How AI & Digital Check-In Are Transforming Hotels | with Nikolai Kronborg
GAIN Momentum episode #99: How AI & Digital Check-In Are Transforming Hotels | with Nikolai Kronborg
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Adam Mogelonsky: Welcome to the GAIN Momentum Podcast, focusing on timeless lessons from senior leaders in hospitality, travel technology, and food service. I have today, Nikolai Kronborg, CEO of AeroGuest. Nikolai, how are you?
Nikolai Kronborg: I'm good. Thank you, Adam. Thank you for having me.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. And you're coming today from, Copenhagen.
Nikolai Kronborg: That's correct, the cap of Denmark. Adam,
Adam Mogelonsky: Oh, yeah. No, I'm a geography buff, so I can even point to it on a map too,
Nikolai Kronborg: I'm proud of you.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. the second grade geography. so before we got on, we started. With the phrase that's on the back of your vest there, your lovely arrow guest vest that says, make time for what matters. And I think that's such a beautiful phrase to encapsulate what you're trying to achieve and are achieving for hotels with Arrow guest as well as just.
The hospitality industry in general in terms of the experience economy and creating these special moments for guests. So give us the elevator pitch of what AeroGuest is all about and how it actually does make time for what matters?
Nikolai Kronborg: we believe in making time for what matters for boths and guests. And we do that by building really, deep integrations between the tech stacks. Within hospitality. so we can automate all kinds of, repetitive tasks. so by doing that, we free up time for hotels, to do what they actually wanted to do by joining hospitality May maybe, talking to guests.
Repetitive task of checking people in or out or whatever they do. And, at the same time, guest travelers also want to utilize their time by not standing in line or doing other repetitive task, during their stay. And they, wanna be in control so they can prepare their stay beforehand. We are also inspired by 20 years of airlines moving the. Through your phone checking into your airline the day before. So all that stuff is tucked away and you can concentrate on what matters traveling.
Adam Mogelonsky: you're giving a great overview of tens of thousands of hours of development work to make that happen and to stitch together those processes to move something like check-in and all of its various procedures into the phone. And, I'm wondering if you could color that, just focusing on the check-in insofar as how you've helped move that online to make that mobile enabled in various ways, and then, talk about how that's really improved the service and tracing that all the way through to the quality scores on trip.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, you are touching upon the toughest part, right? We, the chicken is the obvious, so that's where we started and. We will never be done. It's, extremely complicated as, first of all, to automate that process, you need a two-way integration to the property management system at hotel, not a one way.
You have to be able to pull data and push data back, right? And, all the hotels we've been working with, even if they work with the same property management system, they use it differently. And then you can add different countries, different requirements id, passport needs, city tax, stuff like that. So really complicated.
while, at the same time hotel has been operating you. Completely the same since you built the pyramids, right? and they have been earning money, so why change? a winning concept. so they have a very, strong mindset on, we're doing it like we used to, and then we come around saying, yeah, that can be done smarter.
so that is, a big process. And on top of that. You cannot check in people, before they arrive if they have any outstanding. So the whole payment part, you need to have that in place as well. And, there comes security, there comes credit cards on file deposits, you name it. and we have to, be able to, of course, take that money.
Pre, you sitting in your couch the day before, sink in and then push that data into the PMS as well. Different rules applies for different countries and so forth. big tasks and a lot of PMSs, you have to do the same with, all over the world.
Adam Mogelonsky: And within all that, you also have to make a decision about which markets to target in far as expansion and deploying the. I guess compliance standards to your platform to make sure working, can handle the city taxes, can handle the security procedures, the data procedures, and then also making sure you have the necessary data structuring with the interfaces, that are most common amongst the PMSs used in that territory. So that is huge.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, so you can say there's two, two realizations. the one is relatively easy. that's the integration part. Not that the integration is easy, but Oracle infor, they are, 70% of the market and the rest is long tail. so having those, plus some, European like news for example, and some local Nordic ones, we basically cover the world, being PMS agnostic.
but if you then add digital market
in.
