ºÚÁÏÍø

Transcript

Introduction
 
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Matt Talks and Matt Talks to Pepa this time or Josef S. I don't know what you prefer.
 
External, it's usually Josef, but it's not, it's always Pepa.
 
What do your friends call you? Pepa?
 
Peppa. Yeah.
 
And Peppa will be for today. What do you do at ºÚÁÏÍø?
 
I'm the chief product and technology officer. That means that I lead all the teams that make our products better every day.
 
Nice. And how big is the team that you lead?
 
That is close to five hundred people today, composed of product managers, designers, a lot of engineers, but also security, data, etcetera.
 
That is crazy. Like, we, we really deeply think about how much money do we invest in r and d because ultimately, we wanna change an industry, and we try and tie the growth of your teams to our revenue. So as we gain more customers, we always might wanna make sure that we also grow the r and d teams so that we can keep up. And today's conversation is around the ºÚÁÏÍø roadmap. And we're probably one of the most open companies in talking about what we're planning to do. Do you ever worry about that we're releasing all these secrets to the world and everyone else is listening and copying what we're doing? Do you worry about this or you actually think this is the right way to do it?
 
I'm definitely not worried about sharing things like competitors today. I think the history has proven that it's like it's not about idea, it's about execution. It's always like about execution. Very little companies who are sort of the dominant players in their industries today, were the first ones to introduce that product to the market.
 
So so usually, it's much more about execution. So I'm not worried about ideas. What I'm sometimes worried is that we do sometimes change the roadmap. And so, you know, talking about things out loud and then changing that can be difficult to navigate for our customers sometimes. But that is that is, you know, we when we change, we always change for our customers as well. So it's like, a, it's a two way door.
 
Yeah. Like we try not to reveal too much so that we still keep the flexibility to be able to change things.
 
But it is really hard to come up with a roadmap that satisfies everyone, especially when you've got a broad spectrum of products, right?
 
Yeah, there is, I think news is that now sixty countries, seventy countries, eighty countries, globally, multiple segments, everything from hostels to long stays, traditional hotels, boutiques, like kind of everything, groups of hotels, small groups, bigger groups, different ownership structures, brands, etc. Obviously, everyone, you know, has has sort of different challenges, unique challenges that they are facing. And every hotel is indeed unique. So, so satisfying everyone is a hard challenge, but that is why, why we are so excited to be on that journey, as well.
 
So, so I grew up knowing I was going to be a hotelier. That was always my dream. Did you always grow up knowing you wanted to be a CPTO?
 
Yeah. Was that in your dream?
 
Definitely not. I have a I have a saying that, you know, people always feel like they have a dream job or there is something they really want to do. And that is kind of like define your passion. And I always say, that's bullshit. I never believed that I always think like you're passionate, like, that's a trait of a person. And it doesn't really matter what you do.
 
And I found myself being passionate almost about everything.
 
And so so I always do things that excite me and and and, you know, expand my impact, and that's how I I guess ended up being, CPTO, as well even though I originally did not, plan for that.
 
Did you I wanted to be an architect.
 
I wanted to do, like, architect. My my family is like civil engineers, and so I wanted to, you know, design buildings and, stuff. So, yeah.
 
Where did that change?
 
At which point of your life did you think, no, actually, that's not what I wanna do?
 
When I was my, chess, I played chess when I was younger. My chess teacher, he was a software engineer And, it sounded interesting. So when I was twelve, I bought a book intro, like, one zero one software engineering, and I just fell in love, with it. And and and, you know, got my first gig when I was thirteen, like, doing program, and I really kind of got stuck in it, crafting software and, you know, building things for customers, etcetera. So really got stuck with me and, some to now, even though I'm not hands on, obviously, anymore, not coding.

Chapter
Hospitality's biggest pain points
 
And and you are like, I hate that I say this, but you're one of the most powerful people in our industry that could make a change to the way that people travel in hospitality. Right? Because if you're running one of the fastest moving tech companies and you're making you're at the league of making a lot of the decisions, But what's one of the things that you notice in hotels that you wish you could fix or that you might fix down the line that you that they're really like a pet peeve that you have?
 
This is also a dangerous question, right? Because Yes.
 
Now you're going to turn Building for such a diverse audience, I can't over index on my experiences.
 
So while I do have, like, some personal wish, I always have to be aware that I can't actually put them into our roadmap in any way. But what really, I always hate when, you know, there is, like, inconsistent cell at the level of service. There is, you know, you go into hotel and not just hotels, a lot of businesses, small businesses, big businesses out there, but you go into a new immediately after your chicken experience, you, like, have five things in your head that could be better.
 
And you know they are not hard things. Those are things that, you know, could be easily put in place, to just make the experience better. And, and and that is you know, that consistency is is is something that I am, like, really wishing for that we can help, achieve, you know, within our industry so that we can rely on exceptional service. If you if you think about the best memory you have in hospitality, what makes that memory special is that you were probably the only one who experienced that on that day. And that's a pity, you know? So some all about how can I make it so that, you know, we can scale great guest experiences by being intentional, about them?
 
Because what was a great hospitality experience that was given to you that was unique to you?
 
I, there is a couple of options, but the one that I always go to is when we were on Mallorca, there was this, like, very small family hotels. They wouldn't even use music. It was like, I don't know, seven rooms.
 
But I was super exhausted after day, of walking through the mountains in, like, forty degrees. I was super hungry. And, you know, the lady, she showed us the rooms and, you know, let us basically drive a tent in another room that was free, and then then she would basically cook us dinner herself. And that was, you know, the the just I really needed it after that day. So it was a it was a really personal, like, authentic, experience, such that I keep referring to. I love that. But I'm a foodie.
 
So any hotel that has good food, that is actually No bread.
 
No bread.
 
