available. So that means you canuse it anywhere on the bus on
the way to work or in thereception. We're also building
it into the employee portal, ofcourse, so that we have it extra
available for prompts and backoffice staff that are dealing
(15:26):
with questions from the guestsevery day. And we don't want
them, you know, standing ontheir mobile and looking weird
when the guests arrive. We wantit to be easily accessible for
them.
So we're doing a bit of base,but, the fact that it's always
winchy means that it's kindalike any other very more
commercial chatbot there whenyou need it wherever you are.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
And how do the guests interact with it? Because,
presumably, they're not in theGoogle Workspace like Google
Cloud.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
No. They're not. No. They are interacting on it on
our website for the moment. Thisis quite new.
We only have 2 hotels up at themoment, but it's speeding up
quite fast now rolling it out.But we just wanna, you know,
make sure that we reallyunderstand it and how it works
and get rid of all the bugs andthe things that we thought would
be great that show up that theyaren't. So at the moment, it's
(16:14):
more like an intelligentcustomer service agent at the
website, and we're stilltraining and learning. So that's
how they interact at the moment.In the future, I don't really
know.
We might release it, obviously,for members in the app. Maybe
we'll connect to the loyaltysystem in different ways.
There's just an incredibleamount of possibilities. And I
also think, the subject thatyou've touched upon before on
(16:37):
how do we innovate, how do weprioritize what to do, this
actually gives us real timeinformation about IDs from
employees as well. So we canreally innovate based on input
from any 20,000 or any customerthat is interacting with us.
We can get that informationinstead of, you know, maybe
someone tried to write an emailand it didn't get through you,
(16:59):
or you didn't have time to readit, or your boss wouldn't listen
to your idea. It's obviously notgonna solve all the problems in
the entire world, but it itreally gives us a whole new
perspective on how to act withinformation that is structured
in another way than what it isin the page we're at, basically.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Are there certain milestones on the guest side of
the chatbot that you guys arelooking for before you roll it
out? Or how do you think aboutthe staging? Because, like, I
think about when we send anemail to our audience of, like,
70,000, I'm about to press sendon that email. It's already been
written and edited, but I haveto click send and take
ownership. It's such a scarymoment, and Mailchimp has that,
(17:36):
like, sweaty monkey finger.
I can't imagine rolling out anew tool to 20,000 employees,
let alone got 100 of 1,000 or1,000,000 of guests. What does
that process look like fromwhere you guys are today of
piloting 2 hotels with the guestfacing to all of your
properties?
Speaker 1 (17:52):
As a company, we like to be a bit rebellious. We like
to go in a different directionthan a lot of others do. If we
go big and we fail, at least,and we tried, we will probably
learn from it. So we're not thatscared. We haven't put up a lot
of milestones, like we have todo this or that.
We basically just wanna train ita bit more to make sure that the
(18:14):
information that is scraped cananswer as many questions as
possible. But I think that whatwe're learning already from the
pilot is that it's so easy forcustomers to understand and
interact that there's really norisk in just deploying it in
several cells. Obviously, wehave to make sure that we can
scale it and all of the techystuff behind. But apart from
(18:35):
that, I think that we're gonnafirst thing, now we're obviously
going to release the employeebooks to charge 20,000 employees
and make sure that we do thatvery well before Christmas, and
then we'll probably do a coupleof more hotels. I don't know if
we'll do, like, up until 20 8,30 exactly where we'll go with
them versus another of scouts.
That is not really called scoutsexternally. That's just internal
(18:57):
that we call it scouts. Thehotels will have to get it you
know, name it their little boxso it fits their brand and
culture. But I think thatwithin, you know, 4 to 6 months
is probably gonna be rolled outeverywhere that we want it to
and all the channels that wewant it to and maybe some that I
haven't thought about today. Andif I'm wrong, I'm struggling to
figure out how to do it and thenrelease it a bit later.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
And what other data architecture systems are
enabling this LLM? I know youmentioned that you guys use
Snowflake, and you haveSalesforce from your guest side.
Can you talk a little bit abouthow the LOM might interact with
those tools, or is it not quitethere yet? It's more interacting
with, like, your general contentabout the hotel business and
then plugging in thepersonalized data in the future?
Speaker 1 (19:40):
It's a bit of both. Obviously, we started with all
the internal stuff that we need,that we could connect to, and
and that we where we can, youknow, control the information
very well. And that is still atthe core of the system. But we
are planning to connect it,definitely to sales, first, for
the corporate market to connectall that data into theirs
because and there's severalreasons for that. A lot of them
(20:02):
are basically because all thehotels need information about
the corporate deals when theyare doing bookings directly to
the hotels.
I mean, not all bookings gothrough web or through the sales
agents. A lot goes directly tothe hotel. So we're gonna do
that. We're obviously, like Isaid, we're in forms of booking
systems. It's gonna try toconnect it to the Vietnamese, me
and me, TriBe, everything thatgoes around there.
(20:22):
It's really exciting to try toconnect it also to Flex, keeping
that we are rolling out now asthe new housekeeping system and
connecting information there.Because, you know, you can do
talk to your housekeepingpersonnel there, and you could
actually gather up information.And if someone does, you know,
rebook a room or wanted you tolater check out, you can get all
that information flowingthrough. The whole dish of
(20:43):
warehouse that we are at themoment is still in space like
Matillion. So, yeah, that wouldbe, very useful and rich source
of information, but we haven'tquite decided yet what kind of
information that we wanna pullfrom there.
