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The Benefits Behind Zero-Day Rate Inventory

 

 

Yannis Moati, CEO of HotelsByDay, and TJ Noble, senior director of key accounts and technology solutions for DerbySoft, chat with host Robin Trimingham regarding why hoteliers should rethink their attitude toward offering day rates.

This frank conversation discusses, among other things, marketing and operational challenges and also explains how technology can now make it possible to monetize hotel amenities, such as the pool, gym, spa and co-working spaces, to create scalable revenue for hotels.

 

Highlights from Today’s Episode

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This episode was supported through the generosity of the following sponsors:

Front of the House  (fohworldwide.com)

Since our start in 2002, FOH has transformed an industry accustomed to the ordinary by offering stylishly unexpected and uniquely trend-forward collections for hospitality and food service. fohworldwide.com

 


 

Episode Transcript

Yannis Moati: We are at about $6.2 billion of demand by 2026. For daytime services and daytime products. It’s just a tiny speck in the overall demand that there is for overnight stays, but when you consider two things, one, that still most people don’t know, that there is this service to be booked, and two, that the solution is finally becoming scalable now. So we’re finally going to have hotels all over the world that will be able to simply just plug in to the services, where before they had to create all those steps. Now they can just plug in through their resolve and provide the services, and with it, demand flourishes going up.

Robin Trimingham: Welcome to The Innovative Hotelier podcast by HOTELS magazine, with weekly, thought-provoking discussions with the world’s leading hotel and hospitality innovators.

Robin Trimingham: Welcome to The Innovative Hotelier, brought to you by HOTELS magazine. I’m your host, Robin Trimingham. In the hotel industry, one of the oldest and perhaps least discussed rate codes in existence is the day use rate code, frequently only acknowledged as a way to charge guests a late checkout fee. Upscale establishments have traditionally shied away from marketing this rate category because of some of the types of customers it’s thought to attract, but for some forward thinking hoteliers, all of this is about to change. My guest today, Yannis Motis, the CEO of Hotels by Day, and TJ Noble, senior director of key accounts and technology solutions for Derby Soft, are here today to chat about the game changing benefits of offering zero day room inventory. Join me now for my conversation with Yannis and TJ.

Robin Trimingham:  FOH is a global food service and hospitality company that manufactures smart commercial grade solutions. Headquartered in Miami, the company designs and manufactures all their restaurant and hotel products. They have showrooms and distribution centers located throughout the globe, and their products are always in stock and ready to ship from any of their distribution centers worldwide. Welcome Yannis and TJ, it’s great to meet both of you.

Yannis Moati: Thank you.

TJ Noble: It’s great to meet you. Thanks for having me today.

Robin Trimingham: Today we’re going to do things just a little bit differently than I have done with other podcast guests. I’m going to ask you each to start by explaining what your company does, because I’m not sure that our global audience will have heard of you guys before, and then we’ll dive in a little bit deeper regarding how you’re working together. So, Yannis, if you don’t mind, I’m going to ask you to kick things off here briefly. What is Hotels by Day?

Yannis Moati: Yes. With pleasure. Hotels by Day is an app that was launched in 2015 that promotes experiences during the day at hotels for guests. And by that, we mean hotel rooms for a few hours to rest, shower, change, uh, refresh from a red eye, but also pool passes, gym passes, parking passes, meeting rooms, co-working desks. So basically, we’re a marketplace that offers a new experience for guests to be able to experience the property and for hotels to be able to better monetize their assets. And we launched in 2015.

Robin Trimingham: So that’s a pretty unique I haven’t really talked to anybody else who does anything exactly like that. Okay, TJ, it’s your turn. What exactly is Derby Soft?

TJ Noble: Thank you. DerbySoft creates technology that solves our customers needs. We want the business to drive the technology with no limitations. No rules that tell a hotel or channel how they have to fit together, and hopefully doing so to maximize everyone’s potential. When you sit down with DerbySoft, you have a meeting with our solution engineers. They aren’t going to start off with technical questions about what system capabilities are. They’re going to find out what the hotelier is trying to accomplish, what the channel is trying to do, and we want to have a perfect understanding of how they want to do business together. Then we start looking at the system capability, identifying gaps, and we’re going to have technology to marry those systems and the way needed to support the business.

Robin Trimingham: That is a great approach. It sounds to me like you’re doing a lot of bespoke solution work for people. How did this idea for the partnership between your two companies come about? Yannis, maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.

