Ahead of IHTF 2023, we speak to the presenters, panellists and sponsors to get insight on the content that will be shared and the key trends hot on hospitality lips. In this episode, we speak to Tess Mattison from Zaplox and William Lee from Onda about technology procurement and the key factors for hoteliers to consider.
Programme Notes
Ryan Haynes:
Hello and welcome back to Travel Market Life, the pre-IHTF 2023 conversations where we are speaking to some of the presenters, panellists, and sponsors of the event to really understand what's on their minds and some of the content that we are going to be hearing from in Vienna at the end of March. In this episode, we are going to be speaking to Tess Madison from SAP Blocks and William Lee from ONDA about the contributions they're going to bring to the event. Remember, you can follow us on LinkedIn Travel Market Life, or subscribe to our newsletter by visiting the website TravelMarket.life. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy this episode.
Ryan Haynes:
Joining me now is Tess Mattison, President and CEO of SAP Blocks, whom I actually had the opportunity to speak with last year after she gave a presentation at IHTF. Welcome back again, Tess. So back again for another year. You've been in this role at SAP Blocks now for just over a year. How have things been going? How, how are you viewing the market?
Tess Mattison:
It's been an exciting year indeed, and, and hi again. I'm also like super excited to, to come to Vienna and attend the event. Again, you never have as many answers as on the first day of your new job. From then it turns into questions, right? So, it's been an amazing year to learn a lot about our company, but also, I think the most important thing is that I've really come to understand how we, as a company, actually complement hospitality and how we can support with, you know, the struggles they have and then what I call the grey space in their digital guest journey.
Tess Mattison:
So yeah, I learned a lot and we've had a really exciting year business-wise as well. So yeah, I'm in a good place, right?
Ryan Haynes:
I mean, that's the thing you do come from the hotel background, your background at Nordic Choice and Scandinavian and, and where you gave a presentation last year about talking about digitalization strategies and now, you're very much in that deliverer, that supplier side of things. And how, how do, how are you noticing the key concerns and issues that hoteliers are particularly facing today and, and, and looking forward from this year?
Tess Mattison:
So, so yeah, know they're, they're pain better than anyone. It used to be mine, you know, so, so yeah, I know what they're, what they're up against and what they're experiencing. And when I look at it, I see two kinds of types of digital maturity in hotels. One that doesn't have any digital self-service at all, or didn't have it like in a pre-pandemic environment, and they're now looking for partnerships and guide us and speak to the market. They're like, we're falling behind even further, you know, and then, and here you go, like, I have this roadmap in 19, I have these guest expectations I need to deliver on this, and I just don't have the resources, the time or the knowledge, right? So that would be one, one part of the industry where we go like, Hey, we've been doing this for, you know, 13 years, we can help you get out of the gate.
Tess Mattison:
That's, that's one part. The second, and, and here's what's, what's really interesting to me, that the, the hotels that have this in place that, you know, built this big ecosystem and big IT departments pre-pandemic, they come to realize that we cannot just keep building ourselves. I was one of them. I wanted to build everything. I had my IT team, I had like two 50 developers. We did everything ourselves. And now we come to realize that, hey, some part of this, I need to move from build to buy because I can't do everything and I need to focus on what is driving my business, what's the core of driving my business and these things that are complex expensive and require additional kind of competence and knowledge that I don't have, not part my DNA that I need to buy from, from a, from an outside kind of, I wouldn't call it vendor, I would call it actually partner, that can complement what I have in place.
Tess Mattison:
So, I say there is a really exciting time. There's also challenging, you know, to meet guest expectations with limited resources, staff shortage, and to be honest, to recruit IT teams to hospitality right now it's hard, you know, we don't have the best reputation to be honest, you know, after the pandemic. So, there is a lot of movement and I do believe there's a lot of opportunity for us to support the industry, to take that step to truly offer a digital complement to the physical experience.