So we're still working on thatone a bit. There's a lot of
marketing information in Brazethat we wanna connect, and there
(21:04):
are also a lot of we're buildingup GDP systems now and
everything. So there yeah. I Idon't really see a limit to
this. We just haven't made thefull road map yet.
To be honest, it's gone fasterthan I thought it would, and I'm
quite an impatient person. So Iusually push limits a lot, but,
yeah, I've been taken bysurprise here. We need to speed
up the road map a bit. Yeah.It's not really my doing.
(21:26):
It's just definitely the teamsthat have been working on it.
They've been great, and they'vebeen I think what's really cool
is that they've been acombination of, people that came
from hotels into the technologydepartment with a very good view
on how do you run a hotel, whatare actually our challenges,
with the engineers that can, youknow, build solutions? And I
think that is actually quiteunique in our tech team that we
(21:49):
have chosen to have a variety ofpeople from hotel and engineer
business in the tech team. We'vealso chosen very carefully to
have some people that have, youknow they've they've never gone
to technical schools orengineering courses. They just
train themselves, combine themwith all the sort of, you know,
structured engineers that havethought that this is the only
(22:09):
way to think so that we can mixall these competencies and
energies together.
And I think that's what makes usable to move this fast is that
we're not stuck on thismythology or this mythology or
only that. We are seeing itacross, and I yeah. Basically, I
think that's where the magichappens.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
So I wanna pivot to cyber. I know it's a huge top of
mind for hoteliers everywhere.The good news since COVID is
that the industry has come along way. And from a digital
transformation perspective,hotels are operating more
efficiently than ever. RevPARsare through their roof, so all
good stuff.
But with that comes a big loopfor hackers. What are the
biggest shifts been from whatyou've seen from when you
(22:47):
started to now in terms ofcybersecurity, cyber threats,
the changing nature of thosethreats? What are your biggest
learnings from a cybersecurityperspective in your last 4 or 5
years at the business?
Speaker 4 (22:59):
I think one of my main learnings is basically that
it's impossible to protectyourself fully. So what you need
to do is to prepare yourself forwhat will happen, not if, but
when we get in fact. I thinkthat's huge learning, and then
we have to stop pretending thatit won't happen to us and that
we can protect ourselves.Obviously, with the introduction
(23:20):
of Gen AI, it's written at aspeed that is just, you know,
kinda hard to understand, whichmeans that the hackers have
field days every day. They canwrite so much code, and even we
can become, you know, malhackers by writing code wrongly
as well.
So I think to train people oncode and how to recognize
irregularities has become veryimportant. Monitoring
(23:42):
irregularities has become veryimportant. There's obviously all
the basic stuff with the try toshield yourself and all the good
old firewalls are still there,but monitoring a lot of data and
and the regularities are bigger.Training yourself because scam
is everywhere. Luckily I'm notgonna say luckily because it's
(24:04):
not a good thing, but, I mean,everyone else is also doing
that.
The banks are training peoplebecause you get a lot of scam
from banks and fake phone calls,and you get it from all over the
place. So I think, basically, wehave to work together as a a
society and together with thegovernance involvement in
different countries to figureout how to protect ourselves. So
(24:25):
it's not a tech problem anymore,and it's not a business problem.
It's a problem for all of us.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
What's next for strawberry? Where do you see the
next 5, 7 years of digitaltransformation? Obviously,
you're building a lot of gen AIcapabilities on top of these
systems. Are there any otherareas of focus or some of those
2030 priorities where technologyyou think will play a key role
that we haven't talked aboutyet?
Speaker 4 (24:51):
I think what will be most insightful apart from that
is definitely how we work withinsights. And and to me, AI is
part of working with insightsand making good decisions or
making efficient decisions. ButI think that all the insight
that we will now gather and wecan also, you know, put on top
of the loyalty programs and thecorporate deals that we have to
(25:13):
continue to expand our universeso that we can add partners and
services that will make us yoursort of your chosen chosen
friend for not only a hotel roomor that spa, but a lot of other
more like our chosen your chosenexperience partner. I think that
is where the technology willhelp us basically getting
(25:33):
insights and then actually, youknow, making it easy to connect
to these different partners. Andthen I actually think there's a
lot still to be done in supplychain in hospitality.
Maybe that is my retail heartspeaking, but I sort of really
wanna get into that. And at thatpoint, I think that what used to
be sort of, you know, hypesaround blockchain and everything
(25:55):
that is sort of, you know,hasn't really gone anywhere. I
think if we talk about logisticsand actually chain between
partners and ourselves,blockchain is very relevant. It
might have been a high for allour customers. We had to go, you
know, looking on blockchain andall of that.
But when you talk about links oftechnology and then there's some
(26:16):
partners who are operatingtogether, I think that there's a
lot still on everything that hasto do with data architecture,
blockchain, and different waysof connecting together through
technology. I think that's goingto be super exciting.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
And when you say supply chain, you mean
purchasing of FF and E, likelinens and soaps and things like
that? Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
And food. Good god. I mean, we we have so much food
and drinks. You know, all thesupplies that come in and out of
the hotels a day, I think to bemore efficient on following that
chain, it's also one of theareas that we work mostly to be
more sustainable. And, you know,I mean, for a hospitality
company, we wanna work withsustainability in our own
(26:57):
business environment.
