"Our Opera Cloud version has just transitioned to the Oracle Cloud Native Environment. Opera is now much faster and more stable compared to the old server. There will no longer be any system downtime during updates and upgrades. The Cloud Native Environment will give us more opportunities for connecting to 3rd party solutions using OHIP.
It’s great that the Management at Solstrand Hotel are focusing on digitalization and development, and that they prioritize to have a person dedicated to these tasks within their own team. Independent, historical resorts like Solstrand Hotel needs to offer their guests modern solutions. Not only to meet the increasing expectations from our guest, and to stand up in the competition against the hotel chains, but also to give our staff the best tools and make Solstrand an attractive place to work.
It’s exciting to go through and analyze the different processes that daily takes place at the hotel, to see where we can help the teams to save time by making the processes more efficient. Setting up Opera in a smart way has been essential, to be able to extract good reports for the kitchen and restaurant departments. Oracle has also been helpful and created customized reports that fits our needs.
Integration to Opera Cloud was essential when we selected our spa system TAC in 2021. Many of our guests appreciate to charge their treatments to their room, but we have also managed to get 55% of the reservations to be booked and prepaid online. This means less stress for our spa therapists and more time to prepare the room between the treatments.
In May we installed new 43” Phillips MediaSuite TVs from BazePort in all guest rooms. In addition to the standard TV-channels and built in Chromecast, these will give our guests the general information they need, in their preferred language. We no longer need to update an information folder in all the rooms, it’s now easy to change for example the breakfast hours digitally. The integration with Opera will reset the guests Chromecast settings upon checkout.
We have just signed an agreement with P3 Hotels and are in the process of building a customized Booking Engine. We will also be using their solution for sending pre-stay emails to all our guests, offering packages and room upgrades, as well as mobile check-in and check-out. P3’s long experience with OHIP integration to Opera Cloud was an important factor for our choice.
We are in the final process of evaluating different housekeeping solutions and will go live with this in Q1 2024. This will also give us more efficient Maintenance and Lost & Found functions. All integrated with Opera Cloud of course.
It’s fun to be early adopters of new solutions, and it gives us a great opportunity to give feedback and push for further development, to make the solutions better. OHIP is still new to many system providers, and some haven’t developed all the same functions as in the old interfaces yet, but the opportunities with OHIP are endless. We will no longer consider a new system that requires an old type of interface that is connected through a server at the hotel."