Yannis Moati: Absolutely. We were, uh, with pleasure. So as I mentioned, and actually repeated it, we launched in 2015, early 2015. And when we launched, we realized fairly quickly that in the ecosystem of hotels that has ins and outs in every single hotel has its own technology, its own challenges, but also options. We realized that unfortunately, in this galaxy of connectivity and this galaxy of technology, there was absolutely nothing that allowed our solution of hourly hotels or hourly services, or at least if not hourly daytime services that was outside of the regular check in at 3 p.m. and check out the next day at 11 a.m.. It was absolutely nothing that allowed us to scale the model nationwide and eventually worldwide, so it was pretty limiting at first when we launched to be able to one sell the concept and two provide this concept to all of our hoteliers and everybody that wanted it. So what we had to build is a very seamless, simple back-end technology that allowed the hoteliers to manually input their inventory in the night stay business to have a manual connectivity is a big taboo and it does not work out. But for the day-to-day business, we realized that it actually works out fairly smoothly because essentially it’s, um, it’s fixed inventory.

Yannis Moati: Uh, when we set the proper benchmark in terms of inventory rates and availability, that sets could go on for months, quarters, if not years. So, we realize it’s fairly static to sell a room for a few hours during the day or a pool pass rates don’t change so fast. And we started, um, onboarding properties first one at a time, then small management companies and eventually bigger companies also that joined us, up to the point in which the technology limitation was, was not enabling us to be able to create the scalability, as I mentioned before, but also the connectivities that some bigger partner, larger partners out there, as in hotel brands, wanted us to create. So we went to we both went to Derby Soft, explaining what the issue is, explaining how a day room is being processed on our end and also on the hotels end. And we needed someone. We need a specialized technology solution provider to be able to connect the two dots, and Derby Soft was able to pull through with this challenge and quite successfully. We are very pleased with that possibility of working together.

Robin Trimingham: Now, TJ, I understand that this was first to be asked to do something like this. What did your what was your team’s reaction when this request first came in?

TJ Noble: It’s exciting when something challenging comes up for us. This is literally what DerbySoft does. Look, we know there are some systems that don’t support this. Either the concept of a day use room isn’t supported, or the ability to distribute that product from a central reservation system or PMS or whatever the system they’re using. But this is the exact type of thing Derby soft helps with day in and day out. We use our technology to, sometimes to something simple. Map a rate plan to a hotels by day rate plan using rules the hotel provides us. We can get the availability and rate to hotels by day and the manner they expect. We do a lot of that, that formatting of these messages to be compatible with each other. It’s taking the incompatible and making them compatible so we can insert logic to accommodate the zero night inventory, the way the hotel system needs to see it if that’s the challenge. In some cases, maybe it’s more straightforward than others, but with DerbySoft, there will always be some solution we can implement to allow our clients to do business. Our view is, and I think I said it once before, the business should drive the technology. If a CRS can’t support this, we’ll fill the gaps to make it work. This is what we thrive on. It’s what we’ve become known for in the industry.

Robin Trimingham: Okay, so I have a classic hotel example for you, and maybe I’ll ask if either one of you can talk to us a little bit how things would work with your solution. One of the things that happens all the time is you’ll have a no show. Hotel thinks it’s a no show. We can go and charge the credit card because that’s our policy. We can put this room back up for sale. However, the guest has frantically really tried to say, “hey, my flight’s late, I’m coming, but I’m not coming till two in the morning, but I want my room. Don’t get my room away.” What happens? That message just gets lost in the minutia of the notes. If it made it into the notes in the first place, and the hotel is at capacity and the room gets given away, and here’s the poor guy at the front desk at two in the morning going, “well, what do I do now?” How would your system handle a situation like that or handle it differently?

Yannis Moati: It is indeed an issue of technology to be able to provide better clarity to the customer’s needs and to the customer’s agendas. And to that point, I’d like to just step back and say that our solution was born out of that necessity, that we realized that I was a travel agent myself, and I had customers wanting a different type of check in/ check out than what most hotels were providing. And what is the custom time, which is again 3 p.m., check in 11 a.m., check out the next day. Our solution came out of the necessity of a customer that is ever more dynamic than before, that is accustomed to everything on demand according to their needs, and just couldn’t understand that hospitality was being so rigid and tongue in cheek. I realized that hospitality was becoming inhospitable to modern guests, with modern needs, with modern dynamics, right? And so, yes, we created technology to be able to provide a solution of more flexibility, more dynamic pricing, etc, but essentially, the issue that you list, Robin, is a is an issue of operations more than anything else. And we realized that our solution is not for everyone. It requires the hotel’s operation that is dynamic on the go, that is ambitious, that has a good visibility of its occupancy and non-occupied rooms. We work with the hotel in detail and we dig down.

