HOSPA Webinar - 4th November, 2020

HOSPA in conversation with Percipient

 

A United Front - This year has demanded agility in spades. With the associated ramifications of COVID-19 dictating huge changes for the hospitality sector, those businesses who have been able to embrace digital transformation and deploy modern technology, are positioning themselves to better manage the onslaught of these changes.

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Never has it been more important for the hospitality sector to be united and share experiences in order to navigate both the immediate, and on-going challenges to the industry.

Focusing on the growing pressures of digital adoption in the wake of the global pandemic, the webinar will examine how hospitality organisations are looking to modernise their back-office technology in a bid to support evolving business strategies and adjust to new objectives.

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ATTENDEES

• Jane Pendlebury - CEO, HOSPA

• Chris Stock - Percipient 

• Mark Jelly - Avenue 9 Solutions

• Peter Gibson - Hastings Hotels

• Paul Fitzgerald - iNUA

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Agenda

00:00 Introductions 

 

00:01 - Jane: Good morning, everybody, and welcome. Thank you for registering for today’s webinar, which is all about how technology can help hospitality businesses plan for the future.

 

We’re joined today by Percipient, who work with the Sage Software Solutions, Avenue Nine, who help roll out such solutions, and two high-profile hoteliers.

 

I’m delighted today to be joined by Chris Stock from Percipient, Mark Jelley from Avenue Nine, Peter Gibson from Hastings, and Paul Fitzgerald from Inua.

 

Thank you all for joining us. I’m going to start by asking Chris to introduce himself.

 

Chris: Good morning everyone, I’m the MD of Percipient, and as Jane said, we’re a Sage business partner and we focus very much on implementing accounting solutions for the hospitality industry.

 

Jane: Brilliant, thanks, Chris. And Mark?

 

Mark: Morning everyone, I’m Mark Jelly from Avenue 9 solutions. We deliver cost effective solutions that ensure our clients are more effective and efficient, saving time, energy and resource - especially with our new Avenue 9 analytics intelligence application.

 

Jane: Brilliant, thank you Mark. Peter?

 

Peter: Morning everybody, I’m the finance director for Hastings Hotel Group. We are Northern Ireland’s largest independent hotel group. We operate a portfolio of seven four star and five star hotels across the province with a couple of spas, couple of restaurants as well. I’ve been with the business for a year.

 

Jane: And finally, last but not least, Paul.

 

Paul: Good morning everyone, my name’s Paul Fitzgerald, I’m the CEO of Inua Partnership, Ireland’s leading hotel management and hospitality consultancy firm. We currently operate and control nine hotels. They’re all full-service four and five star properties. We’ve just started our IT and digital transformation journey and we’re very lucky to be working with Chris from Percipient and Mark from Avenue 9.

 

Jane: Brilliant, thank you all. So, Peter, as you’re a little further down the road than Paul is, can you explain a little bit about which areas of your business you’re undertaking this digital transformation?

 

Peter: It’s really all areas of what you might call the back office, or administrative functions, I guess, starting with our core finance platform, but ultimately extending to purchasing and procurement, HR, recruitment, training, staff scheduling and payroll. All functions and tasks that need to go on in the background to ensure the smooth running of our hotels.

 

Jane: What was it that drove the need for change?

 

Peter: I started with the business about a year ago and it became obvious very quickly that the systems and processes in place were quite outdated. They all worked very well, but just very manual and administrative tasks. Critically, none of this was compliant with the making tax digital (MTD) regulations which have now been pushed back to next year. So there was that compliance aspect that was a very key driver for the whole thing, but it was clear that there was lots of functionality and opportunities for us to streamline those processes and make them much more efficient.

 

Jane: Is this part of a wider digital strategy, or is this just a first step and you’ll see how it goes?

 

Peter: It’s certainly part of a broader strategy across all of our back office processes - not just limited to finance functions. I wouldn’t say it’s going much into our front of house activity at this stage, albeit that with the  efficiencies and changes that we’re making to our processes, I’d certainly expect it to free up a lot of our hotel staff to be able to spend more time on guest facing activities.

 

Jane: That’s a really great summary, thank you. Paul, similar questions: Which areas of your businesses are undertaking this transformation?

