Guest data and direct bookings with the top 3 CRM solutions on Mews Marketplace

[00:00:00] Bryson Koehler: They generated $54 million with us in two years. They targeted guests to book via third parties. They did that winback campaign with a direct-only incentive, and they were able to shift a tremendous amount of business by turning them from an OTA booker back to a direct booker.

[00:00:29] Matt Welle: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Matt Talks Hospitality. Last year, we did an episode where I invited four different companies and founders that ran AI chatbot companies. And it really resonated with the audience because sometimes it's hard to understand what a different provider does, and this gives you a real insight into what the thinking of a founder is behind the business. So, I want to repeat that again, but I want to dig deeper on the CRM side, so customer relationship management systems. So, today, I have three guests with me. I've got Daan from Bookboost. I've got Bryson from Revinate, and I've got Benjamin from Quinta. All three, distinctly different systems, and I wanted to get the elevator pitch from them. So, I said, "Okay, pitch it to me in a couple of minutes. What is the problem that you are solving for hoteliers? And give us a teaser of what's on your road map to come." So, three companies, three distinct problems that they're solving. And we, as hoteliers, sit on this gold mine of guest data, but we're not getting the most out of it. And if you wanna truly improve your business, we need to make sure that that data gets leveraged in the smartest way possible to ensure that guests who have booked you before book you again and again and again. I hope you enjoy this.

[00:01:40] Matt Welle: Hi, everyone. The first guest today is Daan de Bruijn, and Daan works at Bookboost. So, let's talk about what Bookboost does. Daan, can you give us the elevator pitch?

[00:01:49] Daan de Bruijn: Absolutely, Matt, and thank you for having us. So, hotels end up having to pay a lot of money to acquire guests, as we all know. And once that guest is acquired, actually, often in terms of digital engagement, so once a guest comes to the hotel and is booked in, it's quite little. And the underlying reason for that is that hotels often do not have easy access to their data and do not have a good overview of the guests. And that means that hotels end up not knowing their guests digitally, you could say. We believe that every hotel should be able to know its guests digitally. So, that's where our Bookboost comes in, and that's what we've built the hospitality engagement platform for, which consists of a CDP, a customer data platform that tackles that data challenge. So, that can pull data from various sources, centralizes master profile and have a full context of the guest. And there, you can also segment your guests into groups. And then we offer four products to action that data, which includes marketing automation where you can send your newsletters, your reengagement campaigns, winback campaigns, etc, a module for the guest journey, so to automate the entire guest journey from pre-stay to in-stay to post-stay, a module for customer service, which is the unified inbox, and the unified inbox unifies different inbound channels into one inbox. And there, you can set up convenient automations and workflows to handle that efficiently. And, lastly, because as you can imagine, Bookboost sits on a lot of data from having centralized that data from various sources. And, also, throughout the platform, there's a lot of engagement throughout the marketing module, throughout the guest journey, and throughout customer service. So, there's a lot to learn, and that can be done via Bookboost Insights, which is the module for analytics. And so, all in all, that's what the platform does, and it's helping hotels to build the guest relationship.

[00:03:34] Matt Welle: Nice. And you talked about the unified inbox. Is that unified across, like, email and, like, SMS and WhatsApp, or is it really focused on email specifically?

[00:03:43] Daan de Bruijn: Yeah. So, it includes 22 different channels, including email indeed, including messaging such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and a bunch of other messaging channels, and also OTA channels. Hotels get a lot of questions via OTA, such as Booking and Expedia.

[00:03:56] Matt Welle: Right. Through Booking.com, then that goes into your inbox, and the hotel never has to actually log in to an action item Booking or Expedia to respond.

[00:04:04] Daan de Bruijn: Exactly. Precisely.

[00:04:05] Matt Welle: So, my next question, and I think you've actually answered it, but, like, let's see if I've actually missed something, but what problems does your solution solve in hotels?

[00:04:12] Daan de Bruijn: So, once you have that overview of the guest and have the right tools to utilize the data and turn that into action, there's a lot that can be done, actually, that hits both on the operation side of things as well as on the guest relationship and guest experience side of things. So, for operations, indeed, like we just talked about, there are a lot of different channels. Also, the website, email, phone, OTAs, etc, that the hotels get questions from. So, that can be quite a big operational ask to cater to that, and that's what the unified inbox helps with. And it can automate repetitive questions, and as well do some tasks that are associated with questions.

[00:04:48] Matt Welle: If you have a unified inbox that responds to customers are, one, you capture all of them, but it's also the speed of response because you now no longer have to log in to 24 different platforms, as you mentioned?