Exactly. So any hotel that has a great restaurant or great food options will always be my favorite hotel. So that that is maybe my other, like, you know, really personal thing I would love to improve to make sure that hotel restaurants are not like they don't have this label. It's a hotel restaurant.
 
Yeah. Like, but they are actually great, restaurants and, and, and gyms, you know, also like you go to a hotel gym. Oh, it's a hotel gym. Like, why is that?
 
Like, why is, why is it not a proper gym? Like, and there is, there is no good reason for it. It's just that, like, they didn't care usually. Yeah.
 
It's an afterthought. They wanted to tick the box from Booking dot com that they have a gym and Yeah. And hopefully they get more guest, but actually the experience is just inferior. But I love the example of Mallorca because it's I think if you think about what Airbnb tried to do originally, they wanted to get these really personal experiences in people's homes.
 
And actually what it's become is this industry of just soulless apartments that are being rented. And it isn't what you experienced is what you're getting with Airbnb. And one of my favorite hotels is this hotel in Stockholm called Ethem, which is Ethome. And I had the same experience.
 
I arrived and it's this was a luxury hotel, so it was probably a very different experience. But as I arrived, I was hungry for my trip. And I said, do you still serve lunch? And she just walked into the kitchen.
 
And then she said, any allergies? No. And then they served me whatever they had in the moment. And it was just such a nice warm experience, and it just made me feel at home, which I guess is their brand.
 
And that I think is the ultimate hospitality experience.
 
Yeah. I really, enjoyed we were talking to someone who did a talk at one of our conferences, internal conferences, and they've read with BMW, and they said that the kind of main metric BMW was optimizing for is obviously the amount of times you buy a second BMW.
 
And the most kind of tolerated metric they found is when you had an issue with the first BMW and they fixed the issue, you would always buy a second one. That was the biggest indicator for that. And I think that just speaks to both of our experiences you just mentioned when you go into hotel and you you have a struggle, it's not just a delight, but you actually have a real struggle that they managed to solve and actually turn into a delight man. That that is truly when you, like, kind of get, even emotionally attached to the brand and to, to the business.
 
But some of that I I think there is data in hospitality as well that the you know, some of the most loyal customers you have may at some point have complained, but because of the recovery, experience that they've had, they've become incredibly loyal versus someone who's just, yeah, it was good it was good enough. Like, I'll come back next time. But that loyalty, those people that had these extreme emotional experiences and then turn something negative into something extremely positive we'll be loyal for life.
 
Definitely. Definitely. And also when we talk about, like, when people talk about, you know, hospitality, we tend to over index on, like, kind of luxury personalized experiences. We also have to kind of I always try to think about all the possibilities like someone, some guests just care about the cost, right?
 
And therefore, like they need a different experience basically like this luxury, one. But what we believe is that technology can actually commoditize what luxury is today, tomorrow. Right. So like if you think two hundred years ago, kind of only like the highest in the, in the society could travel.
 
Nowadays, everyone travels, right, because of technological advancement. And that is indeed our mission at ºÚÁÏÍø's Eye View. It is to also make sure that technology can enable these these great two day luxury, but tomorrow, tomorrow absolutely ordinary experiences for everyone. Nice.
 
Let's talk about the Rob app.
 
So, there's one thing that is looking forward, but one thing is also looking backwards, whether we actually delivered on something that excites you in the last year.
 
What's the most exciting thing we released in the last twelve months?
 
That's, it's like picking your favorite children, and it's super hard. But there is one that I think really fits the context.
 
Everyone talks about AI, everyone talks about it, but very few actually know what to do with it.
 
And I'm so glad that we have managed to figure out a real use case that actually makes our customers better, which are the smart tips that actually try to get all the data across all these systems into a single, you know, tweet sized or X sized, you know, separate on tweets, even with X.
 
Yeah.
 
That's good to know. I'll take a note on that.
 
So so so that I think is really powerful because it actually is a real thing that that that shows this is the free I'm I'm super bullish on it. Yes. There are still things that are, you know, you know, make it like, oh, it's maybe in the future, but I don't believe it's a maybe, it's something a matter of when. Some some plans we sort of help on that progression and we continue to explore avenues to make it not just tick a box, you know, use as an AI solution, but actually things that our customers will test them and know that they are, you know, making their, jobs, better, easier, more successful.
 
So looking forward to twenty twenty five, we obviously have a large team of people that have to deliver quite a broad spectrum of features out there.
 
One of the biggest kind of categories that we're talking about internally is revenue. We wanna help hotels drive more revenue.
 
And when when you think in hotels and you think about revenue, you generally think RevPar, revenue per available room, which is room revenue divided by the number of rooms that the hotel has. And then that's the metric that our whole industry is built on. We're thinking we can go much further than just that one metric. That's the only metric that is measured across our industry.
 
But ultimately, that's the only thing we can measure today in our industry because that's what our systems are built for. So if you can't measure something, you can't fix it. So we've been working hard on fixing the underlying data layers, in our system. But do you wanna maybe talk about what the future of AI was? Because I think we've obviously had a product in this category before, which was, an analytics product that we I I generally wasn't proud of. We pushed it out a few years ago, and, it was it was decent, but it wasn't world class, and it didn't change the narrative.

Chapter
Revisiting past products and features
 
And when we went back to the drawing board, we really said we need to get this right. If we wanna do this right, then we have to own this product from the beginning. But maybe if you wanna talk us through what work has like, we've been working on this for quite a long time. And what are you hoping to release this year?
 
Yeah, I think, first of all, we always when we talk about any sort of report or data, we always say, you know, best report is no report.
 
The same as best job is no job. So and the best kind of process is no process.
 
So, so we always Can you explain that?
 
Because I don't think everyone understands what you mean with it, but I think it's a really bad point.
 
