At the beginning of this month, in a UK first, an army of custom-made RoboVac Buddies have checked-in to 579 Travelodge hotels the length and breadth of the country.
Stayntouch, a global leader in guest-centric cloud hotel property management systems (PMS) and contactless technology, today announced the opening of a new European headquarters in Amsterdam, Netherlands to accommodate its growing European and United Kingdom customer base and support rapidly accelerating growth across the region.
Trusted by the most notable brands around the globe, Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons a Belmond Hotel is one of many Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Belmond luxury properties running on Silverware today as the rollout continues in Italy, Peru, Russia, and U.S.
A peaceful hotel, exclusive to residents, on the banks of the River Dart, Dartmouth. Classic and proudly independent, Dart Marina is a stylish, well-equipped hotel with 49 bedrooms, first class facilities including a bar and restaurant and chic styling throughout. A selection of self-catering riverside apartments and one of the best yacht harbours in the west country complete the mix.
Infor, the industry cloud company, today announced that the 366-room Copenhagen Admiral Hotel has selected Infor Hospitality Management Solution (HMS) and Infor EzRMS Revenue Management System (RMS). Infor HMS went live in Q4 2021 and will be followed by Infor EzRMS in 2022, replacing a legacy property management system (PMS) that restricted growth and limited the guest experience.
ROOMDEX, the leader in automated hotel upselling solutions, is happy to announce that, following a very successful pilot, Cedar Court Hotels will activate ROOMDEX’s Upgrade Optimizer software across its entire collection, consisting of:
Northern Ireland’s premier luxury Galgorm Resort has been successfully relying on the Maestro Web PMS since 2018. With 125 guestrooms and suites, a first-of-its-kind Thermal Village & Spa, a variety of restaurants and bars, an extensive conference and banquet facility, a championship golf course, the award-winning facility initially sought out Maestro to provide a centralized and rich profile for each guest to support its high volume of bookings, and grow alongside the business as the Galgorm Collection expanded. Today, the luxury hospitality group is deploying additional properties with Maestro, and it is leveraging Maestro PMS’s contactless mobile tools to welcome guests to its many properties.
The co-operation will see AHoP provide the systems, daily operations management, and 24/7 customer service for Hotel-B. The AHoP autonomous hotel concept, based on the core technology built by apaleo, covers all aspects of the guest journey from booking to departure and supports seamless and fully automated and digitalized processes. In practice, this means traditional reception, check-in, and check-out procedures are not needed at the hotel. The guests of an autonomous hotel never have to queue in the lobby, but they can enter and leave their rooms without any unnecessary interactions.
Bulgarian software developer Sirma Group Holding [BUL:SGH] said on Tuesday that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 80% of local peer Sciant after it was granted regulatory clearance on the deal.
I think they will help accelerate the industry forward on the short term, solving the issues of legacy providers. As hoteliers upgrade their technology stack to more modern solutions that have well built integration layers, the hubs might loose some of their importance.
There are over 5,000 hotel tech vendors around the world working around the clock to develop new and innovative solutions to common problems or applications to elevate service delivery in hotel operations, guest communications, revenue management, marketing, etc.
The award-winning 5-star luxury hotel Coquillade Provence Resort & Spa in France is a new customer of dailypoint™, Europe’s leading data management and CRM platform.
Barcelona, November 10th –- Amenitiz, the Barcelona-based startup which has become one of the fastest-growing “Hospitech” companies in Europe, has secured €6.5 million in seed funding from some of the world’s most successful technology investors, including Point-Nine, Backed and renowned business angels like Avi Meier (Travelperk), Matt Robinson (GoCardless) and Carlos Gonzales (ex-GoCardless). In addition, Jean-Christophe Taunay (ex-Vend, now CRO at TravelPerk)is also joining Arthur Waller (ex-PriceMatch, now Pennylane) as an independent board member. This new funding will enable the company to expand into new markets and accelerate growth towards its ambition to become the world’s leading hospitech platform.
