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Transcript

Introduction to hotel data
 
Hi, everyone. Matt talks this week again at you. And I want to talk about data. And it it always tunes a lot of people out when you say, oh, let's talk about data. But I actually think, it's really powerful in the way that we can drive our business but also your business forward. But, I often use data to underline why we're making certain decisions in the business and use some examples to make it come to life. And that's what I wanted to do with you today.
 
One of my pain points when I worked at, in hotels way before ҹɫֱ²¥ was that the legacy systems that I used to work with didn't have great exports of data, but I had questions. I had endless amount of questions. I was always like, but why? Why?
 
And and often the humans couldn't answer some of the questions that I had. You know, I I'd be like, where are customers coming from and why are they booking from those channels? And and why is the average rate from that customer higher than that customer? And you couldn't drill down beyond one single layer of data, and today you can.
 
Today, we've got five and a half thousand hotels live on ҹɫֱ²¥ in different countries. And because we're in a cloud system, all of the data points are connected. And it becomes so powerful to start to dig in and ask five why questions to see if we can answer some of these commonly known topics and questions that we've had and actually see if we've got answers to them, and we do today.
 
And most of the data that we as an industry, as hospitality, talk about is RevPAR, revenue per available room. And that seems to be the only metric that universally is shared across the industry, but it doesn't tell a full picture. It tells just one of the many metrics that says whether you run a good business.
 
So I wanted to share some of the amazing data that we've got access to, and we're using this to obviously create different case studies and and and give regions access to more of it. But that's what I'll talk through today, some of the data that excites me, that hopefully excites you through this presentation.
 
So I'm going to briefly talk about regional data because it is important to go region by region. Then I'm going to quickly look at that occupancy and RevPAR data because whilst I I I talk about it being a singular metric, it is still an important metric that we we look at. But I also want to look at what, are we seeing in terms of online check-in and upsell and kiosk adoption.
 
Upsell, like, ancillary products that we're selling in hotels, how how are we seeing the success of those and diversifying beyond hotel rooms? And then lastly, I'll give you a quick summary of all of the things I've gone through because I'll I'll talk through quite some data points, and I want to make sure that the most important messages land really well.
 
First of all, the data that I'm showing you, we actually break this down per region because we do see significant changes, region by region. So our major regions are the US and Canada, UK and Ireland. We've got France. We've got the DACH region.
 
So that's that's Germany, Austria, and and Switzerland. And we've got the Benelux region that we've produced custom data snaps for. And if you scan that QR code, so you can just pause me, and you can just scan that QR code. You can download specific data sets for your region because, contextualizing data is really important because what works in the BENELUX might not be the same for a German hotel, for example, and I think it is important that you compare apples to apples.

Chapter
Occupancy and RevPAR data
 
So let's look at occupancy. And what we did for this dataset because we're growing as a company incredibly fast. In the last year, we've onboarded over close to two thousand hotels. So, we're shifting into new markets. We're growing faster, for example, in the US. So I wanted to remove the bias from the data. So what we did is for this dataset, let's just take hotels that were live at the start of twenty twenty three and not include any hotels, from that point onwards so that we have a really like for like data sets.
 
And we looked at occupancy. And you can see that, actually, those hotels that we've onboarded before twenty twenty three, are seeing, a better occupancy in twenty twenty four, which is encouraging. It's great to see that those hotels are starting to really leverage the system to drive better optimization of their rooms in some way.
 
However, when you compare that increased occupancy to their RevPAR, revenue per available room being the blend of occupancy and and average rates, you see an adverse effect. So you see that in twenty twenty four, in the last few weeks, it has dipped below last year. So whereas at the start of the year, it started strong. So it started ahead, Then you see it's kind of in line. Then you got that big big spike in August, and that's caused by the Olympics because we've got lots of hotels in Paris that have done really well for those couple of weeks that are there. But now in recent weeks, we see the RevPAR dip below even though the occupancy is ahead. And that means that the dip in rates is significant that we're seeing in hotels, and that's not a good trend.
 
Of course, we want to make sure that we drive great occupancy.
 