Definitely ahead of any other markets, within this Also, change management, doing things differently.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah,
Nikolai Kronborg: that's the toughest part I would say.
Adam Mogelonsky: the toughest part is the human part.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah. As we talked about and
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Nikolai Kronborg: before, we've been doing this like we've used to since the pyramids were built. Why chain site. And, people are afraid of change. They are especially afraid of technology. it's also an industry who has been offered all kinds of technology over the last 30 years that might not have been useful.
So they are also a little, hurt by that. And you, can add expedia and.com and all that on top of that, so they're a bit afraid of technology, I would say.
Adam Mogelonsky: one interesting part of the hotel industry that people outside don't really consider as it relates to technology is that it's a triple platform. You have to have platforms that appeal to upper managers. Who are not necessarily using the systems day in day out and or IT managers that are just configuring it.
Then you also have the guests that are using the guest user interface. But then in the middle you have the associates that are using the interface every single day. And I'm wondering what features or tools have you put into Arrow guest both on the platform as well as in your business processes to really improve that associate experience?
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, that's a really good question, right? I think what nails it?
Something they all can relate to of those you mentioned is because all of them at some point is also a guest, so the user interface, the user experience and design, when you do the web check, that is something everybody can relate to. Is it easy, simple, You don't have to fill out any data because we haven't already.
From the PMSI would say that is where we have put a lot of resources into that, because if people try some technology and it feels easy to use and the incentive is obvious, okay, I'll do this check in on my phone the day before so I don't have to do the other thing when I arrive. Like downloading your boarding pass for your airlines the day before.
So that's in place, right? I don't have to stress about that at the airport. That is the one thing that, really work on a broad perspective of all those stakeholders, I would say.
Adam Mogelonsky: And, if we're talking about, all stakeholders, we can also talk about all features. So we focused in on that check-in. I'm wondering if you could color that in terms of the entire guest journey and what other features you have on Arrow guests that really make it. Best in breed guest management system, GMs.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, so that's It's not a simple answer because that's a process. So, we were around relatively early and the other, you could say suppliers that were there covered different parts of the journey because you had to concentrate on one thing, right? We concentrated on the chicken part.
As that evolves, the end game is that you need one guest system platform that covers all of it, because you need to have a minimum of suppliers in your tech stack because they all have to be very strongly integrated to each other. So data can flow between each other. so we've been adding, Difficult check in, check out payment, digital keys first. And basically what you then add on top of that is the full communication from the booking confirmation email to stay, including, upsells, extras, loyalty programs, CRM, permission gathering, all that because you need, all these systems, the front Disney's a lock-in.
They need an email builder to use, they need to know what data is. Imagine you had to log into six different, systems every day that, that has been their world for quite a while.
Adam Mogelonsky: Six, not
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah. Maybe more even. So that's, completely crazy, right? if you talk to Hotelier at rather big hotels working at front desk.
When they meet in the morning, they are just like crossing their fingers that this day will go, okay. The first thing they look at is how many arrivals is coming, and hopefully everything goes well and I spill their names right? And I can find the reservation in the system and get them off to their rooms.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. You know the, it's often said that the check in itself is the most, Costly part of the hotel journey on a per minute basis and just automating that in various ways can help to create that arrival experience with such a great pace for a great onsite experience.
Nikolai Kronborg: it, there's so many things, that will be improved. you mentioned yourself, you were going to Singapore, right?
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Nikolai Kronborg: at 11 o'clock at night. You don't wanna speak to anyone. You just wanna go to your room and you have your reservations on your phone. You have your digital key, you have your room number.
You go straight there, and then you can talk to people the next morning if you wanna.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, that is, that is the, whole I gamut of the travel industry is that, the context of the guest. So if I'm arriving at 11:00 PM I don't wanna talk to anyone. I just want to go straight to my room. Versus arriving at 3:00 PM I'm excited, I'm ready to go. I wanna, I want to go down to the lobby bar.
I want to talk to someone, et cetera, et cetera. Same person, different time, different context.