Not I mean, it's great to planttrees, not against that, but
where we can make a differenceis our own supply chain and the
buildings that we are actuallyhosting to make them energy
efficient. And we are veryinvolved in sustainability
chains, and also we really wannawork with that, and I think
that's to work then withtechnology and then tracking
(27:17):
supply chain and everything thatwe buy and how we, you know,
wash linens and how much food.We've done a lot about food
waste. I think we're reallyindustry pioneers in food waste,
Everything that we do in ourmenus around sustainable
sourcing and also presentingfood, I think there's still a
lot that we can do. But we'reproviding data, and we're
(27:39):
linking them together now.
You know, the big corporateclients are getting reports back
on their sustainability ratingwithin us. So together, we're
pushing and pulling each otherforward. So anything that we can
connect to data change. And,also, I think that with all the
regulations that are coming fromEU, for us especially, then on
being able to trace whereeverything comes from, how did
(28:01):
you buy, technology is reallythe only way to do that.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Are there specific technologies that are enabling
some of that food wasteanalysis, like menu
optimization? Is that mostlymenu? I think your POS or are
there other software?
Speaker 4 (28:14):
It's a lot of that extremely new, but, obviously,
it's also the whole story, youknow, the insights and the data
warehouse and everything that wehave in our data platforms then.
And there will be a lot ofinformation coming from the
customer data platform that weare currently implementing as
well. So I don't think there's,like, one answer to it. I think
that we will have to combinedata. And, again, I think them
(28:34):
combining all of thistransactional data and facts
with the soft data that you getfrom the Aeroskout will maybe be
a key to cross the insights andget real insights and sense
check if what we're doing ismaking any sense and has an
effect at all.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
There's one question I always ask at the end of these
interviews. I love to know, isthere something where you feel
like the industry has it allwrong? Or is there anything that
you kind of look right andyou're like, how do people not
realize this?
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Actually, I think a lot of companies are still too
idealistically focused oncustomer journey. It's basically
of course, it is one of them itmight be the key thing in
everything that we do. But I'veseen this is not only
hospitality press. It's alsoretail. We wanna get things
personalized to a level that Ithink that, to me as a customer,
(29:25):
really isn't interesting.
Like, if you wanna customizeyour shower curtain or customize
my door, customize my bed, Ithink that we're putting too
much effort into customizingthings that are not really what
makes a difference when you do abooking or when you buy
something instead of focusing onjust removing pain points. So I
think that's a general thingthat has come with this
(29:47):
conversation in ecommerce. Andjust because we can do
something, we wanna do it, thenwe sometimes forget that this is
not really what's important tothe customer. It's just a lot of
money to get very specializedinto an area that will really
make a difference, and thenmaybe we forget the basic things
that mean something to me when Icome to Deontal. And I think,
(30:10):
for me, at least, I mean,there's nothing any technical
system or solution could make upfor it if the staff weren't warm
and welcoming.
So I think we forget sometimesto cater for our employees so
that they can be our primarysource of customer service, and
that is human to human,basically. So for me, my mantra
(30:32):
is is not to make the guestjourney great with the digital
tools, but the more I can makethe people that work there great
with digital tools, I think thatis maybe the technology's most
important contribution to theguest journey is that we secure
the human interactions and thatthey are good.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Well, Carry
Speaker 3 (30:52):
on it. This has been a great episode. Thank you so
much for coming on the showtoday.
Speaker 4 (30:56):
Thank you so much, Jordan.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
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
(31:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Do you
Speaker 2 (31:31):
know a hotelier who would be great to feature on
this show, or do you think thatyour story would bring a lot of
value to our audience? Reach outto me directly on LinkedIn by
searching for Jordan Hollander.For more episodes like this,
follow Hotel Tech Insider on allmajor streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple Music.
And then maybe they leave or they shift roles, and
there are new people to trainand train and train. It's an
analyst job. So what they'vedone is that they've built, on
top of Gemini Flash from Google,they built our own generative AI
bot.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider,
a show about the future ofhotels and the technology that
powers them. Today on the show,we're joined by Carrie Anna
Fisbick, senior vice presidentof technology at Strawberry, one
of Europe's largest hotelcompanies. In this conversation,
we dive into Strawberry'sdigital transformation journey,
the state of cybersecurity inhotels, and some fascinating
(00:36):
real world applications ofgenerative AI. Carrieanna also
brings some really compellingcontrarian insights to the
conversation, Like why hotelsneed to focus on staff before
guests and when it's actuallybeneficial to make decisions
based on feeling intuition evenin a data driven world.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Carrieanna, thanks so much for coming on the show
today.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Thank you, Jordan. Nice to be here.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I'd love to start by talking about maybe just give us
a quick background on you, yourbackground in the hotel industry
and the technology space, kindof how those things came
together for you.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Alright. My background is actually mostly
from art, so it's not from myneither hospitality or
technology. So it was kind of anaccident that I stumbled into
technology. Basically,recognizing that there was a
huge potential in makinganything really more efficient
or more innovative, working withnew developments by working with
(01:26):
technology. So my interest sortof came from there, some
curiosity in how to make thingsback.