[00:04:58] Daan de Bruijn: Totally. So, it helps the hotel to reduce workload. And as well, it actually makes the customer experience better because the response time goes down, and that has a positive impact on conversion rates, on revenue, initially. That's a few examples on the operator side, but also to already proactively send that invoice to business guests so they don't have to ask for it or to drive up online check-in rates, which reduces manual workload. So, there's a lot of these, like, examples throughout the guest journey that can be automated. And then on the guest relationship side and on the guest experience side, when you know that a guest has stayed with you before and they really appreciated staying in that seafood room or they've purchased a certain package, If you know the history, you can send targeted campaigns, and that converts a lot better than generic ones, but also to upsell, for instance, throughout the guest journey. So, sometimes guests do not initially book breakfast. It doesn't always mean that they're not interested in booking breakfast. So, if you remind them about that at the right time and just offer it, there's actually a surprisingly good conversion rate on that. And the list goes on and on. So, to ask for reviews at the right time and post-stay in touch with the guests and make sure that once the guest wants to book again, they book directly, so you save between 15% and 20% off on commission fees. So, it's really about a guest relationship, and the benefits hit both on the operation side of things as well as on the guest experience and guest relationship side of things.

[00:06:20] Matt Welle: And if you look 12 months forward, what juicy things do you have on the road map?

[00:06:23] Daan de Bruijn: I love that question, and I would like to highlight three things. The first one, it's maybe slightly a more boring one to talk around, but it's actually really fundamental, and important is connectivity. So, we're expanding the integrations. We see more partners integrate towards us, which we have open APIs for, we're building more integrations, and we're now seeing first use cases where also data from the restaurant is centralized, data from spa systems, which then brings new opportunities to cross-sell, a data from review system so you can take that into consideration in the master profile and show that in the inbox. So, the receptionist knows and also uses it for segmentation, so you can be even more precise in your outreach. And examples like that make even more use cases available to use the data. We're also looking at meeting and events now to add that. So, there's, like, the integrations and the richer the master profile becomes in context, the more use case enables, and that's what we're working on. Another area is AI. Today, we have two agents in the platform. So, one agent lives in the inbox, which can automate approximately between 90% to 95% of repetitive questions. And within the next two weeks, actually, we're releasing conversational commerce for that agent, which means that you can also sell services via conversation regardless of channel, and then it would automatically add that as a line item in Mews, so the operator's taking care. So, that's the inbox agent that's already alive in the platform today, and we have an agent in Bookboost Insights. So, rather than clicking around and creating your own dashboards, the agent can do that for you for the analytics part of things. So, those two agents are alive in the platform today, but what we're working towards is to become an agentic-first platform, which means that it doesn't matter where you sit in the platform; the agent can work throughout the entire platform. So, let's take an example. You're building segmentation in the Audience builder, and the agent comes up with a better way of segmenting guests, then the agent could also directly suggest and create content and build a campaign in the campaign builder or improve that interaction in the guest journey. So, it doesn't matter where you sit in the platform. The agent can work throughout different interfaces and can work throughout the entire platform. So, that's what we're working towards, and we're currently building the guardrails for that. That's another area of innovation at Bookboost. And the third one that I would like to highlight is more ways to use the data, to action the data, and one area that we're investigating and that we're thinking around is loyalty. Like, what more can we do in terms of preferred rates, in terms of instant rewards? Those can work really well to strengthen that guest relationship. So, more features and more products to use that data. That's another area of innovation.

[00:09:03] Matt Welle: Love it. Can you tell me one customer story? Like, when did you come into a customer and made a real impact to their business?

[00:09:09] Daan de Bruijn: Sure. If I can only pick one, let me quickly introduce. So, Bookboost works really well for independent hotels, but, actually, the platform is specifically designed for groups that require central control and having a good overview of the entire portfolio centrally, while as well having flexibility on the property level. So, I would like to highlight a group, then in that case, which is one that comes to mind is CIC Hospitality. They operate Best Western, Thon Hotels, Aiden Hotels in the Nordics, and when they implemented Bookboost, within just a few weeks, they started to see quite impressive results. So, for instance, what they see is that online check-in rates, which for them is an important metric that they look at goes up quite significantly, often up to eight times within just a couple of weeks. They're seeing click-through rates on upsell campaigns of close to 70% because they're really precise with personalization of each touchpoint. And as well, their average response time for inbound requests has come down to only just a few minutes regardless of channel. That's quite impressive results. There's a lot more examples that I would love to talk about, but if I could just pick one, then that would be the one.

[00:10:21] Matt Welle: And I love, like, CIC, I think, one of the most innovative groups in the Nordics that we work with as well. So, I definitely agree that that's probably the best customer to pick to talk about. Nice. Daan, thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate it.