 

Paul: In Inua, we are strong disciples of lean thinking and principles of lean. On the back end of 2018 early 19, we trained 21 members of our senior management team on Yellow Boat? Lean, and off the back of that we’re pushing hard to drive competitive advantage of Lean and at the same time looking to leverage a scale of having 9 hotels within the group. That first stage is really looking across all the functional lines, and seeing where we can apply principles of Lean, more efficient workflows and processes - and that’s across procurement HR, revenue management, reservations, finance and digital marketing. There are 2 themes underpinning that strategy: Consistency - consistency of systems and infrastructure and processes across the hotels. All the hotels would have the same time and attendance system, reservations platform, spa management software, and using the same EPOS and PMS systems. The second is ‘integrating the back end’ - how do we integrate the back end out of hotels locally and bring that into a quasi-shared service or head office infrastructure? We believe that’s where the real ad value will be.

 

Jane: Gosh, this really is part of a big project for you, then?

 

Paul: It is, and to be fair, Mark from Avenue 9 has really been pushing that agenda first. Back to what Peter was saying, in terms of scope, that if we’re going to go off their list, are we better off just broadening the scope and see if we can unleash significant value back into the machines. We have really broadened the scope off the back of some really good chats.

 

Jane: That’s really good to hear. And like Peter, were you relying on spreadsheets previously or are you replacing a different system?

 

Paul: We’re using Sage 950 currently, and looking to migrate to Sage X3. I can resonate with everything Peter said; very reactionary spreadsheets, lots of errors within the spreadsheets, hard to get this press-button reporting culture, no business intelligence culture within the business, no use of dashboard reporting, and a lot of clunky, mackerel-based spreadsheets that perform well, but simple stuff you drop in a line, or take a column out of the spreadsheet and the whole thing comes tumbling down. That typically is the function within finance hotels - they sit in the back office - but I think businesses now as we migrate into this new normal are going to have to look at leaning out the machine - striving for Lean functions in these back office functions are critically important and I think it frees up time.

 

Jane: Now is the time I think where …. Efficiencies from technology are crucial, especially when we’ve got possibly a leaner workforce and a more flexible workforce who are taking on multiple roles at the moment as well, so that makes perfect sense. Chris, is that something you’re seeing generally - is that a trend, would you say, in the industry over the last year?

 

Chris: Definitely - what we started to see about a year, maybe 18 months ago was the industry invested very heavily in intuitive customer-facing front-end systems and websites, and that’s probably the right thing to do. But then what they were left with were creaking back office systems. The realisation was internal employees, finance teams, were using quite expensive Legacy software and spreadsheets and a lot of manual processes, which obviously takes time and is inefficient. So from mid 2019 onwards, we’ve started to see a lot more of an adoption in modern finance systems. Particularly Cloud as well, because it takes away that internal infrastructure requirement, and ultimately what that’s started to lead to is a much more agile finance function. Positive push to the users through dashboards, and it helps a lot more on the decision making side of things. More modern systems/processes are automated, Lead to more agile finance systems. More modern systems are automated. The finance functions are adding more financial value to business, and the culture’s changed - they’re focusing a lot more on data analysis as opposed to data input.

 

Jane: Your mention of manual input - there’s a stat like 90% of spreadsheets around the world have an error in them somewhere. Mark, have you been seeing similar trends to Chris in the last year?

 

Mark: Absolutely, there’s certainly been a move to more paperless environment, self service for both guests and staff, the ability of guests to look after their own profile online, mobile check-in, mobile key, order at table - all of these have come into prevalence since March (COVID), some of us have been banging the drum for a number of years about trying to get things out from the administrators in the hotel out to the customers themselves, we are a retailer after all, retailers have been doing this for years, why haven’t hospitality? Paperless data for desktop is an absolute must at the moment, with reduced head count in hotels now, the information is still required but with less people to do it, and it needs to be done on the same timeline. So how are we going to do it? It’s got to be automated, and by automating it, you also get one version of the truth. So you’ve got one number, and no spreadsheet error that’s going to cause 166,000 COVID cases to be missed.

