Hotel am Strand streamlines processes to enhance guest experience with Oracle
Hotel am Strand boosts efficiency and quality of service by consolidating onto Oracle Hospitality.
The family-owned ‘Hotel am Strand’ on the Baltic coast in Kühlungsborn is a 4-star property with 40 rooms and apartments furnished in modern style. The hotel also markets and manages vacation apartments on behalf of third-party owners. With its attractive location, extensive amenities, and excellent service, the Hotel am Strand occupies its own niche position in Kühlungborn’s highly dynamic tourism market and on the Baltic coast as a whole.
The Hotel am Strand—with its unique profile as a hotel, provider of apartments, and manager of third-party vacation apartments—did not have a software solution that integrated all areas of the company. Instead, the hotel used diverse standalone solutions and Excel applications developed in-house. These did not deliver all required functions and created unnecessary work. Information gaps and inaccurate data exchanges between the disparate solutions led to inefficiencies and, ultimately, higher costs.
“We have perfected our workflows with Oracle Hospitality. With increased efficiency and additional capacity for guest services, we secure our market positioning. Oracle makes an important contribution to the successful development of our hotel and guest services.”
Business challenges
Leverage property-management synergies and boost process efficiency by deploying a universal, flexible, and high-performing software that maps all processes relating to the management of hotel rooms, hotel apartments, and vacation apartments of third-party owners
Improve customer service and avoid manual errors with effective and efficient information exchange between the various corporate divisions
Reduce work required for typical tasks such as room cleaning, checking in/ out, and hotel bookkeeping, to save costs and tap into additional guest service resources
Ensure that the new system can be linked easily and comprehensively to external online booking platforms so that the hotel’s offers can be updated instantly and bookings can be accepted through various channels
Broaden the scope of the booking system so that variable processes for special promotions and special deals with individual guests can be mapped
Collect comprehensive hotel and guest data and easily migrate from previously used systems
Adopt a solution that can be intuitively operated without the ongoing need for external experts
Apart from our in-house solution, we reviewed other hotel software. Oracle Hospitality was the only one that met all our requirements. We are impressed by the system’s performance and flexibility. It has allowed us to both increase efficiency and further improve our service.
Results
Delivered improved guest service by deploying Oracle Hospitality Suite8 Property Small Business Edition as a single software suite for all hotel operations, including the management of apartments and vacation apartments through the creation of guest invoices for their owners
Enabled the automatic adjustment of prices based on capacity by transferring rates from all booking platforms to a separate booking software by using 2 add-on modules, Oracle Hospitality Suite8 Property webConnect and Oracle Hospitality Suite8 Property Two-Way Online Interface, which encompass online bookings and external channel managers
Registered minimum and maximum availability of each room, room category, and corresponding price code, depending on actual occupancy figures, ensuring that a given room is available to the respective guest for the duration of his/her reservation, and thereby avoiding room changes during a stay
Enabled customized up- and cross-selling offers by operating the Oracle Hospitality Suite8 and all add-on modules on Oracle Database 12.1, providing hotel managers with a 360-degree view of every guest and a complete overview of the services he/she has used in the hotel, apartments, vacation apartments, or restaurant
Integrated reservations and invoicing for hotel rooms, apartments, and vacation apartments on a single platform, Oracle Hospitality Suite8, gaining the ability to analyze these segments individually and generate reports—which previously had to be produced manually—at the touch of a button
Used the Oracle Hospitality Suite8 Property module to provide owners with vacation apartment invoices, which include details about the occupancy rate for their apartments—when these invoices were produced manually, the process required up to 8 hours per month
Automated review questionnaires for hotel and apartment guests to continuously optimize hotel operations—a task that was previously impossible in technical terms and attributed to a lack of time
Increased vacation apartment sales by 12% in the first year of deployment, most particularly through Oracle Hospitality Suite8 Property webConnect, which connected the booking engine on the hotel’s website and the external channel manager, ‘Hotel Spider’
Streamlined various processes, from room cleaning to invoicing, by enabling cleaning personnel to report their current work status to the hotel reception in real time, using mobile devices, which minimizes the time that newly arrived guests have to wait for their rooms to be ready
Migrated the guest data stored on the legacy hotel software or in separate Excel spreadsheets seamlessly using the migration tool of Oracle Hospitality Suite8 Property Small Business Edition
Partners
“DATEN + DIENSTE impressed us with their competence and dedication and relieved us of virtually all work arising out of the system conversion. The conversion went smoothly, and our guests did not notice a thing”, Anne Kathleen Kühn said.