[00:10:34] Daan de Bruijn: Thank you very much.

[00:10:35] Matt Welle: Guest number two, Bryson Koehler, is here from Revinate, and he's gonna answer these same questions. So, the first question is, what does your platform do? Give it to me in two minutes.

[00:10:45] Bryson Koehler: So, the hotel problem that we're trying to solve is that over the last two decades, hotels have increasingly turned to the OTAs for their bookings, and in many cases, for their guest relationships, really knowing their guests, and that's been impacting their ability to drive direct bookings, profitability, as well as deliver consistently awesome guest experiences, and then drive that incremental revenue that they so desperately need to help counteract some of the pressures that we have on room rates. And it's caused because guest data is fragmented. Guest data is fragmented all over the hotel. The property management system has a source of information, the point of sale systems, the Wi-Fi log, you know, the portal when you're logging in with your email address, the spa system, the bike rental station, all of these, you know, outlets across a hotel have different slices and understanding of a guest. And not understanding the guest and not having that pulled together really impacts the hotel's ability to action, and create that ability to drive that direct demand. And so, our mission is very simple. We empower hoteliers to take control of the guest by turning the scattered data into actionable insights and automated outcomes. And we wanna reach the right guest at the right time through the right channel to help them drive direct bookings, help them really target the upgrade and upsell opportunities that they have, build long-term loyalty, and repeat business. And we do that by owning and believing that the guest data really is the bottom line in owning that guest relationship, resulting in higher margins, higher profitability, in increased spend or per guest basis.

[00:12:26] Matt Welle: Nice. And can you make it very specific, like a specific problem that Revinate goes in and solves for hoteliers?

[00:12:33] Bryson Koehler: So, one of the main things that we help hoteliers do is to unmask messy data. Messy data that comes in from an OTA that isn't complete, that doesn't have all of the attributes of that guest. Can we reverse engineer that and relink it back to a profile that may be sitting in their Mews PMS? How do we help match and unmask some of the, you know, messy data that is there? Data that may be sitting in other outlets, you know, systems, you know, bringing that together and really building that rich guest profile so that the hotel can see that full 360 view of the guest, and then if you think about knowing that data, knowing that guest, and then activating it across an email channel, a direct web channel, a voice channel, a messaging channel, activating that now as we released a couple of weeks ago in digital marketing channels. So, you now have the guest. You've built the segment. You understand the targeting that you're trying to do. Our ability now to activate that across a series of channels so that you can make sure that you're communicating the right message to the right guest at the right time.

[00:13:40] Matt Welle: I love that. And that's such a big problem that you're solving. I think people have been struggling with the reservations coming in through an OTA, and you're like, right, that email address is not a real one, and like, they obfuscate everything. So, the power of being able to connect them to a guest profile and then merging those so that you actually really know the entire history of a guest is really, really powerful.

[00:13:58] [AD]: Thank you so much for listening to Matt Talks Hospitality. I really enjoyed these conversations. I did wanna take a moment to talk about the Mews Revenue Management System. Two years ago, we acquired Atomize, and we then, from that moment, started rebuilding the whole platform from the ground up at the core. So, the idea was that the Mews operating system becomes the core platform that everyone in the hotel lives in, but we had to rebuild the whole user experience inside that same platform whilst we optimize the algorithms. That product is now live. Hoteliers and revenue managers love it because once they log in to Mews, they get their business intelligence insights. They can manage the rates and the connectivity to the channel managers. And now all the price recommendations are sitting in that same platform, and this makes the life of revenue managers much more interesting because it turns them into revenue strategists. You can see this demo straight away, directly inside the system. We can get you live by tomorrow, and we can get recommendations flowing to instantly make your business a better business. I hope you enjoy it.

[00:14:52] Bryson Koehler: Yeah. For 17 years, we've been, you know, working on these problems, and we've gotten quite good at reverse engineering a lot of that.

[00:15:00] Matt Welle: What does your road map for the next year look like?

[00:15:02] Bryson Koehler: So, there's a lot going on at Revinate, as there is with Mews and everyone else. You know, I think, you know, what you'll see us do is continue to lean into automated outcomes, less about tools, more about automation. Don't just help me, you know, run a campaign, build the campaign for me. So, automated segment building, automated campaign building, automated by outcome. What is the problem you're trying to solve? And so, we've launched IV as our intelligence layer, and IV, you know, is helping us in our chat product become more fully automated. She's helping us in our voice product with automated AI call scoring and coaching, and feedback to the agent. She's helping us, you know, with our, like I said, some of the campaign building capabilities, predictive marketing, identifying where the winning play is most likely to be next and automatically running that highest performing campaign, thinking about that A/B testing, learning from that campaign, and constantly refining it. One of the things that I think will be most exciting on the IV front is the conversational reporting. So, moving from static canned reports to a conversational interface for reporting.

