We had the chance to catch up with another guest speaker who will be joining us at Unfold next week!
Klaus Kohlmayr is the Chief Evangelist and Development officer at IDeaS. He has been challenging the status quo on pricing and revenue management for the last 20+ years. His areas of expertise include thought leadership, technology partnerships, strategy, and innovation, giving us a variety of topics to discuss.
Let’s start with your long-running hospitality journey.
I’ve been in hospitality since I was 15 when I started attending hotel school and learning the art of hospitality. I worked in many hotels and moved through most hotel departments, eventually reaching revenue management. The reason I love hospitality is the people and the opportunity it’s provided me to travel the world.
IDeaS is driven by service and hospitality attitude. So even though I’m working for a software company, we still pride ourselves on being people-first and valuing our clients.
What do you think the new standard in hospitality is? What do you think is important going forward?
During and after Covid, hotel guests dramatically changed. We all worked, shopped, and interacted completely differently. Digitalization has accelerated expectations of how technology should enable the customer journey.
The new standard in hospitality, for me, is based on efficiently enabling personalized experiences for today’s and tomorrow's guest. The only way to do that is with modern, cloud-based technology infrastructure. Different systems should be tightly integrated, allowing data to flow freely in a way that supports business growth.
Collecting data about your guests across all their touchpoints is crucial for making informed decisions about your future offers and guest experiences. Ultimately, this leads to merchandising: you want to be selling anything a hotel has to offer. Think beyond rooms – restaurants, parking spaces, meeting rooms, etc.
If you don’t have a modern technology stack (PMS, RMS, CRS, CRM), you won’t be able to engage with customers in a modern and efficient way as they expect you to, so they’ll go somewhere else.
What are the biggest challenges to embracing the new standard of revenue management?
Technology adoption is a big challenge, along with the pressure on budgets and as a result, its prioritization. However, we’re seeing a positive trend of hotels investing more in revenue management technology. It’s interesting to note that innovative hotels lead the way in making RMS (revenue management system) the first upgrade in their technology stack.
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