Personalizing the guest journey with AI | with Frank Reeves

The Modern Hotelier #48: Personalizing the guest journey with AI | with Frank Reeves === David Millili: Welcome to The Modern Hotelier. I'm your host, David Millili. Steve Carran: I'm your co-host, Steve. Karen. Jon Bumhoffer: And I'm the producer, Jon Bumhoffer. David Millili: Steve, who do we have on the program today? Steve Carran: Yeah, David. Today we have on Frank Reeves. Frank has acquired a reputation of being one of the most innovative travel technology folks in the industry since co-founding hotel technology company, Avio in 2002, Frank has developed cutting edge technologies that enable outstanding growth in hotel direct. Bookings while reducing dependence on online travel agents. Currently, Frank is the chief evangelist officer at the SHR group. Welcome to the show, Frank. Frank Reeves: Thank you so much. David Millili: All right. Good to see you, Frank. So today we're going to go through three areas. We're going to ask you some quick lightning round type questions, get to know your background [00:01:00] around your career, and then get into some industry topics. Sound good? Frank Reeves: Sounds good. David Millili: Alright, so let's get it started. So, what was the worst job you've ever had? Frank Reeves: This is an easy one. Actually. I think I was 13, maybe 14, but, um, I'm from Ireland and on the West coast of Ireland, there's a beautiful seaside town called Kilkee. And I took a job working, um, in a bingo hall, uh, quite a seedy bingo hall. And what made it the worst job was the, the owner proprietor who was just. It's a bit of a sleazy guy and like to sort of take advantage of, you know, shortchanging some of the elderly bingo hall players. Um, who was not sleazy, however, was his daughter, who I, I had my eye on and, uh, it all worked out well in the end. David Millili: That's good. So, are you a morning or a night person? Frank Reeves: I am a morning. I'm like, uh, circa 5 a. m. one of those guys. David Millili: So, if you had to delete all the apps off of your phone and you could only keep three, what three apps would you keep? [00:02:00] Frank Reeves: I'm a big YouTube guy, so I think YouTube, I use that far more than I should, um. Podcasts, music, so Spotify, I guess, for both, um, and I've got two young boys. I'd probably have to figure out some common denominator, common denominator kids game to keep them both happy. So that'd be my three, David Millili: That sounds good. What's the emoji that you use the most? Frank Reeves: fist bump. David Millili: Yeah, cool. What's your Favorite song. Frank Reeves: Favorite song. Um, there's a group called LCD Sound System. I like most of their stuff, but they've got a really cool tune called All My Friends, really upbeat, kind of picks you up, gets your energy going, uh, All My Friends. David Millili: Do you have a favorite restaurant? Frank Reeves: I have many favorite restaurants. I mentioned I'm from Ireland, but I live in London and My favorite restaurant in London is, it's actually also the oldest restaurant in London called Rules or Rules of [00:03:00] London in Covent Garden. Um, quintessentially British fare. I don't think you can have a meal like you can eat in Rules anywhere else in the world. They're very famous for their game and again, like ingredients and the very best of ingredients and cooking techniques for a game that again, I don't think you can really get that kind of a meal, uh, outside of, outside of London, outside of Rules. So yeah, Rules of London. David Millili: sounds good. So, if you had your own talk show, Who would your first guest be? You can pick anyone. Dead or Alive. Frank Reeves: Dead or Alive. Okay. First guest. Um, but with a marketing hat on Trump for ratings and only for ratings, I'll get the audience, I'll get the eyeballs and then I could follow up with who I really want. Right? So who I would really want would probably be. Norm Macdonald, the comedian that sadly passed away I think last year, like just, for me, genius, far smarter than he led on, but like, just hilarious, so yeah, I love Norm. David Millili: I agree. I mean, he's, I mean, the whole, the whole joke reading thing was, was [00:04:00] hilarious. His, his, his uh, podcast. Alright, so, you have a time machine. You can go into the future or into the past. Which way are you going and what year are you going to? Frank Reeves: I'll go backwards, I think, um, the moon landing, I think, Steve Carran: Nice. Frank Reeves: that, 68, 69, something like that, um, before my time, but, um, yeah, I think the moon landing, there was so much about that, I mean, I wished I lived back then, but, um, I think maybe the, the single biggest positive event that, Brought most of the world sort of together, um, feeling, you know, objective and big thinking around. So yeah, I think that, that, that must've been such an incredible time for the world, most of the world to feel very united and excited and positive about where things were going. So moon landing. Steve Carran: Awesome. That was great, Frank. So now, uh, we'll learn a little bit more about your background, what makes you take things like that. So you grew up in Limerick, Ireland. Is that correct? Frank Reeves: I did [00:05:00] indeed. Yes. Steve Carran: How did that shape you into who you are today? Mm