SmartHOTEL

Developing software isn’t a piece of cake. It’s a complicated process in which priorities are constantly changed. These changes can influence the focus, which could hamper the quality of development.  To master this process as a team and overcome this risk, we work with a proven and successful method: Scrum.

The goal of Scrum is to deliver a complete and finished product or “product-part” with the whole team within short timespans, also known as Sprints. This prevents the team from lingering around in an ever-growing list of unfinished projects.

Together as a team, we decide on the workload that can be deliver during a Sprint and define the tasks that need to be completed within it. This is probably the most exciting and fun part of scrum. After defining the tasks in the sprints, we play a game of “poker” and quantify the effort we estimate that is required for each task. Statistics from past Sprints assist us in this estimation process, which improve constantly as time goes on.

On a daily basis we discuss the workload that is to be handled today, scheduling appointments in case any assistance is required from each other, as well as the work that was done the previous day.

A scrum team is multidisciplinary and all members continuously look at our product from their own specialisations and views. This results in the best possible solution for the product or “product-part” as thoughts and opinions are provided during brainstorm sessions and meetings, in which all aspects of a product are taken into account.

Currently we have a scrum team consisting of 8 people;

3 back-end developers;

2 front-end developers;

1 technical tester;

1 UX designer;

and 1 scrum master.

In short; a highly driven team that constantly aims at pushing the product in assisting hotels in realizing “The ultimate Guest experience”.

Graag wil ik mij even voorstellen. Ik ben Monique Mobach en één van mijn rollen binnen SmartHOTEL is die van Personeel. Misschien wel de leukste rol die je kunt hebben, want zonder getalenteerde en gemotiveerde collega’s komt een organisatie niet verder. Ik probeer er onder andere voor te zorgen dat de Smarties (Smarthotel medewerkers) met plezier bij ons werken. Net als iedere andere medewerker van een organisatie gaat een Smartie elke dag naar zijn of haar werk toe. Maar wat maakt nu het verschil met gewoon naar je werk gaan, je werk doen, einde dag weer huiswaarts keren en ’s avonds op de bank te ploffen en denken… is het al bijna weekend? Of elke dag goed gemutst naar je werk toe en het stiekem jammer vinden dat je alweer moet stoppen… Oké, oké, dit laatste is weer het andere uiterste zal je denken.

Toch kan een werkplek dusdanig leuk en inspirerend zijn dat je inderdaad fluitend naar je werk toe gaat. Buiten het feit dat je een goed salaris hebt, werkzaamheden doet die uitdagend en leuk zijn is er tegenwoordig meer voor nodig om je thuis te voelen bij een organisatie. Zo kennen wij bij SmartHOTEL geen managers of bazen die jou vertellen wat je moet doen. Sinds kort werken wij op holacratische wijze, wat o.a betekent dat we binnen onze organisatie werken met verschillende rollen om ons doel “helping you to realize the ultimate guest experience te bereiken. Je bent hierin eigen baas over je eigen rollen waarin iedereen zijn of haar creativiteit en ondernemingsgeest geheel kan benutten zolang dit het doel van de organisatie verder brengt. (lees meer over holacracy: www.holacracy.org ). Je krijgt hiermee een bepaalde verantwoordelijkheid en beslissingsvrijheid die in veel organisaties ontbreekt.

Maar er is meer te vinden bij SmartHOTEL. Ik beschrijf graag een doorsnee dag voor je zodat je een beetje een beeld kunt vormen hoe het er bij ons aan toe gaat. Over inhoudelijk werk ga ik niet praten, want dat er hard gewerkt wordt om de hotelier te helpen, dat mag duidelijk zijn. In de ochtend word je bijvoorbeeld bij binnenkomst uitbundig begroet door de enthousiast kwispelende Fay, onze Smartdog. Mocht je toch nog met het verkeerde been uit bed zijn gestapt, dan krijgt zij het voor elkaar om je alsnog te laten glimlachen. Na de opstart van je pc ga je hard aan de slag. De developers halen een kop koffie alvorens ze hun dagelijkse stand up doen en de hotello’s onder ons nemen nog even de dingen door van de vorige dag. Een kort overlegje met een collega wordt hier regelmatig gedaan tijdens een potje pool of darten.