Nikolai Kronborg: Exactly.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. on that note of the word context, which is so critical, and you mentioned before the whole idea of dynamic upselling, and I'm wondering how do you, go about. Infusing upselling into the journey that's created on your platform without it being obtrusive or, having some intelligence to take into account the context of the guest.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah. That's a good question. what, we have realized, the last couple of years is that hotel to own this, let's call interaction two to one day before they arrive, is a really powerful space because the guest's mind. Is, ready for that travel. They're not ready to, buy anything two months before their stay because people book a long time prior to the actual travel. So having the attention that short period of time just before they arrive to the hotel, and you are putting them through a very important incentivized funnel. Which is a chicken part, there's a big reward for the kids to go through that because then they know all that stuff is done.
So while they're doing that, asking them if they want this or that service or upgrade or whatever, just flows naturally into that. And, because you have all the data from the PMS. all the rate codes have all the payment rules. you only show them relevant stuff, so to speak, so you're not showing them something that they already have or didn't want.
next it is of course to predict what might Adam be available for, right? And their incomes, CRM, loyalty, ai, and so forth. That space is really, powerful.
Adam Mogelonsky: And just broadly based off the data through your through AeroGuest, what would you say that hotels could expect in terms of a total revenue uplift from dynamic upselling? through using guest intelligence?
Nikolai Kronborg: that is also a good question, right? Because there. Almost no hotels that is similar to each other.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Nikolai Kronborg: But if you take a, let's say three, four star boutique hotel, add some room service, some upgrade, some bike rental, stuff like that, you should expect, no less than, 10 to $20,000 per month just on this extra stuff, just before you arrive and it'll only increase not because you want to buy more Adam, but because the technology and the UX will be there. So if it's easy for you to push a button to pay $20 for a late departure, if it's not a hassle, you do it, or early check-in. Stuff like that.
But if it's a hassle, ah, I'll talk to them when I, arrive at the hotel and see what happens. But all of this becomes in-game purchasing,
Adam Mogelonsky: in, in game purchasing. Yeah. The freemium, model. But I was gonna drop back. You said, we've been doing hotels the same way since the pyramids. And if you look at the advent of the credit card in the fifties and sixties, it was when you switch over from fiscal cash to this. Imaginary piece of plastic, you end up spending more and, essentially your platform has infused elements of the Amazon shopping cart into the hotel stay. And it, it makes total sense.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, completely. you also know it from, what is big in Europe now is of course all this, tap to pay.
So when Apple added your credit card in, people just, suck the money out of your phone. you're completely right. You just spend more because it's convenient and. Basically, and that there's still a journey there, for hoteliers to understand that, that payment is actually, they need to completely remodel guest payments because it becomes a strategic, tool, not just a thing they need. it's quite interest.
Adam Mogelonsky: Just to get a little bit technical here, because I'm a technical person, but I know we have some technical. Listeners. So you mentioned the late checkout for $20, and what I'm first wondering is what is the workflow on that you've had to build an arrow guest to say, we're gonna offer late check-in late checkout for $20.
It's gonna get pushed through the PMS and then it goes off to a, the housekeeping module or service optimization system. Is that, could you that up to,
Nikolai Kronborg: I don't wanna, I'm the technical person here if my employees are listening to this podcast, but I do know something First thing is for this to work properly, right? so let's say you are coming from me sending an email. Could I get a late checkout front? Has to respond to that email fast, saying you can, it costs you, let's say $20.
Please confirm the payment. I need to confirm it by email. They need to figure out when and how I pay.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Nikolai Kronborg: 50% of all guests, requests are not answered.
So that's my payment. yes,
you don't have time. You don't have time. That's why you see all these chat bots and AI chat bots trying to do the answering, right?
so payment, again, you need to call that upfront. So imagine you get an email. Automated by rate code saying, Adam, do you want a late check out? For example, there's a payment button on $20. You just push that button. You know that's saying yes. That payment goes automatically to the PMS through your reservation.
So the front is, can see in the PMS system that this reservation with Adam, there's been a change. Has been added a late checkout. So he's not checking out 11, he's checking out at two o'clock, and it's already paid for. So front is doing nothing. And if the PMS also is integrated to, intelligent housekeeping services like Iceland, sweepy, the PMS will then notify sweetly, task management housekeeping tool.