Frank Reeves: So, I mean, Limerick, Limerick is great. It's on, it's not quite on the west coast of Ireland, but it's, it's, it's far enough west to, to, to be touching distance. Um, and I think looking back at it, what's, what's maybe important about Limerick, and maybe this is true of most Irish towns, super grounded, you know, you can never, you can never get ahead of yourself. Right. Um, so I think, I think, yeah, Limerick's a very grounded town. Um, but then I think also the West, in particular, the West of Ireland is also, you know, puts, puts things in perspective. So I think, you know, both people and place, if I think about being grounded in Ireland the way I do, I think of it as people and place. Um, so I think, I think, yeah, just keeping, keeping everything on the level. Steve Carran: Awesome. Have, have you ever heard of Karen Ireland? It's like an hour and a half, hour, hour and a half from Limerick. C A R R A N. Frank Reeves: oh, Karen, yes, I have. [00:06:00] Yes. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, in the Bern, I think, right? Steve Carran: that's where I'm from. That's my, Frank Reeves: Oh, no way! No way! Steve Carran: from. So have you ever been? Frank Reeves: I have. If it's the place I'm thinking of in the Bern, then yes. I mean, that's, again, toward the west and one of the places I love the most, yeah. Steve Carran: All right. Well, that's a bucket place. I got to go. So, Frank Reeves: Let me know. David Millili: you went to Ryerson University, um, which is now Toronto Metropolitan University. What did you study when you went to school? Frank Reeves: So no, David, I went to the University of Limerick, so I'm from Limerick, went to school in Limerick. Steve Carran: well, let's redo that one, David. You're on the wrong tab. David Millili: I'm on the wrong tab? Which tab am I on? Oh, shit. Sorry, shit. Steve Carran: it's okay. Frank Reeves: Let's, let's, let's leave this all in. David Millili: we're doing, we're doing a podcast after this. That's the other, Frank Reeves: I'm doing, I'm doing one as well, actually, with Adam Mogulunski, maybe. Steve Carran: Yes. He didn't, he would. David Millili: Adam. I was thinking as I'm reading it, I'm like, this is really weird, but whatever. I'm like, people travel. [00:07:00] We've had, we've had guests that like are from like Frank Reeves: If it's on the teleprompter, David, you know. David Millili: all right, we'll start again. Was your major graphic design? Frank Reeves: Nope. Uh, information technology. So programming is my background, IT and programming. David Millili: Okay. Got it. Okay. So you went to the University of Limerick. What was the area that you studied and what really kind of got you interested in that area? Frank Reeves: So I studied, uh, a course called ITT, so information technology and telecommunications. Um, I've always loved computing, programming, goofing around, um, gaming, you know, Commodore 64. I sort of, those were real formative. um, dabbling in that sort of stuff. Um, what I, what I loved and really wanted to do in college was, was computer programming. I think I slightly chose the wrong course. I should have leaned more toward computer engineering, was less interested in the global satellite telephony system, um, than I was programming. But yeah, went [00:08:00] there, did. ITT went on to intern, um, with New York Life on Madison Avenue, which has had a fantastic 10, 11 months there, um, and really sort of doubled down on some of the concepts around system administration, network administration, and programming around sort of, uh, server, uh, server uptime and network performance. Steve Carran: very cool. Very cool. Now we'll get into your career a little bit more. So after you graduated from the University of Limerick, what type of jobs did you work? Frank Reeves: I only had the one actually, uh, after college. So I went, as I mentioned, I was in New York for intern and then came back to do, finish my final, final year in university. In Limerick and then went to Dublin to work with Sun Microsystems. Um, it's a big, big American dot com company. So again, was a programmer for those guys for about three years. And if I'm honest, the last 12 months of that were probably spending most of my time distracted by the early days of, of Avio and probably using, using their wifi and their network to do some [00:09:00] better programming. And, uh, server management that I could do at home. Steve Carran: That's great. That's great. David Millili: So what, what led you to found in 2002 Aveo? What, what, what drove you to that? Frank Reeves: So we were, we were a team of three co founders, um, myself, my brother, and another guy called David. Um, and Brian and David were, were really kicking about various ideas, looking to get something up and running, and nothing was really sticking. Um, they eventually brought me into that conversation, which allowed us to kind of talk about programming, because that was what I, I guess, brought to the table. Um, so... My contribution, I guess, was, Hey, if we're going to program something, let's program the, around the internet, right? So, and Ireland was, and still is, world famous, I think, for the caliber and quality of hospitality, uh, both in terms of the product, but also the people and just the all around brand. So we thought, well, okay, let's, let's think about the internet. Let's think about travel. Um, and we went with Dremoland castle.