ҹɫֱ²¥

Transcript

Introduction
 
Hey, everyone. This week, I wanted to discover the impact that ҹɫֱ²¥ is having on hotels because it's one of the hardest things to prove out. And we've struggled for a very long time to have actual numbers
 
to prove what the impact is because we're sitting at the heart of the hotel. We drive huge amounts of automation, but we also work with lots of integration partners.
 
So, you know, what's the direct impact that ҹɫֱ²¥ makes versus what an integration partner
 
does? So we we actually needed external help because, obviously, it sometimes
 
helps if you get an external party to specifically focus on identifying this. So what we did is we went to a, analyst firm called IDC.
 
They've been looking at the space for a couple
 
of years, and we said, can we commission a white paper where you specifically identify for us what our return on investment is for hotels, how much efficiency are we driving, are we driving additional revenue?
 
And we commissioned them with that. And they they went away and they interviewed. They did a lot of, qualitative interviews, but also a lot of interviews, but also a lot of quantitative research to come up with the impact that ҹɫֱ²¥ is having on hotels. And the input is real.
 
Like, we're what they came back with, they said that hotels are seeing a forty four percent, improvement of automation of business processes. They're seeing twenty four percent, efficiency gains for front desk staff. They're seeing thirty five percent more time spent with customers, and they're seeing a thirty one percent decrease in manual errors. So those are some really punchy big numbers.
 
And and I initially said, can we trust that? That's that's almost too good to be true. But, obviously, we can't influence the way that this this study was conducted. IDC has their methods, and we have trust that this is done objectively.
 
We did not get involved in any of this. So it did lead me to think, okay. You know, I instinctively knew that we would have a big impact, but seeing it in numbers in this amazing report that you can download from our website, and we'll link it down below, this video.
 
But, actually, there are things that we've done to drive this, and I think it's important for me to explain what happens in a legacy system. So my first next video will be just talking about the past, but most of our industry still runs on systems from the past, and what are some of the challenges that they have. And then I'll, break down what we've done to as a response to the systems from the past. First, I'll talk about, employee. What what have we done to improve the employee flows? Secondly, I'll talk about the guest facing platforms because modern systems now have guest facing platforms.
 
And then lastly, I'll talk about some of the integrations and what is the difference between an integration with a legacy system and an integration with a cloud first solution. And through that, we'll discover quite some, aspects. Now I'll go very specific on specific features inside the system that, we've we've implemented, we pioneered in some in some ways, that have driven significant impact in the way that the hotel operates.
 
Today, I'll focus mostly on the efficiency side because IDC identified that there is both, significant efficiency gains. And I really want to explore this, you know, like, seeing that front desk has saved twenty four percent inefficiency. That's powerful because that's time we can spend with our customers.
 
So today, I'll explore the efficiency angle.
 
A separate angle that I'd love to explore in a future video will be the revenue. Like, how are we driving incremental revenue as a PMS? You would traditionally think as a PMS to drive that, but we're having a significant impact in that area as well. I hope you enjoy this.

Chapter
Part 1 - Understanding legacy systems in hotels
 
So let's talk about those legacy systems. And I grew up with legacy systems. I I learned my hotel profession working in DOS, and then, I've worked in Windows, and it was a challenge, but we've run hotels on those for decades, and it's worked really well. So why are they failing, and what are the some of the biggest challenges that we're seeing in legacy system?
 
So one of the very first things that that I did not grasp and it took me a very long time to understand, was the night audit. The night audit, comes from a time when systems couldn't have massive databases. So they couldn't have thousands of future items loaded on bills. So they've come up with this model where every single night, they will close today and then they'll start a new day and then they only have one day of postings live.
 
And that's why they implemented the the night alert because these systems could not have these massive databases.
 
And, so it does three things. It's it's first of all, it needs to turn from one day to the next day, and then post all of the room charges on the different bills.
 
Before you can do that, you have to solve all of the different no shows. So you need to manually decide whether you want to cancel those no shows. But, you know, are they gonna arrive or not? Because you're doing the night or at, like, two, three o'clock in the morning.
 
So you have to make a judgment call whether it's a post cancellation fees or not manual. And then thirdly, it runs all of your end of day reports because there's a clear cut of the past and there's this moment when you start to run all of your end of day reports that you then have to print for your accounting department so they can do their manual checks. So we never built the night audit in our system. Like, it was never a topic of conversation.
 
