Boost Your Hotel Revenue with Top Ranked Hotel Technology Apps - 1-Click-Connect and No Activation Costs with protel

Three vendors have teamed up with protel to offer an amazing deal that will help boost hotels’ revenue.

Market demand for enhanced connectivity within the fragmented hospitality industry has been on the rise recently. Much of the problem boils down to hoteliers’ dependence on data and other tech silos, and different departments’ historic reluctance to move away from them. But attitudes are changing.

There have been some ambitious initiatives by some early PMS startups trying to meet this new demand. But to make a true market shift, one or more of the bigger and more established PMS technology vendors would need to move in this direction.

With its powerful client base of 14,000 hotels, protel has listened to the market and is set to become the first well-established tech player to act. It will provide access to the hottest and most appreciated technology vendors in its Marketplace through “1-Click-Connect” – with no activation cost.

For hotels of all sizes, the future recently arrived in the shape of a new data-sharing platform. This technological breakthrough will enable long-awaited collaboration between #HotelTechnology vendors. Freed from traditional vendor lock-in, the PMS will put the hotel back on the right track.

Let’s explore the idea behind increasing hotel revenue, based on examples from three vendors who have joined forces to provide a greater experience to all protel PMS users (via the protel.io Hospitality Platform). With all three, users will enjoy zero integration costs (for a limited time only), with simplified “one-click-connect” technology that should allow any protel-powered hotel to up their game instantly.

Data intelligence - why it matters

If we let computers make decisions that affect our profitability, accurate data is of the highest importance. But with so many applications in the hotel running off their own data silos, who can say which set of data holds the most up-to-date and useful information? And how can it be intelligently accessed?

By design, all tools on the protel Marketplace, irrespective of vendor brand, have constant access to the complete, live data-stream in the hotel (even across the hotel group). Beyond the data that they themselves enrich and pass back, each app can call on, process and react to hotel-wide events in real-time.

Take OTA Insight, one of our featured vendors. Renowned for its commitment to data quality, the market-leading cloud-based data intelligence platform can now easily deliver actionable insights back to the hotelier. Launched last year, the versatile tool maximises every revenue decision with lightning-fast, actionable insights so you can confidently make better revenue decisions based on the most relevant, granular data from your PMS.

Other vendors subscribing to this fresh data-stream, such as our featured vendor Oaky, the “upselling rockstars”, can fine-tune their system, knowing they are basing their predictive calculations on the best data available in the hotel at that very moment, not on what happened at close-of-day yesterday.

Another example is top-rated revenue management software, Atomize, which considers real-time, dynamic data 24/7 from hotels’ data-streams and gives you optimal price suggestions per room type.

For revenue boosters, timing is everything. And a big component of timing is personalisation.

Personalisation at scale

The better the data, the clearer the picture we can make of it. Manually running through thousands of guest profiles to see who repeat-books which rooms is not an ideal job for your trainee salespeople. These are tasks made for computers - and as the programs sift the records looking for patterns, they become very good at spotting nuggets of information that the human eye - even a well-trained one - would not readily see.

Tools like Oaky, with their inbuilt segmentation options, allow the hotel to automate personalised upselling. By combining data around guest behaviour with data around the property, hotels are able to create hyper-personalised communication even for guests that have never stayed at their property before.

This individualised upselling is very powerful, as the program crunches through swathes of data, deciding who gets what offer - and when the best time for that individual offer would be. On one side, the guest receives such a personalised notification that they really feel cared for. On the other, thousands of these messages are sent automatically, freeing up staff to care for their guests, all while extra revenue is being happily generated as if by magic. It’s a win-win.

Data-driven revenue management

Getting closer to the core of many hotel businesses, which still seem heavily focused on inventory sales, let’s look at how accurate and readily available data can help in setting optimised room rates. This powerful, automated strategy ensures that inventory is always offered at the best possible price in order to secure business.

In the past, the revenue manager herself would track competitors’ pricing, scan historical records, monitor pick-up rates and try to match them up to the seasonal demand curve, all within her home-made, macro-enhanced Excel sheet of RevPAR possibilities. And there was plenty of room for error.

How much valuable insight was being lost?

Strategic revenue business intelligence

OTA Insight’s next-generation business intelligence platform, Revenue Insight, helps unlock the potential of a hotel’s PMS data, delivering lightning-fast, actionable insights so that revenue managers can confidently make better business decisions at the click of a button on one simple dashboard.