Ryan Haynes:
I mean, that's the thing a lot of the tech companies have really learned. As you grow as a business, you understand the industry the makeup, the ecosystem where you need to connect, and how you need to integrate. And obviously, hoteliers sort of really understand that from the get-go. But now we've got so many more systems that are available off the shelf that can be fully customized around a property or a brand. And as you say, you know, the, the, the, the need to be able to find the right level of skills and support and insight and consultancy to really leverage those opportunities today, it's not about CapEx and putting a load of money into something and hoping for the best. It's about putting money into something and seeing that almost immediate return.
Ryan Haynes:
So talk to us a bit more about the SAP Locks offers, please.
Tess Mattison:
Yeah, so, so let's say what we do, we really complement hospitality. So, we go in and, and the beauty also with this event, I know we're going to talk about it, is that for me, hospitality is about adding value to the guest. That's what it's all about. And now in my job and where we are, we're adding value to the hospitality industry, enabling them to add value to the guest. So, so when we look and we see, if you look at, at where you are on your digital guest journey and see what's the grey space, and then we try to fill that grey space, what we do, we are a source company, we are a software as a service and we offer mobile guest self-services to hotels.
Tess Mattison:
So check in, check out payment and mobile keys either through a kiosk or a mobile app or an SDK, software development kit. So, if you have your own app, hey we'll make it easy for you to integrate with all the systems that you have. So normally say that we're the glue in the experiencing phase of the customer journey or the guest journey as we actually call it. And we make it easy for hotels to bundle and offer up all these systems into one and offer a seamless experience to the guests.
Ryan Haynes:
And it is really about servicing those items that can be retailed and made, as you say it, accessible for the CU guest, customer, consumer, however, you want to describe them, to be able to select themselves.
Tess Mattison:
I call them guests. I'm a bit, you know, again, come from hospitality, they're all guests to me, right?
Ryan Haynes:
Abs. Absolutely. And obviously, we've got to look at that model that traditional e-commerce has been using to really understand those opportunities and touchpoints and as we've seen, digital can bring so much more additional revenue and make those services and products that are not necessarily so visible at a property right there in front of somebody's eyes as they're sort of preparing for their trip. I mean, you know, we're looking forward really to finding out how some of the hoteliers have made great advancements in this at IHTF. So I'm sure there's going to be a lot of fantastic conversation and we're going to learn a lot there. Any particular sort of developments or insights from you guys at SAP that you'd like to share today?
Tess Mattison:
Yeah, so we had a really exciting year. As I said, my first year was a good one and we really kind of blew our KPIs out of the park. And December 1st we actually signed two contracts for our digital self-service. One was with Raison Hotel group for EMEA and APAC and the other was for Nordic Choice Hotels here in Scandinavia. They're both very in different kinds of stages in digitisation. Nordic choice has been like the early adapter, the first mover. I actually did a pilot on mobile keys in 2010 when I was with Nordic Choice, you know, so that's how long they were.
Tess Mattison:
Yes, so I was like, hi market, welcome to the party, you know, we're catching up, we're Radisson, they're about to embark on a huge digitalization journey, like fighter transformation plan. So, I'm really, really happy that they both put their trust in us to complement their journey regardless of where they are. But the funny thing is that I actually met with the Rason team for the first time in real life at last year's IHTF. So, for me, I'm like just really excited about what this year's event will bring.
Ryan Haynes:
Yeah. And both Radisson and Nordic Choice are going to be attending and both of them have presentations as well. So hopefully we'll get a bit of insight whilst we're at the show. Perhaps you can get me in for a conversation with one of them to talk about their strategies. So, I'm very excited myself to really find out how they've been advancing these last 12 months. Tess, thanks again once again and I can't wait to see you in Vienna and for us to have a proper chit-chat in person and have conversations with the other hotelier.
Tess Mattison:
Thank you, Ryan. Look very much forward to seeing you and the rest of the team as well,
Ryan Haynes:
Joining me is William Lee, the Chief Business Development Officer at ONDA. Thank you ever so much for joining me today. William, please tell me how is it different from other platforms on the market?