That goes straight to the cleaning personnel saying, don't knock on that door. It'll first be liberated at two o'clock for cleaning. No one has done anything. It's completely automated. Makes complete sense. It's intuitive. That's how it should be, right?
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, it just, it's unlocking additional experience, but also additional value for the hotel. And, I brought that up because the whole idea of dynamic upselling and now these additional tools to support this can help handle objections for that change management because everyone may assume. that Oh, we're deploying this new piece of technology and we're simply swapping one point of friction for another, insofar as having to check this additional system for upsell requests.
But what you're saying is that isn't the case.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, and I'm saying that I think everything you and I will talk about here today,
we believe will be hygiene within hospitality in the commun years. If it takes two years or four years, I dunno. but the biggest challenge here is that introducing some of these new ways of doing things depended on technology. Hotels has to operate, differently. Might not be big changes, but it feels big if you've been doing the same way past hundred years. So that is the dialogue in the room, If you want this revenue, don't do this and that, do this and that instead. It's not complicated. That's the dialogue, services like pre-arrival check-in means that you, Adam, you've done your check-in the day before.
So on the day of arrival, when that room is cleaned, it comes available. We see that availability in the PMS and we allocate that room to you automatically. A lot of hotel people, they wanna do the allocation manually because they think they know you and they think Adam would love a corner room, but that is, that doesn't make any sense, right? Just let the system allocate that room for you. They can do it.
Adam Mogelonsky: And, one other point to that $20 upsell for Lake checkout, are you seeing a lot of activity around testing that $20? As in, how do you know that? Your revenue off of $20 versus 25
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, I would say we, we are not there. We are not there yet.
This is early days, and you also need relatively large hotel groups, let's say plus 15 to 20 hotels for them to have a, small department maybe in a marketing employee so forth that can, do a b testing and checking things out.
they are very, operational, open 24 7. So, you need resources, and hands to, to have the dialogue with someone like us. we do all the work, but that part of the market is still very immature because that would be the way to do it. Let's make three. You have arrivals every day, so you would, get data very fast, right?
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. And, one of the things I love about data and just having a guest management system where everything's unified under one platform is it enables the data to be structured in ways to allow for continuous learning.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, exactly.
Adam Mogelonsky: So what other ways? by using Arrow Guest can hotels learn to improve either revenues, operations, and of course experience.
Nikolai Kronborg: I think, I mean there are so many touch points, Adam. first of all, the biggest. By far the biggest challenge for hotels is that on average, Adam hotels only have contact data on 50% of their guests. So you have 50% of your guests coming to your hotel, eating, sleeping, staying there, leaving again, and you have no way to communicate to them. And that is of course, you have, agents delivering guests where they wanna own
the guests.
You have, conference guests, big groups
have no data on those. And you have the OTAs, that has these encrypted emails and stuff like that. And in a world that is becoming digital and there's a lot of revenue that is.
That's gonna be the biggest topic on the professional hotels saying, of course we want to be able to communicate with all August. We want to be able to ask for a permission after they leave so we can get it, get into the diary booking part where the big money is. That is, a big thing that, that is, something we work a lot on.
You can imagine. There's a group booking a hundred people from a Canadian lumber company coming, and it's a person at that company who booked a hundred rooms. there's no data.
Somehow that person should have a simple tool, easy to fill out with the personal data so that all the employees have a great stay and in a few years time, Adam.
There will be only digital keys at all hotels in the world, it's more secure. So you have to be able to push that digital key to every individual and every individual has a phone. So that is something that is very interesting.
Adam Mogelonsky: it's, interesting and, again, going back down to the technical details, could you color one way by which you help hotels to get that information on the guests so they can move from 50% of known ge of all guests being known to 65 80, and help, to initiate that learning curve.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, We, of course, have this group booking data tool. the biggest, initiative we are doing now, it will be launched in June, is that we completely replaces any kind of kiosks. So imagine that you're doing your web check, that check-in flow. If you haven't been in contact with the hotel, you arrive at the hotel.