I remember I brought it up right before we opened the first hotel, and I said, where is the night audit? Like, this is a critical piece. And then as the developers asked me, like, what is it supposed to do? And I just explained what it was supposed to do.
 
And they said, but we've solved all of that in the cloud. It's it's this is not a problem. We've got infinite size databases, and we don't have these issues that legacy systems have.
 
So we will automatically solve no shows. So, you know, when a certain time hits, we will just cancel those reservations. We will automatically post the cancellation fees on the bills. And then if they do arrive, then, you know, you definitely have to create or you have to reinstate that reservation.
 
However, it's fully automatic. The reports always exist, and the postings are always there from the moment the reservation is created. So we never created this night sort of thing, but it creates creates a lot of friction. You need to have a specialized person at night.
 
So that's one of those things. The second thing I remember, when I went into the reservation office, and reservations would come in with credit cards, I had to process those credit cards from the terminal for non nonrefundable reservations manually by by hand and then staple those receipts to the bills and then they go to the reception desk when the guest checks in. And these motel transactions, these mail order telephone order transactions, the the the most risky transactions, we did all by hand and I think a lot of hotels today still do that by hand.
 
Also, all check ins and checkouts have to happen at the reception because a hotel on a legacy system doesn't offer things like online check-in, online checkout. So one hundred percent of guests have to pass by the reception desk. There is no way to to automate some of that.
 
If you've got new employees coming in in a legacy system, it does take weeks because these are very, very feature rich systems with user interfaces from the nineties often.
 
And, you know, the modern young generation, the generation that's usually hired to stand at the reception desk is not used to using their system, so it takes them weeks to be fully trained.
 
There's lots of workarounds because you don't like, we've we deploy MEWS multiple times a week. So we forgot a bug, we'll fix it, and then you release it. But these legacy systems, they don't change for years at end until you buy an upgraded version. So if something is broken, you need a workaround, and that just lasts for a long time.
 
Often, we see that these legacy systems are closed networks.
 
So you have very, few number of integrations that you can use, and often the integrations aren't one hundred percent. I just, came out of Austria this past week, and I spoke to Atelier. And he said, we have a one and a half way integration with a channel manager. And I said, what is that?
 
Like, what's the half that's missing? Because it should be full two way. And he said, reservations, they just don't come in correctly. So we have to check every single reservation.
 
So even though it's a one and a half way, that last fifty percent of that one way, means they have to check every single reservation because you don't wanna miss a detail. So one and a half is actually worse almost because now you have to verify everything and you just have to constantly scrutinize everything that happens with this integration.
 
Also, we're seeing with legacy systems that they are not mobile. So you might have the most beautiful hotel lobby, with the most beautiful computers. But when you look around it, you see, you know, one of those old systems, and they all run on tablets. So if you wanted to do a luxury hotel with a mobile check-in where we just sit you down in the lobby and grab a tablet and check you in, that isn't even an option because these systems have to run into the local network. So it has to be plugged into the wall. And even if you were able to run them on a tablet, the user interface is not built for mobile. So So if even if you can make it run on an iPad, it still wouldn't work because you couldn't work with that user interface.
 
If you have a legacy system sorry. There's a lot of points here, but I've lived this. So I I I feel like this is, me reliving my past. And at some point, that server in that backroom, it, it broke down because we had a massive energy out electricity outages to our hotel. The server died, and then we had several days of trying to get a new server activated.
 
And we were offline for a very, very long time. We needed a specialized IT team that costs a lot of money. A new server costs significant money. So there's a real risk with servers breaking, and that isn't the risk when you're in the cloud.
 
And then lastly, it's really around data and reporting and flexibility of reporting.
 
I often hear from hoteliers that they just don't trust the reservations report because they don't match, for example, the report that comes out of, their revenue management system. But these systems must be one hundred percent correct. And the feedback we often get from, for example, revenue management systems is that ҹɫֱ²¥ is the preferred because we get beautiful data through the API and the data just matches. So we don't have to validate a lot of this data to just see how we can map it against each other.
 
