Shaping Hospitality’s Future with Hotel Oderberger, Flexkeeping and GauVendi
Mews Unfold 2024 takes place on 29th May at Amsterdam’s stunning Muziekgebouw. It’s a day of hospitality innovation, designed to inspire hoteliers in the pursuit of remarkable hospitality.
This year’s theme is Shaping Hospitality’s Future, and ahead of the event, we spent some time with three of Unfold’s speakers to pick their brains about some of our industry’s most pressing topics.
Here are some of the highlights from:
- Luka Berger, CEO of Flexkeeping
- Tini Diekmann, Director Revenue and Distribution/ Deputy Hotel Manager at Hotel Oderberger Group
- Markus Mueller, Co-founder and Managing Director of GauVendi
What excites you about hospitality right now?
Markus: We are in a major change cycle accelerated by the recent pandemic, resulting in new challenges like the emergence of novel technology, labor shortages and the demand for more personalization. It’s a great time to be at the forefront of driving necessary change, especially in the field of distinct and differentiated guest experiences in a scalable and automated way.
Tini: What excites me about hospitality is its resilience. There is one challenge after another in hospitality. When I worked as a tour guide for TUI Group, I handled countless client complaints, weather disasters and even a volcano eruption, and in the last few years hospitality has dealt with Covid, economic crises and unstable global politics. But the industry always gets back on their feet, stronger than before. Which leads me to the next reason I love the industry: it’s so full of exciting, wonderful, helpful and life-loving people.
Luka: What excites me the most about hospitality is really hospitality itself. Hospitality is all about taking care of other people, creating amazing experiences, just showing others that they're being cared for. This is the essence of hospitality, and this is what really gets me excited. When you can make someone feel that they're completely relaxed and completely taken care of, this is the most amazing thing that you can do in hospitality.
What are hospitality’s biggest challenges?
Markus: I'm concerned that the automation of guest services might cause us to lose the personal touch that makes staying at a hotel a special experience. This isn’t a big deal for cheaper places to stay, but what about nicer hotels that aren’t super expensive? Travel is about feeling good and making memories. If everything becomes either very fancy or very basic, we lose the middle range that offers both quality and value. It’s important to talk about how we use technology to keep delivering great guest experiences, because that will be what sets hotels apart from each other.
Luka: The thing that worries me currently is the staffing situation. It worries me because I think hospitality is often not tackling it in the right way. For example, in the housekeeping department, a common solution is implementing a skip cleaning policy or a green initiative or so on, to ease the staffing problem. While some of those initiatives are really good, I think this as a solution is wrong.
The real solution should be investing more into the job, investing more into your people, more education that changes the perception of the job and increases respect for this important role. And, at the end of the day, increasing pay, too.
What’s shaping hospitality in 2024?
Luka: On one side, it's still the staffing issue that I mentioned already. But also, a lot of new concepts are being developed and built, like hyper personalization. A lot of it is driven by tech, and tech absolutely is the thing that is shaping the industry.
Markus: Labor shortages are driving a greater need for automation and innovative technologies are changing consumer behaviour. Two main types of technology providers are emerging: those offering one-size-fits-all solutions and those providing modular, partnership-driven technologies that can be customized as needed, like Mews for example. I prefer the latter, more flexible approach because the industry is becoming increasingly diverse, with a range of unique accommodation concepts that demand tailored technological solutions to provide distinct guest experiences. No company can claim to be the best in the world at everything.
What are you investing in right now?
Markus: At GauVendi, we concentrate on developing a technology that lets operators sell distinct and unique guest experiences that match their brand positioning in a scalable and automated way. Automation is a necessity for all, but intelligent differentiation is a competitive advantage.
Whether it's differentiation through hyper-personalization or through diverse distribution, pricing and sales strategies, now is the time for operators to take back control over distribution and sell experiences, not only commodities. The core basis to drive this change is to break away from static room inventory management towards dynamic inventory.
Tini: The biggest opportunity right now is AI. The challenge is to use it to help save resources and money while also reassuring your staff that implementing this technology will not replace them but give them more time to do their most important job: creating a remarkable experience for the guest.
We are investing in digitalization and AI for the above reasons, and this is why we like Mews so much. With their open APIs we can try out new tools and features like an AI based Chatbot with DialogShift or a smart heating option. I try to be very open to new ideas and tools, always looking around and evolving.
Luka: At Flexkeeping, we’re investing most in automation and in AI. Automation is such a huge thing, because it can really help hotel teams to optimize operations, to save on time, on costs, and to speed up certain processes and services. There are areas, big and small, where automation can really help.
We're also investing a lot into deploying AI the right way, because as with automation, it can completely change the way you manage certain processes. It can unlock so many new opportunities in the way you do things or in the way you understand things and then, enables to change certain things.
What new technology excites you?
Luka: Something that really stuck in my mind was by a company called Holoconnects. I saw their hologram boxes for the first time at HITEC in Toronto, 2023, and I was blown away because it felt so real. The capability to be able, for example, to have virtual front offices across multiple locations that all feel real is so exciting.
Combine that with all the VR and AI tech that is being developed, and it brings the human touch to technology. We’re getting really close to really challenging the argument that tech won't be able to replace humans, and I'm looking forward to that challenge.
Markus: With new technology, hoteliers have a major opportunity to regain more control over their own distribution, tap into the personalization megatrend, boost operating margins and offer better guest experiences, especially if they abandon legacy management practices and standards. For instance, there's no reason to keep selling standardized room types when every guest is unique.
Another opportunity lies in attracting diverse talents to the industry, thanks to new job profiles created by emerging technologies. We're collaborating with hospitality schools to teach new methods of selling hotel stays, crafting unique guest experiences, and optimizing pricing strategies.
What are you most looking forward to at Unfold?
Luka: What I'm looking forward to most is meeting great people and having great discussions. I think that those are the two things that are absolutely guaranteed at Unfold.
Tini: I’m really looking forward to meeting many of my fellow industry workers and sharing new ideas and visions. And of course, I’m looking forward to the party at the end of the day...
Markus: Meeting and exchanging with like-minded industry leaders and partners who drive change in our industry, and of course to meet new potential business partners.
To hear from Luka, Tini and Markus in person, be sure to get your Unfold ticket now.
About Mews
Mews is the leading platform for the new era of hospitality. Powering over 5,000 customers across more than 85 countries, Mews Hospitality Cloud is designed to streamline operations for modern hoteliers, transform the guest experience and create more profitable businesses. Customers include Generator-Freehand, The Strawberry Group, The Social Hub, and Airelles. Mews was named Best PMS (2024) and listed among the Best Place to Work in Hotel Tech (2021, 2022, 2024) by Hotel Tech Report, as well as World's Best Hotel PMS Provider (2023) and World's Best Independent Hotel PMS Provider (2022, 2023) by World Travel Tech Awards. The company has offices in Europe, the United States and Australia.
