Yes, you have understood it right. The article is not going to add to the worries of hotel analysts about sad hotel occupancy statistics in the last three months. Instead, you can have a realist plan on how to raise your profit. If you are eager to make a profit from your hotel, of course.
Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, “Never let a good crisis go waste”. Did Churchill really say these words or not, just think over the meaning of the phrase.
What does it say to us? As far as the hotel business is concerned, it means that when your profit drops, you have to decrease your expenses. Now you are waiting for better times when your profit and expenses recover. However, the main thing is to decide if you really want to return a big profit together with big expenses. If yes, you are an altruist but not a business person, and you might not want to continue reading this article. If you only want to return a profit and say goodbye to the essential part of hotel expenses, I think you should pay attention to this article.
It is well known that according to some traditions dating back to more than a hundred years ago, before going to a hotel room any hotel guest has to come up to the reception desk and together with the hotel officer make a ritual of check-in. Yes, a ritual; I can’t find any other word. By the age of 50, I have visited 80 countries and staying in hundreds of hotels I saw the same thing everywhere. In case you arrive at a hotel prior to the fixed hour, what happens first is you become nervous and want to know if you can check-in sooner, then you stand in a queue at the reception (and say hello to social distancing during COVID-19 pandemic). Then you watch the hotel officer filling in some papers. Then you are given a key and some papers. At last, you may go to the room. This happens in the age of the internet, smartphones, credit cards and NFC technology. Substantial experience in business and travelling makes me think about the need to change the hotel-guest relationship system on the paradigm level. The hotel must open its doors and astonish the guest with comfort. As for the reception office, it should be left behind and give way to modern technologies.
How will it work? If you come to the hotel prior to the standard check-in time, your smartphone will find an available room of the chosen category, cleaned and fully prepared. With one touch of your finger, you get an offer to buy an early check-in at a fair price, which depends on the number of hours you need and on other customers willing to buy the same service. From my huge travelling experience I know how important it is for hotel guests everywhere in the world: in San Francisco, Sydney, London or Moscow. After a long night flight, I always want to have a shower, have a couple-of-hour nap in a comfortable bed, put on fresh clothes and get down to business. Obviously, early check-in concept exists now; however, in most cases, it is not regulated. Moreover, there is no world purchaser standard. We suggest developing it.
However, we moved away from our point. So, we bought an early check-in, got a key to the room through NFC technology in our smartphone and went straight to the room avoiding formal procedures at the reception desk and contacts with the crowd.
As a result, the hotel gets additional profit thanks to the REGULAR selling of early check-in, which may approximately amount to $30/40 for every fourth of the fifth guest. Simply multiply these figures by the number of your guests!
Hoteliers can also cut costs by downsizing and reducing the reception staff. You may have already made some employees redundant during the COVID-19 pandemic; then you will not have to employ them again.
Mobile apps for hotels available on the market fail to solve evident problems I tried to describe. None of the existing apps, from those used internally by networks like Hilton and Sheraton to commercial ones, attempt to solve the problems by changing the paradigm.
As for us, we want to change the world. The world of travel and hotels.
Our DeskBell service is ready to offer a mobile app, to hotels; it can be comfortably used instead of a hard copy of a reference brochure in every hotel room. At present we are looking for investors to take the next step.
We invite interested investors to join our project. We invite hotels to contact us now and become our partners.
Our service can be integrated into most POS systems.
Let us change the world together.
By Dmitry Finogeev