[00:16:12] Matt Welle: Meaning, so you can ask questions or…

[00:16:15] Bryson Koehler: Yeah. So, you can basically come in and say, when is my next, you know, light demand period? What should I do during, you know, next Wednesday when I look, you know, light? What's going on, you know, in the market that may be driving these sorts of behaviors? What am I doing two months from now? All of those sorts of things, where it's more of a conversational reporting interface, we're quite excited about that.

[00:16:36] Matt Welle: Nice.

[00:16:37] Bryson Koehler: You know, I think that omnichannel pathway gets more complicated. So, when you have email and voice and SMS and WhatsApp and now digital ads that we've added as a capability, you need that automation to make that easier, instead of just putting more work on an already overtaxed hotel staff. The other thing that is really around the AI search challenge. We know so much about the guest, and we know so much through guest feedback and surveys about the hotel that really gives us a semantic understanding of the type of hotel this is, the type of guest that loves this hotel, and doing that matchmaking. And so, our synthetic insights work that we're working on now, using anonymized signals to really understand supply and demand to increase targeting capabilities. And one of those targeting capabilities that we're really working on, and we announced a partnership with Google and their GCX platform a couple of weeks ago at our Navigate Conference, is on AI search. How do we make sure that we're helping our hotels compete with the billions of dollars the big brands are spending on the on this? And we all know the OTAs are gonna fight hard, you know, on this as well. But visibility in AI-driven search results and being able to help match up that guest profile, the type of targeting, the type of guest, as well as the kind of, you know, soul of the hotel, we think we can add a lot of value there.

[00:18:04] Matt Welle: Great. In our last 30 seconds, can you tell me a short example of an actual customer where you made an impact?

[00:18:10] Bryson Koehler: Yeah. So, we've got so many great examples, but one of my favorite ones is the OTA winback example. And I'll pick on Brittain Resorts today. They generated $54 million with us in two years, and they targeted guests who book via third parties. And they did that winback campaign with direct-only incentives, and they were able to shift a tremendous amount of business for the repeat visit by turning them from an OTA booker back to a direct booker, and that really just speaks to the heart and soul of what Revinate is all about, using data to help you win that direct business, build that direct guest relationship, and, you know, being able to retarget bookers on the web that left during the booking process, retargeting them with direct campaigns, converting that OTA booker back to direct. I think $54 million in two years for them is one of my favorite, you know, win campaigns that we've got.

[00:19:07] Matt Welle: Congrats. That's really, really amazing. And thank you so much for joining and sharing these stories.

[00:19:11] Matt Welle: Up next, we have Benjamin Devisme from Quinta. And you may know the company as Quicktext. I'm sure he'll explain that they have shifted to a new brand, Quinta, but give us your 2-minute pitch.

[00:19:23] Benjamin Devisme: So, in a sense, everyone is obsessed with AI, and we're obsessed with the data that is feeding it. Quinta collects, structures, updates, and distributes hotel data for the AI world, meaning that we centralize all the knowledge that the hotel has in a structured way so that this data can then feed AI use cases. At the beginning, we built the knowledge base and the use case. For example, you may know Velma, which is our reservation assistant and also digital concierge. But then we expanded to how can we feed third-party systems, such as, for example, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. So, we started developing features that enable the hotel to be visible on these channels. And then we said, "Okay, let's try to feed all the AIs that the hotel is using, not only, you know, ChatGPT outside, but also, since solutions are piling up, you know, someone wants a phone AI, someone wants a mini AI, and every solution becomes deeply specialized. And every one of these solutions needs a database." Since we have such a strong database with 3,700 data points per hotel, and it's not replicable for every solution, let's open to third-party solutions, and that's what we are today.

[00:20:37] Matt Welle: The problem you're trying to solve is really trying to connect all of the different manual systems, or maybe describe what the problem is that you're trying to solve for hotels.