And more guests in hotel means you can drive more ancillary revenue because they're they're more mouths to feed effectively.
 
And hopefully, hotels are good at driving ancillary revenue. But if you were a pure bed factory, and you look purely at RevPAR, then you're seeing adverse effects this year because you're seeing that starting to dip below. And I'm hoping that as we head into the the the quieter season, which is the the the October, November kind of months, that we will continue to hold on to average rates and keep driving that average rate. A really interesting metric that I'd love to start sharing some data on is also TRevPAR, which is total revenue per available room. So it wouldn't just look at revenue per available room. It would actually take all revenue of the hotel, including ancillary, and then compare that to the room because that will show that we're actually great at getting more guests in who are now spending money in the restaurants instead of on their room rates.
 
And I'm hoping that for the next time that I'll talk data, we'll have that metric for you as well.
 
Here,

Chapter
Direct bookings data
 
we looked at that same data set again, only hotels that have onboarded before twenty twenty three. What we're seeing through the channel manager and the channel manager is where most of your OTA bookings are coming through. And what we've seen is a worsening of the total value, per night. So this is not the average rates. This is a total booking value, per night.
 
And we've seen in that those hotels that there has been a decrease of six euros per for the average value that is coming through these channels.
 
If you look at the ҹɫֱ²¥ booking engine, which most hotels use, you actually see a different trend. So whilst channel managers are seeing a decrease of the total booking value, the booking engine is seeing an increase. So they've gone from a significantly higher rates. And, you know, the difference with the channel managers often, when you get your net rates from Expedia through.
 
That's why that explains some of that value difference because that is commission that is not necessarily calculated here. So don't look at the, the absolute values, but look at the change that's happened here. Hotels that leverage the ҹɫֱ²¥ booking engine in the right way have seen an increase, like a significant increase, year on year, in performance. And this is also, you know, one hotelier is being smart about how they drive bookings into their booking engine, but also, you know, the booking engine team really investing into this product to make it convert better, sell more products to, sell higher category rooms as well.
 
And and that's really one of the focuses that we've had. So it's really encouraging to see that those hotels that focus on driving direct business are now thriving.
 
And some of my earlier Matt talks so I think, I've done a session on building a website. I've done a session on driving performance of your booking engine. Some of these pieces will be relevant for those hotels that have done a great job. And if we look at some of those hotels, there's I I took three, hotels that we've done case studies with where we said, okay.
 
Let's just look at what good looks like. What what should hotels be doing? Because whilst we're seeing really great numbers here, you got Big Mama who's seen a forty percent increase in direct bookings in Berlin. We see the the conversion rate of Maison Juste, of fourteen point seven.
 
Those are industry leading terms, and it's because they really have a strategy towards driving direct bookings and making sure that their website is optimized to capture those bookings, that's what you should take an example on. And that's why these benchmark reports for your region are really important because you should be doing better than the average. The average is the average. It's you know, if you're a great technological advanced hotel, you should not aspire to be average.
 
You should aspire to be better than the average. So knowing where the average lies, from those data snaps is really relevant to helping drive some of your ecommerce strategy. And driving direct bookings is your cheapest channel, and, you know, your website is your best salesperson, your your your most valuable salesperson that you should be investing in. And it is really good to look at some of these great case studies that we have.
 
Just go and have a look at their website. What are they doing after you watch the video about building websites and seeing, are you recognizing some of the elements of what I said, in that earlier video compared to what they're doing on their websites that's now driving some of these impacts that you're seeing here in the results.

Chapter
Online check in and upsells
 
I want to talk about online check-in. So for us, we, we think online check-in is a native feature that any PMS today should have.
 
So we built it because we build our this system inside the cloud, cloud native. We're like, well, all of our guests have access to this database through their smartphone. And if we build a great mobile solution, every single hotel should have an online check-in. So we just email these customers at the time of booking and then two days before arrival saying, you know, we've seen you've not checked online yet. Go through this process.
 
And then we can even, enable an SMS that that drives further engagement with the online check-in. We're seeing one in eight guests today checking in online, which is a a good number, but it's not great.
 