Yannis Moati: We go into the numbers of their check ins, check outs, their occupancy on a per quarter basis. So, we come up with a solution that provides the property the right formula to be able to be flexible. And so, long story short and long worded answer, I apologize for this, the issue that you stated is not much of an issue that we have a problem with, because we have one identified the property that can take in flexibility to provide all the technology and all the tools for them to be able to manage this flexibility. And three train the staff at the hotel before we go live to be able to identify any type of request that comes out of the standard 3 p.m. 11 a.m. check out the next day. Therefore, yes, it is an issue. Customer requirements and change of plans is definitely an issue. Technology that should be able to be more transparent with every single person’s demand and identity is definitely a need for the industry to get to. But we are getting there and it is, we think, less of an issue with our properties because we train for that specific problem of flexibility, and that’s what we solve. Therefore that’s the solution we provide.

Robin Trimingham: I think you make a very valid point when you say it’s partially an operational problem. Technology is only going to be as good as the people using it, leveraging it. So you’re absolutely right TJ. Talk to us a little about the -I don’t want to say challenges, because that’s a negative word- about what it took to create a solution and get it working for hotels by day.

TJ Noble: We are a company founded by engineers. Our CEO and CTO co-founders are engineers. That’s how they started off. And from our earliest days, they didn’t come into this business with any notion of boundaries or how things have always been, why things are the way they are to them. They looked at things as just data is data. Let’s just build it the way it needs to be done. I come from the supplier side of things. Is that one of the major chains for 15 years, and I remember our sales team often saying, well, we want to do this and maybe the channel needs it to be this way. And then the connectivity team saying, “no, the CRS doesn’t support that, can’t do it that way, or something”. I’ve heard even quite recently, as someone said, “well, this is how the GDS works”, or “the GDS can’t do that, we can’t do it”. That’s to me, not ideal. That’s not how this should be any of this. So we truly just take an approach of what do you want? Giannis was very good about explaining what this product is and what the opportunity is and how they want to do business. We have very specific solutions, customized solutions with some of the biggest players, many systems, CRS companies, we know what their abilities are. We know how their systems work, how they distribute. And this really became fun for us. I mean, this is quite literally what we do every day. So it was avoiding that common theme of, “well, we can’t do it. It’s never worked that way or can’t distribute this”. And we just said, “well, how can we do it? We know what you’re how your system does work, what’s the closest you can get”. And DerbySoft will get it over the finish line with our solutions in the middle. So for us, I hate to put it this way, just another project, just another day in the office. But we had a great partner with Yannis who had the vision on the distribution side of this. They added this product and knew what the opportunity was.

Robin Trimingham: Established in 2002. FOH is a woman-owned global food service and hospitality company that manufactures smart, savvy commercial-grade products including plate wear, drinkware, flatware, hotel amenities and more. Driven by innovation, FOH is dedicated to delivering that wow experience that restaurants and hotels crave, all while maintaining a competitive price. All products are fully customized, and many are also created using sustainable, eco-friendly materials such as straws and plates made from biodegradable paper and wood, and PVA-free drinkware. FOH has two established brands; Front of the House, focused on tabletop and buffet solutions, and Room 360, which offers hotel products. Check out their collections today at fohworldwide.com.

Robin Trimingham: I think you’re making a fair point. I mean, I put you on the spot by asking the question, but you’re absolutely right. The key to solving any never-before-done thing before is simply asking, “How can we get this done?”. What sort of data exists regarding the demand for flexible day-use room rates? Because I know some of our more traditional hoteliers won’t be used to thinking about it this way, and I think this would help them.

