Eklo Hotels and Apaleo: growing with the group

Eklo Hotels operates ten properties across France, built around an economical, ecological hotel concept with rooms sleeping between one and eight guests, its own French Kiss restaurant brand, and event and coffee shop spaces. As the group grew, it moved its entire portfolio onto Apaleo, the open, API-first property management platform, automating reservation handling, group bookings and daily reporting across all ten hotels.

Nearly two years on, Karine Girard, Regional Operations Manager at Eklo, puts the savings at a minimum of two minutes on every booking at the integration stage. Across the 22,142 bookings the group processed in June 2025, that comes to at least 738 hours returned to the teams in a single month. What she rates more highly is what happened after the contract was signed. "It isn't just a provider who deployed a tool for us and today is no longer there. It's a real collaboration, real long-term communication. Having worked with several property management systems in my career, this is the only one where we have that collaboration day to day."

A brand that outgrew its own tech systems

Eklo's first hotels served a leisure clientele with a light food and beverage offer. The group has since added conference rooms that the earliest properties didn't have, private dining spaces, and two coffee shops in Bordeaux and Nantes.

"We want our properties to be genuine places to live, open to their surroundings, to our neighbourhoods, to our cities," Karine Girard says. "Not only to outside guests, but to be local players too."

Ten properties, several businesses inside each building, one brand promise across all of them. That combination is what put pressure on the old system.

The Porte de Versailles trigger

Eklo opened Paris Porte de Versailles in 2024. As the group's flagship property, with far more individual bookings and its first significant MICE business, it exposed the limits of a traditional PMS quickly.

Teams were checking and correcting almost every reservation by hand: rate, guest numbers, routing, corporate and virtual card handling, card tokenisation, and prepaid payments entered manually. Eklo's smaller properties absorbed that workload, but with the booking volume at Eklo Paris it wasn't manageable.

"We were losing time with a lot of repetition of human tasks, which inevitably means a lot of errors," Karine Girard says. "A loss of time for the teams, but a loss of money for the group too."

She was the quality and guest journey manager at the time, and led the review that followed. Before the group could rethink its wider stack, the centre of it had to change.

A pilot, then the full portfolio in five months

Eklo piloted Apaleo at its Bordeaux property in November 2024, then migrated its remaining hotels between January and May 2025.

Card handling changed as well. Tokenisation and payment pre-authorisation now run in the system, so card details are no longer keyed in by hand, including on prepaid bookings. Reducing the number of people who handle card data is a security gain that doesn't show up in time saved.

On the group side, Eklo works with Backyou, now connected to Apaleo. An option request is pushed straight into the PMS and moves to confirmed once validated, rather than being rebuilt by hand in a second system. Around 40 group enquiries a day arrive at Porte de Versailles, where a five-person commercial team handles the group and events business. "Before, there were misses, we'd forget to put an option on," Karine Girard says. "Today there's a fluidity that lets our commercial teams focus on answering enquiries rather than on data entry."

Reporting changed at head office too. Each hotel previously sent its figures up via Excel extractions. Eklo has since connected its finance tool to Apaleo, and the daily reports now build automatically. "At 9AM, the hotels know exactly what they did last year, where they stand against their budget year to date and month to date," Karine Girard says. "Head office, the finance team and our investors also know very well what's happening in the hotels."

A stack that keeps changing

Three integrations are complete, including a digital guest journey that already lets guests buy upgrades and extras. Eklo is currently finalising its guest journey CRM and is integrating stock management between its restaurant POS and Apaleo, so that sales deplete inventory automatically.

That stock integration started with an introduction Karine Girard made herself, putting an Apaleo contact and the vendor together at a trade show. It runs both ways now: when Eklo is weighing a new tool, Apaleo is the first call. "Apaleo knows our hotels, knows our teams, knows our range of hotels," she says. The group also joins quarterly product sessions and tests features in beta.

AI in the hands of the team

Karine Girard sees personalisation and revenue management as the next levers. Eklo already runs chatbots with its partner Bowo, answering simple guest questions in under a minute where staff availability previously meant several hours.

What she rules out is the staffless model. "The idea isn't to have a 100% digital hotel group. It's out of the question for us to replace our receptionists with 100% digitalised check-in." Other groups make that choice. As an economy operator, Eklo builds on the quality of its welcome and on human contact, which is the group's DNA.

"What will make the difference in the end is people. But it's the tools we put in people's hands to be as effective as possible."

Karine Girard expects the stack to keep expanding as the group does. "The group hasn't finished growing."