So I think we have this, famous example that we keep overusing, but there is like thousands more of night outreach, right? Like when you're optimizing for a job to be done at a hotel, you can either think, how do I reduce the time it takes to do accomplish the task? Or you actually think from a different perspective, like, why do I even do that? And can I register completely and just kind of get it to zero? So instead of making night audit more efficient, we completely automated the task from hotels. And and that is sort of a mantra that we continue to, continue to live by and and think about, obviously, you know, it doesn't it's it's not something that happens overnight, sometimes, but, you know, the same way we should be thinking about, you know, not just how you make check-in more efficient, but why do you need check-in and how can we completely, remove that and make it more like a welcome ceremony, instead.
 
And and and when it comes to revenue, right, like it's it's, it's, I think one of the things that the industry is talking about quite a lot, it's like, it's also not just, first of all, it's not just about the rooms. I probably probably always said that, ºÚÁÏÍø is the only product property management system in the world. Everything else is like a room management system.
 
So, we have the first ones and the only ones that I think who really deserve the label of a PMS. And it really kind of we encourage you to think outside just those rooms because of revenue parallel of the room. You know, thinking about rooms as the only vertical to grow your revenue is just limiting to your business. You should be thinking about your guests and other spaces, your overall, real estate, but also revenue is not the only thing in the business, right?

Chapter
Holistic approach to revenue management
 
It's also the total profit of your business that you should be optimizing for. And I think what we'll see more and more with technology and what great solutions like Atomize have been preaching for for a while now that we are now super, you know, super proud to kind of, partner, so well and and and merge with is is really that that whole picture of how can how can the technology, you know, enable all of the P and L, not just parts or small pockets of it, but really kind of think about the the business much more holistically. And and and that that is, I think, like a a big brand promise of ºÚÁÏÍø is that we think for you and with you holistically, not just limiting.
 
We just do this part. If you think about a lot of softwares that you do on daily basis, that you use on daily basis and think about what they, what do you know, what they know about you, you know, think of your to do list. They to do list only knows what your to dos are. That's not important.
 
We have the privilege to have access to all information that hotel, processes and also be part of, majority of their workflows. And we take that responsibility seriously as that we are also responsible for, you know, holistically actually improving, improving this business. There are five metrics that I'm kind of very excited about that we've talked about on Unfold.
 
I even printed them today.
 
You even printed them today.
 
They are now famously known as the plus pillars internally. But, those are five metrics that I talked about on Unfold that I do think show if technology is making our business more successful. And they also try to actually, it's not just a metric, it's more like a directional, it shows, you know, how we think about technology and what do we wanna, sort of, how do we wanna improve you on, on that front? And, there is, you've touched on the topic of revenue, there is just so much, you know, in that bucket, you know, where do you think we should start?
 
So, like, I'd love to maybe just dig into the pillars a little bit so that people understand what are some of these metrics specifically that we're talking about that are different from RevPar?

Chapter
Key metrics
 
So, the first pillar is guest experience.
 
Everyone has a different way to measure that, be it reviews or some surveys that you do, you know, compliance, number of complaints, the amount of times people return back. There is a lot of indicators you can use to measure that guest experience, but ultimately hospitality is about guest experience.
 
And, you know, if your experience, guest experience is not good, your business will never be sustainable. People won't return back. You'll get bad reviews. No one will actually book the hotel. I think there was also a study done that, actually the founder of AtomLife shared with me is that every half of a star on Google's rating is equal to additional ten to twenty percent revenue that there is like a huge oration in there.
 
And so that is obviously front of mind for everyone. The other side of the coin of guest, you know, experience is also guest lifetime value. If I say I like something, it might be good, but you don't know whether I truly like it before I actually pay for it. Right? So one thing is what people say, but the other thing is how people behave. So is your guest experience actually so good that people not only like it, but are willing to pay more for it and return back to actually relevant.
 
So that kind of talks about that guest as an avenue for growth.
 
The second The guest lifetime value is one of those metrics that we've all aspired to measure in some way, But because it's so hard to figure out whether a customer is returning, and that's why every hotel is like, oh, have you been here before?
 
And you're like, yeah, many, many times. Yeah. And it's because one, the hotel chains, they don't consolidate the data in the right way.
 
Two, also we don't always know because if you book through Booking or Comer Expedia, then they anonymize your profile. And that hotel was another John Smith is the same John Smith that stayed with an anonymous email address. So we're making it really easy now to merge profiles that and that's something we released at the end of last year, but also to then merge profiles based on your credit card. So that if you go to the restaurant, we can merge that automatically with that with that profile because we recognize that the credit card is the same as the profile on the PMS.
 
So the guest lifetime value, we've really reached a pivotal point at the end of last year where we now have this full profile. And then going forward, we need to now actually do something with it. And I think that's what we would love to dig into on the guest platform side.
 
Yeah. That is definitely like first, you need to collect data, then you need to clean the data like you do with mesh and merge, then you need to show the data and action the data. And these two things like action in the data and showing the data are our our major focus for us, this year as well. So things like showing actual the guest lifetime value in the PMS to the right stuff and also in the POS.
 
So as you know, who your valuable guests are. I was talking to someone running front of house at a hotel and they said that they know which rooms are a little bit better and which rooms are a little bit worse. And the way they allocate them today is just based on the amount on the reservation itself, not the full lifetime value of a guest. So now with this, you're able to immediately see in the, you know, be the POS or a PMS at the front of house, you would immediately see this is a this is a high value guest that's returning for a for a time or, you know, that maybe just the second time, but has spent tremendous amount of money last time.
 
And it's really something that you should kind of nurture in your hotel. And on top of that, it's just not not showing this data. You know, again, AI is something that can suggest based on the information we have, what are the tasks that, that, that you could automatically, you know, so for example, if you're a lactose intolerant, which I know is a thank you love to use, in your example, some LinkedIn, you know, there is something I can suggest that, you know, even though you normally give a milk chocolate to your guests in the house, I can suggest to add a task automatically. That's to housekeeping to say replace that with something that doesn't have met.
 
