In this episode, hosts Steve Carran and David Millili interview Jon Schniepp, SVP of Marketing at Relay. Jon discusses his background, Relay's journey into the hospitality industry, and how their smart radio technology is revolutionizing hotel operations and staff communication.
The conversation covers emerging trends in hospitality communication, staff safety solutions, and the innovative use of AI in overcoming language barriers.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Relay's evolution from a family product to a hospitality-focused solution
- Current trends in hospitality communication and their impact on guest experience
- Staffing challenges in the hotel industry and how Relay addresses them
- The importance of simplicity in implementing advanced technologies like AI
- How Relay is helping hotels improve operational efficiency and staff communication
- Future developments and growth plans for Relay
Join the conversation on today's episode on The Modern Hotelier LinkedIn page.
The Modern Hotelier is produced, edited, and published by Make More Media: https://makemore.media/
Episode Links
Jon Schniepp
David Millili
Steve Carran
Steve on LinkedIn
The Modern Hotelier
Transcript
Automatic Transcription - please excuse any errors
Steve Carran: Coming to you live from HITEC from the Relay booth, welcome to another episode of The Modern Hotelier. We are joined with Jon Schniepp, the SVP of marketing from Relay. Welcome to the show, Jon, thank you for joining.
Jon Schniepp: It's great to be here. It's exciting.
Steve Carran: How is the first day of HITEC going so far?
Jon Schniepp: It got off to a great start. It's always busy the very first day. We got a bunch of team members here and yeah, we're having a blast.
Steve Carran: Great, great. So tell me a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up?
Jon Schniepp: I grew up on the East Coast in Pennsylvania. I went to school in Virginia. Um, and I lived in D.C. for a little bit. And you know, made my way over from Colorado and then to North Carolina where Relay is.
Steve Carran: Very nice. So how did growing up on the East Coast kind of shape you into who you are today?
Jon Schniepp: Yeah, I love the East Coast. I grew up in a really small town. I grew up actually in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Okay. The home of the Chocolate Factory, right? So, it was pretty cool. I got to live in a really great place. It was a small town, but it had a lot of big-town type of fun things. I even got to be an intern at the chocolate company for a summer. One of the coolest jobs. Yeah, I got to taste chocolate all summer. And yeah, it's hard to beat that job.
David Millili: What got you started in hospitality? How did you end up in hospitality?
Jon Schniepp: It wasn't a direct route. So about the first ten years of my career, I was working in consulting, doing IT, doing kind of analytics in the, believe it or not, in like the federal government space. So I was working in D.C. and in Denver. And then I joined a company in North Carolina that was very focused on telecom services. And, uh, really innovative company, and we were trying new things, and really we found our way to the hospitality business through that. When we started Relay, it was about 2018, we initially launched it actually as a product for families and kids, and that product actually did great for us, but what happened along the way is that hotels came to us and said, "Hey, can we buy 50 of these? Can we buy 100 of these?" And we realized how big the opportunity was in hospitality, how much the need was there. So, I'd love to say that we had it all charted out, and this is exactly how we planned it, but it really wasn't. But the team has really adapted, and now it's the entire focus of our company.
David Millili: That's great. Yeah.
Steve Carran: Awesome. So tell me more about your role as the Senior Vice President of Marketing and how it's changed since you originally started here.
Jon Schniepp: Yeah, well, we are now, I would say, kind of a mid-sized company. So, it really changes as you go from being the leader of a marketing team who is just trying to get it off the launch pad, to now where we're at kind of cruising altitude and we're trying to get to another level. So, you know, early on it was, you know, we were scrapping for everything we could get, and now we've got a bigger team. You see, like, we've got, you know, about 30 people here at HITEC, and we've got a lot more resources to go even bigger. But I think the thing that we've learned along the way is that in the hotel industry, relationships matter so much, right? So we've focused a lot on creating great relationships with customers on an individual basis so that they don't look at us like another vendor. So we've really benefited a lot from that. In fact, one of our themes here at HITEC is we're welcoming our customers to come visit us here and we've got special goodies for them. We want to show our appreciation for them being our customers. So that's a big part of our growth story and how we've led it over the years.