 

Jane: I think perhaps they need an Avenue 9 solution with Percipient in the States to run the election results - bit more simple version of the truth

 

Mark: [Laughs] Absolutely, and I think for a number of our customers, you can expand the way you do things and be more efficient without increasing headcount. So if you want to expand your finance department (more entities), by making the technology better, you don’t have to put an extra head in. The technology is there for people to use to be able to get the information out in a far more timely manner. 

 

Jane: Absolutely. And Chris, since the pandemic (March), have you seen changes specifically as a result of that - Mark was saying he thinks maybe it’s sped up the implementation of a lot of technologies that people were talking about - have you seen a difference with the calls you’ve been receiving at the office?

 

Chris: I think first of all, when the pandemic came around, with our customers it was working out - how best can we support them, how best can we help them - and then the conversations started to shift. I think it helped the realisation some of the things we’ve talked about, automation is always there in a modern system - in some of those old Legacy systems it’s not there, it’s all very manual - and then when teams are not sat in an office together, and they’re working from home, those Legacy systems and processes are even harder to run than when everyone in the office. The big shift for us has been remote delivery. Microsoft Teams has been a Godsend for a lot of people in the last 6 months. It’s commonplace to us all now, I don’t see how that will change. If you’d said to me at the beginning of the year that we would sell systems, implement systems and support people without meeting them face-to-face, I probably wouldn’t have believed you but we’re actually doing that now, and the technology has enabled us to do that, and it’s working. Delivery on Microsoft Teams is much more focused, and you’re not needing consultants on site for a whole day, you can do 2 or 3 hours over a couple of days, you can record a session as well, so from a training perspective, it’s a lot better. That’s really accelerated how we can deliver a system.

 

Jane: Yes, and do you think that might be more of your plan going forward? Would you ever have considered that previously?

 

Chris: We had already done it, we had already delivered one project that way anyway, which probably worked out quite well. It’s certainly a way forward, it’s certainly something that we’ll be looking to do.

 

Jane: And Mark, is that something at Avenue 9 you will be delivering more using technology rather than face-to-face?

 

Mark: Absolutely, we’ve got a number of projects - one of which is in Ukraine at the moment, and that’s all remote. The desire and need to deliver remotely is even more prevalent. We’ve found no challenge with doing it remotely, my air miles have gone down and my Hilton points have shrunk 

 

Jane: [Laughs] Not that you could use those anyway, at the moment. We’ve got a lot of online questions already, so I’ll just have a quick scan through of those. Peter, there’s one here for you, asking which back office systems you have integrated with?

 

Peter: At the moment we are concentrating on integrating our sales platform. We use B1 as our main PMS system, which is provided by Agilysys. We’ve got an integration built in to Sage with that. We’re also integrating our spa software, which is provided by Premier, and we’re also integrating our till system as well, which is provided by Pixel Point. So all of those are being integrated. Separately to Sage, we’re implementing a procurement tool called the Procure Wizard, and that also has a built interface into Sage intact. 

 

Jane: I guess most of those interfaces were already developed before we had to go through this pandemic and remote learning. Have you had to experience much of the remote training or integration or technology installations?

 

Peter: Doing it all remotely was kind of what I would have expected, Prior to Hastings, I worked in an organisation that was across multiple different locations, so it was just a way of working that I was used to - I guess I was used to doing team meetings and working remotely. As Chris said, I find it a much more efficient way of working - you can be much more productive in the day with short team meetings. I’m a big fan of the short meetings, so with technology the way it is now, you can see people, you can speak to people online, and I just find it works very well. It helps as well, obviously, with a cloud-based system - it makes it easier for all of that to be done off-site. So, I thought it was great, actually - I think I’d prefer to do it remotely in this way. 

 

Jane: And I guess, also, from being in the cloud, you don’t have to worry about rebooting the survey yourself so much? It’s somebody else’s responsibility to make sure the software is up and running?

 

Peter: It’s brilliant. You can literally update the system - as long as you’ve got a web browser, that’s all you need. So, very very flexible.

 

Jane: Ok, very good. Another question is: How can the technology manage future lockdowns? Maybe one for you, Chris, I should imagine?