Maybe that's something that we already know Matt loves. But what would it be, Matt? What would you instead of chocolate? What would you say?
 
You'd add chocolate.
 
Just simple as that.
 
Matt is not a complex, man to, please.
 
Yeah. Or, you know, that that is something that I can do. But also, you know, beyond that, we are thinking about these sort of personalized automations you could set up and identifying guest segments. Like today's, you know, segments in hospitality are usually tied to rates and rate codes, and then you know, where the kind of guests come from is corporate or not. But I don't really speak about the guests themselves and the nature of the guests.
 
And that's something you could build automations around. So if it's a family, always give them something for kids to the room, for example, is an automation you could have within use.
 
And this would contribute to something that we call, you know, kind of small, like personal loyalty. You know, it's loyalty, that, you know, it's not a program, it's just something that, you know, you know, you should just kind of through the great guest experience, you make people fall in love with your breath and come back. But it would also apply in the future to to kind of program loyalty or a big loyalty as we like to, call it internally, where you would able be able to say that based on your loyalty program, membership and your kind of tier, you would get following rewards automatically.
 
And it isn't something that you would need to do manually, as well as helping to actually, you know, get, get those loyalty, members up and running through our kiosk solution and in front of house recommendations as well.
 
So so these metrics that we're we're measuring, so like guest experience or the guest lifetime value or revenue per square meter or revenue per employee, one thing is showing it for you as a hotel, but another thing is showing you whether it's a good number or a bad number. And today, the only metric that you can reach out to would be the STR organization, which will tell you that your revenue per minute rule is correct. But how can we help, tell hotels whether the numbers are good?
 
That's a great leading question.
 
I know.
 
So, one way we sort of look at these things is, again, as you will said, like everyone tracks the number of steps, they make in a day.
 
But why? Only because everyone knows that ten thousand is good because, you know, Apple said, you know, ten thousand is good. So everyone believes them. And that is what makes it interesting.
 
So what you're really tracking isn't, you don't really care about the number of steps you do. What do you care about? Is it above? Like, have I accomplished basically that call?
 
And, and also that kind of adds meaning to the data. And that is something very similar we want to do is where we obviously have thousands and thousands of hotels nowadays, on ºÚÁÏÍø in every geo and every city. We have at least a few hotels that are very similar to you. And you already you probably already do know them from your competitive asset analysis in, you know, in whatever kind of freight shopping tool you use.
 
But that is just for prices. You actually don't see behind it. You don't get any guidance beyond that. And the way we are thinking about this metric is that we would actually give you those insights across our customer base.
 
So, you would see why is, you know, guest lifetime value higher of a hotel opposite on the street. And what are some of the practical ways we see, them doing without obviously disclosing the information, you know, in a completely anonymous, anonymous way you could be able to see how do you differ versus your, kind of cohort overall on a sort of abstract level and then help you materialize those insights and give you those insights as well. You know, obviously those are lagging indicators. Those are very, very good for like quarterly reviews, maybe monthly reviews to kind of look at.
 
But then you also need leading indicators to actually make a change. And even those leading indicators we are embedding into our platform. So you would, for example, be able to see like, what's the percentage of online check ins versus online check ins and how fast, you know, how does it convert and how fast is it and what can you do? How can you, you know, did you configure that field one field too much?
 
Basically, that kind of repels the user or do you have an ugly image on the booking engine that you can correct? Or can you activate, you know, SMS communication so that, you know, you, you, you kind of get that invite to the hands of your mortgage? Those are things that we'll be embedding into our platform to drive those results across all of revenue, operational excellence and and guest experience.
 
And and and one that will obviously help the hotel and the the operators of the hotel. But on the other side also, I think owners of hotels have lacked insights into, do I put a big brand on the roof? Or am I actually safe to remove the brand because modern systems allow me to run much more efficient and I don't have to pay these huge, franchising fees to these brands? Do I put a hostel in or do I put a luxury hotel in? Because you could do both with the same real estate and hopefully, we'll provide some insights to show that actually you could be more profitable running a hostel than you would running a extreme luxury hotel.
 
And today, those assumptions are very hard to make. And it there are a lot of back of a napkin calculation that happens based on what what they think is going to happen in that particular location. And hopefully, these BI tools that we're building will help give real insights rather than just the the traditional BI tool where you have to just figure it out yourself. We're trying to give some guidance through these tools to the hotels.
 
Yeah. What we have stopped and we've already seen, even with the metrics today we use, as an industry, we have seen a huge inconsistency, you know, inconsistency in data across systems. Everyone measures even ref bar is like you could talk about as a standardized metric. Actually, everyone measures it differently.
 
And I want that service to be part of that and that service not to be part of that. And we have seen that, causing a lot of trouble. So solving that problem as well is something that we devote a lot of time to so that you're able to standardize the metrics and standardize the reporting across your base. So we can define metrics and everyone knows by the definition what that metric means, giving you the ability to create custom dashboards, you know, and that is sort of like one of the main, things we will be launching with that.
 
It's actually in beta right now. So everyone is, welcome to sign up, to that beta as well, but giving you the ability to create any dashboards that suit your business or your segment. As I said, every hotel is at the end of the day, very different.
 
So giving you the ability to do that and access data, not just kind of the kind of locked in data in the BMS, but all the products around and the whole ecosystem of use. We will give you the ability to digest all the data into one place and sort of build a standardized set of reporting on to that, obviously while, continuously improving solutions like Atomize, and kind of giving you options to kind of use those dashboards just as interesting things to look at, not things you need to act on because you have systems in place that act on them, for you.
 
