NH Hotels: their record-breaking digitization of +300 properties with STAY

OPERATIONS

NH Hotels: their record-breaking digitization of +300 properties with STAY

NH Hotel Group is a consolidated multinational operator and one of the leading urban hotel companies in Europe and America. It operates more than 350 hotels in 29 countries under their brands: NH Hotels, NH Collection, nhow, Tivoli, Anantara and Avani.

Why it matters: In 2019, before the pandemic, NH was already looking for a solution to digitize its guest experience. A pilot project was launched with STAY at an iconic property: Madrid’s NH Collection Eurobuilding. The hotel’s typology was a great fit for the platform because it offers its guests many customized services. This first pilot experience was really good for testing some of the features and analyzing their metrics to validate different hypotheses and be able to establish objectives and goals for the roll out of the platform on a larger scale. Taking into account all the learnings of this first pilot, a second pilot project was launched. This time STAY was implemented in a hotel outside of Spain: the nhow Berlín. Despite it being a different type of hotel with different needs and workflows, the solutions and metrics were also really good.

The positive results in these two hotels served as proof of concept to start the first phase of implementing STAY on a larger scale. With the main objective of advancing NH Hotel’s digitization process, STAY was rolled out in 8 more hotels. Prior to this, some features were developed and remade to adapt them to these hotels’ needs, such as Room Service.

Top 3 Core Objectives: The pandemic supposed a brief hiatus on this first roll-out, but STAY used this time to work very closely with NH Hotels in defining what the guest experience would look and feel like at their properties once travel restrictions were lifted.

Digitize all NH's hotels: Implement STAY in a very large number of hotels in very little time to make sure that all of them would be able to reopen safely.
Defining content standards: Common content templates were created for all hotels to speed up the process of introducing contents whenever a new hotel had to be rolled out. This made it as easy as duplicating all those common contents, saving a lot of time.
Developing an onboarding: Special onboarding sessions were held with hotel staff members who had never before worked with STAY, and more advanced training sessions were held for staff members who already had some experience with the platform. The objective was to make sure that all staff members who would be using STAY felt confident about how and where they could do everything so that STAY would make their day to day work easier from the very first moment.

"Thanks to STAY we’re more efficient while maintaining a high quality service for our guests, something which is key for us and for them"

Sandra Pérez Carracedo

Experience Design & Innovation Director

Innovators Mentioned

NH Hotels

STAY

SPC

Sandra Pérez Carracedo

Experience Design & Innovation Director

NH Hotels

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👍 Experience Design & Innovation Director Sandra Pérez Carracedo said that NH is now more efficient and at the forefront, with a digital and seamless guest experience:

"Thanks to STAY we’re more efficient while maintaining a high quality service for our guests, something which is key for us and for them"

⚖️ The selection process: During their research process, Sandra Pérez Carracedo evaluated STAY's product differentiators, customer support, and holistic value as a strategic partner and ultimately decided that STAY was the best fit solution:

Experience Design & Innovation Director Sandra Pérez Carracedo said, about their decision: "STAY allowed us to, in a record time, offer our guests a safe environment and a guest experience adapted to the new situation after the start of the pandemic, making changes in real time whenever they were necessary"

📈 The results: NH adapted all of their hotels in a record time. They are now at the forefront and last but not least, they are saving up to 8 tons of paper every year.

The vast majority of NH hotels (over 350) are now digitized, at the forefront of the industry (51000+ rooms in total).
Room Service transactions increased dramatically, thanks to the rebuilt of this feature, working very closely with NH to better adapt it to their needs.
NH has achieved an estimated saving of 14 million paper printouts, which is equivalent to more than 800 tons of paper saved. STAY is one of the foundations of this sustainable policy.