[00:10:00] which is just outside Limerick City. So our closest and, you know, first sort of pitch if you like, And the pitch was really about, hey, look, we think the internet's going to be pretty big. Um, we think you're going to need booking functionality on your website, and hey, if Frank builds something, would you guys use it? And if you use it and you're happy, can we reference you? And that was it, we went 2001. And by 2002, I quit my job, moved back from Limerick to Dublin, and we were, we were up and running as the first hotel website booking engine in the Irish market. Steve Carran: That's awesome. And in 2017, uh, Avio was the first company in the world with a fully guest centric booking platform powered by AI. What really caused you to focus on AI? Kind of now it's a buzzword, but this was five years ago before, you know, it was, it was kind of a mainstream Frank Reeves: It was quite, yeah. Thanks, Steve. It was quite a leap of faith, but we were, you know, for the sort of the 13, 14 [00:11:00] years, we were continuing to sort of evolve the booking engine with, you know, every possible feature that, that we thought was. Important for the hotel website as they compete with OTAs, right? How do we make the direct channel bigger, better, uh, faster growing? And we would just develop more and more features that either we thought of or hotels thought of. But we really, the step change for us really came in probably 2015, where we thought, well, you know, we're still, we're still just stuck in this paradigm of like a plugin system to the hotel website. And we're going to deliver a great booking experience, but we're just going to do the same thing to every single guest. And as we looked then around at what was happening with. You know, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Netflix were like, these guys personalized, right? These guys seem to be aware of who they're dealing with, who the guest is or who the user is in real time. So we took time out and said, okay, let's continue to expand the platform with features and benefits, of course. But let's take a major step back to invest in some real [00:12:00] machine learning around A, an understanding of the guest journey and B, the ability to then allow hotels. To market such that they're personalizing or nurturing every single guest journey. So we launched the Allura. ai platform, which is really this sort of hospitality AI that's set above the booking engine, making the booking engine smarter and capable of nurturing every single guest journey. Steve Carran: Awesome. Awesome. David Millili: So in November of last year, uh, there was the merger with SHR. So tell us why that was the right fit and what was that process like? Because sometimes those processes can be very easy and very painful. Frank Reeves: Yeah. Well, I mean, it was a great, really great outcome. I've known Rodrigo Jimenez, um, and the SHR team for a very long time. I think we met at, Rod and I met at ITB maybe eight, nine years ago or something, and spend some time together and we've been sort of. Almost mutually flirting with one another since then, just recognizing this, this huge, strong synergies, both in the SHR [00:13:00] platform around distribution and then more recently CRM and revenue management system and robotic process automation, all that amazing stuff that they had. But what I'd really, I think, fallen for over the years was also the culture. that they built at SHR, it just felt like a very natural sort of partner, if you like, for us. So what happened then, um, last year was our Avio private equity firm out of London had been with us for six, seven years. Company was doing really well and they thought, Hey, this is a great time for an exit. So, um, Avio was sort of brought to the market looking for a replacement investor. Uh, but at the same time, of course, the firm that we had run that process wanted to reach out to strategic. So, you know, I made sure that Rod was aware of what was going on and, um, with the backing and encouragement of Serent out of California, um, we were able to, I think, realize the true synergy between both companies, which was like, let's just both get under one roof as soon as possible. David Millili: No, it's a great, it's a great fit. Steve Carran: That's awesome. And one thing you mentioned was a culture. Can you [00:14:00] talk more about, you know, the unique culture that's, that's at the SHR group right now? Frank Reeves: Yeah, we, we have, we had very similar values actually. Um, and we, we use similar terminology even around. The obsession we have around delivering for hotels, you know, we, we were, I think both companies trying to compete in different ways and slightly different sort of segments of the, of the tech stack, but we have this shared obsession with driving performance for our customers and really delivering competitive advantage. Um, so between, between that and a real sort of down to earth startup kind of vibe and culture, um, I think that that's sort of the agility and flexibility and dynamism that comes with that, uh, together with just wonderful people and a shared obsession with. Let's just make a difference. Let's deliver competitive advantage above