Steve Carran: What's the goody for the customers?
Jon Schniepp: Oh man, oh man. We've got an amazing array of different Yeti cups. You know, everybody loves the Yeti cup and we've got a bunch of other great treats for the customers. So, yeah.
Steve Carran: Nice.
David Millili: What are some of the trends you're seeing in communication and hospitality, and how is that impacting the guest experience?
Jon Schniepp: Yeah, so I think one of the big trends that we've been seeing in the customers we serve, we serve about 3,000 hotels across the U.S and Canada, is, you know, we're seeing folks trying to deliver higher levels of service and are challenged with it because they're struggling with staffing, right? So, staffing is such a big issue.
We did some surveys recently. About 75% of all properties are struggling with staffing. And when we look at the data for Relay, one of the things that jumps out is that the higher service level properties are communicating way more than the properties who are lower service level. So, we think one of the important trends to pay attention to is you can strive for better service when your staff is communicating at a much higher frequency. So, that's one of the things that we've seen as a trend that's going on right now.
Steve Carran: Tell us more on the operations side. How is Relay helping hotels on the operations?
Jon Schniepp: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So, Relay at its core is a smart radio that hotel teams use to communicate, right? So they're getting rid of their old kind of two-way radios. They're using Relay to communicate in real time and Relay offers some advantages. It's just a smarter solution. So it uses the cellular and Wi-Fi networks. So it offers a much better range. But then since Relay has some kind of smart technology baked in, it can do a bunch of other things that traditional radios can't do. So our solution has a panic button built in so staff safety is a really important theme over the last couple of years.
We serve a lot of customers and staff safety. We just introduced some asset tracking features, so smart features to find out where are my luggage carts, things like that. One of the most exciting things that we just launched is, uh, we call it Team Translate. So it allows, if you have a multilingual staff, they can use the Relay to communicate in real time, and everybody hears every message in their native language. So if you speak Spanish and you speak French, you're just hearing that in your ear, and it's all happening live in real time. So it's a really exciting new feature that we just released.
Steve Carran: Very cool, very cool.
David Millili: Yeah, I want to maybe dive in a little bit more from the safety aspect and how you're helping on the safety side for the employees. Because, you know, that's just a big concern, especially in the larger, even smaller hotels. But with more staff, the more probability of something going wrong.
Jon Schniepp: Right, right, yeah. So I think that the, you're right, big issue. I think it's certainly, what we've learned is that it's more than just like, uh, housekeeping teams in rooms, or, or workers working. What we've seen is that it's just workers doing their job alone, right? So think of like an engineer who's down in some part of the building that nobody is, and they have a medical issue, right? So we've had a lot of stories that our customers have told us about Relay has really helped their staff in really challenging situations, like a medical issue when there's nobody around.
So I think the safety issues are much more diverse than maybe we initially thought going into it. So I think that's a big part of it, is like being able to, how do you respond to this diverse set of different types of safety issues. So, yeah, it's been kind of interesting and humbling to kind of be part of that when we hear these stories coming back from properties. These are heavy situations. But, you know, we're proud to make the situation a little bit better, a little bit easier to deal with with our technology.
David Millili: Is there one story you can share that's stood out to you that you don't have to name the property, just what?
Jon Schniepp: Yeah, well the one I had in mind when I was just talking is as we had a large resort in the Midwest and, uh, yeah, they had a member of their engineering team who was in a stairwell. He had a heart attack. And he was able to signal his Relay to have a panic, you know, signal a panic through his Relay. And, you know, our alerts go out in under a second, so everybody knew really fast and they knew where he was because of our technology.
And they were able to call EMS. They were able to get everybody there, get this person the help that they needed, and they wound up being okay. So it was, I'm sure, a harrowing day for that place and we feel for them. But like I said, we feel good to have the opportunity that our technology can make a difference.