William Lee:
Yes, hello Ryan. First of all, happy New Year. Thank you for inviting me to these places. So, to tell you about ONDA, we are all employees at ONDA. We’ve had a hospitality background. So, we all have ideas and, and knowledge about what we have to do in the hospitality industry to develop in technological ways. And also we are building a platform that the hotel uses, which is a property management system channel management system and et cetera, et cetera. But the biggest different thing is that first of all, we can do full customization systems since every people have different characteristics.
William Lee:
So, the hotel also has different characteristics and different plans, a different way of doing their business. So, what we are doing is that if the hotel wants to use our system, we help them to customize depending on which way they want to use the PMS or CMS or any other systems. Also, because we are very strong in the GDS system, which is the global distribution, now we have more than 30 different channels in Korea that is integrated, which means that after when the hotels start to use our system, we are not just done with providing the system, we are actually helping hotels to actively do the room sales with our GDS platform.
William Lee:
So we have a special team for that and because we have a good relationship with the channels, we provide some chances to chances to hotels to promote their property in certain OTAs or for example, they can actually put their properties on the top banner of each website so they can actually do some promotion whenever they have some special rates coming up on their property. So I would say we would like to become the best friends of the hotels by providing them with what they need and helping them to sell their rooms, which is the biggest concern about the hotels.
Ryan Haynes:
I mean it sounds like, as you say, it's a system that can be fully customized and wrap around the entirety of the needs of the hotel at that specific need. At a specific point, and I guess, you know, when it comes to technology leaders within hotels, what would you say are the key considerations for technology procurement? They should be prioritizing.
William Lee:
The thing is that for me, I'm thinking of six different key points, but since we don't have enough time, it will be hard to explain everything. But I'll say by bullet points, I'll say cost, compatibility, ease of use, scalability, maintenance and support and security to briefly tell you about my ideas, the cost, of course, the property has to think about how much they, they're going to pay for the, the system itself and compatibility be if they adopt a new system. And if that system is not working with working well with the previous system, it'll be very hard to use, and they probably have to hire more people to use the new system.
William Lee:
So, it will be not efficient and easy to use. Of course, whenever, when the hotel employs a new system, all of the staff have to learn it. So, the learning curve, and the learning period of time have to be very short and scalability. The hotel must know what their benefit will be, after they implement their system on, on their property and maintenance and support. And they will be one of the biggest concerns about the hotels when they try to implement a used system that is outside of their country. So they have to check, check that one because of time differences or maybe language supports and security. If the company tech company doesn't have perfect security, all the hotel information or data might go to go everywhere else.
William Lee:
So, they have to be very careful about that one. So, it's six brief concerns that the hotel needs to be yeah, considered before adopting new systems.
Ryan Haynes:
That's very helpful. Thank you very much indeed, William. And, and really finally for you here, so what do you see are the two to three big trends or changes that are going to be happening within the hotel market, perhaps across sales and operations or within the wider technology sector?
William Lee:
So, I will tell you three different points, which is increased use of technology, labour shortages and focusing on D two C. Actually the increased use of technologies related to labour shortages due to covid 19 pandemic, there were so many hospitality labours laid off because of the down of revenues and stops. So the hotel now is trying to get better and better. The industry is getting much better because now people can travel around. But thing is that the people who used to work at the hotel don’t want to c come back to the hotel anymore because they actually found something to do.
William Lee:
And because of that hotel is trying to put some tax system to replace those old labours, but still, they don't know which one to put. Exactly. And also, because they have to get more room sales, now they're trying to be more focused on B2C with digital transformation because they were very dependent on big OTAs before, but now they're thinking that this is the exact time, to be more direct to the customers and they're actually thinking of like reconstruction of the membership system or yeah, putting new booking engines and et cetera.
William Lee:
So I think there will be big trends that happening right now.
Ryan Haynes:
Excellent. William, thank you ever so much for providing your insights and thoughts on the market and we look forward to meeting with IHTF this year.
William Lee:
Yes, I am, me too.