So as you can tell, legacy systems are whilst incredibly feature rich, they are stodgy. They're really hard to learn, and they make you enter data manually. And this is why if you walk into a hotel, that first impression is that a receptionist looking down at a screen, typing away, inputting data. And it's you can very quickly tell often that this is a hotel with a legacy system because those systems require one hundred percent of guests to be checked in manually. And all of that data, the registration cards that have been filled in by hand has to be manually typed back into that system.
 
And that's when, you know, when you start to think about a shift into the cloud, this is where the opportunity is. Like, if I can help these receptionists through, making sure that their data or the majority of the data is updated, I save them huge amounts of time. They get to actually engage with customers and hopefully get to enjoy their job because nobody enjoys entering data into a system.
 
So I will end my, my session on legacy systems, but I think you get the gist of where the pain points are with these systems.

Chapter
Part 2 - Enhancing the experience for hotel employees 
 
So let's talk about, the employee facing experience inside the ҹɫֱ²¥ system, or inside modern, cloud PMSs.
 
First of all, when a new employee starts, they get automatically logged in to ҹɫֱ²¥ University. So the moment the user is created, they'll get a login to the ҹɫֱ²¥ University and then depending on their role. So if you're a housekeeper, there'll be a light track because housekeepers are not gonna need to know the settings of the billing of the system.
 
If you're a receptionist, for example, you do. So we have different tracks for different employees, and within a couple of hours of e-learning, all online engaging, so this is not just videos. This is a mix of videos and questions and text.
 
They should be able to go on the reception desk. So they will, on their first day, are ready to be able to start taking and checking in and checking out reservations. So e learning is very accessible for every single employee. And we're seeing that that if the hotel creates space for e learning, the amount of support tickets that these people ask goes down significantly.
 
Secondly, we've designed this system in, you know, in the last decade, and the user interface is modern.
 
And that means that people from this generation that are most likely your new hires at the reception desk are able to very quickly navigate the system because it's a very modern intuitive user interface. And it even works on smartphones and and iPads so that you can really use it on any system, any size screen.
 
One of the biggest things that happens is when a guest walks up to the reception desk is, first of all, you say, you know, can I have your passport and your credit card? Because we need to get those details. The passport we need because we need to get the data from the passport inside the system. So what we did is we said, hey.
 
But there's this camera on the computer. Why don't we use the camera to read the passport data? And we opt automatically update the system. So there's literally a button that says read the the passport and it opens the camera off the computer and it absorbs the data, meaning you don't have to type it manually by hand, meaning less errors.
 
Secondly, payments are embedded. So we might already have your payment card from when you created the booking unless, of course, let's say OTA booking and we have a virtual card. If we don't have your card, the ҹɫֱ²¥ terminal, enables you to tokenize the card. So when you tap your card on the terminal or your Apple Watch, it instantly will create, a copy of that card inside our system and it won't enable it for Ecommerce charges. So you can charge it on the spot for, for example, pre authorization, but you can also charge it later in the future even if you've gone, if you've charged more than the pre authorized amount. You can charge that card, afterwards and that's the beauty of the payments integration that we've done. And this means no more chasing guests for their credit card if they, for example, exceed the preauthorization.
 
And it's it's really a beautiful omni channel flow in the way that you are processing payments.
 
What we added on top of the bill as well is this I don't know if you ever log in to Amazon, and I do often because I wanna buy books. And it says buy with one click. There's a literal button there. Buy with one click. And we took inspiration from that and we said, well, if we've got the credit card, we've got the correct billing address, and the you know, why don't we just add a button there that says, take charge and close the bill instantly with one click? So we since we've launched that, we've seen a huge amount of satisfaction from hotels who are loving that button because nobody wants to click three buttons if you can click one button.
 
So so it's little things that we've thought about constantly throughout the system where we can cut out screens and buttons that have a real major impact.
 
And the thing that we spend most time on are the complex problems with the bill. When a guest says, well, I didn't have that item on the bill and you've, for example, already closed the bill and they find out afterwards, you know that this is gonna take, thirty minutes, forty minutes of your time to figure out if that is correct, run to the restaurant to get the restaurant bill if you haven't got that fully integrated.
 