In my last blog I wrote about Revenue Management and how a combination of knowledge and technology can help hoteliers improve their revenues and bottom line numbers. Revenue Management is all about selling the right room, to the right guest, at the right moment, for the best price, through the right channel. In this blog I will focus on a trend that cannot be ignored when it comes to driving consumers to the right channel: Metasearch channeling the customer to the hotel’s direct channel.

Metasearch is a type of search engine that bases outcomes on a combination of results from other search engine databases. Popular Metasearch sites in the hospitality industry are Tripadvisor, Kayak, Google Hotel Finder and Trivago. All these sites source information from OTA’s and the hotels’ own website to display them in a clear overview to the consumer. While Google and Trivago use the price as the most important criteria, Tripadvisor assigns highest importance to review ranking.

Despite the fact that hoteliers cannot ignore the major OTA’s, throughout the past decade there is a major change occurring in the sales funnel. Hotels should conclude that the best channel to sell hotel inventory is the direct sales channel, being walk in, phone call, or directly booking on the hotel’s website. Selling rooms on OTA’s is expensive as high commissions are charged per booked room. Since a few years metasearch sites have started to gain popularity for both the hoteliers as the travelers. Metasearch sites improve the value proposition to the online travel consumer by adding more information in the search results (Hotel location, information, customer reviews, real time availability and rate comparison). The traveler benefits of a clear overview of room rates on various sites, including the brand.com site (the hotel’s own website with its booking engine). This drastically decreases the number of websites visited before making a purchase decision. For the hotelier key benefits of using Metasearch sites include the possibility to shift share from OTA’s to the direct online channel and apply dynamic price marketing (see Dynamic Rate Marketing).

Some interesting newer trends in this shift in the sales funnel are the fact that Booking.com acquired Buuteeq and rebranded this toBookingSuite.  OTA’s are increasingly aware that hoteliers are trying to promote the direct booking channel over the commission based OTA’s and we can therefore see that Booking.com is targeting hotels with a new product in order to keep strong market share in the online reservation segment (and pursue a commission based payment model). In this segment Booking.com will compete with other suppliers of Online Booking Engines such as many channel managers that already offer this as part of their product mix, but also companies such as Bookassist and HeBS Digital. The latter also provides consultancy and advise on how to setup campaigns.

At SmartHOTEL we are currently focusing on broadening our connectivity portfolio to interface with partners that offer an Online Booking Engine and with partners that offer services to setup campaigns by utilizing metasearch in the best way possible. A couple of Online Booking Engines and other partners that are currently connected to the SmartHOTEL switch are BookingSuite, Net Affinity, Hoteliers.com, myhotelshop.  We are also in the process of redesigning our own Online Booking Engine in order to maximize connectivity with several metasearch engines and allow hoteliers to up- and cross-sell during and after the booking process.

Revenue management is a practice known for several thousands of years. The application of this principle is acknowledged from the moment the first human beings started to trade goods for goods, and later for money. The understanding of how the variables between demand and supply influence a price that can be charged for a product or service has defined the laws of economics as we know them today.

In order to apply revenue management there must be 3 essential conditions: fixed amount of resources available for sale; resources to sell are very perishable; and, customers willing to pay a different price for using the same resources. The approach of revenue management in the digital age is born on 17 January 1985 when American Airlines launched its ‘Ultimate Super Saver’ fares in an effort to compete with the low cost carrier ‘PeopleExpress’. As defined by Xotels and many other experts we can set the following definition of revenue management in the hotel industry: “Selling the right room to the right client at the right moment at the rightprice on the right distribution channel”.

In the past decades revenue management has been widely embraced by the major hotel chains in the world. The bigger brands were quick to adopt the pricing and yielding strategies applied in the airline industry. In contrast, I noticed during my time as a consultant for Horwath HTL Cape Town in 2008 and 2009, that the small to medium sized properties (such as independently owned hotels, B&B’s, lodges…) usually did not apply revenue management. At most there was a rate alteration between high and low season. However, this initial step to differentiate a price depending on high or low demand is the most important step a hotelier needs to take, in order to further apply the principles of revenue management.  Being aware of the impact that the price difference has on sales of hotel rooms is key. Next to awareness, the two factors a hotelier should take into consideration in order to apply successful revenue management strategies are knowledge & technology.