everything. You know, it's not tech for tech sake. It's not innovation for innovation sake. All that [00:15:00] stuff is downstream of real customer focus, um, and a real culture around sort of, you know, passion, flexibility, uh, and probably hustle. Steve Carran: Sure. Sure. And it seems like Rod kind of embodies that culture and the culture really starts with him and kind of flows down towards the rest of the company. Frank Reeves: So true, and I think we, we, we never doubted for one second what the, what the org structure should be. I've been, I think for a long time, sort of leading the Avio brand in the market with sort of, you know, thought leadership and presentations and a lot of that sort of stuff. So the, the role I really wanted in the, the new sort of combined, uh, merged company was a role that would have me in the market continuing to sort of expand on. What was the right fit for SHR group in the market? What is, where's the market going? How can we think one or two steps ahead and being kind of on the ground close to hotel operators themselves? Steve Carran: Absolutely. Coming on David Millili: That's great. So give us a little insight. What's next [00:16:00] for the SHR group? Frank Reeves: So what's, what's happened, I guess, since, um, since November last year is we've taken this. And, um, so we've AI that we started in, in Avio called Allura. ai. And we sort of, Rod and I had this agreement that, you know, lots of technology is now integrating, right? There are APIs, open APIs, everyone is sort of capable now of connecting with everybody else. That wasn't really the case back in the day. But, you know, how do we. How do we overcome the issue that, you know, you've still got sort of siloed products, right? You've got CRM that does CRM. You've got a booking engine that does it. It's big. You've got, you know, a marketing focus over here, a revenue management over here. Well, what if we take this idea of You know, a strategic integration across a, a powerful platform of technology products, but then going one step further to the point that all of these sort of products would be informed and enhanced by [00:17:00] this hospitality AI. So that if the CRM is really designed with, you know, in part, almost the website in mind and the booking engine in mind, what sort of outcomes, what business outcomes can we deliver for hotels that will, you know, otherwise be unrecognizable and that should really propel them forward. Steve Carran: That's awesome. That is awesome. Can't wait to see more. So now we're going to move into the, in your industry thoughts, which I'm really excited to pick your brain on a few things. So, um, you know, with the evolution of the guest experience, how has the thought process behind the guest journey changed and, and what is, what's causing that change? Frank Reeves: I think there's been a huge change, but I think hotels, it's probably the single biggest gap that I find when I speak with, um, with, uh, you know, prospective SHR customers in the market and that gap is, is around. Sort of an adherence on the part of hoteliers to this idea of, I mean, it has many different labels, if you like. Look to book would be one, [00:18:00] website conversion rate would be another. But this idea that, you know, a visitor is on your website, a guest, potential guest is on your website, and they either book or they don't. And that represents either a conversion or perhaps abandonment. What we learned very, very quickly after what really happens around the guest journey. Uh, and the guest journey takes time. So what actually happens, I mean, I'll give you an example, even looking at the data for this summer, just being in London, we had all of about one week of summer in London this year. But, um, as, as we looked at the market segment of North American families coming to London, we saw that it's taking five days. For those visitors, for those guests to go about their booking decision. So five days from the first time they land on a hotel website, they'll go away. They'll do some stuff. They'll go away. They'll come back. They'll do some more stuff. They'll go away. And maybe three, four times and perhaps 20 minutes of brand engagement over the course of those five days. So this idea, this concept of look to book or a conversion funnel, you know, it's [00:19:00] like when we see Steve for the first time on Monday and he spends five minutes on a hotel website and then goes away, you know what, that's actually quite normal. We shouldn't fight that. That's not abandonment. Right. Steve's had a beautiful first impression. He's seen of our messages. We've helped to personalize around who Steve is and what he wants and bridge that gap between how this hotel is the perfect hotel for Steve and his family, perhaps. And we should let Steve go away. We should be confident that, you know, he's not ready. He's at an early stage of his booking intent. Let Steve go. Let him come back. We certainly shouldn't be. Just sort of delivering up a brochure website that kind book Direct everybody. And if Steve doesn't book on day one, right there and then we give him this like crazy pop up that says, Hey, don't go anywhere. Here's 10, 15, 20, you name it, right? Here's a discount because that's just not how guests go about travel booking. And the farther away the guest