Especially with the acquisition, of Optimize, we're looking at ways how we can be stronger together, right? We have data that that Optimize didn't have access to and kind of really no other solution in the market has today. So, for example, any revenue management system that you might be using today, will not react to your booking, booking engine correlation rates just because those two systems don't talk to each other. But, you know, again, with the product suite, that news has, that is something we can incorporate into the models.
 
And we have put a significant, resources behind improving the models for you, as well as giving you the ability to tune those models so that it's not like binaries, like, oh, it's AI or me, but nothing in between. But we can also make it, you know, it's AI for these days or it's, you know, you will sort of hinted basically be more aggressive on these days and and less aggressive on those days. And if Garf combined your context with with the sort of benchmarked data and the models to make the best outcome together.
 
Nice. So so we started talking at the beginning really around giving data and giving, democrat democratizing data for hotels, but also then showing you're actually not doing well or you're doing really well, but you could do better.
 
That's the beginning piece. And then, we went down and said, okay, we're actually now hopefully waking hotels up saying you could do more revenue based on the solutions you have, but you're not leveraging the solutions in the right way. And this is a struggle that we often have when we talk to hotels that they think that they're doing fine in upselling. And we're like, no, no, you're actually not.
 
Like we looked at the data and we compared it. And it's quite a manual lift for our customer success people to go into a hotel and saying, you're actually underperforming versus the market. And when a hotelier hears this, that wakes them up because that parks like this, this, this energy to to kind of win. And I'm hoping that this is what's going to drive because we've got all these amazing features and you already touched on Atomize specifically, but we've got more than that.

Chapter
The combo of ºÚÁÏÍø and Atomize RMS
 
But let's let's start with Atomize.
 
What excited you about that acquisition specifically and what's the plan for Atomize going forward for this year?
 
So first of all, we always love the team. The team is amazing and then it really kind of sells the news that it that is the same. We we have in news that someone, you know, feels news or is a user that we kind of tend to use in interviews, etcetera. And and really kind of when when we met with Optimize, we've really felt the deep partnership over the past couple of years, already.
 
And that is, you know, obviously something that's hugely important even outside of the products themselves. But just the mindset of full automation is just something that kind of really appeals to us the way they they they think about in the same way that the best best report is no report and best process is no process. So we'll say it will take time to get there. So we are, for example, combining, the ºÚÁÏÍø BI reports actually with Atomize to craft a more sort of comprehensive offering together.
 
So those are, for example, some of the things that we are working on to That they don't have to leave ºÚÁÏÍø to access Atomize that it would be all embedded inside ºÚÁÏÍø?
 
So that is that is a different one. This is just that we would extend, sort of optimize reporting capabilities by capabilities within our ºÚÁÏÍø BI product.
 
But as you as you write the set, what we are also working towards, that that will take a little bit of time. That will probably be end of the year, maybe even early next year. But, we would be working towards this vision of an embedded RMS. You know, as you all know, we have embedded payments and and our vision is like, what would an RMS or almost anything else would look like in an embedded version where you can't really differentiate between is, you know, this, this one, or the other, you just rethink about the user persona that uses this, and we think about the revenue managers and how do they use this, and they have to jump in between those systems, and we wanna create a one centralized price where they could actually, set their rates as well as kind of tune the revenue management, system, together towards this vision of, you know, PRMS, if you will, as well, one one and two together.
 
It's addressing a real challenge and and having worked in hotels and having to do group quotes and having to then run to your revenue manager to get the pricing. And he's like, okay. How much food and beverage revenue is there? And then you have to put that into a different system.
 
And for the meeting rooms, you have to go into an Excel sheet to get the prices. And a lot of these things are quite manual. And then you have to go into a quoting tool where you pull together these quotes. And we're really thinking that all of this should live inside one platform where all of the users live.
 
They don't all all the different users that sit in our hotel shouldn't log into their own separate systems. That should all happen in one place so that there is a single source of truth rights.
 
Yeah, that is actually also something that we are working on related to security, which has been a huge topic for our industry, like this as well, in which you would be working on a solution that would able to have just one news account to all the products that you offer as well, have a very sort of granular permissions over that. So you could say like this person can go to this product and this and the following product and can only really view and export these two items over here, but nothing else to really kind of, you know, drive the, you know, the least amount of privileges you actually need for your job to help protect the businesses of our customers as well. So, it has multiple angles to it. It's it's user friendly and secure as well, which is which is a win win type of situation.
 
So with Atomize, are we looking to go beyond rooms? Because we're starting to measure and give metrics to hotels to say, okay, revenue per available space, etcetera. So how are we going to leverage Atomize to go beyond just the traditional revenue management system?
 
Great.
 
Great question. So beyond combining the models and combining the UI and then these sort of things that we talked about, Atomize actually, was already thinking about it. The vision of Atomize was to actually optimize for the total profit of the business. And there is already a small feature within Atomize where you can put your ancillary revenues in and sort of take them into an account.
 
But obviously together, we can make it a dynamic feature. Today, it's a static feature that you sort of set it based on the averages. You could actually make it dynamic, you know, based on seasonality and the gas and segments and all these things and also not manual. It would be automatic, basically.
 
So, again, that's something that we can connect together. But it was a huge part of of news is that kind of ancillary revenue of new spaces and an upselling and just thinking about your guests and optimizing for the guests lifetime value in totality, you know, not just, you know, can I sell my rooms? And then that has a variety of, of, sort of components. Right.
 
So it's also attacking the right guests. So being able to focus on the right segments and be able to actually say a good example that is actually tied to another great thing that we are bringing to our program, which is allowances, is we just had a Valentine's Day, right? And if you tried to book a dinner on Valentine's Day, most of the restaurants, even that you regularly go to and have a coffee, will tell you, you are only allowed if you pre book the Valentine's Day's menu fully. So that's a great example of how those restaurants knew that the most profitable segment would be couples on Valentine's Day.
 