And then around four and a halfyears ago, I shifted from
fashion, retail that I've beendoing for about 10 years, and
over to hospitality. Timing waspretty terrible because it was
passed to March 2020. I camefrom the safe spot of fashion
retail world straight into thecorona of, the hospitality
(01:49):
industry. Quite rough. Had sortof, you know, start with just
stopping everything that we weredoing and revisiting everything
and what could we actually do inthe time of, complete, well,
lockdown.
Having said that, it's been veryuseful when you look at how you
very, very quickly figure outwhat is actually important and
what's not. So rough butefficient start in hospitality
(02:12):
around four and a half yearsago.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
And I know we already had Spen on the show. Would you
remind our audience the breadthand depth of the strawberry
portfolio, the composition, thehotel property types and
locations?
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Definitely. We are one of the largest hotel or
hospitality providers in theNordics. And part of our
strategy is actually to move outof just being a hospitality
provider to an experiencedprovider. Today, we have around
250 hotels across Sweden,Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and a
(02:46):
couple of other places as well.We have some hotels.
So we operate in the Nordicswith a variety of high brands
and a new one coming in May nextyear. And then we also have
around 50 independent hotels.They're more like spa resort
hotels that sort of have theirown brand in themselves. So we
(03:06):
do multi branding. That's partof our strategy that we want to
be ourselves to be independentand offer different experiences
for both corporate travelers andleisure travelers so that you
can basically, you should beable to find anything that you
want today with us, whetherit's, you know, a cheap budget
hotel for young travelers or ifyou wanna go to a luxury spa
(03:28):
resort hotel with a lovelylittle restaurant and get a
facial treatment as well.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
And when you came into the business in 2020, how
would you describe what you cameinto from in terms of the
maturity of digitaltransformation at Strawberry,
and how has that digitaltransformation journey evolved
to today?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Great. It's an interesting question, Joan,
because it it was a strange mix.Of being a bit surprised that
it's something that I thoughtwould be more digital mature and
at the same time, reallyimpressed at some of the things
that Strawberry had done as arebel in the industry for the
digital guest journey. So Ithink on a very general basis, I
think that the hospitalityindustry has, for years, maybe
(04:11):
been a bit behind ondigitalization in general. And I
think there are quite logicalreasons for that because you
work in a very physicalenvironment.
We deal with people every day.You have people in your house,
your or everything that is sortof it's not as easily
transferred to ecommerce, likeretail, which is very easily
transferred. And also retail hasa very, you know, strict value
(04:34):
chain with logistics andproduction and all of that. So I
think that strawberriessurprised me by a lot of the
cool, you know, like, mobilekeys that we have and different
solutions for app and web thatthey built that was really cool
on the digital journey, reallybold me. And at the same time,
there was a lot of things thatwe needed to work with on more
ground level to get, you know,data flow and integrations and
(04:57):
master data quality and trackingof your purchase orders and
stuff like that that I would dosee from retail, and retail have
come far along with that no onein the hotel industry was
staying.
So I think, on my part, I veryquickly find that a lot of the
sort of hotel technologyconferences didn't really give
me a lot because they werebasically focused on a lot of
(05:21):
things that I knew aboutalready. So what's important, I
think, for us was to them sortof, you know, look a bit broader
out in the market to otherindustries and what we could
learn from them.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
So you guys have thousands of employees, hundreds
of hotels. How do you guysprioritize and say, okay. This
is our list of things that haveto be digitized or moved into a
technological process that ismanual today. Is that coming
from the hotels reporting up toyou? How does the organizational
hierarchy sit so that you canbubble up those ideas and then
(05:53):
prioritize them as a team?
Speaker 1 (05:55):
What is quite unique with Strawberry is that we wanna
be like a rebel in the industry.So a lot of other organizations
have very strict processes forhow they deal with the
innovation and then prioritize,while we have a more
unstructured process for that.We have, like we work a bit with
OKRs, basically, that we wannahave these goals and solidarity
for Grace. We have we wanna havethese many hotels. We wanna have
(06:18):
these many members.
And then there are differentbusiness units working on the
business goals and how to getthere. And then we try from tech
to support them as best we can.Sometimes the idea will come
from a business unit. Sometimesit will come from 1 employee in
the hotel. Sometimes the techdepartment will come with
something.
And then we try, obviously, likeall other industries, to find
(06:40):
the best business cases to workwith the most. But I think on
the tech part, we prioritizedlately a lot of the good old
cloud shift to getting rid ofold on prem technology that
basically gives where thedatabase structure are so so old
that you can't really use themfor anything new and fun. And so
(07:01):
we prioritized that a lot overthe last 18 months, and I think
that is giving us a lot of theresults that we're now seeing in
form of pricing strategies, howto work with the with revenue
and new revenue items anddynamic yielding and everything
that we do towards guests andalso are able to connect all the
(07:21):
new partners that we wanna workwith. We try to identify when
you go traveling, either at thecorporate or a lesser guest,
what are the most importantthings for you when you go
there? What partners can weoffer you good deals on?