Put simply, with better, more accurate business intelligence, hoteliers are better placed to make better, more reliable business decisions that improve their bottom-line.

How optimal pricing helps hotels

Additionally, thanks to apps like Atomize, our featured vendor for automatic revenue management, hotels are continuously offered optimal rates, down per room type, set for 365 days into the future. Atomize considers historical and future reservation data, real-time pick-up pacing, cancellation data, competitor rates and more. With a mobile-first design, all data is processed with the latest technology, and the system outputs automatic pricing strategy on-the-fly. Hoteliers can review the data behind the price recommendations, including override price recommendations if needed, before they trust it to run on autopilot.

As an added bonus, connected booking engines can be scanned for booking abandonment data, thus surfacing possible future demand. With the as-yet untapped possibilities within the protel.io Hospitality Platform - the key to providing all this accurate information to all connected services - sales cancellations from POS and other revenue channels could also soon benefit from similar insights, allowing a yielding mindset (and toolset) to spread to all areas of the business.

Does context-sensitive selling boost revenue?

An awareness of the old marketing “Four Ps” adage - Product, Place, Promotion and Price - facilitates many sales that might otherwise not happen. Offering an ice-cold beverage to a thirsty traveler who still has many hot, slow miles to go is a good way to sell a product at a premium. So now we just need to teach the machines to recognise thirst, hunger and other needs...

Making hotel offers context-sensitive turbo-charges their immediate appeal, and done correctly, makes the offer seem almost irresistible. Again, access to a live-stream of intelligent data would be a good thing to take advantage of. Sorting through historical data, identifying up-ticks in consumption and the elements that led to this behaviour, is all very valuable insight.

Not only do clever upselling apps like Oaky predict when best to push a personalised offer to a certain guest - or group or “lookalike audience” - but they can help enormously in the construction of these offers too. The ability to harness data-driven content and its delivery proves that machines are being trained well. It also does wonders for a hotel’s bottom-line.

All of which brings us back to data-silos.

Data-silos? No thank you

Are we in the future yet? Well, we could be. It all depends on the unrestricted and economic to and fro of an endlessly enriching, real-time data-stream. Data belonging to the hotel, or the hotel brand, is harnessed and simultaneously shared within all the vendor technologies the hotel is operating on. Is it really? Well, actually, yes - this is what we at protel believe in, and what we have built with the protel.io Hospitality Platform.

Traditionally, where every technology vendor used a proprietary system to deliver the hotel “their” solution, there were multiple vendors, with multiple systems, all variously needing multiple upgrades and expending multiple costs. To add insult to injury, the hotel could not really usefully access the data - multiple CSV exports at midnight won’t be far from most people’s minds.

These independent and disconnected silos of data caused many problems, as the data from one part of the stack would be manually transferred to the next process that depended on it. When the export finally worked, we’d traipse on to the import. But wait - there were also “interfaces” which allowed, for a fee (small, or otherwise), certain vendors’ systems to talk to each other. Generally, the more the hotel paid, the more the systems talked. Perhaps the old “Four P’s” were in use here too...

So what have we learned?

The future of #HotelTechnology is definitely here, but the enabling platform itself is only as strong as the vendors within it. Vendors such as OTA Insight, Oaky and Atomize have stepped up, embracing the protel.io Hospitality Platform, and thus enabling a whole new section of hotels from across the board free access to shaping better revenue.

The shared data, accessible for all, and running on a robust infrastructure, is the lifeblood not only of the hotel but also of the whole ecosystem of connected technologies. Together, the industry is finally moving towards a common goal: enabling any hotel to immediately benefit from cutting-edge technology, without risking non-compatibility or vendor lock-in issues.

But don’t just take our word for it. Take protel up on its generous offer: zero integration costs to connect to any of these featured three vendors by clicking on the link below.

We saved the best until last: all three of these solutions ship with the brand-new one-click-connect feature, and are already configured to work right out of the box. How? Simply log in to your protel system, navigate to the chosen vendor app in the Marketplace, and press the one-click-connect button.

Enjoy your new world of boosted revenue opportunities immediately here!

For more information, protel will organise a red ribbon ceremony at HITEC Minneapolis, on June 18 at 2:30pm at booth 2746.