 

Chris: From our perspective, in terms of delivery, it wouldn’t change too much for us. I guess maybe the question is more perhaps on the reporting side in terms of the intelligence that the system could provide, and obviously some of the software Mark would deliver as well there, so I think it would be from a reporting perspective, I would say - an intelligence that the dashboards would push - and that’s where, again, modern systems provide a much more intelligent output. Years ago, you’d run a report, you’d have to go and get it off the printer - that type of process. Where as now, Peter’s logging in in the morning, he’s got a dashboard that gives him a lot of insight and data, and that can not only sit across the finance system - it can sit across other systems, as well, if he needs it to. So that information is pushed to him, as opposed to him having to pull it, which perhaps he would have previously had to do.

 

Jane: Yes, that takes me back to pulling reports off the printer, and you only had one chance - if the printer paper got messed up you’d lost your report pretty much, and then spending an hour tearing off those bits of paper at the side that were holding them into the printer. 

 

Mark: I think the first thing that happened in the UK was the chancellor changed [put up] the VAT rate. For a lot of the Legacy systems, that is an absolute nightmare. Changes of tax code, and any regulation like that. The technology vendors need to get cuter at how we can make global changes like that to make the customers not have to ring them for support and charge them for it.

 

Jane: Yes we’ve heard a lot about that VAT change in the office, and on some systems it was hard coded, so they literally had to make massive changes 

 

Mark: We need to get away from that. There’s no doubt, in my opinion, that he’s going to keep the flexible VAT rate on non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages, so we need to put the flexibility into the POS systems and the PMSs and into the finance systems so we can change tax rates that will. The other thing to manage the future lockdown is, people need to have a continuity business plan and incident response plans. As part of PCI you need to have that anyway, but I think this has just highlighted the fact that a lot of companies don’t have those and now’s the time to think about it. The chain of command, if you invoke BCP, all of that needs to be thought about so that you have a plan of action from implication, through to coming out of it.

 

Jane: That’s a very good point, well raised. I guess that, in a way, it takes us back to the point about delivering training over teams or Zoom etc, in that if there is a change of staff or people working from home, then they can go back and replay parts of it so that they can refresh their memory or even learn new things if they’ve suddenly got a different area of responsibility. Paul, what other technology are you looking to introduce - specifically digital marketing?

 

Paul: Absolutely - we’ve just launched two software platforms, Revinate and Res Diary. Revinate is mastering upsell - when the guest makes their room booking, they receive tailored email to encourage them to make a reservation in the restaurant, book a spa treatment etc. Res Diary is really pushing that envelope where people want to be able to book all those (unintelligible) on and off, are on a web interface - the days of calling up to the receptionist when you check in to make that booking are probably gone, because frequently you can disappoint the customer. When they check in and they look to make a dinner reservation or spa, they’re actually booked out for that evening. So you have two problems: One, you have an unhappy customer, and secondly you’re giving that incremental business to a competitor. (...unintelligible)Looking at the databases of customers, cleansing databases, making sure the transition to emails to customers are very slick transitions - so integrating that back into the systems to emails - and then back to the revenue management software to make sure the right rates are going out to the consumer. So for the digital space, that’s really what we’re pushing hard on - the Res Diary platform and the Revinate platform over the last 12 months.

 

Jane: Do you truly believe that by the time you’ve finished you’ll have a single version of the truth?

 

Paul: Absolutely. We are chasing the holy grail of deploying a business intelligence piece of kit at the top of our hierarchy and that’s truly agnostic, in the sense that it’ll talk to all these systems. Getting consistency of all that software infrastructure the same across the hotels we believe is the first stage and we have that done, so we have confidence that, let’s pick the business intelligence product to sit on top of that hierarchy, and get all the systems talking to each other, and as you say, have one version of the truth. Back to Chris’s point that email reports become a thing of the past - you just literally log on to your tailored dashboard every morning and have the information sitting there.

 

Jane: Are you finding an increased need for data analytics to leverage insights from data that is captured but not currently used?