In legacy system, this is an absolute nightmare. And when I had several bill mistakes when I was at front desk, I knew I was not gonna get home on time. And we've made invoice refunding so easy now. There's literally a click of a button if you wanna correct an item, if you wanna reopen a bill, and then repost all the items, or if you just wanna fully rebate that bill, all of this, we've it took us years to get this done properly and and easily, but it's now literally a click of a button making lives of front desk agents so much easier, than ever before in their legacy systems. So these are some of the things on the front desk that we've done.
 
If we look at reservations, we've seen hotels completely centralized reservations. So if you have a group with multiple hotels, we have a beautiful single reservation screen that you can use to to take bookings.
 
But also it allows, hotels to have employees work from home. So they can literally work from anywhere.
 
And and they've seen higher satisfaction because they have access to more talent if they wanna make this remote.
 
And also their reservation departments historically used to take the payments for nonrefundable bookings. So they would come in with a credit card and then they have to manually process those cards.
 
All of that is automated. We've built, complete automation payment flows that say if this booking comes in from this channel and it's non refundable, just charge the credit card, send the receipts automatically to the customer and post the charge on the bill. If it is, for example, fully flexible with a cancellation fee at four PM on a day of arrival, we can post that that payment a day before arrival, for example. So you can change all of the automation flows.
 
You can take preauthorizations. You can take payments. It is incredibly flexible, and it can even handle virtual credit cards. So you can automate those virtual credit card that comes with so many rules, sadly, that say often, you know, you can only charge on the day of arrival or you can only charge this card on the day of departure.
 
So we've built in so much flexibility inside ҹɫֱ²¥ so that you can automate how you take those payments.
 
If we look at, another department, accounting, traditionally, accounting has to take all of these printed reports and then manually verify whether all the numbers are correct. Sometimes they have to go receipt by receipt if there is an error in there.
 
That doesn't happen. Our integrations work beautifully. So if you, for example, get the restaurants, at the end of the day, those receipts are automatically uploaded into ҹɫֱ²¥ as and when these transactions happen. So there is no need for printed receipts from the restaurants, because they're all physically in ҹɫֱ²¥, and they match with the payments that were taken because these things should just match. There shouldn't be a reason why these things get stuck in an interface.
 
And and this is what used to happen with us in the past when an interface went down for some time at a at a legacy hotel.
 
They would see, that the the receipts were matching. But that doesn't happen in news because these bills are all constantly uploaded and we have ninety nine point nine percent uptime. So there is no integration failures on that in that sense.
 
And and that makes the life of an accountant very easy because, one, all of the data is being processed, is being pushed into the PMS. That report matches everything that's in the other systems. But also the way because we've deeply embedded payments into the system, at the end of the day, we will say, okay. We processed ten thousand euros.
 
That's the amount that goes into your bank account. And there's a report we provide that you can just run inside so that all of the payments that we're paying into your bank account match what's in the system. So there is no manual verification of transaction by transaction to make sure that you've been paid out for these transactions.
 
Another department, for example, housekeeping. So housekeepers are not sitting behind a desktop. So what happens in a legacy hotel is that they get a printed report with the rooms at the start of the day. So they get twelve, thirteen rooms that they have to clean in that day.
 
Some of them are departures. Some of them are are, stay overs.
 
And, basically, that report is their source of truth for the rest of the day. So they just start knocking on doors hoping that there's no guests in the room. We've provided a native app so they can have an Android or iOS app on their phones, and they can see which guest is currently in house or they can see if a room has already departed. So they don't have to knock on doors until they get lucky, and a guest is not in the room. They can be, purposely led to those rooms that need cleaning the first because there might be an arrival coming.
 
If they see, for example, an item broken in the room, they can instantly go and take a photo of that and upload that into a task for maintenance. So you really enable, the departments that are not behind a computer through a smartphone app so that they can do that job.
 
And if anything else fails, we've got this great integration with Zapier. They're the number three integrations in our marketplace.
 
And anything you can imagine, it's an if this then that's integration. And it can basically say if a guest checks in, and we see that this guest is a VIP, send an SMS to the GM for welcome on arrival.
 
Another thing it could do, for example, is if, a guest checks in and we are supposed to bring a bottle of champagne, send a a task to room service so they prepare that bottle of champagne. What now happens in hotels is that they put these buckets of, champagne in the rooms at three or two PM, and then the guest arrives at nine PM and that bottle of, you know, the the ice is melted and it's a really strange and it's not a great experience.
 