is and the more people they're booking for, like families, for example, the more that consideration time just naturally is. And, and, you know, hotels, I think. [00:20:00] They are really still, as I mentioned earlier, they're stuck in this traditional paradigm of look to book, you know, that counts Steve five times when it's Steve, you know, it's just one guest, right? Um, so yeah, brochure websites and traditional conversion, I think is the, is the major barrier. I guess we're at a point where we just have a far better understanding of how guests engage and dealing with in real time. And I think within that is a significant opportunity for hotels to, to step out of the brochure as a brand.com com strategy. And, you know, OTA has been doing this as well, right? Netflix, everybody, everyone who's serious about e-commerce been with recommender engine and sort of nurture programs for a long time. But hotels, I think are still very much stuck there. Steve Carran: A hundred percent. David Millili: Do you maybe explain how does that, or is it something that you guys are working on? How does that data through the guest journey work with the CRM and knowing that guest to either mark it back to them or as, you know, how to handle a repeat guest? How do they, and we both know how the, a [00:21:00] lot of systems are just not connected. So how does, how does that work for you guys at SHR? Frank Reeves: and I guess that's, yeah, that's, that's, uh, it's a really great example of what's, what's possible now within this sort of, this enhanced hospitality platform that has guest journey and, you know, hospitality AI at the real core of it. So if you think about, um, the way, the way SHR see that guest journey is A, we'll understand if you think of brand. com, we'll understand where that guest has come from, right? Are they coming from Google or are they coming from a meta search campaign? For example, have they been here before, uh, and if so, what have they done? So I mentioned North American families might give 15 or 20 minutes worth of sort of onsite sort of data fingerprint to us. So all of those things, of course, we can't communicate that with a PMS. When we write the booking to a PMS, we're just saying, you know, Steve booked and here's Steve's contact details. But actually we've got 20 minutes of information on Steve that we would love to communicate, uh, so that the hotels can pick that up and do more with. But [00:22:00] yeah, I mean, Allora understands. How Steve has navigated, what Steve is interested in, not just. To the point of booking, but that, you know, Steve's also been really engaged with the dining options of the hotel, but not yet booked the dining packages. So maybe post booking, CRM can kind of lean in to what we know are relevant, valid interests for Steve. Um, and that can be incredibly useful for the purposes, obviously, of upselling, cross selling. But also booking retention and cancellation is a real focus now. Cancellation prediction is another major focus our Allora platform at the moment. Uh, and sometimes that, that enhanced ongoing, um, nurture around the guests, even post booking, uh, can be one of the very effective things that reducing sort of booking infidelity or, you know, reducing cancellations. David Millili: That's great. Good. Steve Carran: I just wanted to talk, you know, experiences are, you know, that's becoming more and more part of the guest experience, right? You know, you mentioned, you know, the dining options, you get to see that during the booking process that they're [00:23:00] excited maybe about dining, you know, experiences as well. Does that play into it? If, you know, I've looked at an experience, a brewery tour, a hyperlocal, you know, experience, does that save that as well? So, you know, I check in and you'll see, oh, I looked at that or even through the check in process. Frank Reeves: exactly. So one of the things that we developed Allora platform this contextual understanding of all of the content on a hotel website. So Allura will just natively understand the content you've been consuming, how much you've been consuming that content. So almost as sort of your decision making criteria, you know, what are your, what are the real factors that are important for you? So to the extent I should clarify, we, we, we, Allora can see the content on your hotel website. Right. So it's first party cookie, private data, um, cookie consent, opt in data. So as long as you've got content on your hotel website that Allura can then sort of make connections between the guests and that content, then absolutely that all becomes part of this far richer understanding of who this guest [00:24:00] is, which can be useful for personalizing the booking, but also post booking or even post stay, right? Again, think 20 minutes to guests. And this is sort of one of the frustrating things because hotels just ignore this data today. It's on their website, but they think in terms of 200 visitors, two bookings, you know, that's a 1 percent conversion rate for Monday. And they're sort of stuck there. And it's very hard. You know, you can, yes, you can buy more traffic, but hey, traffic's expensive, right? You can buy more traffic. You can try and tweak your booking engine. But if you still see the world through the paradigm Visitors and bookers rather