 

Paul: 100%, if I pick 2 examples from a rooms perspective - how much from our conference business drives our room business -  we hold about 400 weddings across the 9 hotels every year - how much room business comes from weddings. So the ability to get at that data and slice and dice it, and present that back in to the relevant stakeholders is critically important. That business analytics piece is critical and we certainly see it as a big cultural C change from a finance function perspective... so typically finance... rear view mirror and tell you how the business has reformed historically. Now with the new deployment of technology and taking efficiencies out of the process, we are asking our finance teams to (unintelligible)... back into the business. From a food and beverage perspective, we’re doing a lot of work on menu selection and margin management, but clearly you need to have very good data as the building blocks for that. You need to understand what are your top selling meals, what meals are favourable for kids - trying to go in and pull that out of an EPOS system isn’t the way it has to be. I spoke about competitive advantage earlier, and as we know, data is a commodity in itself,so if you can get in control of your data, cleanse it and bring it into some infrastructure, you will push competitive advantage into your business.

 

Peter: Intact gives us the ability to slice and dice the data in multiple different dimensions. Be it food and beverage or housekeeping, but also right down to individual bars and restaurants as well, and the time of day. We’ve gone from not just monthly reporting, but to weekly reporting and in some cases daily reporting as well. When you’re operating across multiple locations, it’s good to be able to slice the data and then compare across the locations to try and understand why some are doing better than others in certain aspects of the business.

 

Jane: Mark, I’m sure you’ve got something to add on the importance of using technology and data to analyse performance?

 

Mark: Absolutely. When I worked with Carl all those years ago, we had to produce an A4 spreadsheet that was faxed over every morning with the KPIs on it - so it was running the hotel from an A4 sheet of paper, and that’s what dashboards do now. All we’ve done is take it into the digital age, instead of the paper and fax age.

 

Jane: And how about digging down data mining and that sort of thing? What would you say about that?

 

Mark: If you can drill through from the dashboard through to the source data or information, even more insight. You can answer the question whilst you’re on the phone, rather than having to take it away and do work on it on another spreadsheet to get the analysis that you need - you can show where the correlation is between - if you’re up last year but down on budget, here’s why, and this is the cause of the issue, and publish it out to the correct audience.

 

Jane: Thank you. We have a question here: It all shows a huge reliance on what we all have on our internet suppliers and wifi coverage is more important than, possibly ever before, with fewer staff on site as they are at the moment. Chris, do you have any predictions for life after the pandemic? Any predictions for 2021 and beyond, and whether we’ll see any changes in the use of technology or whether we’ll just have more of the same, but just get more efficient?

 

Chris: I think we’ve probably already seen it; I think it will accelerate it. I think people will look for automation, and prior to COVID anyway, that thirst for data and insight, which is what it provides, I think that’s the key. I think that trend of moving away from the old fashioned back office will continue. I think COVID will maybe accelerate that in cases where people can obviously invest at this time, which is again, a key factor

 

Jane: I’ve heard two sides of the argument about installing technology; one is that it frees up people for more front of house interaction with guests. I’ve also heard the counter argument that managers are now stuck behind screens looking and reporting and making sure everything’s inputted into the systems correctly. Peter, do you find your team has more time for guests now, as a result of your implementation?

 

Peter: We’re still in the relatively early stages of the implementation, but certainly we’ve already been able to ask them stop doing the things they were previously. I would say that the pages we’ve built for the general managers on Sage are relatively straightforward, and there’s few of them as well, so they’ve got a GM dashboard, where they can see the headline KPI and information, and then they’ve got a suite of reports as well that they can easily access and pull up when they need to see them. I haven’t seen any evidence yet of that increase in the amount of screen time.

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Jane: Would that be true for you, Paul, as well?