But through Zapier, you can automate anything that you can imagine and you can put your mind to. And that's why, Zapier is the number three downloaded integration in our marketplace.
 
So these are some of the star facing things. And as you can tell, I get very passionate about the different departments and making sure that they all have their different tools.
 
But ultimately, it really is because, a modern system is a system that everyone understands and, you know, you can find all of the features quite easily. And all of that drives just better engagement, less errors that are happening in hotels, and hopefully much happier employees.

Chapter
Part 3 - How a modern PMS comes with  a built-in guest platform
 
So we talked about those legacy systems. And with the legacy system, a hundred percent of your guests have to check-in at reception desk. What's nice in the cloud is that, the database sits in the cloud. So that means that employees can log in from anywhere, from any device into the system.
 
The other side of that is that also guests are having access to the cloud because guests all have smartphones. They're all traveling around with their smartphone, and they can access the cloud. So you just have to build a user interface that is different, obviously, than than the employee interface, which is the guest interface. And that's exactly what we did.
 
So we said, well, there's check-in and there's check out, and they are very time consuming processes. How do we offer that to guests like with an airline? With an airline today, you download the app, you check-in online, you get a QR code, and you just walk in. And it is so efficient, I don't have to queue up and worry about the queues that I'm going to face at the check-in desk, because I might not make my flight if I'm getting stuck in these different queues, and people have embraced it.
 
So we released online check-in, and online checkouts. So if you think about a check-in, for example, it is, you know, you need to get the registration card filled in. So you need the passport details. You need to take payments, and you need to do an upsell and you need to get the key issued.
 
Those are the four kind of key processes that we see. So, one, we just say to the guest thing, hey. Give us your details. And you know there's no spelling mistake.
 
People don't make spelling mistakes in their own name, in their address, etcetera.
 
Unlike when your employees are copying that from handwritten registration cards. So your data gets much cleaner.
 
So that's how we handle the registration card. Secondly, payments are embedded. So we already have a payments card. But if it's a virtual card that came with the booking, we will just ask the guest to provide their personal card and notify them that we might take a pre authorization for incident incidental charges.
 
So that's the payment. So we covered two aspects of this already. We will offer an upsell. So one, we will verify whether they have breakfast and we will offer them breakfast, but maybe also a high category room or any other upsell products that we have.
 
Potentially, if you have parking, we can add a parking or a co working space. So we've built this really flexible upsell module on top of it.
 
And then lastly is the key. And and this is often, more painful because hotels are not willing to upgrade their hardware. So if a hotel has the plastic keys, so the RFID or the the the magnetic keys, we integrate with those door locks. So when a guest arrives, all they have to do is get the key made.
 
But we've also, built a ҹɫֱ²¥ digital key. So guests can now download their key on their smartphone if the hotel has a modern system. So we've already, for example, deployed this with, Assa Abloy, the number one lock vendor in the world, and we can now enable digital keys for those guests. So you've got an end to end online check-in.
 
Online checkout is a different process because now, often when you get to check out at a hotel, they say, what's your room number? Did you have anything from the minibar last night? These are the charges on your bill. Do you need a billing address?
 
And again, all of these things we've completely automated and built into the online checkouts, and we're seeing real success. Guests are not excited about getting in a queue at a reception desk, waiting for their bill, and they're embracing it.
 
If you want to go even further, we've now also employed kiosks. So you can have a kiosk in the lobby that you can use to get guests checked in one hundred percent without human interaction.
 
Another thing that we added into that guest portal was messaging. So we're seeing that a lot of guests will have questions for example in advance if they want to change their reservation dates or they just have some request or dietary restrictions.
 
They are using messaging very actively with the hotel. We have a native app that you can use, but also we can, work with integrated partners that integrate with our messaging platforms.
 
And and lastly, also there's this flexible booking engine. So the booking engine drives, a lot of automation. So one, it's obviously the booking engine on the website. But we've also added an option a possibility for if you do group bookings that we can send a booking engine link.
 
So for example, if you got a wedding and it's a call in wedding, so meaning, the, the the bride and groom won't pay for all the rooms. They would just wanna send a link to all of their guests. Whereas traditionally, those guests would be advised to call the reservation department. Now they just get a link to booking engine with the special rates though that's for the specific dates and they can just book their own rooms.
 