than actual connected real people, um, that are on unique journeys and need Um, I think it's very difficult to, to, to deliver a step change in the performance of the direct channel without that. David Millili: Yeah, that's great stuff. I mean, I, my, when I left the hotel side and started my first company in 2000, it was a booking engine. So for me, whenever I get to talk about booking engines or listen to booking engines, obviously that was a long time [00:25:00] ago. So with that, the guest journey, what are some of the, you touched on some of them, but what should hotels be looking at as far as, you know, KPIs and making sure that They are leveraging, you know, because you, you hit it on it, you hit on it perfect. There is all this great data, but unless you do something with it, or the system does something with it, it's just there. So what are some examples? Frank Reeves: So I think, I think the KPIs are, also broken because they serve the old paradigm and not the, not the actual sort of guest journey, if you like. So website conversion rates, you know, that 100 visitors, 2 percent conversion rate tells you nothing, really. You can really not build any strategy on top of that. But then I mentioned earlier the idea that abandonment, you know, we see Steve for the first time on Monday, he spends five minutes, beautiful first impression, goes away. Hey, guess what? That's not abandonment. So let's not consider the abandonment stat in its traditional, you know, uh, sort of design to be all that valid either. Um, I think that what, what you ought to think about [00:26:00] is again, back to the North American family coming to London this summer, five day guest journey, maybe 20 minutes of engagement time in some cases. So what we do get during the earlier stage of those guest journeys is we get a sales pipeline. Right? Steve isn't, you know, Steve is still very much an active sales lead beyond Monday. And Steve may tell us on Monday what his dates are and, you know, we can either try and bring him back in through remarketing if he doesn't come back in the expected period of time, or when Steve comes back, we know exactly how to resume the conversation with Steve. But I think the idea that your website isn't just a look to book conversion funnel, it's actually a sales pipeline of active leads. You know, there are London hotels today sitting on an active pipeline of website leads of, you know, 10 million plus pounds. That's the data that is sitting on the website that can be immediately used the next time those guests come back. So I think that's a pretty important step change in KPI. So booking conversion, sales pipeline, or guest pipeline. And of course you can break guest pipeline down into, well, if you've got a sales [00:27:00] pipeline of 10 million. You know, does 80 percent of that come from domestic couples or international families? So who are we talking about? And then how do we lean in to nurture those specific segments of that pipeline? But the final thing, David, I think on this is that, and we really were, we were quite blind to this. Early on, we were, a booking engine and we've always had a very strong performance focus. So we used to guarantee pre COVID, we used to guarantee 25 percent uplift in direct bookings for every hotel that switched to what was then the Avio booking engine. We were so confident that, you know, everybody says they have the booking engine, but we knew, we knew our value, if you like. So we had that guarantee and we were still focused on the booking transaction and there was a gap there because. You know, this only matters when the guest turns up and what we've seen through COVID is just how much this and other industries have leaned into flexibility around cancellation terms and cancellation policies. So whilst we used to have this, wear this hat of [00:28:00] booking acquisition, we now wear the hat of guest acquisition. And I think that's an important gap for hotels because, you know, you could be sitting on a 20 to 30 percent cancellation rate on your direct bookings. And what that means in sort of in relatively lazy terms is that, well, you know, 20 percent plus of your digital marketing budget that generates bookings. Those people don't turn up, right? So, there are KPIs in digital marketing around return on investment or cost per acquisition that also need to be viewed through the lens of guest acquisition rather than booking acquisition. And the reason we focus on that now is that we've turned Allora's attention to sort of this science of assessing Cancelation risk per guest, right? If it normally takes five days and 20 minutes of engagement. And here comes, here comes David with like two visits and two minutes. And, you know, there's maybe 60 days post booking to the arrival, the lead in time. And think about revenue management. How many times do revenue managers change their rates? And so does the [00:29:00] competition. So just how much does the market change, right? And, you know, you've shopped the OTAs, you've shopped the competitors. So it's still, you're still a very active prospect. Um, you know, we, we call it sort of booking infidelity in some cases, but you know, whilst in the PMS, Steve and David's bookings may look identical, but Allora it's like, no, I've got a really brand invested guest here. And does