 

Paul: We have a slightly different model, where we’re looking to integrate the back office functionality outer property level, so a lot of that screen time is being delivered from a head office function, so perhaps counterintuitively, we’re actually freeing up more bandwidth at property level and what we’re saying to GMs as well, you don’t need to worry about whether the … are going to Sage and the debts and credits are actually balancing - we’ll manage that. What we want is for you to be real partners in running that business - looking around corners, building that strategy and dealing with the day to day challenges that arrive - and most of those challenges are driven by people, in terms of managing your team, keeping them motivated - but more importantly, it’s the guests coming through front door of the hotel. So, our chase to integrate the back end of the property level into head office is very much what you speak about Jane - it’s to prevent that notion well - I need to spend between 9-11 on a Wednesday morning cleansing down report x y and z. Fundamentally the move to dashboard reporting should prevent that anyway because as Peter said, you’re effectively presenting key users and stakeholders with personalised dashboard data - you don’t need to cleanse any report - they just open up the interface and it should pull the information through and present them with the metrics they need to run business. I think that culture change is critical and we very much see it as freeing up time to do mind the team and the guests. 

 

Chris: I think that’s the good thing about the role-based dashboard - I don’t think you can ever push too much accurate and correct information to someone providing it’s relevant to their role and helps the hotel, really. I think if someone’s looking at a screen that’s relevant to 3 or 4 different job roles and they’ve got to find which information is relevant to them, then that’s wrong. But if it’s role-based and they’re logging on to their dashboard, then you’re pushing the right data to them.

 

Jane: And Mark, in your experience of doing lots and lots of rollouts which I know you have over the years, would you say the average hotelier sees that as a benefit, that they free up more time for the guest? Or are they more looking at it that they might reduce their headcount, or is it both?

 

Mark: It’s a bit of both - and as I said earlier, if you’re an expanding business, trying to put the technology in so you don’t have to increase headcount, to improve efficiency that way. So you get it slightly on its head ROI. If you’re bringing in 2 new start-ups, then how do you maintain the team but still report in the same timely manner? All this data’s great, but you’ve got to make sure it’s correct. So you can either deliver it to the dashboard as unaudited, and then people clearly know it’s a dash number, or you can put it through a staging process where it’s sanitised before it’s delivered. So you’ve got a choice, but it’s still going to improve the efficiency of the reporting. I’m a great believer that you need to start from the foundations - if you don’t get good data from the beginning, and if you’re a group of hotels, you need to standardise where you’re data is coming from, from the PMS for example, standard transaction codes into standard Sage, or any other chart of accounts, so you’ve got one interface to manage and map, then you’re going to get far more efficiencies out of it than if you’ve got seven or eight different PMSs, different transaction codes and you’ve got seven or eight mapping tables between all these systems that you need to support. And that has proved in the past to be a big challenge.  

 

Jane: I guess it’s always going to be an ongoing training request because requirements will change, won’t they, over time, or people’s roles will change - so they may have a dashboard geared for them in their current job role, but they may need that to be edited and amended. I assume, Chris, you would normally empower - you would make sure hoteliers had the power to do that themselves - do you find people coming back to you for training on things like that?

 

Chris: We always try to take the approach of empowering the user, really. It can happen, it’s perhaps rare - you’ll always look to make sure someone has that capability. It’s all about empowering the user. The tools that are there now are very flexible - even I could use them - you don’t need to be technical anymore to produce a report. You can slice and dice it yourself now, it’s a lot easier.

 

Jane: That’s great. I’ve just had a comment from Harry Murray, HOSPA’s president: Technology is about getting the balance right, and it should help managers to have more time to be visible to guests, and in a support role for staff which is key. So typically, we’re all about freeing staff up to welcome guests. Looking forward, do we see any further changes or anything else speeding up because of the pandemic? Do you think, in the hotels, things you thought you might do, or might do sometime in the future, suddenly have become a more immediate problem, or something that needs to be sorted out quickly?

 

Mark: We’ll we’re talking to our customers about that sort of thing all the time. We know there are applications out there that can do that, and it’s encouraging them to embrace the technology. It’s not just mobile key that you get with that sort of application; it’s all the other things as well, that you can wrap around it. So you get your guest directories in your room, food and beverage menus, order at table, pay at table - everything through these apps now is vital if we’re going to trade in a post COVID environment.