At SmartHOTEL we are aiming to offer both knowledge and technology to the hotelier.

Knowledge is shared in the form of consultancy from our Sales & Support team, but also through a partnership with Hotelschool The Hague. With Hotelschool The Hague we offer an eLearning Revenue Management Course at significant discount to hotels. It is important for the independent hoteliers to understand the principles of revenue management and recognize how these can be applied in their unique situation. As stated in an article in Misset on 27.02.2015, Mr. Van der Rest (Prof. of Strategic Pricing & Revenue Management, HTH) and Ms. Lang (Consultant Revenue Mangement Solutions, KL Consulting) both confirm that revenue management in the independent small to medium hotels will have a direct impact on revenue (4 to 12 percent increase). Big Data, Marketing, Reputation Management together with the current  “Kinship Economy” and the ever growing need for individualizationare factors that should be taken into consideration when applying revenue management. We should also remember that with today’s information overload allowing us to access an infinite amount of data, we can apply revenue management in a different way: Start focusing on guests as individuals and ensure that the most profitable customer is offered a fine tuned stay through the hotel’s own sales channel. In the same edition of Misset we can read about an innovative approach that will bring hotels closer to guests in many ways, benefiting both parties: An app called Enjoya.

At SmartHOTEL we find that the independent hotelier does not have a lot of time and resources to spare to put in practice all aspects of revenue management. However a large amount of software providers are offering a wide scope of solutions which are available at reasonable price. SmartHOTEL is connecting the channel manager to revenue management systems such as IDEAS,Pricematch and RevparGuru. We are excited about increasing the portfolio of connected revenue management systems. At the same time we are investigating what useful features can be added to a channel manager or SmartPMS in order to integrate more revenue management tools.

According to the Dutch, a HOTELLO is a student or graduate from a Hotel Management School. A few examples of these institutions are: Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, Glion Institute of Higher Education, Les Roches International School of Hotel Management, Cornell University and Hotelschool The Hague.

The bachelor program of a Hotel Management School consists of a well-balanced curriculum including both theoretical and practical modules in combination with practical and management internships. Students are prepared for management positions in more than just hotels and hotel chains. As a matter of fact, a large number of HOTELLO’s end up in a vast array of other industries such as the banking sector.

A HOTELLO possesses many core competencies. The most important ones are a service oriented mind-set, a Yes I Can attitude, the capability to assimilate and effectively execute new tasks, a hands on approach, a high standard work ethic, profound communication skills and the ability to understand a customer. In addition I believe that most HOTELLO’s are very open minded, love new challenges and have a high degree of entrepreneurship and ownership. The only negative aspect I can actually think of is the fact that we are sometimes overconfident and think we know it all better than the rest. The latter is less of a problem when working in a group because we have learned to agree to disagree when the bigger picture benefits from quick decision making.

The above reasons were decisive when hiring HOTELLO’s at SmartHOTEL. We needed people who could understand the operational habits from our customers (the hotels) and assimilate different tasks necessary to raise SmartHOTEL products and services to a higher level. Their analytical skills helped to guide our development team by sharing experiences, showing how the systems are used and giving insight on how to improve the user interface.

I was actually the first HOTELLO to join the company, mainly to provide support for our largest customer (Oracle | MICROS) which I did for almost a year before taking on new tasks involving product management and business development. Less than 6 months later two other Hotelschool The Hague graduates were hired: Quinten and Victor. Nowadays we have a total of 8 HOTELLO’s working at our office (In order of appearance: Barbara from Stenden Hotelschool Leeuwarden; Derreck, Elias and Myrthe fromHotelschool The Hague; and last but definitely not least Niels from De Rooi Pannen). All of them started as a support consultant but have now joined either Quality & Knowledge or Sales, Support & Social Media Teams. One of our developers, Gregory (Solutions Architect), has also attended a Hotel Management School at Cambridge International College. All in all nearly half our company consists of HOTELLO’s.