And they have sort of restricted the offer and catered the offer in a way that optimizes for that group. Because they were confident that I can fill all my restaurant with couples on Valentine's Day. So I should actually hyper optimize, for that segment and create a tailored offer and not allow, anyone else. Whereas on other days you can go there and just have a coffee because they know that basically they can't fill it with just, you know, the, you know, a cup of spending crazy amount of money.
 
So and that is a great I think that was a great example of the same thing that hotels should be doing, you know, in different seasons, for different three seasons, use a different ICPs. And and we would sort of think about how can we first give you those insights that you have done. Some nice hotels might even not know them, like who's the most profitable guest in a given season, but then also help you set your distribution, your restrictions, your pricing, all these things in a way that actually are catered towards that. And then when those people are in the room to make sure that the services they use are properly priced.
 
So that, that, that late check-in, you know, is priced differently based on the availability and the season that is same as early checking, same as additional products. So, you know, the idea of food and beverage being dynamic is sometimes controversial. But there are restaurants doing that already, just not knowing about that, calling it happy hours. You know, happy hour is actually a dynamic pricing of food and beverage as well.
 
And it can go to other amenities, be it the spa and wellness or bike rental. You know, maybe everyone wants to rent a bike on a weekend, but not very people want to do that on on a on a business, Wednesday.
 
And a lot of these things that you mentioned now, we actually developed last year. So the ability to book a bike or a co-working desk or, adding up upsells into the online check-in for both products and for for physical rooms. We added it to the kiosk now. So the the products exist. It's and the ability to dynamically price has existed for for however long we've created these options, But no one knows how to do it because humans cannot do all of the pricing for all of these things simultaneously.

Chapter
Dynamic pricing
 
And this is where we get excited because this is where there's a real revenue opportunity because you can only push the price of the bedroom so far before people will leave for another hotel.
 
But these things and I talk about parking, for example, often. If you're running a high occupancy on a Friday, it is very likely your parking will also be busy. So the pricing of your parking should dynamically link to the rooms, and and get more expensive because, like, it's likely that people will come with a car and wanna park it. And that's where incredible revenue gains could come from for hotels going forward.
 
Yeah. Definitely.
 
But even though, you know, again, those are things that we talk about, but there is still I think half of the industry doesn't even change their prices at all. So there's a significant amount of hotels that just say that their room is always one hundred. So the potential in the industry is just incredible overall.
 
So let's leave the revenue item because there's a lot we could talk about.
 
I have so much more on the road, but I want to just pick your brain on. So one of the hardest things is deploying a proper dimension system because hotels never shut. Like, we come in and there's an actual actual operating hotel, and we have to come in and deploy ºÚÁÏÍø. And it is it is painful. However you turn it, like, it is operationally a nightmare to switch out systems whilst you're checking in and out customers.
 
And we've been really good at this. Like historically with legacy systems, it's been an absolute nightmare. And I've been through some of those nightmare scenarios in my previous life.
 
It's got better, but it's not perfect still. But I think you put quite some resources behind deployments this year. Right?
 
Oh, yeah. Definitely. The the mission that we have set for ourselves there is how can we make it so that, you know, changing the PMS is often referred to as a sort of brain surgery or open heart surgery.
 
And, as I'm just going to one of our customer events in a few weeks. And the main topic is basically like fear of change and change management. And, you know, and changing systems is really such a such a scary moment for us in industry, whereas in other industries, it means we change software as maybe too often, but it's almost like a daily it's not a it's not a thing, you know, whereas in hospitality, it still is like a major topic. And one of the big major reasons is because the software isn't actually suited.
 
There is the the business of hotels, six twenty four seven. The guests are always in the building. There is no no time to switch off. So therefore it makes the the the bar for onboarding.
 
And I don't think you suffer is super, super high. But we've set ourselves on a mission that how can we make it so easy that it's like a new iPhone that you got to unpack, you say, migrate from the other phone and everything is done. So that is kind of our vision for where we want, you know, onboarding of a new PMS to be both be it a new customer or a new property they opened up, in a way that we can not only give the power to the user to configure everything and maybe let AI kind of help with that while also looking at external data sources. Right.
 
So again, we have those benchmarking data. We can maybe pre populate a lot of the things already with similar, hotels and how is it usually configured and sort of keyframe automatic, automatic recommendations on top, as well as taking data from Booking dot com and other sort of sources around to make sure that you really we kind of really do as much as we can automatically, out there for you.
 
And that is that is one of the biggest, goals, for my team this year.
 
And the ecosystem. So one thing is changing the PMS. But once you've got ºÚÁÏÍø's PMS onboarding with, for example, Atomize, it should be super it should literally be switching on the token and then the data starts flowing.
 
And I asked, I was last week in Gothenburg and I asked Atomize team, how is it to deploy Atomize with different PMS solutions? And they're like varying degrees of complexity because it depends on how the data is provided to us, whether we have to clean it manually, etcetera. And I said, well, how is it? And they're like, it's pretty good, but we still have manual work to do to make sure that the data corresponds correctly.
 
But we need to make that completely smooth. Right?
 
Especially Atomize will get to stay this year where it's basically there. It's whether you just want to use it or not. You don't need to onboard on the Atomize like it's there.
 
You can kind of start using it and see, you know, see what it does in action in a in a matter of seconds. Right. With other things like POS, obviously those things you do need to know, like, what their menus, but maybe we can take a photo of the menu and ultimately kind of put it in to the software to make that process just way easier. Or, you know, there is so much information out there about your restaurant or hotel on Google already. Right? How can we take that information and pre populate your images and everything kind of preconfigured in a matter of instance? So you don't need to do that manual work like, oh, am I, everyone and I must be like so annoyed when you go and you go to a new e commerce website just to check out and like, oh, your name and address and all of that again.
 
You know, and, and I don't want our customers to feel, that way when when when they, embrace on a new product, embrace a new product or, or property.
 
