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Oracle Customer Success — Schloss Elmau
Schloss Elmau Uses End-to-End Property Management Solution to Enrich Guests’ Journeys and Remain at Forefront of World’s Leading Resorts
ShareThe hotel business is all about guests. Each guest is an individual and wants to be treated as such. It is individualization and flexibility, enabled by state-of-the-art software, which drives innovation in the global hospitality business, no matter whether high-end or low-end. Working for many years with Oracle Hospitality Suite8, we have achieved a level of excellence that has made Schloss Elmau the trendsetting luxury resort in the world. There is no other solution in the market that matches, even approximately, Oracle Hospitality’s outstanding capabilities.
Schloss Elmau, built between 1914 and 1916 in the Bavarian Alps, was conceived by its owner, the German philosopher, theologian, and author Johannes Müller, as a cultural and spiritual retreat for his readers and for artists. The castle served as a hotel until 1942 and as a military hospital during and after World War II. In 1997, Müller’s grandson, Dietmar Mueller-Elmau, invested the proceeds of his successful entrepreneurship into reconverting Schloss Elmau into a cultural hideaway to promote culture across all arts, and in 2007 it became a member of the Leading Hotels of the World.
Today, Schloss Elmau consists of two hotels in one resort. The Castle features 115 rooms and suites as well as restaurants, lounges, spas, fashion shops, a bookstore, and a legendary concert hall. The Retreat, a separate building with 47 luxury and junior suites, two restaurants, and a spa, opened after two years of construction in 2015—in time to accommodate numerous heads of states, governments, and international institutions during the 41st G7 summit in June 2015.
Challenges
- Remain at the forefront of the world’s leading hotels by enabling staff across all functional areas and points of sale (from reception to restaurants, lounges, spas, and shops) to deliver fully individualized services to guests—a key requirement in distinguishing the individual luxury resort Schloss Elmau from its competitors
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Enable guests to book the resort’s complementary services—such as wellness offers, leisure events, restaurant tables, and business events—through the hotel’s website, with easy-to-navigate booking options on any device
- Gain the ability to regularly deploy new services to make the guest’s stay more pleasant, such as introducing mobile check-in without the need to go to a reception desk, or enabling guests to sign off restaurant and lounge invoices on mobile devices
- Increase management efficiency by running a paperless environment with a fully integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system covering finance, inventory, and points of sale supported by mobile solutions for front desk, housekeeping, and restaurant staff
Results
- Deployed Oracle Hospitality Suite8 Hotel Property Management Base as an end-to-end property management system, covering all phases of the guest journey including pre-stay (research, booking, communication), stay (arrival, in-house touch points, check-out), and post-stay (surveys, loyalty programs) to enable excellence in customized, guest-centric hotel services
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Ensured seamless operational workflows from research and booking to departure and guest survey, and enabled staff to focus entirely on guests, by leveraging Oracle Hospitality Suite8’s highly flexible configuration to adapt the solution continuously to evolving hotel needs, through capabilities such as freely definable rates, age groups, packages, and communication templates
- Fulfilled a core requirement of Schloss Elmau to relieve its guests of any kind of administrative burden—such as using credit cards or filling forms at each touch point—by implementing eSignature for Oracle Hospitality Suite8 POS, so that guests can sign invoices on the hotel’s mobile devices and receive a copy including their signature at checkout
- Achieved maximum flexibility for addressing the evolving needs of a trendsetting luxury resort by leveraging Oracle Hospitality Suite’s modular architecture and customization capabilities while holding all resource planning and guest information in a single Oracle Database
- Enabled guests to book services—from leisure, spa, and business offers to rooms and suites—for both the Castle and the Retreat directly on the hotel website using Oracle Hospitality Suite8 webConnect’s shopping cart, providing a positive beginning for the guest journey with easy product search and booking
- Gained the ability to run paperless hotel management, including all required ERP functions from finance to inventory, along with numerous electronic tools such as Oracle Hospitality Suite8’s voucher management tool for reading voucher bar codes and redeeming vouchers against guest invoices
- Provided each room guest upon arrival with an identification card which is activated within seconds through an Android or iOS based mobile device—meaning guests can access their room or suite and pay at any POS from restaurant to concert hall and spa without the need to carry their own mobile device for identification
- Increased productivity of housekeeping and maintenance personnel by deploying the Android-based Oracle Hospitality Suite8 POS mobile extension on 30 tablets, which provide staff with mobile access to tasks and schedules on an attractive graphical user interface, thus speeding information exchange between staff and management while eliminating paper use and reducing administrative costs
- Gained a comprehensive view of each guest by storing guest feedback—captured through personalized guest surveys configured in Oracle Hospitality Suite8’s survey module—in Oracle Database, ensuring the hotel has all guest data available including commendations, comments, and suggestions for improvement
- Enabled sophisticated data mining by using Oracle Database as a single source of truth for all hotel and guest information, allowing management to generate reports by any desired criteria, for example, to find out which guests could be interested in a specific package such as golf, horseback riding, or a hiking weekend
- Helped Schloss Elmau to win one of the most valued single deals that can be obtained in the hotel business—being selected by the 41st G7 summit’s host organization (the German government) to accommodate numerous heads of states, governments, and international institutions in June 2015, thanks to the combination of ensuring outstanding comfort, great improvisation capability, and world-class data security
The trend is going towards maximum individualization, thus as a hotelier I need a modular software package that enables me to treat each guest individually and provides me with all the information I need to have across all touch points. As a guest, I want to be able to select hotel services by order of interest through a channel of my choosing, add those components to my shopping cart, and be welcomed as if they’ve always known me, without being bothered with administrative formalities. Without a doubt, there is no software on the market that can rival Oracle Hospitality Suite8 in meeting the needs of an individual hotel. Built on world-class Oracle Database, Oracle operates the de facto industry standard for property management systems, both for individual hotels and for hotel chains.
About Schloss Elmau