 

Jane: Yes, and a lot of those have been developed quite quickly, haven’t they, to enable hotels to put them in quickly. Someone’s just pointed out that the investment for some of these things is way out of reach for hoteliers at the moment, with so little income coming in. So Peter and Paul, I guess you’re in a good position in that you’re able to continue your rollouts of your digital programme

 

Paul: We’re looking at it the opposite way around. The hotel industry is quite cyclical as we all know - it’s had a good run back in 16, 17, 18, 19. From a stakeholder perspective, pressure is going to come on for a lot of hospitality businesses, particularly on managing the middle part of their profit … because ADR and occupancy and F&B revenues are probably going to be a little softer as we adjust to the new normal. The real pressure point on the business is going to be from an Oplex perspective - what is business doing to lean out its Opex. Unless you invest in the IT along the lines of the conversation we’ve had here this morning, the ability to take costs out and lean out your business I think is very much a limiting factor. In this new normal, pronounced pressure is going to come on a lot of hospitality businesses to start managing their Opex and start leading out to business. We said we need to invest in IT - there is clearly a quantum surrounding that. The ROI on that speaks for itself. It allows you to drive down and lean out your business from an operational expenditure perspective. From a top end perspective, things are certainly going to be a little softer for the next 18-24 months.

 

Jane: Yes, the predictions are saying at least that, I think.

 

Chris: We talked to Prospect last week and they were looking at it in terms of what can they invest now in technology to give them the benefits, because there were demands placed on them by the business that they couldn’t cope with, they haven’t got the information at their fingertips - they had to go away to get it. They were looking at it in terms of what they need to invest to give us that. Obviously it is an investment, but over time that investment will be realised.

 

Jane: With most of these things I’m sure there’s a return on investment as long as there’s the cash there. Peter, I think you mentioned most of your bits are in the cloud. Does that really work for you? Would you recommend that to other hoteliers, or have you kept much locally?

 

Peter: First of all, it wasn’t something we necessarily set out to do at the beginning - we were open-minded about that as to what type of solution we would end up with. Obviously, you do have some concerns in the back of your mind about accessibility and security and so on. That said, with Sage, obviously they’ve got very robust systems and back up procedures and so on, but having gone down this route now, I’d say it’s something that we’re very pleased with and I certainly find it very helpful just to be able to access the system from whenever and wherever you’re not tied down to a particular location. Particularly in a multi-location environment and I’m travelling around the hotels, then it would be frustrating to not be able to access data from any of those hotels. So, very flexible, very accessible. Also it reduces the amount of involvement, time investment needed from our own IT function and support services, so we’ve been able to progress with this transformation with minimal involvement from our IT function. Because it’s all in the cloud, you have no specific system requirements, no issues around server capacity. We’ve found it very flexible.

 

Paul: I can echo what Peter said...The ability to access information whatever time you want - you’re not relying on an FC or an IT person turning on the server. From a GDPR perspective, the ability to reside all the data in one place, certainly from a hotel management perspective, gives us a huge amount of comfort that we know where our data is and what the security protocols surrounding it are. Data is a value driver in the business, and the ability to grab all that data and put it somewhere up in the cloud, not locally, that really gives us the ability to bring insights back into the business and try to drive value out of the data within the business. I definitely see cloud as the way to go in terms of holding data.

 

Jane: And working from home, obviously is key to that. 

 

Chris: I think the trends we’re seeing as well a couple of years ago, probably one in five prospects have come into hotels saying they want the cloud. Probably now, four out of five are adamant they want a cloud solution. That’s the way forward and this has probably accelerated that.

 

Jane: I’m sure it has. Mark, are you seeing the same, people wanting the cloud over premise-based bits?

 

Mark: Absolutely but it depends on how they want to invest, capex or opex. 14 years ago Malmaison Oxford had a fire, we were one of the first hotel companies to operate in Frankfurt. We closed the hotel and by 11am, we’d contacted every single guest who was going to stay for the next 3 months because we were able to access the data on mobiles, laptops from Frankfurt, and because the server room was dead, we had no server. So if we put everything in that server room, we’d have been absolutely ruined. It has its benefits, but you do need the infrastructure in place to make sure that you can run efficiently online.

 

Jane: Someone’s just asked, was that fire actually in the comms room?

 

Mark: No, it was in the electrical cupboard [laughs] so someone knows then

 

Jane: [Laughs] you can pick that up with them afterwards, Mark. That brings us very much towards the end of our allotted time. Thank you to everyone for listening and asking questions.