Yannis Moati: Yes, absolutely. In the growth of our company, some of the issues we had to deal with was, for one, technology that turboshaft is coming through and solving this problem of scalability for us, and we are so grateful for the desire of taking that challenge on, because, by the way, we’ve had a lot of discussions with not just connectors, but GDS as they were mentioned in the past. And yes, there is this prevalent orthodoxy in the industry as well. It has never been done before and this is the way it works, and therefore we don’t see any possibility out there. And DerbySoft was the one company that looked into a challenge as an opportunity, not as something that they should just turn a blind eye on. And so technology was an issue. The second issue was that there was a lack of visibility in the global demand for this product simply because technology was not set up for it, because each single customer for a day use room in the past just walked in. And so, therefore, it was ticked off as a night stay under special conditions. So, therefore, there was a lack of transparency to how much demand there was, how much of a need there is truly how much of a solution there is to be solved here. But we’re creating this visibility, we’re creating this data, we’re creating the KPI. And our company has constantly been growing. Knock on wood. And so, with it with us and also other players in this sector of burgeoning startups in each single continent.

Yannis Moati: Really, because there’s a play in Asia, a couple of plays in Europe, one in Latin America, and not seeing the United States, we are essentially creating the transparency of this demand. So, I’m very happy to report that as of just a few months ago, the first analyst in the industry started reporting on the demand and the potential demand that there would be out there for this product. And so, according to the analysis, we’re at about $6.2 billion of demand by 2026 for daytime services and daytime products. Look, it’s just a tiny speck in the overall demand that there is for overnight stays. But when you consider two things, one, that still most people don’t know that there is this service to be had or to be booked, that’s one we’re seeing it with our demand, like most of our customers, are still at one time users and then eventually repeats and all that stuff. That’s for one and two that the solution is finally becoming scalable now. So we’re finally going to have hotels all over the world that will be able to simply just plug in to the services, where before they had to create all those steps. Now they can just plug in through Derby Soft and provide the services, and with it, demand flourishes. So I repeat 6.2 billion by 2026 and growing. We think tremendously from there on.

TJ Noble: Something I would piggyback off of what Yannis mentioned there. From my view, the mindset is tougher to change than the technology, and I think this is one of those. It’s that mindset of, “Well, we can’t or we never have, or is this the right thing?” I think we can show it is the right thing. It’s changing mindset.

Robin Trimingham: Okay, so that’s the perfect segue into my next question. Let’s talk about the white elephant in the room here. Upscale hotels’ day use rate. There is a stereotype out there that says all you’re going to get or what I’m going to call hanky panky customers because I’m old. And there’s got to be other demographic groups that would truly, legitimately appreciate being able to book these rooms, like, all the time. I mean, I think all you have to do is say airport hotel. I mean, there’s a place and a situation where if it was available and easy to do, I’m sure you would have people coming and going all day long for all kinds of reasons. Talk to me about what’s the real business potential. I know you guys said 6.2 billion. And I think in my vocabulary, once you’re saying billion, that’s a big number. People should listen. But can we get any better picture of who these people are? What are the business categories here?

Yannis Moati: Yes. So we started this solution, as I mentioned before as I was a travel. The agent and I had the customers wanting to essentially landing in Europe very early and wanted to check in right away, and they just couldn’t understand that they couldn’t check in until 3:00 pm. So, I had to spend my time just emailing, calling, begging for flexibility. And this is, with growth of traveling comes in that need of flexibility out there that is growing with it. Right. That’s the first category. And we started with airport properties. And then eventually we moved on to be able to provide those services in city centers and in resorts and in suburbs. So we expanded our footprint. But you’re correct. We started with airport property for that travel flexibility of being able to between layovers, long layovers and being able to provide a room to be able to shower, change, rest for a few hours, work in privacy, do a meeting, a presentation, etc. but you’re absolutely correct. With it comes a romance, right? But for any hotelier that has an issue with that, or with a question about that, I would just remind them that they get as much romance for the night stay as they probably get for the day stays. Okay, it’s a hotel room, so at the end of the day, it’s one of the sexiest product there is on the planet. It’s a bed. It looks clean. It’s inviting. You want to just cozy up in it. And so you might not want to cozy up alone. So whether that be for the night or for the day, there’s just as much demand for it in pretty much similar requests.

Robin Trimingham: I think that’s a fair answer to the question on all I would say is raise your hand if you’ve ever lived the pain of flying to Europe from North America and having to go straight to the office and work eight hours meetings, seeing clients, whatever it is that you’re doing and you haven’t even been able to brush your teeth. I rest my case correct today.