And this has driven a huge amount of, automation for for hotels. And it's those kind of guest facing technologies that are some of the most exciting things because guests are embracing it. We're seeing, you know, one in eight guests now checking in online and and that's an average. In some hotels, we're seeing that number go up significantly.
 
We're seeing hotels with the kiosk that are now driving a hundred percent of check ins through the kiosk.
 
And it depends on how far you wanna take that, automation.
 
But the goal really is for us to take away the boring tasks that employees don't want to do so that we can focus on building really great guest experiences and exceeding those expectations through different ways than, typing in the guest data into a system because nobody gets excited about that, not the guest and not the employees. So this is where guest facing technology comes in. Every providers to providers to sometimes be compared to ҹɫֱ²¥ because we are so incredibly different from what they had in the past to what you're now getting as
 
part of the package.

Chapter
Part 4 - Efficiency: driving integration in modern hotel management
 
The last
 
part of, talking about this, how do hotels actually drive efficiency with a modern PMS, the last part is about integrations because a typical hotel on ҹɫֱ²¥ has about six to seven integrations, and that's an average. So if you're a larger hotel, you probably have close to ten to fifteen integrations, and integrations are there to drive efficiency.
 
But traditionally, they have not always done this because these integrations weren't always a proper two way integration.
 
With ҹɫֱ²¥, one, we don't charge for integration. So integrations are for free, and they are all API based meaning they are modern integrations that work on on, open documentation network. So data flows really solidly and fast. And and that means that the data is reliable and it doesn't get stuck in legacy interfaces.
 
So most integrations will be done fully two way integrations and always read the documentation of the integration partner to see what it it does exactly.
 
The number one integration that we have, and I think it's ninety five percent of hotels use a channel manager.
 
A channel manager will drive reservations through. So one, they push reservations down from the different OTA channels and we push rates and a benefit back up to the channel manager.
 
And, you know, in the early days, we've saw quite some, resistance from hotels who were like, yeah, but I like my teams to input these data so that they can remember the guest name. And we thought there's gotta be better ways that you can use your staff than having to input the data. Today, all of the hotels that we have have a full two way connectivity where a hundred percent of the reservation details flow in. The credit card comes in automatically, is tokenized inside our system security. So no one ever sees a credit card. If there's nonrefundable charge rule, we will charge that credit card instantly.
 
These integrations are fantastic, and this is work that no human should ever have to do manually anymore.
 
We have built integrations with booking dot com and Expedia, which would cover ninety, ninety five percent of bookings in hotels. And we've done this because speed of integration is critical, especially if you are in a high density cities, meaning lots of travel. So if you're in city center London and that last room, if you get a cancellation for it, you wanna make sure that as fast as possible you open it up but also close it up because you don't wanna get overbooked. And we found that having direct integrations makes, the chance of overbookings significantly lower. But also what we can do with Booking dot com is when we see a credit card come in that fails, we can automatically report it back and then they will cancel the reservation if they don't get a valid credit card. So we can't just do more if we do direct integrations, but we really recommend any hotel to have a channel manager.
 
Secondly is the revenue management systems. We're still seeing, less than fifty percent of hotels having a revenue management system today which is crazy because computers are just better than humans at setting the right rates at the right time and being online twenty four seven, changing rates as and when things happen.
 
And, you know, there's a whole plethora of different RMS systems, but one of the most important things is that the data that's in the PMS matches the data in the RMS because if there's a, gap in the data, they're making price recommendations based on the data. And if the data is wrong, they're making the wrong price recommendations.
 
So it's so critical that this integration is beautifully working. So all of the data gets pushed from ҹɫֱ²¥ into the RMS and the rates recommendations automatically get pushed into ҹɫֱ²¥ so humans don't have to interact with the rates because this will be fully automated.
 
Another great integration is the point of sale. Right? If you've got a restaurant or a spa, they should be posting items directly to the PMS. They should not be running up and down with bills getting manually posted inside the system. All of these charges and the payments should automatically post and flow into ҹɫֱ²¥.
 
For example, payment terminal integrations that the moment a payment is taken on the ҹɫֱ²¥ terminal, we also tokenize the credit card and we can charge that card through an ecommerce transaction afterwards if there's a late charge, for example.
 