[00:20:44] Benjamin Devisme: Yeah. So, every AI agent out there, phone, chat, voice, even like the LLM, like ChatGPT, they need one reliable source of data, and that's a role we want to play. While there is a flood of revolutionary AI and solutions that are in the market right now, nobody's asking the right question, which is where does the data come from? So, Quinta wants to be, or is that layer of data that feeds all the other use cases that you might think. As I said when we started, like AI was something that was very small, and we had to build everything from the knowledge base to the use case. So, right now, for example, we are in the middle where we still have a lot of features that are built on our database, but more and more we are trying to let third-party AIs enter and feed from our database. So, in terms of use cases that we serve right now, well, the first one would be driving high-quality traffic to the hotels because, as I explained, we have Velma, that interacts with the customers, and we know everything at the hotel. So, we have been understanding what customers want to know for each hotel, and we try to make this content available to ChatGPT. It can happen through dynamic FAQs that we install on the website and that represent the topics that customers are interested in. A little bit deeper, we install within every hotel a dynamic schema.org that is kind of the same information as what we give in the FAQ and the website in general, but at a deeper layer, that is accessible mostly to AI, not to humans. And what AI like to look for in that layer is, does the information exactly reflect what is visible on the website to make sure that the information is accurate? And then another, like, going even deeper in that, as I said, we integrate with other AIs. So, one of them is Claude. And in a sense, we connect all the knowledge of the hotel to Claude. And when the hotel wants to rank in a specific prompt, for example, in ChatGPT, it will tell Claude, "Okay, create me the content that will help me rank in this very specific prompt," and since it has all the data about the hotel, Claude doesn't create something from scratch. It transforms information into arguments. And that's where we enable content creation, not only through our system, because we are a knowledge base and an AI, but we realize that systems like Claude can magnify this knowledge base and transform it into automated content creation, for example. The second use case, as is probably the oldest, is Velma, which is, once a hotel is, once the customer is at the hotel, either on Instagram or on the hotel website, I say at the hotel when he's online, looking at the hotel, he may want to dig deeper, verify the information, or, well, as I said, expand it. So, he will interact with Velma, and Velma collects all his data so that if he doesn't convert after the conversation, we can actually re-engage this customer proactively via email or WhatsApp. So, two use cases that we hold. The visibility, how to drive the traffic to the hotel and when the customer is on the hotel assets, be it WhatsApp, Instagram, the chat on the website, we guide that customer through the booking process and make sure that we hold all his information so that if he doesn't book, so hotel actually can create a proactive follow-up strategy and convert the business that you would otherwise lose.

[00:24:08] Matt Welle: Can you talk to me about a customer? Like, where have you deployed it and what has the impact been?

[00:24:12] Benjamin Devisme: Yeah. So, at the moment, we're deployed at around 1,900 something properties, 70 something countries. I think I quote my first customer that is still with us today, like, it has been ten years already. So, it's Hôtels Paris Rive Gauche, and it's a boutique hotel group, and it uses our solution end-to-end. So, it uses our knowledge base that is called Q-Data, to structure and update its hotel information across all its channels. So, direct channels. So, Velma, on different communication platforms. On his website, we place information. I forgot to say, but we also distribute data, updates, for example, Booking, Expedia, etc. So, we maintain all the information of the hotel consistent and up to date. It uses Q-Sales to actually, like, Q-Sales is the feature that is behind Velma. It's the thing that contains, like all the information about customers that we collected and the status of the reservation, so that they can effectively retarget customers. And now they are starting to use our connectivity to third parties that work through something called MCP, which you may or may not expand later. And basically, they use this MCP to actually build content for their website, like specific content about, I don't know, why Hôtel & Spa La Belle Juliette, which is one of their property, is the best hotel for honeymooners in order to rank better on queries on this, specific prompt in ChatGPT. What is interesting is not one layer at a time. It's the fact that they use the four together.

[00:25:40] Matt Welle: So, if you look, fast forward 12 months from today, what does Quinta do more? Like, what's on the road map that gets you really excited?

[00:25:46] Benjamin Devisme: Well, in my field, it's a topic that is very difficult to answer because everything changes, you know, month to month. Panorama for AI is more and more crowded. So, I think we will reinforce our position as a base to feed every use case that you want to do with AI, because AI with no data is useless. And there is no way that the hotel will be able to update 10 databases at a time. So, we will keep reinforcing our ecosystem of connectivities to enable, I don't know, tomorrow you want a phone system. Well, I have an AI, but building a phone system is a whole different job. So, I'd rather work with someone that does that good instead of trying to build everything on my own that would then slow the development of all my other products. So, my focus right now is to be the most open and connected knowledge base about your property that exists on the market.

[00:26:37] Matt Welle: I love it. Benjamin, thank you for joining me today.

[00:26:39] Benjamin Devisme: Cheers.

[00:26:41] Matt Welle: I hope that you're enjoying this episode because if you do, make sure that you press that subscribe button. It really helps grow the audience and keep you informed whenever a new episode drops. We have some of the best hoteliers on this platform, and I love asking them the hard questions so that hopefully, you can improve your hospitality business as well.