Yannis Moati: As a matter of fact, Robin, just today we got a reviewer from a cruise line journalist that tested our services without us knowing in New York City before onboarding a cruise and needed the room for a few hours. Because, as you can imagine, the pre and the post write the pre-cruise and post-cruise where the cruise departs around 5 or 6 p.m., and usually flights come in into the sea around 7 or 8 a.m. that a lot of customers start arriving into the city. At that time, they’ve got nothing to do then no place to leave their luggage into, and so they book a room for the day. Same thing with post cruises, where disembarking at 6 or 7 a.m. and then your flight leaves much later than that. And so, we provide either the pool pass where you can stay by the pool all day, or you can book the room and use all the amenities at the hotel during the day and just enjoy, relax. And it doesn’t cost that much. By the way, a hotel room for the day is about 50% off from the night stay rate. It used to be fixed before, as I mentioned, but thanks to Derby Soft now it yields and is dynamic. So, wherever the room rate goes for the night stay, we’re right behind it at pretty much, uh, a discount of 40 to 50% off.

Robin Trimingham: A dynamic day use rate. That’s a mind blowing concept to somebody like me who actually has a real hotel background. Okay, on a very serious note, unfortunately, there’s been a lot of coverage here and there that some hotels have inadvertently played a role in human trafficking, which, I mean, we don’t even need to say what an atrocity that is. What would you say to a hotelier who’s really hesitant to enable day use inventory because of things like that being in existence? I don’t know which one of you would like to take a crack at that.

Yannis Moati: I would like to start if you don’t mind. So, we’ve thought about this problem tremendously as well, because yes, we are selling hotel rooms as I mentioned before, comes with it a natural romantic play with it, whether by day or by night. But we understood that we were under the auspices of the visibility and the fact that a lot of people associate day rooms with just romance and nothing else. We understood there was bigger demand out there. But basically what we are providing is a technology solution to to solve a myriad of issues of the flexibility that, as I mentioned before. And so we are asking for a credit card to guarantee the room. We are asking, of course, for every customer to follow the protocol of the hotel, which is check in with an ID and a credit card that matches. And already there you are eliminating a lot of the dark side, let’s say, of the demand. Because usually when there’s human trafficking, they usually isn’t all those records that goes with it. But in the terms and conditions, we also are allowing the hotel to be essentially the last point of deciding and whether that they would like to check in or not, or honor or not the customer to come in. So we’ve got ways of blocking, ways of checking, ways of communicating that will not touch onto this sector. But at the end of the day, customer can always make a booking, whether it be legit or legitimate. And there’s very little for us to understand and to know if that is the case, because we cannot screen every single customer with a national registry, let’s say, or international registry. But all those steps, essentially, we don’t condone cash payments. We are not promoting cash payments. We ask for credit card guarantees, we’re sending that information to the hotels, the hotel keeps it as a record. So all of that essentially creates a buffer and protects us from any type of demand that might not be legitimate.

Robin Trimingham: I would imagine. Equally so, this becomes an operational training and security issue on the hotel side that they really should be dealing with in a responsible way in the first place.

Yannis Moati: Right.

Robin Trimingham  Can you give us a sense of the revenue optimization potential for hoteliers who enable this zero-day rate code?

Yannis Moati: Yes. So we were an uplift in the sales to some hotels to a range of about 3% annually. So it really differs on what is the size of the property. Is it a boutique hotel or is it a 250-key property? Where would they be located? Close to an airport or not? Because we I must say that there’s tremendous traffic still around airport hotels is where we have some of the biggest demand out there. So, we can lift the PNL by 3% per year. But those are data free, the connectivity. And so we’re seeing an acceleration that is greater than we’ve ever seen before for that product that is direct connected with yourself. So we are estimating that the uplift in sales is going to be even greater than 3% in the future for two reasons. One, that the rates are dynamic, whereas before we missed on the opportunity of being able to increase those rates a little bit better and a little bit more, now they’re dynamic. And so with the good health of the industry lately, especially in big cities where we’re selling our products like the New York and Miami and LA, etc., we’re seeing that the price are going up. And so with it, we’re going up with as well, thanks to the direct connected opportunities and the distribution of those properties as well, especially for big brands that they are being able to now gather more than just a couple, a few tens or 20s of properties. Now they have the ability of going much higher in terms of numbers. And so we expect to be a higher lift than just 3% as we were in the past.

Robin Trimingham: I would imagine that on the hotel side, this really becomes like a marketing exercise to try and figure out new ways to leverage the advantages of the technology. TJ, what would you say to a hotelier who’s concerned that enabling day use will actually cause them to sell rooms at awkward hours, overtaxing their already short-staffed housekeeping departments and things like that?