And I think, basically, thatthose are sort of we try to
prioritize by finding goodbusiness areas, but we also
like, you know, to try and fail.So sometimes it's not maybe the
(07:44):
main thought through idea, butsomething that everyone has a
lot of energy around. And then,you know, if people have a lot
of energy around something, thatusually means it might get you
very, very much further than abusiness case that no one really
wants to work with. So we try todo a middle of that as well so
that we let people in thecompany be a part of the
innovation and follow gutfeeling as well as numbers.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Are there any specific projects that the team
is really excited about rightnow?
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Definitely. On the commercial side, we're launching
a new partnership with aNorwegian air company. So we are
together building a company thatwe own based on us to join all
our member points in oneprogram. So, basically, the new
company called Spem, they willconsolidate the points that you
(08:33):
earn as a member in Strawberryor in Norwegian Air. So you
have, like, a digital currencythat you can spend, and that's
why we call it Spem because thatmeans spend, across our
different hotels and airlinecompanies.
And we're gonna onboard morepartners for that as well, and
they're launching on the 19thNovember. So not very far away.
(08:54):
So when the, you know, the sortof, you know, thrilling loss,
the test stages whereeverything's probably seems
impossible, but you solve itanyway. We're very excited about
that. So a lot of the teams areworking on that based on loyalty
strategy, partner offerings,building technology, analyzing
data, training our hotel staffin the new loyalty program.
(09:16):
Lot a lot of excitement aroundthat one. And then we're still
excited about, you know I knowyou have Ben on the podcast
earlier, and he spoke about allthese systems that we had rolled
out. We're still very excitedabout that, actually. So we're
tweaking all the, you know, howcan we do this a bit
differently? How we can weconnect this data a bit more?
What can we learn in how wewanna do men's geoengineering
(09:37):
out of the restaurants? Can wetweak that a bit more there?
Reception role, how can that besmarter? Still a lot of work
around that. It's great to seethat the things that you've
implemented actually have animpact.
And then we have another teamthat has been working sort of in
the background, and everyoneelse has been rolling out all
these new systems with buildingour own generative AI bots, and
(10:00):
we built it initially for ouremployees. You know, we have
around 20,000 employeescurrently in the company, and we
have a turnover out of the inhospitality, and you probably
know this. The turnover out onthe hotels is quite high,
anything from 30 to 50%sometimes. We have a lot of
people that need to be onboardedand a lot of people to be off
(10:21):
boarded or retrained or movingaround departments and
everything. And that's justobviously a huge logistical
operation to train them and getthem to understand your business
or hotel.
How do you do this? How is thisroutine working? What do I say
when this gets asked about that?Everything from where is the
parking to how do I do a refundif someone has paid me the wrong
(10:41):
card, or how do I actually helpsomeone that wants to find a
hairdresser? It could beanything.
Right? And you want youremployees to be on top of that,
everything that the customer isasking them for help about,
which means that basically overyears, you've been building, you
know, manuals to be out of yourhouse, training them, training
them, training them. And thenmaybe they leave or they shift
(11:03):
roles, and there are new peopleto train and train and train.
It's an analyst job. You know?
So what they've done is thatthey've built, on top of Gemini
Flash from Google, they builtour own generative AI bot that
has been secretly learning inthe background for a year now.
They collected the lang chain ontop of several of our systems,
(11:25):
basically. We picked those thatwe thought would be the most
useful, obviously, our GoogleWorkspace and everything that is
in there. And then some of thespecific systems, 1 by 1,
connect to them to that, allvery secure. We we're not
releasing any information thatwe don't want to, but we also
connect to the bot to the thegeneral worldwide Internet so
that basically now our employeescan ask our little bot, which is
(11:48):
called Scout, a little helper,about pretty much anything that
from how's the better going tobe tomorrow to how do I change
the booking in the small system,what kind of menu will our
restaurants have tomorrow, Whereis nearest neighbors?
Anything that they need to know,they can ask, and it's just so
much more efficient way to toshare information. We're super,
(12:11):
super excited about that.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
How did that process work as you guys are rolling out
the LLM Bot Scout? Is there,like, a digital master manual to
everything at the company, orwhere does that data and content
sit today?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
It's a variety of things. I mean, we have an LMS,
obviously, with trainings sothat we release to be a 1,000
headquarter employees. And wehave Google Workspace, so there
are a lot of Google sites withinformation. Then there are all
the colleagues out there thatthey ask every day about how to
do things. Then we have digitaltrainings.
(12:47):
We have, weekly webinars. We'vehad a lot of classroom trainings
before we changed the techstack. We actually had to go out
there and do classroom training,which is also a huge cost, you
know, travel wise and timeconsuming. So I think there's
not, like, one answer to how wedid that, but I think that
across all the departments thatare working on getting
(13:08):
information out to themselves,there's so many hours and so
much documentation that is builtbut never read, never understood
because nobody likes to read amanual. We all hate that.
Nobody even reads the IKEAmanual. You know? That's why
they made it all into picturesbecause, hopefully, someone will
at least wanna look at it andmaybe understand. So by
(13:29):
introducing a Scout now and thistechnology that combines all
these various types and systemand information, And instead of
sitting there reading themanual, or even for the guests,
because we're also connectingthis to the website and for our
guests, you can just ask aboutthe exact thing that you're
wondering about and not navigatefor ages to find information.