Let's say there's a QR code for EC checkin. You scan that and what we will show you just on top of that web checkin flow is basically an interface, like a SK saying, find your booking. So right Adam Ky is this you living in Canada? That is me. Click. And then you are into the web flow, and when you do that flow, you will add your email.
So that is the 50% you don't have already. And at the same time, you can imagine, 500 people coming to the hotel in the morning because it's a conference hotel sitting in the big conference room at four o'clock when that conference is done, they all go out and want to go to that room and there's a huge line.
So they will just sit in the conference room, scan QR codes on the wall. While sitting the conference room, their room, just so that will be, that's where we take the check from 50% to 90%.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. yeah, it's a fantastic tool just to think. How you can improve service, improve traffic around the hotel to create these log jams. And I guess the second order effect of that is the faster a conference guest can get to their room and cool down, the faster they can get downstairs to the bar.
Nikolai Kronborg: Completely. And you know that, that's why, we don't want be tough on those who make, it's just that using your own device, your email is already in there, berg at canadian com, right? That's a long, that's already in there. So you know when the email in the email field is, you push that, your email comes up, you click done, right?
It's all about that. It has to be click, click. Super easy, convenient.
Adam Mogelonsky: so one other aspect of AeroGuest to touch on, agast has its own embedded payment, gateway or processor. Is that, is.
Nikolai Kronborg: we are not a payment provider, so to speak. We work with partners. so the contract you could say is with us. And we, implement all these smart payments, in the guest journey, but we work with the biggest, payment provider like, shift Four Planet Agent. So yes, we are PCI compliant and stuff, but the actual payment stuff at Gateway is through those partners.
Adam Mogelonsky: And it's, that's just eliminating yet more friction in terms of
how people can complete things. Like a, late checkout and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Nikolai Kronborg: add on top of that, choose the currency you wanna pay with a payment method, right? Google Pay will pay your credit card, a credit card on file deposits. You, there's all kinds of payment services that are super important, in the digital world. And that's, it's a very competitive market, so there's a very, there's a lot of strong, suppliers out there, so that's nice.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, you mentioned that Canadian Lumber company sending a hundred people and prior to that there's probably a Master folio where they only have one company card and then people wanna do individual payments above that, on whichever other card they have.
It's incredibly important to be able to facilitate that because otherwise it's lost revenue.
Nikolai Kronborg: Exactly, and, one of the issues we had, was, when you do the web checkout, right? So we completely move the guests from in-house to out of house in the PMS automatically. But if you, let's say paying with a company card, you wanna make sure that you get a receipt. What should be paid with a common car and maybe what should be paid with a private one.
small, weird stuff like that, that, can be done at front desk just saying, I'll pay this with this car and the other. But doing that digitally, that demands some, some, powerful UX and knowledge, right? It's not easy.
Adam Mogelonsky: No.
Nikolai Kronborg: we have to solve it somehow.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, and be accurate as well, which is the most.
Nikolai Kronborg: And, I can do, you can do roadblocks like that all day long. we just launching a few properties in Spain and they need to provide a passport to the government on the same day. So somehow digitalize that and automatically send it somewhere.
Adam Mogelonsky: okay. You're launching properties in Spain, and this speaks to the whole, another point of friction in hotel sales, which is the fact that you have a platform that could technically be configured to work anywhere in the world, and yet. The sales effort is often on site, in the place you're selling to.
And of course with Spain that's a good thing, right? You get to go down there and pitch them in a nice, sunny place and have some delicious tappas and things like that. but it does slow down the growth. Process. So I'm wondering what, is your overall, philosophy or process for having a company that is cloud-based can go anywhere, but still making it hospitality specific and ensuring you have that hands-on approach to help hotels get onboarded and get the technology, in a good place.
Nikolai Kronborg: Really good question. so you can say that, when we started out, naive and not knowing anything about anything, being my age, it was, teams all over the world, right? But before we were even, almost not, almost haven't built the platform.
Everything moved online. So, that actually for us did that. We could do sales onboarding, customer support via video. that's it.
