Tech CEO-Turned-Hotel CEO Shares Tech Advice - Ben Rafter, Springboard Hospitality

Ben: We're about 50 hotels. We're not a large company. We overinvest and have a dedicated department just to try to make new things stick.

Josiah: A dedicated department? Who's in this department? 

Ben: Well, it's a department of three, so it's not a huge department. But we have a director of strategy. And again, I'm a big believer in diverse backgrounds. So this person came from the investment banking industry. and get classically trained a little bit differently. We have Cornell-trained people, we have economists, we have everybody, and he leads this department that effectively does nothing but beta new, not just technologies, but new opportunities.

Josiah: I would love for you to explain to our listeners why beta testing is important because you might see a technology out there that might look and sound good. What's important about beta testing?

Ben: Well, if the seller, the company, is doing its job, all the technologies sound good, right? Beta testing distills whether or not it actually provides the value. And we're very guest-focused, as you might guess. So if it's a guest-focused technology, whether the guest not only adopts it, but actually wants it. And there's a big difference between the two. There are a lot of technologies out there where the guest will use it. Yeah, OK, great. But the guest isn't going to go home and say, I'm glad I stayed at that particular hotel or resort. I had had a better experience because that technology is there, right? So we beta almost everything. We, of course, look at the return on ad spend. There's great analytic packages out there that just don't pencil for 120-room independent hotel, right? The other problem we have that I think is relatively new and interesting, and I'd be curious if you've seen this, is we keep starting down the path with a new vendor that's doing one thing. And before we can even get the one thing implemented, they're selling us on five other things. Like, oh, we were the best mobile check-in technology, but now we have this great upsell package. And it drives me insane because so much time and energy is put into implementing a product correctly. That's another reason why you beta things, right? Is can you get it to talk to all the other systems? that we're more interested in do the product that you sold us to begin with and just keep making it better rather than saying you have to cross over into some complementary but not necessarily similar area or technology. And we're seeing that everywhere right now.

Josiah: I appreciate you mentioning that, because I understand how this emerges from the technology providers. It helps their business to have other services, right? I'm also hearing from hoteliers, though, where it helps to have providers that are offering an array of solutions. So it's fewer relationships to deal with. But your perspective, what I'm hearing from you, is make sure that the implementation is delivering as promised, so you know they can deliver the goods before you consider something else.

Ben: Yeah, exactly. Make sure that the core thing that we picked you for is working perfectly first. And we're sort of a framework-driven company, meaning that we want to consolidate down to as few provider partners as possible. But we also realize that we're never going to get down to just one. So more of our time is spent on connectivity and sort of the framework to hold everything together, which we call hospitality intelligence, than it is on the actual technology product, meaning that if your systems don't talk together, you're just wasting all your time and energy. And the biggest problems are with anything not talking to a point of sale or PMS.

Josiah: And is that what you mean by hospitality intelligence is the interconnectivity of that?

Ben: Yeah, it's the framework. It's making everything function together.

Josiah: So I want to go back to the implementation driving results, just because I geek out on this kind of stuff. Sometimes I find myself on Hotel Tech Report or other sites looking through different solutions providers. A lot of positive reviews, but I kind of like looking at the ones that are mediocre or poor. And invariably, so many of them focus on a poor implementation. And I'm curious how your observations of that, what makes a good implementation, what are the hallmarks of that?

Ben: Well, it works right and it talks to the other systems. And data is a real problem these days because there's too much of it, right? And or it's too hard to manage. So it talks to the other system and distills data into a package that a very, very busy revenue manager or general manager can usefully use. And back in my tech days, and you still see this, The flaw was embarking on these projects that would take two years, think ERP projects, like PeopleSoft and SAP. And then by the time you get it actually 60% implemented, the world has moved on, right? And to some extent, that's still a problem. The implementation speeds are faster, but by the time you actually get it functioning across the entire enterprise or across even an entire, just a single hotel, The technologies and the consumers have sort of moved on over to here and are thinking about something else. I can think of some mobile key technologies that stand out where I just don't see the value of having a mobile check-in where the person still has to go to the front desk.