So we did an acquisition early last year, but we kept it quiet because, it was a different type of acquisition than what we've done with with the ºÚÁÏÍø POS and now with Atomize, where we bought the company and we started selling it immediately. Whereas with Quotelo that we announced at the end of last year, we've done the acquisition already months before, and we started a lot of the groundwork. Can you maybe share a little bit of what what we're thinking? Or is this like still a secret that it needs a good secret?
 
I think at this point, you know, it's something that I just maybe use as an, as a space for everyone to kind of encourage everyone to come unfold, our annual conference, where we'll be obviously sharing much more and more detail in a sort of fully fledged presentation. But indeed, as you know, Quotelo was a company in the event management. And and so we are definitely looking at how can we redefine, event management, for, for our customers, as well as, you know, make it part of our wider, wider ecosystem, as we like to call it. But I will keep it there. Right.
 
You, briefly touched on security. And our industry has been faced with, more and more aggressive attacks of phishing attempts. And they are morphing from your traditional email from a Nigerian prince to suddenly being really advanced.
 
And it's been consistent. Like, we've experienced this since the summer, and consistently in waves it comes. But we are now learning from other, partners in the industry that some of them have been already for years feeling this, this pressure. And it's widespread.
 
And we're seeing now others also making sure that they enforce two factor authentication.
 
So there's really this wave of security being the topic of the day. And I remember last year, Unfold, my big takeaway of Unfold last year was cybersecurity will be the number one thing on the agenda. And it wasn't the most exciting topic, but it's so important. And more than ever today, it remains relevant. What is the plan for us to better secure the data that we sit on as a platform?
 
Yeah, that's great. There is there's plenty of things that we are doing. You've seen us if you've been watching our, released old page, you've seen plenty, tens of updates that help you tackle this kind of industry wide, problem, especially as you know, that that your churn is so high for front of house, usually in hospitality, etcetera. So you need to kind of keep training new and new, employees that that that makes it quite difficult.
 
The composition of front of house is usually, you know, that, you know, you have multiple people using different computers. It's not always easy as like I have my own device and no one else will ever use it. So therefore, we've actually just shipped a feature called trust browser or trust device where you can actually only approve the devices that you have, in your hotel.
 
So I'm gonna use that as a moment for everyone again to kind of just, you know, look at that and, and, and sort of turn, turn that feature on as well as the usual that as for Matt was sharing, you know, have a bookmark or, you know, set up your computers in a way that they already open your browser, always opens with a new slogan page, you know, and you don't even have to find it because the main vector of attack is actually through Google search when people type in news login and it gets into a malicious site or any other software.
 
The sort of continued, is, as I've already highlighted, is this kind of the kind of permissions and user management. Like there is one way preventing that they have to go into the door, letting them in the door. And there was, there was a huge focus, making sure that they can't get in. But even whatever you do, you will always like these things will always happen.
 
So how can we also make it sure that when they do happen, we minimize that impact and that's very, very granular, and role based permissions come in so that everyone has the least amount of privileges they really need, to accomplish their jobs. Right. You probably don't need exporting the whole database, to do the checking. Right.
 
So there are always a lot of there are already a lot of ways you can set it up in use, already, but we have just decided to make it much more robust and really go into the smallest detail possible. So you can really say which actions you can do on which items. So you can say, I can read the reservations, but I can't edit reservations or I can't I can only export, you know, customer profiles, but I can't, update them. And you can really kind of go into detail and really kind of tick the box only for things and craft these roles for a property and assign people only those roles, that are relevant to them.

Chapter
Identity and single sign-on
 
So that that is something that is a huge thing that we are embarking on. We're also, you know, working on a centralized identity so that you have just one set of privileges and one account for all your, used products, as well as we have just made a decision to give SSO for free for six months for them because we have seen SSO as a thing that actually helps quite a lot. Our customers have made the decision to actually eat the costs ourselves, and so you can now try it out for six months for free.
 
And single sign on is probably much more for the serious hotel companies that have an IT department. If you don't have an IT team, you're probably not going to have single sign on.
 
But you have different options to log into the system. So that could be your two factor authentication codes that you get into the app. We actually have this feature, but it's the least favorite. The better version is actually the magic link, right?
 
So if you get a magic link that emails you in your inbox where you then verify again through your inbox, that this is actually you. And this is a thing that I learned in the last year. I always thought that these, apps that you have, like the Google apps and stuff where you get a two factor code was pretty safe. But actually, if you've gone to a phishing site and you're logging in and then you're putting in your Google code into that fake website, you're giving away the access to this account as well.
 
So the most important thing is to never click on Google sponsored links, and try and keep your team on the magic links if you can. And I know that in hotels this is a challenge because not everyone has an email address and we're looking for better ways to do that. But that is honestly the best way. If you don't have an IT team and a single sign on, then the next best bets would be the email links.
 
And then the third best bet would be the, the codes. But they are definitely the least favorite there.

Chapter
The rise of extended stay in hospitality
 
Extended stay is, something that last year, if you read the media and you looked at what the big brands were doing, suddenly you started seeing every major brand talk about extended stay or apart hotels and going to diversify their categories. What are we doing in that segment?
 
Great question. And we also not only we have seen a sort of segment of extended stay rise quite a lot in the industry, but also aspects of extended stay within traditional hotels, right? For things like membership, etcetera. That's another way that you can grow your revenue.
 
You know, having these kind of subscriptions and memberships being through your amenities or hotels on some loyalty programs that you pay for. Know, this sort of subscription based economy overall is there in the world and you just haven't been great at adopting that in hospitality, be it for leisure purposes or even corporate purposes. Right. You could have a subscription between you and a different company that sort of, you know, gives them a favorable contract or you pre contract something that you pay for on a monthly basis. That's, that's a great way to really, you know, secure that business. You know, a lot of times hotel I've seen, I've seen hotels giving too much flexibility to especially companies, and then they can cancel and basically you're screwed and you're not in a favorable position. Whereas, you know, the subscription based contracts are actually a great alternative to to secure that revenue.
 