TJ Noble: I get it. T me, the idea of selling a single room potentially more than once in a day sounds like an incredible opportunity. From a revenue perspective, it just seems like a no-brainer. I’m aware of the challenges, maybe with staffing, housekeeping and things like that, but to me, those are things that additional revenue tends to help sort out or be a big driver for it. One of the biggest benefits about connectivity, at least connecting through DerbySoft, is we want the hotel to be the source of truth. If they don’t want to take a piece of business, then through their own systems, they close it out. We want to integrate with those systems. Maybe they want to limit that availability, which is then again seamlessly integrated with us. Our cache accuracy, our caching technology in general is one of the best in the business. I would say it’s probably the best for this particular product. They can work with hotels by day to dictate those hours the product is available to. From a solution standpoint, we can also set inventory thresholds to control this to help the hotelier if that’s what they want, maybe only to allow two rooms of inventory for certain time frames or whatever that limit is, whatever the business rules they want. We will integrate that with this overall connectivity solution. We want the hotel to be in control.

Robin Trimingham: I want to imagine, on the hotel side, what they normally do when occupancy gets a little soft is they’ll close a floor or 2 or 3 to maintain great integrity. I would imagine that one of those close floors and is an opportunity to actually operate on day use and allowing it to have its own housekeeping security cycle without disrupting what’s going on in the -I’m going to call them- the traditional rooms.

Yannis Moati: Right. So TJ mentioned about the opportunity of selling the room twice. And this is definitely an asset and a possibility that we’re offering that you could sell the room for the day without displacing the overnight. And I don’t mean to geek out on it, but we do have the stats on every single city, with every single type of hotels, with every single size of the hotel, how many staff do they have, etc. so we can drill down into how many rooms can we operate? What is the limit of what we could operate without displacing the overnight? So we’ve got the solution for that, but let’s not even get there with your hotel might not be 100% sold out. You might be ranging in places like New York around 85, 89%, which is really high, by the way, and that’s great. But you’ve got, what, another 10 to 15% of those rooms that were not sold out the night before that the larger OTAs did not sell a week before, a few days before, 24 hours before. And so now you’re past midnight, where you got to do with that room, right? With us, you could still sell it at 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m., check-in for three, four, five hours, and if not the room, then something else.

Robin Trimingham: And then turn the room around. Yeah, I’m with you.

Yannis Moati: Exactly. And then. And turn the room for the late check-in customer that usually because places like New York City, you’ve got 30% of your check-ins that come in after 6 p.m.. So let’s forget about being 100% sold out and running our model. In this case I would advise just closes out. Whereas before you had to go on to a different screen to close this out and we made it super easy for you. You can also text us via WhatsApp. We’ve got a 24 over seven customer service team. You can. You don’t even have to waste our time. But now from your PMS directly, you can close us out very quickly and so there’s no waste of time. So yeah, you’re closer to 95% close us out. It’s fine. We don’t want to be an issue. We want to be a solution. So, working with us, I’m sorry, I need to mention it. There’s no minimum guarantee of inventory that we ask our properties if they want to sell one room randomly once a month, fine. If they want to sell 100 rooms every day, that’s fine. Also as well, as long as we measure that, they can do it. And to the last point, I’d like to talk about this. We’ve in the last decade have talked about Airbnb being a threat to the industry. And yes, we understand how they can essentially attract customers to want to book alternative lodging versus a hotel because it’s different because it looks different and all that stuff. But one of the assets that alternative lodging will never be able to replicate is having a staff of 200 people that can actually run multiple keys, multiple rooms at this hotel differently than a host with 1 or 2 bedrooms, right? So there’s no flexibility that alternative lodging will ever be able to get to, or at least not in my visibility and vision, but with hotels, with our solutions, and now with their staff together, we can create this flexibility seamlessly without any displacement of anything. And so yeah, we made it easy for our hotel hoteliers to work with us.

Robin Trimingham: I think that we could have a completely different discussion about alternative hotels, but in a competitive marketplace, a competitor really should just inspire you to advance, to up your games, to think of new ways of doing business, to think of new ways of partnering like you two. I want to thank you both for your time and for chatting with me about all of this. You’ve been listening to The Innovative Hotelier join us again soon for more up to the minute insights and information specifically for the hotel and hospitality industry. You’ve been listening to The Innovative Hotelier podcast by HOTELS magazine. Join us again soon for more conversations with hospitality industry thought leaders.


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