What's interesting in that number is if you just take the OTA, so your booking.coms and Expedia, it's one in ten guests that we're able to get through, to check-in online because what they've done is that they've anonymized these email addresses. So we are emailing those email addresses and the email comes through, but they often will just lower engagements on those emails or the URL doesn't work and that, you know, a user has to copy paste it. So engagement from OTA, or OTA bookings is really low to get them to engage with Digital Journey.
 
 When we see hotels switching on SMS because SMS can then message customers to do the check-in twenty four hours before arrival, that's having a significant drive to optimize.
 
And one of the things we do during online check-in is we say, hey. We recognize we don't have your correct email address. We see this this OTA email address. Please give us your correct email address so that we can connect with you, throughout your journey.
 
 It's one in ten for OTAs.
 
If you look at the ҹɫֱ²¥ booking engine, we're seeing a one in three of guests checking online. So the more guests that you're natively getting through the reservation flow, they will all embrace the rest of that digital journey. And one in three of those guests will then check themselves in online and will not have to land at your reception desk and create manual work.
 
Really driving direct bookings, again, leads to further engagement with the digital journey down this downstream.
 
We've added in upsells into the online check-in. So as part of the online check-in, we're saying, hey. Give us your passport details that we need for the registration card. Let's let's take your credit card so that we don't have to ask you for that again.
 
But we also by the way, we did we saw you don't have breakfast included. Would you like to include breakfast? Or do you have a car? Or would you like to book our sauna?
 
For example, if we know that there's high demand for the sauna, you can include sauna in there. These are the top upsell categories that we're seeing.
 
And especially, I love these late checkout and early check ins. We're seeing real success on those solutions, and people are willing to pay extra for the benefit of arriving earlier than the three PM check-in time.

Chapter
Self-serve kiosks in hotels 
 
Where if guests have checked in online, but you still have plastic keys, you might have to dispense those. But often, like I said, you know, seven out of eight guests don't check-in online beforehand. So a kiosk is a really great last mile solution to help drive automation. And, again, I've done a Matt Talk specifically on kiosks and talking about the benefits of the kiosk.
 
And we've seen incredible results. So today, seven percent of guests checking in on the kiosks. And a couple years ago, this is a brand new product, and we saw very little engagement. But we've really invested in it because we're seeing the, the change of an industry, and everyone is embracing kiosks across different businesses.
 
And as are we, we're seeing that hoteliers are finally really embracing this because they're seeing real efficiency gains. Like, a a Hey Lou Hotel is seeing a two minute check-in time on a kiosk. And if you think what a check-in is in a normal hotel, it's this passport and credit cards and printing registration cards and bills, etc. It takes four to five minutes to normally check-in a guest, whereas on the kiosk, we've really focused on efficiency and getting these guests checked in as fast as possible.
 
And an average of two minutes is incredible.
 
So we're seeing more hotels, doing check ins. One of the great great upsells that we do on the the kiosk is an early arrival fee. Because right when you walk in the door and you go to the kiosk, that's the moment you want access to your room. So we have live, inventory updates because the housekeepers are using smartphones now to inspect rooms back into the system.
 
If we instantly see that another room in that category is available, we can say, well, for, I don't know, twenty euros, would you like access to that room already now at nine AM instead of waiting until three PM? And we're seeing hotels really engaging with this, but it is important that you give housekeeping the tools so that they can use their smartphones to constantly inspect rooms. But we're seeing, an an early arrival fee being one of the great upsell solutions coming out of the kiosk, because a kiosk is not embarrassed to say for twenty euros, you can get access. Whereas as humans, like, we're not great at selling naturally, so we have to train our our team members.
 
And and that's a hard thing and a hard investment, but you don't have to train a kiosk. And it's pretty consistent at offering this every single time when there is an actual room available.
 
Let's talk

Chapter
Additional bookable spaces
 
about additional spaces. So in hotels, we just think about bedrooms. That's what we've been trained to do. We sell bedrooms, and then we might have a restaurant, but we think in RevPAR, revenue per available room.
 