And this is not just to be there real customers out there today in our space that are doing this. This is not a co-working company. This is like the social hub, for example, have successfully launched this product on ºÚÁÏÍø and are seeing incredible impact of rethinking what a lobby space could be and turning that into a co working space and then driving subscriptions for their lobbies. And it and it's incredibly powerful.
 
And we'll have, social hub at ºÚÁÏÍø Unfold. We're on stage also at ITB where we'd be talking about some of these these use cases. But there are hotel companies right now doing this thing. And this leads back to where we started our conversation, which was about total revenue of the real estate.
 
Right? So how do I measure how much revenue you're making per square meter? That lobby in hotels is the most valuable space, and it is the most underutilized in terms of driving revenue. And this is one of those great examples where we could help you.
 
I've got a Matt Talks coming up with the CEO of, Mr. Green, which is this great co-working brand. And I'd love to just pick his brain on how can we learn as an industry to run a co-working space, for example, or maybe a small version of that in your hotel lobbies.
 
And and and I'll that that'll be an episode that's coming up because I think this a really hot category.
 
Definitely. So in that space, you know, those are things like recurring billing and subscription based billing that you, that is now part of news and will continue to expand to companies and credit cards and etcetera. So you can really go and create these, we call them payment plans, in the, in the PMS where you can say charge these guests monthly for the following items, for example, and, and also, contracting. So a lot of these kind of more subscription based services, be it student accommodation or membership, they usually require some sort of contract.
 
Right. It's not your standard, like filling reservation and order. You want to put some sort of agreement in place. So we are also putting that into our platform as well, so that we have this kind of contracting phase, in the sort of reservation lifecycle as well.
 
So we spent quite a we've definitely gone longer than normal episode, but it's because, like me and you are probably really passionate about what we're doing. And we only covered like the top line items. There's so much underline. Under the iceberg.
 
Yeah. Like I wanted to end on a high and I was like, let's talk about accounting. Like and no one would ever think that's the high, but, we have underserved accountants in our system historically.
 
Can you talk a little bit about what the work is that's undergoing to make sure that we make accountants happy around the world?
 
Yeah. So we've actually just launched, City Ledger, a new City Ledger. It's, people may also know it as accounts receivable. So that is actually something that's out and order life, I think, for a week or something.
 
So that is something you can go ahead and already check out, check that out. We obviously want to take that much further. Right. So that the the the overall flow of, you know, managing those, payables and receivables is, you know, way easier today.
 
And we can kind of help you, improve your cash flow today.
 
Like, it's currently And this goes back to the conversation we had at the start here where you said, do we need a report if we can automate the hell out of this? And Exactly.
 
Ultimately, the first thing we did is, right, we built the reports. We have the functionality to say, okay, if if someone's not paid their invoice, we will send a reminder. You can now press a button that should be automated. We should automatically send a reminder.
 
The invoice now comes with a payment link so that they don't have to go to do a bank transfer. They can literally just press the link inside the invoice to take the payment because we're also the payment provider to the hotel. So we're taking this baseline report and then we're really thinking about, we'd like to remove this report in a few years time, if we can just automate the hell out of it. But right now, what we need is that report.
 
Exactly. So those are some of the things that we'll be putting in place, as well in the following. We are actually looking into even things that could enable that because right now you have to do some, for example, in some cases, when they do choose to pay through a bank transfer, you actually do have to do the reconciliation manually, right? You have to go into ºÚÁÏÍø and actually say this was paid and add the external thing.
 
We are looking at ways how can we completely automate it so that reconciliation is not something you need to do. It's just something the software tells you like it's done and everything is fine. Maybe like this thing is actually not fine. Have a look.
 
But but, you know, this process as such could be, should be something that we completely removed from Vendasta and shouldn't be actually worried about. And this will extend to not just collecting money, obviously, post stay, but also in stay and pre stay. So, that is something with the full ledger solution that we are looking to launch, kind of mid year, with, you know, the the guest ledger and the deposit ledger as well. But again, then building on top of them to make sure that we actually don't need these reports in our industry, at all.
 
But it's a it's a baseline that we need to establish because getting the data right is a huge challenge. And there is again, like million use cases in million countries. So getting this right everywhere does take a little bit of an effort. But when we will have that pace, we can then finally get to the delighting stage, as we like to call it, and help you sort of automate and streamline a lot of these processes, get that money faster in your building.
 
So you don't have to wait for it and you don't have to worry about that. And you sort of feel on top of your cash flow instead of managing cash flow.
 
Like there's no better way to end with happy accountants.
 
Like, Like, it's not the most exciting feature, but it's been a real challenge that we wanted to solve, because, accounting in hotels is really complex. The way you book something months in advance and then you consume it over multiple days and you get group bookings and, like, it it's a really hard challenge. And we thought and we worked really hard on solving this, at the baseline.
 
Thank you for talking me through some of these big, big boulders that were pushing up the hill.
 
There is so much more, and we will make sure that all of this information, and we do webinars in different languages as well. But I wanted to just really have you here to explain some of the thinking that we have going on into kind of the bigger thoughts. Thank you for being here.
 
Thank you so much.
 
And I actually just to add on, I do find that, exciting even that. So, you know, that that is the power of combining, payments as well. You know, part of our platform, a lot of hotels still think about payments as a commodity. I just need to to accept payments.
 
But there is so much revenue loss and so much manual labor still that that we need to remove from our industries that that as I said to my original answer, I get passionate about everything. So even this is my favorite area. And thanks for having me, Matt. I'm looking forward to solving this.
 
Thanks.