(13:51):
And I think it's really, reallygoing to revolutionize how our
employees are trained, whatinformation they have, how they
can help our guests, and alsohow our guests are able to
interact with us.
And then we connect all thatdata, you know, and then when we
see what are the guests actuallyasking about, what are we
training the employees around,what are we offering them, what
(14:11):
do we see the guests wanna buyor find, what partnership should
we have. It's like an ocean ofinformation that we haven't had
access to before. So I thinkit's one of the coolest data and
insight projects that we areactually in the midst of.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
So the hotel employees, they access this
through, like, a web portal thathas, like, a chat gpt vibe.
Well, obviously, it's on Google,so the Gemini version. But
there's, like, an interfacewhere they can query all these
different disparate datasets andpieces of content?
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Actually, what we've done, and I think that is also
part of that what the success isbuilt into Google Workspace. So
it's like, you know, where youcan chat with all your
colleagues when you're in GoogleWorkspace. Like, I can send a
chat to Jordan or I can send achat to Sun. Scout is one of the
chatbots in there, so you canchat with Scout. So you can just
pin it in your your mail whereyou are on your phone or in your
(15:05):
computer or in your pad.
Wherever you go, basically, youhave your Gmail accounts
available. So that means you canuse it anywhere on the bus on
the way to work or in thereception. We're also building
it into the employee portal, ofcourse, so that we have it extra
available for prompts and backoffice staff that are dealing
(15:26):
with questions from the guestsevery day. And we don't want
them, you know, standing ontheir mobile and looking weird
when the guests arrive. We wantit to be easily accessible for
them.
So we're doing a bit of base,but, the fact that it's always
winchy means that it's kindalike any other very more
commercial chatbot there whenyou need it wherever you are.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
And how do the guests interact with it? Because,
presumably, they're not in theGoogle Workspace like Google
Cloud.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
No. They're not. No. They are interacting on it on
our website for the moment. Thisis quite new.
We only have 2 hotels up at themoment, but it's speeding up
quite fast now rolling it out.But we just wanna, you know,
make sure that we reallyunderstand it and how it works
and get rid of all the bugs andthe things that we thought would
be great that show up that theyaren't. So at the moment, it's
(16:14):
more like an intelligentcustomer service agent at the
website, and we're stilltraining and learning. So that's
how they interact at the moment.In the future, I don't really
know.
We might release it, obviously,for members in the app. Maybe
we'll connect to the loyaltysystem in different ways.
There's just an incredibleamount of possibilities. And I
also think, the subject thatyou've touched upon before on
(16:37):
how do we innovate, how do weprioritize what to do, this
actually gives us real timeinformation about IDs from
employees as well. So we canreally innovate based on input
from any 20,000 or any customerthat is interacting with us.
We can get that informationinstead of, you know, maybe
someone tried to write an emailand it didn't get through you,
(16:59):
or you didn't have time to readit, or your boss wouldn't listen
to your idea. It's obviously notgonna solve all the problems in
the entire world, but it itreally gives us a whole new
perspective on how to act withinformation that is structured
in another way than what it isin the page we're at, basically.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Are there certain milestones on the guest side of
the chatbot that you guys arelooking for before you roll it
out? Or how do you think aboutthe staging? Because, like, I
think about when we send anemail to our audience of, like,
70,000, I'm about to press sendon that email. It's already been
written and edited, but I haveto click send and take
ownership. It's such a scarymoment, and Mailchimp has that,
(17:36):
like, sweaty monkey finger.
I can't imagine rolling out anew tool to 20,000 employees,
let alone got 100 of 1,000 or1,000,000 of guests. What does
that process look like fromwhere you guys are today of
piloting 2 hotels with the guestfacing to all of your
properties?
Speaker 1 (17:52):
As a company, we like to be a bit rebellious. We like
to go in a different directionthan a lot of others do. If we
go big and we fail, at least,and we tried, we will probably
learn from it. So we're not thatscared. We haven't put up a lot
of milestones, like we have todo this or that.
We basically just wanna train ita bit more to make sure that the
(18:14):
information that is scraped cananswer as many questions as
possible. But I think that whatwe're learning already from the
pilot is that it's so easy forcustomers to understand and
interact that there's really norisk in just deploying it in
several cells. Obviously, wehave to make sure that we can
scale it and all of the techystuff behind. But apart from
(18:35):
that, I think that we're gonnafirst thing, now we're obviously
going to release the employeebooks to charge 20,000 employees
and make sure that we do thatvery well before Christmas, and
then we'll probably do a coupleof more hotels. I don't know if
we'll do, like, up until 20 8,30 exactly where we'll go with
them versus another of scouts.
That is not really called scoutsexternally. That's just internal
(18:57):
that we call it scouts. Thehotels will have to get it you
know, name it their little boxso it fits their brand and
culture. But I think thatwithin, you know, 4 to 6 months
is probably gonna be rolled outeverywhere that we want it to
and all the channels that wewant it to and maybe some that I
haven't thought about today. Andif I'm wrong, I'm struggling to
figure out how to do it and thenrelease it a bit later.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
And what other data architecture systems are
enabling this LLM? I know youmentioned that you guys use
Snowflake, and you haveSalesforce from your guest side.