We sell in solutions, it's a quite a big platform, so we fly a lot. Face-to-face onboarding, strategic meetings and stuff like that, I would say still is very strong. but compared to 20 years ago, I would say a company like ours would have a rather big headquarter with a lot of services there because you can do a lot of stuff on video.
You would fly out to the big cities, where you have your tech partners and your concentration of hotel clients. And as you grow you will, company like us. The next, office we would have would be in London, and then you would have one in Munich, and then you would have one in the East coast in the us But smaller teams that moves around also because.
You invest a lot in the platform for that to be intuitive, right? I mean you, we all know HubSpot as a C, we use it. I never met someone right from that company. And that's because they have done it, intuitively and good. Yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: it's interesting you bring up HubSpot 'cause I was gonna circle back to CRM and loyalty and, within the CRM space, but also in other technology spaces. One thing that I've observed from the buyer side, the owners and the corporate level, is looking at a company like HubSpot and going, It's not hospitality specific. Therefore, I want a CRM that's has hospitality experience because I know it's gonna be configurable to the way I want it. the question therein is what features does Agast have to properly either extract or, export and transform data for the CRM to enable that post-day continuous learnings? And then the next question over that is, how, would you contend with your CRM partners in deciding which ones to try to integrate with, whether HubSpot, which is a more horizontal, larger CRM, or something that is more of, specifically towards the hospitality vertical.
Nikolai Kronborg: Very good question. so we just launched what we call audience, which is a CRM and a permission gathering tool, which is very interesting. I'll come back to that. So I would say what we just launched is a minimum viable product. the reason we did that is exactly. We all hotels ask, is it something you do?
And that's because there is no hotel loyalty CRM platform built specifically only for hotels at the same time. demand is completely different if it's a small hotel, a big hotel. A conference, hotel conference. Is it CRM for B2C, B2B, so forth. So again, what we did beginning naively is that a lot of us come from a digital background knowing a lot about CRM.
There's, hundreds of thousands systems out there. The core of a CRM is a, an overview of the data and a communication module, right? We had that already. so basically let's build that. But what drove it was that hotels, they have no way of. A lot of permissions to be able to communicate to their guests after the stay.
They're allowed to communicate from booking to during day, like the airlines, and on top of that 50% they don't have data. So knowing, as we talked about with the upselling, so the space within the check just before you arrive, if you ask for permission there, what would happen? We launched it just a month ago.
It's live on two hotels and 50% of every guest checking in signs off for permission. So that is a completely crazy number. And they're not promising them, 50% discount on the next day. It's basically, again, the endang. It makes sense. It's trustworthy. It's nice. Fine. I wanna hear from them. so
combined with check in, checkout, communication we believe will be hygiene in our world. This is the future for us. so we will be a Salesforce within CRM four years from now. The challenge there is, in order to have a powerful CRM within hospitality, you also need what's called a, A EDP Essential Data platform. And that's because again, hotels have a lot of platforms like the poss, the whole food and beverage part.
So for me. For air guests audience CRM system to understand Adam, who gave her permission. We know everything about the booking, the reservations, he has a, he's paying this for the room and stuff like that.
We need to know what's going on his restaurant visits at the hotel,
meaning we would to integration.
So our challenge is how do we not end up having 500 informations, because that's would probably be impossible, right? So of course you would integrate to the big ones. already today we see that because we have a small C. So when we sign a big hotel group, they are traditional. They have a big CRM already.
We make the integration to that. So they use our platform to get the permissions and not the CRM. They move it up to their own CRM on at some point. We'll of course pitch for that, but, we are still early days, but, that is super interesting, right? Because it's also super intuitive that the guest management platform, of course, is where the CRM is.
Sense that, and the, interesting part there is when we then, in the fall add, AI on it, so you have all these permissions that's coming in every day, and certainly you have thousands of those and you have no overview. What should I communicate? Also creatively, what's a good idea?
So the agenda, AI can say Good morning, miss Fronts, or Miss Marketing or Mr. Marketing. you actually have, 1,200 permissions, of people, staying at your hotel. last Easter, is coming up. Send them an email offering them this and that, because creativity is also a scarcity, right? You don't have time to come up with ideas, you don't have the overview of what, and then that agent can do all kinds of suggestions, right?