It has become inevitable for independent hoteliers to build their online presence. While Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) used to represent a minority share of independent hotels’ bookings 10 years ago, their market share has grown by 50% between 2013 and 2019 and can now represent up to 71% of an independent hotel’s online bookings today. To counterbalance OTA’s domination, hotels have high incentives to enable direct bookings on their own website. But while OTAs have invested heavily in creating a seamless booking experience on their own platform, making reservations on many independent hotel’s websites is still a frustrating process, costing hoteliers thousands of euros in commission and lost margins.
Amenitiz uses this dramatic change in the market as a wedge to build a complete Operating System for independent hoteliers, B&Bs and cottages in Europe. Starting with their online presence, providing them with a website and a channel manager, but also extending into their operations with a very easy-to-use PMS (Property Management System) that hoteliers use daily to automate their tasks like invoicing and their payment processes. As it grows, the company plans to extend its offering with additional services like revenue management in order to offer independent hoteliers services that were up until now available only to large hotels.
Amenitiz CEO Alexandre Guinefolleau said: “In this digital age, we believe running your hotel and developing a strong online presence should be as easy as booking a trip on Airbnb - if not easier. Unfortunately, as hoteliers become more and more reliant on online distribution, they often realise that their current tech stack -if any- is unnecessarily time-consuming, expensive and burdensome. We’re looking to change that by rebuilding the hotelier’s operating system and becoming a no-brainer for any hotelier in Europe.”
“We are proud to have the backing of investors with a unique track record of supporting other market disruptors that have transformed entire industries.”
In this latest round, the company is also being supported by existing investors such as Otium Capital, Arthur Waller (Pennylane), Nicolas Celier (Ring Capital) and Sebastien Venturini (Weekendesk), who back market-changing companies including Smartbox, TheFork, Matera and Payfit.
Since its commercial launch in 2018 by CEO Alexandre Guinefolleau, CRO Emmanuelle Guinefolleau and co-founder Frédéric Cadet, Amenitiz has helped over 3’000 properties in 28 different countries and now has over 100 employees.
After growing over 4x in 2020, one of the most challenging years for the hospitality and travel industries, this new injection of funding will allow Amenitiz to triple the size of its team in the coming years helping them address strong demand in the French, Italian, and Spanish markets while augmenting their technology offering including a focus on payment and a strong partner ecosystem.
Louis Coppey, partner at Point-Nine, said: “We’ve been partnering with industry-specific SaaS companies since the inception of Point Nine. From Clio in the legal space in 2011 to Nexhealth in the medical space more recently, we’re strong believers that software companies can bring significant value to an industry and even sometimes impact its competitive dynamics. We’ve been impressed by Alexandre, Emmanuelle and Frederic’s industry expertise and by the depth of their long term vision. We’re very much looking forward to supporting them bring one of the oldest industries in Europe online”
For more information please contact [email protected] or +33 6 08 69 33 92
Founded in 2011, Point Nine is a European early-stage venture capital firm focused on B2B SaaS and B2B marketplace startups in Europe and North America. The firm is a seed investor in more than 150 companies in over 30 countries, including Algolia, Brainly, Chainalysis, Clio, Contentful, Delivery Hero, DocPlanner, Front, Loom, Mambu, Revolut, Sqreen, Typeform, and Westwing, amongst others. Point Nine has one of the highest “seed-to-winner” rates of the industry.
BACKED is the human-centric venture capital fund. They invest at seed, in Europe. As sector-agnostic investors, they place founder talent above all other factors. Through their strong founder support platform and portfolio community, they’ve helped 90+ entrepreneurs successfully scale 50+ startups. Unicorns to date include Thought Machine and Sky Mavis. Other notable investments include Hutch, Pollen, LabGenius, THIS and Medal.
Sea Containers London has adopted Oaky as their digital upselling tool, further expanding Oaky’s UK customer base. Situated on London’s South Bank, this lifestyle hotel will leverage Oaky’s data-driven approach to further refine their personalised and innovative guest experience.