All of these integrations, the two way, level of integrations that we offer just makes the life of hoteliers so much more efficient.
 
Another great example is for example hotels who are like, they're looking to import the data into, for example, MailChimp application because they run campaigns, but it's done very statically. So they will say, oh, I'm gonna run an ultimate campaign. I'm gonna just send it to my entire database. Those types of campaigns don't work really well.
 
So an integration like Revinate is much more powerful than integration with MailChimp. And yes, we will push the data into both systems. But the app like a Revenate is much more mature to build special workflows. So it's not gonna just ram out a campaign to a hundred percent of your database where a lot of people are like, I'm not interested in this campaign and unsubscribe from you.
 
You want relevant content to go to guests at the right moment when they're ready to book. And that's where a good CRM comes in. And all of that data from ҹɫֱ²¥ will help them set up the right campaigns to your customers.
 
And obviously, there's been a real development in large language models and and and AI recently. And there's been this rise of fantastic chat apps that we're seeing like Runner AI, for example, BookBoost. They do a great job of integrating chat with the system. And I strongly recommend embedding those apps into your guest and, website flows because they can help guests answer questions way faster than humans can. Again, allowing you to rather focus on anticipatory experiences rather than reactive experiences of helping the guest. The goal of AI is to help you anticipate what a guest would like and then build something better on top of that. And if if anything, AI should be helping you create better guest experiences.
 
So generally, I strongly recommend, having a number of integrations, to help you drive way more efficiencies that your teams can focus on that guest experience.
 
And, honestly, if you don't like an integration, you literally switch it off and then you can switch on the next integration.
 
Back in the day, this used to be an investment because you wanted an RMS integration. You had to get have someone come in to your local server and install a local, integration or a door lock integration. I remember that those were used to be really expensive. And then you just use it for a long time because you have to write off this investment.
 
That isn't how modern integrations work anymore. You pay on a monthly base and if you don't like it, you just switch it off and you switch on the next one until you find the perfect tech stack for you, and for your hotel.
 
So that's the last block, that that really digs into some of the integrations.
 
As always, we've got an incredible team of solutions architects at ҹɫֱ²¥. And if you're ever wondering what's the right integration for your hotel in your market, just reach out to the ҹɫֱ²¥ team and we're always happy to help and give some recommendations because, yes, it it does get confusing. We've got about a thousand live integrations, and they're not alright for every single hotel. So definitely reach out to your account manager, and we'll try try and help guide you in the best way we can.

Chapter
Closing comments
 
Oh my god. You made it to the end. And thank you for sticking with me. I know that I these sessions can be long, but it's because I wanna share so many examples, about how we can help drive some of the innovation.
 
We started with IDC and the powerful white paper that they wrote for us based on data that they've taken from from our hotel but also competing systems.
 
And they've seen such, an important lift in efficiency because those hotels chose to go into the cloud.
 
Of course, if you're running a legacy system, it will probably still work for a couple more years, and it'll be fine. It can check people in. It can check people out. It can issue bills. But I'm hoping that through different examples you've seen what a modern cloud system could do for you. It is much more than just replacing a legacy stack and housing that in the cloud, because of the innovation of the Internet.
 
We've got far reaching, innovations that we're doing like, for example, an online check-in that is a native part of the portal, the embedded payments. Those things can only be enabled when you are in the cloud. And obviously that means more data security. So, and and lastly, obviously, integrations. Those things should just work. You shouldn't have huge amounts of data gaps into the integrations or doing manual checks of of reservations every single day because they just flow in.
 
I'm hoping that this helped convince some of you to think about moving into a modern cloud solution because we have such a long way to go. The majority of our industry still runs on legacy systems. And ultimately, a hotel that is more efficient is more profitable. And an owner of a more profitable hotel will invest into those hotels.
 
So I'm hoping that some of you will see this as a sign that it's time to to move into the cloud. As always, if you have questions, if you just wanna get a demo and have someone show you all these features, just reach out. Just press book a demo on our website. And these are free free demos. We're not gonna charge you anything. I think it's important that we we help listen to what you're looking for at your hotel and if we can help some of our technology,
 
leverage our technology to help drive those outputs for you. Thank you.