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After: Hospitality Management Magazine
Krispijn Westerink has seen a lot of innovations come and go in the two decades he’s been in the hospitality and hotel technology business. The head of sales & partnerships at Freetime Hospitality also believes that the coming years could bring more developments than ever before. Westerink notes that hoteliers and technology providers, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, are open to new ideas and innovation, and he expects significant progress to be made.
“COVID has been a massive accelerator,” he explains. “Generally, the hospitality industry isn’t the quickest to adopt new technologies. There’s always the question of, ‘What exactly is hospitality?’ Does it mean giving a guest an online portal where they can do everything themselves, so they don’t need to talk to me? Of course, this varies from guest to guest and hotelier to hotelier—some hoteliers don’t see this as hospitality. They say, ‘The guest comes to me, I greet them, and we interact.’ That’s part of it too, but the other side is also a form of hospitality that we’re slowly accepting, and guests are increasingly asking for it. Today, they’re used to doing everything digitally.”
“It also adds something to the customer journey; the guest takes a bit of control,” he continues. “Everything can be done online nowadays, so it shouldn’t be that the guest arrives at the hotel only to spend ten minutes going over all their details with the receptionist. That moment should be one of personal interaction: ‘We have all your details, great. How can I help make your stay even better?’”
Westerink sees an opportunity here for the Property Management System, which he describes as “the beating heart of hotel operations,” to take some of the burden off the hotelier. Technology can, for example, help address staff shortages. “When things like payments and check-ins are done in advance, it becomes easier for the hotelier to have less experienced or younger staff at the reception. If they are friendly and make the guest feel at home, then you’re already on the right track. You don’t need to have extensive knowledge of the systems and procedures because most of it has been sorted out beforehand.”
To enable such service and support, a PMS must be a jack-of-all-trades. Westerink notes that many providers have adopted a so-called app store approach in recent years. Technology providers often refer their clients to third-party applications for additional services, such as housekeeping programs, room keys, or apps that communicate with OTAs. However, in his daily visits to hotels, Westerink has noticed some downsides to this approach: “Many hoteliers are realizing that they don’t have just one provider, but rather six, seven, or even eight.” All these services, of course, require commission, and Freetime Hospitality wants to initiate a shift in the opposite direction in the coming years: “As a provider, you have the opportunity to rein this in a bit. I want to be able to tell eight out of ten hoteliers that they can do everything with our system. If a hotel asks, ‘Can we do upselling?’, I want to be able to say ‘yes.’ Or, ‘Do we have a housekeeping app that meets the needs of most hoteliers for managing daily tasks like housekeeping, maintenance, and lost & found?’ It shouldn’t be the case that a hotelier needs a dedicated provider for these basic functions, charging several euros per room per month just to change a status via a mobile device. If you run a large hotel with hundreds of rooms, you might want an app with more advanced features like time management, but the basics should always be covered. This also applies to meetings & events, online distribution, the booking engine, managing activities, and renting spaces and products like bicycles.”
Freetime Hospitality has expanded beyond the Dutch borders in recent years, but Westerink emphasizes that the company doesn’t plan to lose sight of its roots: “If you ask our clients why they haven’t switched providers, nine out of ten will say, ‘I have someone here in the Netherlands, and when I call, I’m spoken to in Dutch.’ Everyone naturally wants to go after the big hotels, the chains, and the groups. On one hand, I agree with that, but on the other hand, 60 to 70 percent are still independent hotels. In the Netherlands, there are many more non-branded beds than branded ones; the hotelier with fifty, sixty, or seventy rooms who thinks cost-efficiently doesn’t want to work with six or seven providers.”
Westerink and Freetime Hospitality have a clear goal in mind with their Property Management Systems, VIPS and VIPS CloudPMS: “Technology should ensure that the hotelier has to do less. I often tell hoteliers, ‘The less you need to use our system, the better we’re doing our job.’ If everything is well-organized on the back end in terms of distribution and integration, the system becomes primarily a reference tool. We become more important by moving ourselves to the background, so hoteliers spend less time on our products. They shouldn’t have to be too involved with the system. Of course, when you start working with us, you need to set up how the hotel operates within the system, what the rules are, how room rates are offered, and what kind of product you’re offering. But after that, you should be able to let go. The hotelier needs to have confidence in that.”
In the area of credit card payments, Westerink sees significant developments. Hoteliers place great value on credit card numbers, but due to changing laws and regulations, nothing can be charged to credit cards without an authorization code or the physical presence of the card. He also sees a trend where technology providers strike deals with payment providers and take a commission from the hotelier’s payments as a result. Freetime Hospitality doesn’t participate in this: “We’re a tool to make hoteliers’ lives easier. Efficiency is part of that, but it’s also about costs and choices. When I make a deal with a payment provider, I take away that choice and increase the costs. After all, we’ve negotiated that deal and built the integration. With VIPS and VIPS CloudPMS, we’ve deliberately chosen a party that handles payments without us getting involved. Of course, this can be arranged if the hotelier insists, but the principle is that the choice should always rest with the hotelier.”
