My Formula for "Effortless" Hospitality Tech - Chet Pipkin, Desolation Hotel

Josiah: The promise of technology in hospitality is huge. It will save you time, it will save your team's time, it will improve the guest experience, and it will improve your profitability. That doesn't always happen, but sometimes it does happen, and I saw this for myself staying at Chet Pipkin's Desolation Hotel recently. We heard a bit about their extraordinary guest experience yesterday on the show, but every touch point from the booking process to even something as simple as checking out a bike was super simple and really easy for me. And if you've been listening to our series this week, that won't come as a shock because Chet built Belkin into one of the largest technology businesses, selling more than a billion products. And he brings such a simple, practical, powerful process to choosing and using hotel technology. I appreciated that as a guest, and I think there's something here for us all to learn from. So let's get into it.

Josiah: What I wanted to ask you about is, as a technologist, somebody who built a very large technology company, how do you think about technology, and I guess more specifically, what technology partners to work with? Because that feels like such a big piece of the guest experience. I'm curious how you approach that.

Chet: For me, this is really straightforward and it's really simple. It's getting the objectives and it's getting what matters to you right on that single page. And so what is it we're trying to do? So any place where there's friction, we want to take the friction out. Anytime you're going to encounter any kind of problem, we want to anticipate it and solve it for you before you have it, or give you the tools or some kind of path to follow so that that problem can get solved. My own experience in tech has been far too often people are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist and actually create complication for folks. We try to stay focused on addressing an issue that people have and using tech to do that. And then doing all the complicated tech work in the background so that the user experience is really simple and really intuitive.

Josiah: I would love to hear an example of that because I had the experience, whether it was some of this technology signing in for stuff, but can you walk us through an example?

Chet: Sure. And just another theme is there's always pluses and minuses and pros and cons to everything. Nothing solves everything. Just surrender that thought. So then you're choosing what matters more and what matters a little bit less, and then you're going to choose that. So Cloudbeds is the PMS. It's got a bunch of gaps on the reporting and analytics and all that kind of stuff. So we could go a different way and we could get much more depth and richness there. I would love to have that. And Cloudbeds is unbelievably easy for the team to use and for the support. And because it's cloud-based, all of us can access it anywhere all the time in a complete fashion. There's really nothing we can't do that Cloudbeds is capable of doing. So for our size, there's more than enough support. And then the ease of use and continuity. I'm checking in on Cloudbeds wherever I am all the time, and it's super easy. The example you gave is a great one. We need to get an agreement with you with what your stay is going to look like, a release for the use of the bikes and that sort of thing. How do we make that really seamless? For people that want some more information from the organization, a chat text is just an easy, great way to do it for a lot of people. So we deploy that. We added all the technical enhancements to the room that we thought took friction out and added to it. And we didn't put one thing in there that we thought would be irritating or frustrating for a person to figure out. So the TVs work the way you probably use your TVs at home. It isn't some hotel system you got to figure out. I use Hulu or I use Netflix or I use Apple. All that's lit up for you. QR code sign in. It takes a couple seconds. That's the way you do it in your normal life. It's what you know. It is what you do. So you take all the friction out, you put all the experiences in, and don't add anything because you want to be cute or whatever else motivation you have, which actually is more irritating to people than it is problem solving.

Josiah: I want to close this part of the conversation with talking about what you alluded to of making this work for your team as well. And there's a human component too. So I think picking up on what you said about the text chat, I actually had the chance to do that because I was coming up quite late on Friday. I was texting with your team and they were there and they were interactive. I found it was the best of technology combined with great human powered hospitality service. It was a great guest experience. So that was really great to experience.

Chet: The fact that there's a person there is such a critical thing. I'm booking a trip right now that I'm going to be taking in a few weeks that I'm very excited about. It's with a name brand hotel we would all recognize. I want to add nights to my reservation. I want to do more. You want to spend more money with them. I'm not picking the cheapest room. I cannot get a person to help me on the phone. And I've got status and elite this and elite that, and I've got these numbers and everything. I've tried six times. When you call us or you chat with us, there's a person. And I don't know who thinks that they're further ahead, quote unquote, being more efficient or trying to save money. I'm in these crazy phone trees. I eventually get to a person, and they're doing as well as they can with the tech and the tools they're given, and they're saying, I'm not empowered. I don't have the authority to modify your reservation. It's just nuts. I finally just have my admin do it, but not everyone's got an admin and I don't know how she figured it out, but she did. But we always have a person here and you're always talking to a person and just getting back to the scale thing. Scale with people. Whatever you think you're saving, you're losing.

Josiah: So interesting. So interesting. I appreciate you sharing that story because I am always fascinated by people's personal experiences that drive them to build the things that they've done. We talked a little bit about the history and what you've experienced in the past, but this is not just ancient history. This is you right now.

Chet: Yeah. Right this second. And I'll guarantee you that the people running that organization, when they go to book a room or whatever, they're not using their own system. Which is, I always just use my own system. I pay for things. If I'm booking for friends, I go through and I book it myself because I want to know how we're doing, what it feels like. They're not booking their own rooms on their own system. They would never stand for it.