We've diversified news beyond just bedrooms. We thought, well, what about the parking? Couldn't we map that out? Because often, when I book my hotel room, I know I'm going to come by car.
 
I want to book my car park as well and not risk coming to the hotel and not having parking available. But a hybrid traveler might want a coworking space or a coworking, desk that they want to book as well. And if you have a spa, maybe they want to prebook their sauna.
 
And we've started seeing hotels get really, really creative. And we're now seeing that one in four hotels have started adding additional, we call it bookable spaces, which is different types of spaces that could be, you know, a co working space, that could be a parking space, but it could also be a bike rental that you have. So it's also spacious objects so that you can do bike rentals beforehand, and in inject that into the different booking journeys.
 
And we started seeing hotels making about 10k in additional revenues, this summer versus last year, because we started expanding the the optionality of the types of products that you can add in here. And also parking has been one of those really great areas of focus that we're seeing and driving results.
 
So one great example is one of my favorite hotels is in Hotel Paradiso in Paris.
 
They've used their unused roof terrace to turn into a cinema. And you can now book this on the website so you can watch a movie on the roof. They also have, used some of the basement spaces because remember, in hotels, we often have dark spaces available that you can't turn into bedrooms because you need windows for bedrooms. But they turned some of those spaces into a karaoke room, for example, because a karaoke room doesn't need windows.
 
It just needs a great sound system. It needs some tables and stools, and you can start to make revenue from it. And then they created a booking engine that they added to to their website and to their booking flows so that they can start to have guests prebook a karaoke room. It's a great event space for hotels.
 
I've started seeing hotels adding their sauna, because often saunas get busy at specific times and starting to yield the sauna. Because for example, it might be really busy at, like, a Sunday or a Saturday afternoon at between three and six. So the price for the sauna could go up, and it could be free at different times to start to regulate some of the flow. And this is some of the really exciting things that we started seeing with bookable spaces and hotels getting really creative with selling these spaces.
 
And those bookable spaces are just on the one side creating an inventory so I can have my parking inventorized, and I can create a booking engine so that people can book it. But it's also important that we connect some of those spaces to the wider world. One great use case has been day use. So if you've got lots of rooms, why not make those rooms available for day use instead of overnight use?
 
And we have now built a connective connection to this great OTA, which is Day Use.com, where you can suddenly start to market your rooms for day use so you double up occupancy for those rooms. We did another great one with Avutech, which is this, parking, hardware provider. So as you drive up to the parking, we can now recognize the license plate because in the booking, we've now asked you to give us your license plate, as you drive up, automatically, the parking beam will open up and it will register that you've now, arrived, because we recognize your parking license plate.
 
And those are some of the really smart things because you're starting to connect the different systems that we can enable.
 
And then Bowo is the partner that's enabling some of that great innovation on the on Paradiso with their karaoke rooms and their cinema rooms. So I'd say have a look at some of those partners, and we'll add more of those partners on the bookable spaces going forward.

Chapter
Top marketplace integrations for hotels 
 
As a marketplace, we've got about a thousand different integrations, and sometimes it's hard to find what you're looking for. And I thought I'd share some top line numbers, but I'd love to do a different math talk going category by category and sharing what we've seen, as the top, integrations, but also what are some of the up and coming. These are the top six integrations across all of our hotels that we're seeing this summer. So that have been starting to get enabled.
 
Obviously, Booking.com is the number one vendor and we're seeing most hotels do a direct connect. The direct connection that we have, is often better than running that through a channel manager because the more channels that you have in between or most systems that you have, the more breaking points or slower the connection will be. And especially if you're running a hotel in a high density city, you know, when you're fully booked and one room cancels, it pushes that out to all channels. And you want to make sure that that connectivity is as fast as possible. And if a credit card fails, you want that reported automatically, and that's what we enable with the Booking.com. But in the fifth place, you also see that we've now added an Expedia Direct Connect so you can connect the biggest channels globally directly.
 
Lighthouse, we're seeing their on the book product is is really strong and they're seeing, a lot of demand for that. Zapier is a connection that you might not have heard of. And often we educate our hoteliers on this when we start to work with them.
 