Can you talk a little bit abouthow the LOM might interact with
those tools, or is it not quitethere yet? It's more interacting
with, like, your general contentabout the hotel business and
then plugging in thepersonalized data in the future?
Speaker 1 (19:40):
It's a bit of both. Obviously, we started with all
the internal stuff that we need,that we could connect to, and
and that we where we can, youknow, control the information
very well. And that is still atthe core of the system. But we
are planning to connect it,definitely to sales, first, for
the corporate market to connectall that data into theirs
because and there's severalreasons for that. A lot of them
(20:02):
are basically because all thehotels need information about
the corporate deals when theyare doing bookings directly to
the hotels.
I mean, not all bookings gothrough web or through the sales
agents. A lot goes directly tothe hotel. So we're gonna do
that. We're obviously, like Isaid, we're in forms of booking
systems. It's gonna try toconnect it to the Vietnamese, me
and me, TriBe, everything thatgoes around there.
(20:22):
It's really exciting to try toconnect it also to Flex, keeping
that we are rolling out now asthe new housekeeping system and
connecting information there.Because, you know, you can do
talk to your housekeepingpersonnel there, and you could
actually gather up information.And if someone does, you know,
rebook a room or wanted you tolater check out, you can get all
that information flowingthrough. The whole dish of
(20:43):
warehouse that we are at themoment is still in space like
Matillion. So, yeah, that wouldbe, very useful and rich source
of information, but we haven'tquite decided yet what kind of
information that we wanna pullfrom there.
So we're still working on thatone a bit. There's a lot of
marketing information in Brazethat we wanna connect, and there
(21:04):
are also a lot of we're buildingup GDP systems now and
everything. So there yeah. I Idon't really see a limit to
this. We just haven't made thefull road map yet.
To be honest, it's gone fasterthan I thought it would, and I'm
quite an impatient person. So Iusually push limits a lot, but,
yeah, I've been taken bysurprise here. We need to speed
up the road map a bit. Yeah.It's not really my doing.
(21:26):
It's just definitely the teamsthat have been working on it.
They've been great, and they'vebeen I think what's really cool
is that they've been acombination of, people that came
from hotels into the technologydepartment with a very good view
on how do you run a hotel, whatare actually our challenges,
with the engineers that can, youknow, build solutions? And I
think that is actually quiteunique in our tech team that we
(21:49):
have chosen to have a variety ofpeople from hotel and engineer
business in the tech team. We'vealso chosen very carefully to
have some people that have, youknow they've they've never gone
to technical schools orengineering courses. They just
train themselves, combine themwith all the sort of, you know,
structured engineers that havethought that this is the only
(22:09):
way to think so that we can mixall these competencies and
energies together.
And I think that's what makes usable to move this fast is that
we're not stuck on thismythology or this mythology or
only that. We are seeing itacross, and I yeah. Basically, I
think that's where the magichappens.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
So I wanna pivot to cyber. I know it's a huge top of
mind for hoteliers everywhere.The good news since COVID is
that the industry has come along way. And from a digital
transformation perspective,hotels are operating more
efficiently than ever. RevPARsare through their roof, so all
good stuff.
But with that comes a big loopfor hackers. What are the
biggest shifts been from whatyou've seen from when you
(22:47):
started to now in terms ofcybersecurity, cyber threats,
the changing nature of thosethreats? What are your biggest
learnings from a cybersecurityperspective in your last 4 or 5
years at the business?
Speaker 4 (22:59):
I think one of my main learnings is basically that
it's impossible to protectyourself fully. So what you need
to do is to prepare yourself forwhat will happen, not if, but
when we get in fact. I thinkthat's huge learning, and then
we have to stop pretending thatit won't happen to us and that
we can protect ourselves.Obviously, with the introduction
(23:20):
of Gen AI, it's written at aspeed that is just, you know,
kinda hard to understand, whichmeans that the hackers have
field days every day. They canwrite so much code, and even we
can become, you know, malhackers by writing code wrongly
as well.
So I think to train people oncode and how to recognize
irregularities has become veryimportant. Monitoring
(23:42):
irregularities has become veryimportant. There's obviously all
the basic stuff with the try toshield yourself and all the good
old firewalls are still there,but monitoring a lot of data and
and the regularities are bigger.Training yourself because scam
is everywhere. Luckily I'm notgonna say luckily because it's
(24:04):
not a good thing, but, I mean,everyone else is also doing
that.
The banks are training peoplebecause you get a lot of scam
from banks and fake phone calls,and you get it from all over the
place. So I think, basically, wehave to work together as a a
society and together with thegovernance involvement in
different countries to figureout how to protect ourselves. So
(24:25):
it's not a tech problem anymore,and it's not a business problem.
It's a problem for all of us.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
What's next for strawberry? Where do you see the
next 5, 7 years of digitaltransformation? Obviously,
you're building a lot of gen AIcapabilities on top of these
systems. Are there any otherareas of focus or some of those
2030 priorities where technologyyou think will play a key role
that we haven't talked aboutyet?
