Do you think the future is tech-enabled hospitality?
It’s 100% tech-enabled without losing the human touch in hotel groups or in hotels. The hospitality industry is built upon human interactions, so technology will definitely not replace that.
It’s also our vision at Bookboost to enable hotels to cut away the repetitive steps. Don’t focus on administration and doing things again and again so a hotel and the staff at the hotel can actually focus on building the connection and the relationship with the guests.
So yes, the future of hospitality is 100% tech-enabled—aligned with the goals of each hotel—and also not replacing the fundamentals that the industry is built on.
How can hoteliers maximize tech investments for revenue, efficiency, and guest experience?
The fundament of doing any tech investment is that you have the basics right.
This industry, especially compared to others, has so many players, ways of doing things, workflows, and different legislation in each country. That’s why there are so many different players trying to solve a diverse amount of problems. It means systems often don’t talk well with each other.
To make your tech investments profitable and ROI-driven, you have to get the basics right. And the basics are in data—customer data, reservation data—having that organised and talking to each other.
That’s exactly what we solve at Bookboost. We bring together all customer data and relay all these data points to each other. In this way, you can get the fundamentals right. You have one profile with 100 guest data points then you can start building upon that. You can start delivering experiences that align with your brand as a hotel.
If you want to automate more processes, you need the right customer data—you need the right fundamentals in your hotel to automate processes. If you want to deliver better service, you need that customer data—because then you understand your guests. You can welcome them back. You understand who your returners are, who your loyal guests are.
If you want to improve your distribution, you also have to get the fundamentals right. You want to know who your guests are, what’s their booking behaviour, spending behaviour, demographic behaviour—who are your loyal guests, who are your returners, your first-timers?
So really making your tech investments profitable starts with getting the fundamentals right and having a good system that collects all data, and specifically customer data.
Amid ITB’s innovations, how can hoteliers stay agile and choose the right tech?
That’s also in line with getting the fundamentals right. If you have the customer and reservation data—your two basic data points in your operations—you’re able to iterate quickly. You can be agile, learn from what is happening. It starts with an iterative cycle – understanding what’s happening, being able to quickly adjust to that and having the infrastructure to implement, to learn again, derive the insights from what you have done and make an iterative circle on how you want to improve your rents.
It starts with the vision—your north star. Then the agile steps start with getting the fundamentals right.
How can technology help hoteliers unlock new revenue beyond room sales?
It’s about really understanding your guests.
First step is in the fundamental data and understanding who your guests are, seeing what certain types of guest populations do. Probably your business guests behave differently than your leisure guests. Probably your returners behave differently than your first-timers. Summer visitors versus winter visitors.
How can hotels use tech to deliver authentic, personalized experiences while also catering to business guests?
It’s about understanding patterns so you can create data-driven campaigns and offers at scale, aligned with the learnings from your data.
Look at all the big companies, how they make decisions is data-driven. It’s not just a gut feeling anymore even though it’s still very strong. You always need to have an understanding in a hotel such as “this is probably going to help my customers either being an upsell or cross-sell or a different offer”. But it has to align with your customer data, market insights, and how different guest populations and guest segments behave.
Is the future of hospitality tech in specialized platforms or all-in-one solutions?
It’s a tricky one—generalism versus specialism.
I think there will be a couple of building blocks in the industry. The systems that house different data entities—property management systems (PMS) being the fundament of reservation data, and CRMs/CDPs being the fundament of customer data.
On top of that, there will be more specialised tools that solve specific problems and plug into those fundamental systems in the industry.
Of course, there are platforms that try to encapsulate everything. Then there are concerns like do I lock myself in too much to a certain platform?
There will always be a balance of tools that solve very specific problems and tools that provide the fundamentals and then quickly deriving values.
For us at Bookboost, that means getting the customer data right—CRM, marketing, customer journeys, guest app, ticketing and we also have partners that plug into that ecosystem to improve workflows, automations, agent AIs—specialised for different regions or a very specific problem.
What are you most excited about for Bookboost in the next year?
We just raised a huge chunk of money. We’re very happy in these times to raise a quite large amount of cash in Europe. We’ll invest that in new functionality around customer data, relating data, and bringing better experiences to guests for our clients.
We’re launching more functionality focused on creating more loyal guests—because loyal guests bring more direct bookings in the end.
So we’re really excited about that—getting our foot down more in our core markets and working with more innovative clients in our portfolio.
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