Zapier is a if this, then that solution. And it's it's it's so cool. And, again, I want do another Matt Talk about Zapier specifically, what you could do, like, some of the cool innovations that you can do with it. But it works on a way where you can connect lots of systems.
 
They have hundreds of connections there, you can say, like, I want to have a trigger in the PMS that that then results in an action on the other side. So you could, for example, say, if VIP four like, if a serious VIP customer checks in, the moment I press the button check-in, I want to SMS the GM that a VIP has arrived because one of those awkward scenarios in hotels is often that, you know, it says call via call GM on arrival. Like, you're in front of the guest.
 
It's it's one of those awkward things where you have to pick up the phone and say, hey. Mister Johnson's here. Can you just say hi? And then the GM has to come out and say hi.
 
You could get rid of that because the moment you press check-in, the the GM will get an SMS instead of you the the receptionist having to remember to call that GM in front of the the VIP or making them wait for this this welcome. And that's just one example, but it's so powerful what you can do with Zapier.
 
The fourth one is SiteMiner, the biggest channel manager in the world. We're seeing huge success globally with them. And then the sixth one is STR. So that's the platform where, for example, RevPAR is being reported and you can start to get insights, on RevPAR.
 
So I talked a lot and I talked fast. You can always slow me down, of course. But what are some of the biggest takeaways? So one thing that we're seeing is occupancies continue to rise, which is really encouraging because that means that more people are traveling and consuming our goods that we have to sell.
 
We are seeing RevPAR declines, however, in the last few weeks, which we're looking at closely. Obviously, that spike we saw in the summer was thanks to the Olympics.

Chapter
Key takeaways 
 
But we need to keep an eye on making sure that we are holding strong on our on our rates and that they don't decline year on year because that has an adverse effect on our on our bottom line.
 
Also, when you think about your website, it is really critical that you build a a high performing website, but you've also got a booking engine that converts. Conversion on a booking engine is really critical. And if you're seeing those numbers drop, then I'd say definitely have a look around because this is your most efficient channel, and it should be driving a lot of the bookings. Because the more you get direct, the stronger engagements you have with digital journey that happens after the booking is created like an online check-in or kiosk.
 
On the upsells, we're seeing the online check-in drive significant upsells. So if you want to drive more upsells through these journeys, make sure that you enable the online check-in emails, the SMS to drive as many customers through that.
 
The fifth thing is start to think about more than just bedrooms and figure out a way to get those services sold beforehand. Get people excited about booking the sauna, booking that karaoke room, booking the gym space.
 
You can load pretty much anything today in ҹɫֱ²¥ and start to make it available on your website or as part of your booking journey.
 
And then lastly, kiosks are here to stay. Whether we like it or not, they are working and and more businesses are starting to, embrace kiosks, and they have a real impact on driving efficiency. And one of the big challenges of hospitality has been that we're thinking, I want guests to have a human experience. But the experience that we offer to guests is - hi, can I have your credit card and your passport? And that isn't the experience that we aspire to create, but that is the experience that guests are getting. So if we can take those pits away from from that experience, we say, let's let the computers do the boring things, then we can use our our valuable employees to engage into creating really remarkable guest journeys. And that's some of the hardest things that we have to teach our teams to do, but it's also what makes hospitality so exciting and so special.
 
Those hotels that embrace these automation tools, we see much better guest engagements because, actually, the engagement we have is is purposeful, and it's driving those great experiences.
 
Technology should actually just take the boring stuff away so that we can just be going back to being hoteliers and getting excited about driving those results.
 
So that's ҹɫֱ²¥, or Matt Talks data.
 
Go and have a look at your region specific data. I think it it really will help you understand the benchmark, what you're competing with in your region, and then please outperform the average. Never settle for doing at average. Like, I always think that we should aim higher than the average level.
 
So I'd like to challenge you. And and if you have great results, reach out to me. I'd love to do a case study with you and hopefully talk about your hotel in in one of these sessions as well. Thank you.