Breaking Down Silos in Hospitality Technology - Hanna Schiller, Ireckonu

Josiah: 0:00

Last week I arrived at Ian Schrager's Public Hotel in New York at 2 am after a six-hour flight that was delayed by five hours. I was exhausted and just wanted to get my room key as quickly as possible. Fortunately, they had a self-check-in process that only took about 15 seconds and I was so impressed that I had to learn more. So today we're learning from the person behind the technology that powered that experience. Hanna Schiller is the VP of product at Ireckonu, a hospitality technology company based in the Netherlands. In this episode, you'll hear lessons from Hanna's experience working at a nonprofit serving hotel companies in the area of technology advice for evaluating technology and changing traveler expectations. But we kick things off with Hanna talking about her career journey for a little bit of context. Here's Hanna.

Hanna: 1:08

I've been in the hotel space for about 10 years now, Started out in the OTA world in my 20s and moved into the spawn activity management software, which is really starting to get into the hotel side of things. Then I moved to Chicago for that role and ended up going to a nonprofit organization called Hospitality Technology Next Generation (HTNG), which is now aligned with AHLA. So they merged together and I worked there with Mike Blake, who is well-known in the hotel tech space, for a year. That was a really great experience and that's what enabled me to learn about all the different hotel tech folks out there and what they're building, what they're doing, Being in this nonprofit. I worked with the hoteliers, learned about the problems they were having and got to learn about the vendors and what problems they were trying to solve. And that's actually where I got to learn about I Reckon U, which is where I am now. I've been with Ireckonu for six and a half years. I moved to Amsterdam, which is a great city. I started in business development and did that for a while. Then I started to kind of take on more sales and marketing responsibilities, and ran that for a while until we got into the scale-up phase. When that started to happen, we needed to grow in different ways. I then moved over to product and have kind of been helping in sales and product and juggling between what we need to build next and what the customers are looking for and what are the prospects looking for. So helping build it in all directions. And really that requires me just to work with a lot of my peers who know a lot more than I do, and it makes it really fun and exciting.

Josiah: 2:40

I love that. I wonder if we could spend just a few moments talking about what you learned at HTNG because it sounds like an extraordinary experience to understand across the ecosystem how people are thinking about technology. Is there anything that stands out in terms of what you learned through that experience about hotel tech broadly that might be worth talking about?

Hanna: 2:58

I think one of the main things is that it's a lot more complicated to enable a hotel digital experience for guests. Then it is to deliver a home experience, a home digital experience. So it's not that simple. I think some people, especially in this tech era where we're so Desperate for technology to be so easy and accessible there's a lot more that goes into the hotel space, especially when you have multiple hotels and you want to create the same experience across an entire brand As well. As you know, there are a lot of different systems and those systems are very siloed. They don't speak well to one another, and so that was one of the biggest challenges I saw. I found that so interesting, and I found it so weird that we couldn't just quickly solve that. And when I learned about, i reckon you, that's actually what kind of brought me into. Ireckonu delivers a middleware solution that, at its core, is what we do And that allows us to integrate into all of the siloed systems that do not communicate well to each other when it comes to centralizing guest profiles, when it comes to centralizing reservations, and then we can connect to other systems to enable a better guest journey. So I thought that was really cool, but siloed systems and how they connect is probably one of the largest industry challenges that there are.

Josiah: 4:11

I was watching someone work with an antiquated property management system the other day that looked just so painful and sometimes people are locked into I don't know a contractor for some reason. they can't change that out, but it sounds like what you're building is a way around, that way to address that challenge. and so I think your role specifically in product is really interesting to me because at this conference I was at, there's this, the CEO of Deutsche Hospitality saying okay, it's sort of boom times for hotels right now. there's a lot of money coming into the hospitality industry and we need to invest in product right and so product obviously within hotels could be the physical asset, the real estate, the Architecture, the design, but I think you know it is also technology product and you're leading product at the company and with your background, as we've talked about, how is that informing your product strategy in terms of addressing some of these opportunities?

Hanna: 5:01

So really, one of the things you notice post covid is this shift and there's a demand from the consumer side of things. Guests want more technology, they want more of a digital experience. They want to go straight to their room or use a kiosk to check in and, as mentioned before, enabling that is very difficult with these siloed systems and a lot of these systems are quite legacy opera. One of the most well-known PMS is quite robust and it's been around for a long time and so integrating to that and everybody wants to, as a vendor wants to integrate with them can be quite complicated. And if you can't do that well, then you can also not provide that digital experience that the guests are expecting, because there's so much information just even from that one system. You have to pull forward In order to create that digital experience along the way.

Josiah: 5:52

I guess like a follow-up to that would be we're heading into a couple of technology trade shows here in the US with HITEC and The Hospitality Show. A lot of people are going to be Looking at their technology options. What advice would you have for someone who says I love that end state that you described, where things are integrated, I'm able to connect my systems. How would you advise someone? shop or evaluate The providers that will allow them to get there?