Speaker 4 (24:51):
I think what will be most insightful apart from that
is definitely how we work withinsights. And and to me, AI is
part of working with insightsand making good decisions or
making efficient decisions. ButI think that all the insight
that we will now gather and wecan also, you know, put on top
of the loyalty programs and thecorporate deals that we have to
(25:13):
continue to expand our universeso that we can add partners and
services that will make us yoursort of your chosen chosen
friend for not only a hotel roomor that spa, but a lot of other
more like our chosen your chosenexperience partner. I think that
is where the technology willhelp us basically getting
(25:33):
insights and then actually, youknow, making it easy to connect
to these different partners. Andthen I actually think there's a
lot still to be done in supplychain in hospitality.
Maybe that is my retail heartspeaking, but I sort of really
wanna get into that. And at thatpoint, I think that what used to
be sort of, you know, hypesaround blockchain and everything
(25:55):
that is sort of, you know,hasn't really gone anywhere. I
think if we talk about logisticsand actually chain between
partners and ourselves,blockchain is very relevant. It
might have been a high for allour customers. We had to go, you
know, looking on blockchain andall of that.
But when you talk about links oftechnology and then there's some
(26:16):
partners who are operatingtogether, I think that there's a
lot still on everything that hasto do with data architecture,
blockchain, and different waysof connecting together through
technology. I think that's goingto be super exciting.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
And when you say supply chain, you mean
purchasing of FF and E, likelinens and soaps and things like
that? Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
And food. Good god. I mean, we we have so much food
and drinks. You know, all thesupplies that come in and out of
the hotels a day, I think to bemore efficient on following that
chain, it's also one of theareas that we work mostly to be
more sustainable. And, you know,I mean, for a hospitality
company, we wanna work withsustainability in our own
(26:57):
business environment.
Not I mean, it's great to planttrees, not against that, but
where we can make a differenceis our own supply chain and the
buildings that we are actuallyhosting to make them energy
efficient. And we are veryinvolved in sustainability
chains, and also we really wannawork with that, and I think
that's to work then withtechnology and then tracking
(27:17):
supply chain and everything thatwe buy and how we, you know,
wash linens and how much food.We've done a lot about food
waste. I think we're reallyindustry pioneers in food waste,
Everything that we do in ourmenus around sustainable
sourcing and also presentingfood, I think there's still a
lot that we can do. But we'reproviding data, and we're
(27:39):
linking them together now.
You know, the big corporateclients are getting reports back
on their sustainability ratingwithin us. So together, we're
pushing and pulling each otherforward. So anything that we can
connect to data change. And,also, I think that with all the
regulations that are coming fromEU, for us especially, then on
being able to trace whereeverything comes from, how did
(28:01):
you buy, technology is reallythe only way to do that.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Are there specific technologies that are enabling
some of that food wasteanalysis, like menu
optimization? Is that mostlymenu? I think your POS or are
there other software?
Speaker 4 (28:14):
It's a lot of that extremely new, but, obviously,
it's also the whole story, youknow, the insights and the data
warehouse and everything that wehave in our data platforms then.
And there will be a lot ofinformation coming from the
customer data platform that weare currently implementing as
well. So I don't think there's,like, one answer to it. I think
that we will have to combinedata. And, again, I think them
(28:34):
combining all of thistransactional data and facts
with the soft data that you getfrom the Aeroskout will maybe be
a key to cross the insights andget real insights and sense
check if what we're doing ismaking any sense and has an
effect at all.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
There's one question I always ask at the end of these
interviews. I love to know, isthere something where you feel
like the industry has it allwrong? Or is there anything that
you kind of look right andyou're like, how do people not
realize this?
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Actually, I think a lot of companies are still too
idealistically focused oncustomer journey. It's basically
of course, it is one of them itmight be the key thing in
everything that we do. But I'veseen this is not only
hospitality press. It's alsoretail. We wanna get things
personalized to a level that Ithink that, to me as a customer,
(29:25):
really isn't interesting.
Like, if you wanna customizeyour shower curtain or customize
my door, customize my bed, Ithink that we're putting too
much effort into customizingthings that are not really what
makes a difference when you do abooking or when you buy
something instead of focusing onjust removing pain points. So I
think that's a general thingthat has come with this
(29:47):
conversation in ecommerce. Andjust because we can do
something, we wanna do it, thenwe sometimes forget that this is
not really what's important tothe customer. It's just a lot of
money to get very specializedinto an area that will really
make a difference, and thenmaybe we forget the basic things
that mean something to me when Icome to Deontal. And I think,
(30:10):
for me, at least, I mean,there's nothing any technical
system or solution could make upfor it if the staff weren't warm
and welcoming.
So I think we forget sometimesto cater for our employees so
that they can be our primarysource of customer service, and
that is human to human,basically. So for me, my mantra
(30:32):
is is not to make the guestjourney great with the digital
tools, but the more I can makethe people that work there great
with digital tools, I think thatis maybe the technology's most
important contribution to theguest journey is that we secure
the human interactions and thatthey are good.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Well, Carry
Speaker 3 (30:52):
on it. This has been a great episode. Thank you so
much for coming on the showtoday.
Speaker 4 (30:56):
Thank you so much, Jordan.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
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
(31:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Do you
Speaker 2 (31:31):
know a hotelier who would be great to feature on
this show, or do you think thatyour story would bring a lot of
value to our audience? Reach outto me directly on LinkedIn by
searching for Jordan Hollander.For more episodes like this,
follow Hotel Tech Insider on allmajor streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple Music.
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