that correlate in certain conditions to more loyalty around the booking? We generally find that it does, but there are other factors to it as well that help us really sort of assess. In a dynamic way, the cancellation risk for every guest, and then of course we can lean in again, you mentioned CRM. That's another way that we can lean in and try and retain a guest that we might feel is A, high value, and B, high risk of cancellation. We have to, we have to go the full, the full extent of the, the, the, the journey to ensure that the guest turns up and spends money. Steve Carran: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. David Millili: Yeah. So what, what's driven me crazy? And I want to talk to you about this because, um, I think it's important, uh, it, when first, when [00:30:00] booking engines first came out, the natural place to get inventory was through the CRS. So that's why all the CRSs are the booking engines. But it feels like hotels just, and the CRSs just treated the guest in serving them up as if the guest was calling a travel agent. So all these rate categories, all these room types, when you talk about personalization, What do you think are other mistakes that kind of the more traditional booking engines, I won't name the competitors, but they haven't changed some of them in a decade, um, and they're still not taking the OTA approach, which is kind of keep it simple, serve up some simple rate plans and room types, and you go to some of the branded websites and you're getting 14 room categories and 10 rate plans, and it's just overwhelming. Frank Reeves: completely overwhelming. And also, I've not seen, I've not seen another hotel, excluding the ones that we work with, that gives me the experience of after I book If I book the hotel on a Monday via brand. [00:31:00] com and I go back on the Tuesday, I'm still getting book direct every single time. And that I think comes from the booking engine's broken understanding of who this guest is and where they are in their journey. It's just a complete disconnect, right? That's just the concept is I've got a brochure website and I'm going to plug a booking engine in there. And that's my strategy, right? I'm going to design my site around the lowest common denominator, all that content's there and everyone is just going to get that. That's what I'm saying to the world. I hope you find what you need. Book Direct. Um, and how infuriating, right? Because the OTAs don't do that. You book on Booking. com and then they're telling you all about the other stuff you can do when you go to San Francisco and that's just very natural, right? And it's, it's far more like online hospitality. So, I do think that's the single biggest. Gap, if you like, in the market, the traditional booking engines, what I've seen is whether it's CRS or PMS or even just IBE, I still see them designed around that funnel, which is fundamentally designed around a one size fits all approach. And I think that's just, it's very difficult to deliver growth. You know, how do you deliver [00:32:00] a growth from that? It's not about just small little tweaks and we're all mobile optimized. We all do that stuff. We've been doing that forever, but you're not really going to move the needle very much unless you make that entire experience about the guest and we're all different. And hotels love that. I mean, tone of voice, you know, we talk to hotels now about, well, how do you want to talk to like a North American family? And how is that different from, you know, a domestic couple coming from maybe Manchester to London or whatever it might be? And hotels love that. They're hospitality people and we've given them this opportunity now to just sort of, you know, to deliver that amazing brand experience. David Millili: that's great. And so we talked about booking engine, CRM, so maybe to the hoteliers that are listening, maybe explain how digital marketing is important to driving growth and why is it important for hoteliers to try to not just rely on their vendor, but also understand the digital marketing side of things. Frank Reeves: Yeah, so we've been, I mean, we've been, I think we were, if I go back to 2002, [00:33:00] we probably had 12 months of just pure booking engine and hotels came to us and said, look, you gotta, you gotta help us. It's a, you guys gotta do digital. You gotta do design because. You know, we, you seem to understand our business, you're designing software for us. You've got to understand more about what we do because it's all a connected ecosystem. You know, the website is the booking engine, David, to be honest with you. Those things shouldn't, shouldn't be distinct. Is there two Netflixes and two Amazons? And it's all, it's just one, right? Um, so if we think about it as, you know, the acquisition of. The through digital or social or whatever it may be, meta search, the acquisition of guests at the very top of the funnel, all the way through that guest experience of your brand, because it's all brand experience. That is one, it should be one connected ecosystem where everything talks to everything else. Um, again, I think the single biggest change. And it's a psychological sort of step change that hotels could take is re looking at their digital marketing metrics on the basis of guest acquisition, [00:34:00] not just booking