Josiah: Defeats the purpose.

Ben: Yeah, exactly.

Josiah: For me, this comes back to what you mentioned around hospitality intelligence, the interconnectivity of this. I imagine somewhat hedges your bets a little bit or future-proofs you or whatever you want to call it around that a point technology might come and go, but if it's connected, you have the ability to plug and play a little bit more.

Ben: Yeah and I mean if let's say you book a reservation six weeks out from that reservation six weeks out to six weeks post stay there are so many opportunities to interact with the guest and every single one of those interactions should be very, very rich in my mind and very, very seamless. And then they should also support actual human interaction. We're in mainly leisure markets. So I'm not a big fan of just go check in at the Marriott or the Hilton box. I get it in the business market. You may not want to talk to somebody maybe 11 o'clock at night. But in leisure markets, the person should be able to enhance and enrich your experience backed by technology, if that makes any sense. And if they're not, if you go in and you just get service, perfectly nice person has you a key and says, thank you for staying, Mr. Rafter, or whatever, that's a big failure on the hotelier's part.

Josiah: I'm just thinking back to what you just mentioned a few moments ago about understanding the effectiveness of technology. You talk about a guest may use a technology, but they could just be using it because it's there and it doesn't make that big of a difference. If I'm reading between the lines, it seems that you're looking somehow to understand how they're feeling about this. Did this improve their stay? I imagine there's maybe some quantitative along with some qualitative feedback collection to understand that.

Ben: Yep. Well, I mean, the most obvious is one we've been doing for a long time, is if a guest is unhappy with their stay, you need to intercept it while they're staying, right, and repair that. But I think we need to get technology to the point of we are anticipating what the guest wants before arrival. The easy things like, do you want to be close to the elevator on a low floor? You know, things, things that we've been doing for years, but also anticipating that the guest wants a local chef or the guest always wants to go to the, you know, Michael Mina, who's in 50 different cities or whatever, all the way down to this is the means of how the guest wants to check out. And now I can't remember the last time I actually checked out. I just leave. And it seems to work. No one ever chases me down. Being able to know those little tiny touch points and then also being able to know Because, again, we're so heavily focused on what, for lack of a better word, would be called independent or lifestyle, I think we can get to the point where we know that that guest wants the hole-in-the-wall bar three blocks down that is the exact opposite of a Ritz Carlton marble and French Michelin star experience, even though you might be paying the same price point, right? And luxury as a whole is breaking down And to me luxury, we're staying far away from technology now, but to me luxury is knowing what I want to do and then offering a real customized version of that way more than it is staying in sort of that little bit stuffier formal version of an inner city midtown hotel that was built 200 years ago and has lots of marble. Perfectly good experience, but generally not what I'm looking for ever when I'm in New York or Paris or somewhere. I see all those things breaking down, and technology can be an enabler of knowing how we can provide that person's version of luxury versus the historic definition of luxury, which many people still want. but many people don't, especially as you get into generations behind me, the Gen Z and things like that, right?

Josiah: I find that fascinating because I'm hearing more and more people on this show talking about and looking to luxury as they think about innovation, partially maybe because of the complexity, but it might give us a little bit of insight to where hospitality is going beyond just the luxury segment as it's defined by SDR or whomever, right? And so I think it seems like this is maybe as we think about creativity or how do we use technology creatively, maybe there's lessons to be learned exactly like you mentioned.

Ben: Yeah, somebody was telling me about, Technology can help with sort of the emotional intelligence of things. And getting back to the roots of hospitality, it's very easy to provide service, right? It's very easy to provide a clean room and a nice bed and Wi-Fi and streaming, which by the way should be basics of any stay. If you can't get their bed right, and nowadays, at least in my opinion, if you can't throw Netflix up onto the screen with your phone, You've missed the mark already, but where we're getting at is trying to find technologies that Make it so that instead of just providing service, you're providing true hospitality. And that's what I want in a stay. I want people to know what I want. Whether I'm visiting New York City or whether I'm in a outdoor camp in Jackson Hole, I want people to know what I want, which is going to be different than the next door neighbor. And everyone's talking about outdoor technology. We have a whole bunch of outdoor resorts these days. But even you break that down, my version of a great hike is 100% different than 99% of the other people at the hotels were in a great hike. And we need to get to where we know all of that or we're not providing great hospitality.