Steve Carran: Save someone's life, that's incredible. Yeah. So, we always hear about, you know, staffing shortages that are happening in the industry right now, but you know, along with that come hiring challenges as well. What are some of those challenges that you've seen and how is Relay helping overcome those challenges for?
Jon Schniepp: Yeah. Yeah. So the, almost every, every, like I said, about, it seems like about 75% of properties are really struggling with this and staffing, finding the right people is just a big ongoing challenge that general managers and AGMs are always facing. I would say what Relay's contribution to it recently that we've heard is it with the Team Translate feature.
So usually if you have say Spanish-speaking housekeepers, you need a head of housekeeping to speak Spanish or whatever the language is, right? You kind of need the communication to happen. So what we've been seeing and hearing is that, uh, with this Team Translate feature, you can kind of broaden your hiring pool because you don't necessarily need them to speak that specific language or be the conduit between this group and that group, right? You can rely on the technology to bridge a lot of those gaps that where you'd have to like hire a very specific person for. Now you can hire hopefully a broader group of folks. So, yeah, it's been really interesting.
Steve Carran: That's very cool.
David Millili: Outside of that, which is amazing, what other emerging technologies like AI, how do you see that affecting communications, and maybe specifically your company?
Jon Schniepp: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, everybody's talking about AI right now, there's a lot of new AI news every week it seems like. I think the thing that we have learned is that you have to find a way to deliver this great technology in a simple experience. So I think like that that's where I've seen maybe other solutions fail is that they have a lot of technical power but they deliver it in this complexity that doesn't really fit for hotels. So we are working on some really advanced technology. There is AI built into the product that we actually deliver today.
But we pride ourselves in kind of delivering that in a way that is very easy to use and it's really accessible for, you know, the folks who are, you know, their job isn't to learn our tool, their job is to keep guests happy and respond to guest requests and things like that. So, we try to make it really easy to use, and then, you know, for the property more broadly, like really easy to deploy. So, when we go and look at AI and what we can do with it, we look at it through that lens. It's like, how can we harness this power but introduce it to customers in a way that is really seamless.
And Team Translate's another good example that uses some AI in the background. It recognizes, "Hey, is this person speaking Spanish? Okay, I need to translate that." Basically the users of it though, all they have to do is speak. Yeah, they don't have to mess with a setting or anything like that. They just speak into their Relay and then it takes care of the rest. So that's been a big part of when we look at AI and all the amazing technology opportunity that it creates, you know, I think we're pretty opinionated that you gotta have to deliver that in a really simple package so it actually delivers some value.
Steve Carran: That's great. Great utilization of AI in the hospitality industry right there. So, what gaps are you seeing in the hospitality industry right now in this sector? And how is Relay filling those gaps?
Jon Schniepp: Yeah, so obviously we're focused on, you know, communications. So, teams across all sectors. A, say, a large property, like how well are they communicating, how frequently are they communicating? And I think, you know, as I step back, I think that's where the gaps are. Is that, like, I think teams could be in much closer contact. You know, we go to some places and their teams are talking, like, all the time. You know, the, the, it's so much volume.
And, using traditional radios, that gets annoying because there's so much radio chatter and it's like blaring in through the hallways and people don't want that. Right? So our solution has ways to manage that. So it's discreet. You can put an earpiece in, things like that. I think to answer your question, the biggest gap is how do we get these teams communicating more frequently and more often? I think the way you do that is by lowering the barrier so that it makes it easier for them to.
Steve Carran: So what's next for Relay?
Jon Schniepp: Oh wow. So, we're super proud. We're growing really fast. We're serving more and more hotels every week. Like I said, we serve over 3,000 hotels. We have some phenomenal technology in the pipeline that we're just starting to, you know, get in the hands of some of our customers. So, we'll be announcing some of that stuff in the coming months throughout the rest of the year. So, there's some exciting things to come. Very exciting.
Steve Carran: Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. It's great to be at HITEC on the show floor with Relay and Jon. Thank you so much for letting us stop by your booth and chatting with us a bit today. Thanks for coming.
David Millili: Thank you.
Jon Schniepp: It was great.