acquisition, you know, because what you'll find is, okay, well, we did this campaign and we got like loads of bookings, but actually wait, Like 20 percent more of those bookings canceled than this campaign. Like, does that campaign actually deliver the right guests? Yes, it delivered bookings, but like no commitment, 24 hour cancellation, right? You know, we, we, and it's very easy for hotels. Google tends not to be able to show you that stuff, but we've connected up our tech in such a way that we can sort of track from the campaign all the way through, uh, the guest acquisition piece. And I think hotels can, can start to ask more interesting questions when they seek out that sort of data around. Cost of guest acquisition rather than cost of booking acquisition. David Millili: that's great. Great advice. Steve Carran: Absolutely. That was great. So, uh, well, that was awesome. We're done with our questions on our end, but our producer, Jon, has been listening in. right. So, uh, I'm going to kick it over to Jon for, for one Jon Bumhoffer: So listening to talk, listening to you talk about all this stuff, it's kind of over my head. I'm not really in that world, but it, you know, the, I know the [00:35:00] hospitality landscape is pretty complex with a lot of moving parts. You have to connect a lot of dots when you're building something like this, that's going to benefit, um, hoteliers. How do you Like, what helps you connect those dots and just be aware of what people need? Um, it's like, how do you go about learning about what people need and connecting the dots in a way that's helpful for others? Frank Reeves: Thanks, Jon. That's a, that's a great question. I think it is. We're all, we're all so close to it that I do forget sometimes that it is, it is confusing and, um, uh, and sort of interconnected. Um, we have over 2000 hotels around the world, right? Between Aveo So we're, we're, We're servicing hotels, um, all over the globe of different, you know, from independents to, to, to chains, and it's not at all unusual for two hotels to connect things up in a totally different way. So we've got a platform within Allura. We've got a platform of amazing tools [00:36:00] from distribution to CRM to digital marketing, content management system, booking engine, obviously, um, some hotels will take multiple products. And we like to think that, you know, one plus one equals three plus another one equals five and nine, et cetera. But, um, hotels should connect things up the way that's most sensible for them. So whether that's the IBE connected directly to the PMS or perhaps through a CRS or, you know, even a channel manager. Um, what we strive to do is, is have this Allura intelligence always sort of connected regardless of how many components a hotel wants to use. But, you know, ultimately hotels don't want to be manually, manually managing things. Uh, we want to get. Um, the guests obviously connected directly to the hotel. Allora platform is where all that sort of guest communication, guest marketing, because the website is a marketing platform. Ever before it's a sales platform, it's a marketing platform. So, you know, your PMS will have a room description, but, you know, your. IBE [00:37:00] will know who that room description is being delivered to and Gen AI and all this other stuff that we could have, we could have spoken about, you know, we've got the ability to say, well, we're now going to deliver this message, uh, to this kind of guest. So I think all that stuff sits in the Allura platform. Connected up in whatever way makes most sense to the hotel. All those connections are there, but I do think when, when a hotel is choosing, choosing relationships and choosing them, cause hotels shouldn't be going out there looking for AI, right? It's all very confusing. You don't want AI. You want the benefits of AI and you want tangible benefits of AI. I think you want to choose vendors that are. Thinking in a more open ecosystem sort of way, not just about, I B, but why should I connect A to B? What should those outcomes be that serve the hotel? And, all sort of overlap with one another in many different ways, but let's just sort of, let's get around innovative solutions that really deliver and keep customers always ahead. David Millili: That's great. That's excellent. So that does it for another episode of The Modern [00:38:00] Hotelier, but at this point, we would like you, Frank, to let us know how people can either get in touch with you. How can they find out more about the SHR group? So plug away. Frank Reeves: Thank you at very straightforward, shorgroup. com, um, or allora. ai, A L L O R A dot AI, but one will, one will link you to the other. Um. Those sites are just crammed with examples and testimonials and it's all about results at the end of the day. So some of this might, might sound good, but I think, you know, you always got to sort of get out there and, and, and sort of listen to, to what the real results are in the industry. And you'll get all that content on shrgroup. com and I'm just frank. reeves at shrgroup. com. David Millili: Okay, great. Thank you so much. Well, that was a lot of fun. That does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. We hope to see everyone again soon. Thank you, Frank. All Frank Reeves: Thank you. Steve Carran: Thank you.