Josiah: Fascinating. So I am always interested in people who have backgrounds in technology, are at the leading edge of implementing technology, what they look to as areas of opportunity. I've heard in some of your public remarks a focus on behind-the-scenes technology to empower your people in providing this sort of hospitality you've described, is that still the case? Are you looking at sort of behind the scenes operational tech as an interesting area?

Ben: Yeah, it's not very exciting. Well, it is exciting to me. It's not very exciting to most people. I would say two out of three, maybe four out of five technologies we adopt, the consumer probably, or the traveler probably never sees. Some of that is government mandated. We're having to make our team members more efficient. Case in point, in West Hollywood, where we have four hotels, a housekeeper can only clean so many square feet a day. So how do we maximize the efficiency? Because at the end of the day, we still report to an owner there, and that owner has to maintain certain profit levels, obviously, right? Other things I think can make people's jobs a whole lot easier, which I'm a big fan of. It's the hardest working industry. Anything we can do to make somebody's job and life that much easier. are important. And then a third one is sort of the intersection where if we can help a front office agent interact with a customer that much more efficiently, then we're better off. And I'm a big fan of writing content that's customized. Everybody's doing it now, right? But We want to be able to truly deliver local experience. You're in Honolulu and you're there for 36 hours. I could make a very big argument that I could never send you to the beach or into the water and deliver you an experience that you will never experience again, right? And if we've written enough content and know how to deliver that, then I think we've succeeded. That's where maybe at some point, the intersection with AI will help. We can generate some of that content. Although right now, I think AI is still a little bit too stiff, if you will, but it's getting there. It's getting there very, very quickly. And what's behind the scenes, and this is something that I saw you talking about that's very important, is AI is now providing sort of guide rails on how to get there. Best example is the TripAdvisor example, is AI responding to TripAdvisor? Maybe, probably not gonna be the best response, but AI identifying why there's a problem to begin with, that was a great example, because it's there, we can use that today, AI can generate 80% of the response, and then somebody can customize it for that particular guest.

Josiah: I love it. I mean, just staying with that example, Adele Gutmann taught me a lot around this. She used to be a commercial leader at a small collection of hotels, and in her experience, it's all about, I mean, exactly like you mentioned, it's the behind-the-scenes work to do that, which sort of ties back to what you mentioned earlier of like a lot of stuff's behind the scenes. And I think, you know, whether you call it labor management technology or something else, there's a lot of infrastructure that goes into Making this possible and did I hear you sort of alluding to sort of almost like what do you call it? Where you a housekeeper sort of decides, you know Kind of what room to focus on next that sort of pathing. Is that an area of opportunity that you see have found?

Ben: Yeah, I think we've, at least in most of the hotels, we've largely solved that. I mean, if you really took it to an extreme, you could manage somebody's schedule down to the minute. We obviously provide more flexibility because things happen. If a housekeeper gets stopped in the hallway and spend 10 minutes with a guest, that's a way better experience than spending an extra 10 minutes, you know, who knows what to do. The idea of knowing which rooms to skip, which room is the next most efficient room, whether the housekeeper wants to drop a floor or go up a floor, when we need to deliver supplies to that housekeeper, how small the cart can be, that's largely been solved. So we've aided in the housekeeper's job. Now what can we do to make the housekeeper enjoy that job more? daily paychecks, which some hotels are exploring. Is it an extra week of vacation? Is it a bus stipend? Let's figure those things out because, again, at the end of the day, it is a human business, hospitality. And so the technologies are all there. Now let's use them to make somebody's life easier or better or more functional.