The most obvious ones are Pricing and Forecasting - and hopefully most of the vendors out there already have some or a lot of that built in. One that hasn't been solved yet and which is most "on-brand" for a hotel is guest personalization.
AI in Hospitality is not some futuristic, Spielberg-esque technology or a nice PR opportunity to make your hotel company look cool, but a real-life, much needed technology that can help your hotel a) solve concrete issues plaguing the hospitality industry such as labor shortages and out-of-control labor costs, b) improve efficiencies and productivity, c) automate pricing and business decision making, and d) respond to the exceedingly high expectations of your exceedingly tech-savvy guestsSome of the temporary measures to tackle the current pressing issues employed by hoteliers include changes in the business model, outsourcing or hiring more gig workers to do the job and streamlining operations.
AI does and will have a place in hospitality. For far too long we have relied on old fashioned manual processes and adore spending hours in Excel sheets and copy paste information. We know that system integration issues have been behind this but with the modern open API platforms removing this barrier there is no reason why AI should not have a more prominent place in our industry.
OpenKey, the industry standard for universal Digital Key in hotels, today announced the successful launch of Digital Key technology in Siberia Bar & Hotel in Aberdeen, Scotland. Siberia is a modern, independent boutique bar and hotel, located on historic Belmont Street in the heart of Aberdeen City Centre. A fiercely independent company, Siberia prides itself on “doing it our way for over 20 years.” In implementing OpenKey’s next-generation platform, Siberia is empowered to operate more efficiently by offering fully contactless guest check-ins, thereby increasing convenience and safety for guests and staff.
BeyondTV GuestCast (BTV), a full-service provider of guestroom entertainment services and solutions, has announced the successful implementation of its BeyondTV GuestCast in-room entertainment solution in Aurelia Antica Suites & Apartments. A newly opened property located just minutes away from the center of Rome. Designed to fit the needs of long-term and short-term guests alike, the property delivers the tranquility and privacy of an apartment without sacrificing the superior services and amenities of a 4-star hotel. By adopting BeyondTV GuestCast in the property’s modern suites, Aurelia Antica Suites & Apartments is set to further promote comfort, connectivity and personalized control in guest rooms.
From 9 to 11 March 2022 live on the stage of the acclaimed eTravel World segment, the focus will be on how to deal with the long-term fallout of the pandemic. For this reason, ITB Berlin is now inviting papers on the key topic of Travel Technology & Sustainability. Speakers have until 31 October 2021 to secure their slot at the eTravel World.
Innovation and transformation are taking place at a rapid pace all around us. Technology allowing for a true digital revolution, environmental and social being the middle point of attention and the covid pandemic making us all aware of what quality time and life are all about.How does our industry respond to these new demands, especially as so many are just trying to stay afloat given the financial impact of 18 months of economic downturn?
Start-ups ignite transformation. Any industry that is either embryonic or in dire need of change has to deconstruct and regenerate in a more coherent, dynamic form. This is what happened to the food industry in many countries and to the many industries pre the advent of technology.
It's all about beliefs, culture, and behavior. Companies must have a purpose—and that purpose must be authentic, inspiring, actionable, and consistently shared across the entire organization. It's important to understand (and celebrate!) the power of diversity versus the challenges of sameness.
Let's begin with arguing that the word "contactless". When a guest us using their mobile phone or a self service check in our out, there is still contact, there is still service that can be provided, and if the hotel does it well their is still staff member around to assist if needed.
The contactless guest journey is here to stay. The hospitality industry will not be going back to the old times of 100% human-assisted guest journey. Why? To begin with, the current labor shortage is not going away anytime soon.
Personally, I don't associate the contactless tech experience with COVID. I associate it with the rise of mobile technology in general and the intersection of customers of any industry wanting more control and the commercial opportunity of giving them control, thus offloading processes and effort.
Job seekers are now able to submit applications to Deutsche Hospitality within only two minutes by reaching for their smart phones and leaving a simple voice message. This new system has been made possible thanks to a cooperation agreement with the Heidelberg-based software development company Talk’n’Job.