Hanna: 6:17

high tech is a really good event to really look at all the different options that are on the market across the board. I think one of the things that I would recommend is, if you want to enable such a great digital experience, you have to really look at the back end, the plumbing side of things. So how are my systems communicating to each other? how am I essentially all that information? If I go to a London hotel of one brand and I go to the New York hotel of the other brand, as a guest, i expect to be recognized at each hotel and the same level. In the same way. You need to really enable that experience. In order to do that, you need to have very like strong plumbing is what I refer to it or framework to really bring all that data together. So when you're looking for systems, you're looking for, you know, depending on what kind of software you need to bring into your hotel, whether it's a PMS response system or what not. It's really looking at how are their API is, are they strong? are they robust? can they send not only reservation profile data, maybe even more data, because the more I know about somebody, the more I can entice them to become a repeat guest on the line and I can look at managing risk with them. So bringing all of these things together really allows you to Create that again, that ultimate guest experience that everybody is trying to achieve, where you get people to have a similar experience across one brand and enabling that with that centralization of data.

Josiah: 7:34

For non technical leaders that are listening to this. Are there questions they could ask that would help them get to a solution with the right behind the scenes plumbing? You talked a little bit to this of sharing guest profiles, but how can we somehow figure out between systems that may sound the same at a high level and figure out who really has the chops here?

Hanna: 7:55

Yeah, So I think some of the things that you have to kind of look for in that plumbing layer is really, you know, it can be referred to as the middleware or a service bus There's a lot of different terms out there And usually they have a little bit of both or they have both very robustly. But you know you're looking for systems that really, you know, have a strong API stack so you can actually build your own technology on top of centralized data. So when they bring in all that reservation and profile data, that you can build your own things, but also that they can integrate freely across the board. So how many vendors are these plumbing systems integrating into That?

Josiah: 8:26

makes a lot of sense. Sometimes you will get hung up on like you have X number of integrations and it's fantastic. But if I'm a buyer you need to be like okay, i work with X, y and Z systems. Do you integrate with them? Or you know I'm to give moving here. The number doesn't matter as much as do you work with, who we work with And also the depth of the integration right And the ease of activating that integration.

Hanna: 8:48

And how closely they work together. I mean, that's another part of it If they don't work very closely together and they don't understand the full structure, and then it can become really complicated down the line If you want to do something different or you want to bring in more data. So I think, really, looking at the entire relationship and all the different components of what those vendors have together, i think that's really important.

Josiah: 9:09

Totally. Is there any examples that come to mind on a client activation of your technology that has gone really well, and what have been the contributing factors of them taking advantage of your platform? I'm interested in success stories that we can learn from.

Hanna: 9:25

I think the one that I would maybe discuss right now that I find the most interesting is we have worked with a hotel group that is a multi-chain global hotel group, and what we did is we helped centralize their guest profile. So that's, you know, we bring in reservation data from the PMS, we bring in profile data from the PMS as well as other systems, including not only transactional data, so like you know what they food and beverage, you know what they ate, and hotel data like how long they stayed, and that's more transactional to me. But we also bring in the behavioral data. And what we do is we really enrich that guest profile And we helped them create a RFM tiering model to recognize guests based on a score of how that they created themselves right, it's individual to their brand And we're able to score that guest And then, therefore, that entire kind of loyal team and guest experience is based on that model. So, based on all the information we know about you, josiah, and how often you've stated all the different hotels we populate, that you have a score of X and therefore we can provide you the service level that is equivalent to X and that or delight you at service level Sorry, i should not say that And then more like, we delight you with certain experiences based on your loyalty to the brand and that entices you to come back. So it's really about trying to bring back that repeat guest And with that we've done so much as well from a kind of like a customer data platform that's that's term that's become very big bringing in that event and behavioral data to really drive knowing the full story of a guest, not just during their stay, which is really common, but before the stay and post the stay and the engagement in between stays. So really trying to get that whole picture and make sure that you can create an experience that makes them want to come back while they're there And afterwards entice them with different marketing kind of communications to bring them back. So it's just trying to create that full scale kind of ecosystem of bringing that guest back in.

Josiah: 11:25

I think that's why Hotel Tech is so fun, right, because it's about delighting people. At the end of the day that, whether it's your guests or your staff and it's about doing well by doing good, and that you're delighting those people, you're bringing them back. That loyalty obviously is the most cost effective way to acquire revenue as a repeat guest right. And then you that feeds into guest advocacy and people leave those positive reviews, and so it's all a virtuous cycle. You get people like me, and I'm sure there's thousands of others that have stayed at the public hotel that are saying this is an amazing experience, and then the public hotel gets free publicity because of that, you know the way of travel has changed over time.

Hanna: 12:03

So what we used to have a lot of business travelers that has decreased quite a bit post COVID. But what has increased is the leisure travel market. That has gotten quite large, in the sense of a lot of people are ready to travel and are going back out there and trying to stay in different locations and see the world and experience things, and so the expectations are a little bit different and what the desires are and the needs are and who's traveling. So I think that hotels really need to think about how they can best step up their game, and especially when it comes to that digital footprint and that guest experience. And how are you going to get those leisure travelers who are, you know, been saving their money for the last few years, to go out there and travel? How do you get them to come to your brand multiple times across the entire world? So I think there's a lot to think about there and a lot for hotels to consider.