Business, clients, family, clients, seasonalities, like these stuff and stuff like that. So, that's, really interesting. Or you have 500 people only spending a hundred dollars during this day, communicate something to them or these travelings with a dog. Tell them that, remember, this is a dog friendly hotel. Come visit us for the spring.
Adam Mogelonsky: I've always thought about hotel CRM in terms of the creation of more segments, but in a lot of ways you're talking about creating tags onto people. the, just because somebody has a traveled with a dog that's a tag, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're part of that dog friendly segment.
I love that you shifted it over to discuss and inject the term AI in there. 'cause we hadn't actually mentioned that up until now. I'm wondering what other ways are you gonna see artificial intelligence help us to segment or to tag guess in order to devise better and more specific communications to them to really, drive that repeat traffic and that customer lifetime value.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, that's also an interesting question. you'll probably get all kinds of different opinions when you ask people about that. Our position is that adding any agen AI on your platform is only as good as what data is flowing within that platform. So company like us, as AI is a hot topic, get pushed by the investors, you our position is that we wanna finalize, if I could say that our integrations, so we, are building very deep integrations between PMS systems payments, basically. So we have AI in mind when we build it, but when we, have control of those integrations in the data, we believe AI can be really strong. for example, the mentioned agen AI on helping marketing on their communication, within, CRM.
it's only as good as the data that the a, the Agen AI can rely on. So if you don't have an integration tool, let's say that POS system, we don't know anything about Adam's food and beverage habits, then, it's limited. so as a hoster, you need to, and as a company like us, you need to know when is the time to hit, the edge.
And that's also why you see, good and bad, chat bots. We use chat bots, an example. 'cause Easy on Stand is a plugin. They can only, answer. Automatically with the knowledge they have. So the less knowledge, the weird answer you get, right? And we've all been chatting with the chat bot with questions and finding out they couldn't help you.
And that's not good. So you need to know when is it good enough for your brand to add this?
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow.
Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. And, you mentioned a word previously, hygiene.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yes.
Adam Mogelonsky: and by that, are you referring to the cleansing and structuring of data?
Nikolai Kronborg: Now I'm basically more practical. You would never, when you buy an airline ticket today, you know that 24 hours before you would go to a computer, check yourself in and download the boarding bus that is today hygiene. So what I mean with hygiene hospitality is that you will be. Before you arrive, you would have a key on your phone.
You've paid for everything. You'll have, the hotel directory. So you can see the opening hours of the fitness room and all that you're prepared. That's gonna be hygiene. yeah. So we are looking to, what is the USP gonna be for a COVID line, us? And what we foresee is the whole communication, loyalty part.
Adam Mogelonsky: GMS CRM like this, and the more you can integrate those, the better you can create that virtuous circle of, people back in, communicating with them and extending the stay.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah, adding the integrations to this system and all this system as a world, right? So a lot of integration work needs to be done. It's more like your business model. Can it, It handle that many expensive integrations. That's gonna be the challenge.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. And, the integrations is a nightmare unto itself because how do you pick out the partners? And a lot of times, I don't wanna be assumptive here, but that may be client led in terms of you're pitching a business and they require that
Nikolai Kronborg: Yes. Yeah. That was how we started.
So we ended up having 10 hotels in 10 different countries with 10 different Es because we said yes to everything.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Nikolai Kronborg: but I think time will work for everyone because if you have a tech company that wants to work in hospitality, they need to be agile, open, they had, because they need to work with other tech platforms and, you know.
if they'll not open an agile, you they'll be put out of the loop.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. and I think that's the timeless lesson right there, is just the agile being, having agility, being able to respond quickly and flexibly to everything.
Nikolai Kronborg: Yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: Nikolai, we've covered a lot of ground here and, I'm just wondering if there's any final thoughts you have either in terms of trends you're seeing that excite you or, anything else you wanna mention about a guest.
Nikolai Kronborg: I just wanna say that I'm excited on behalf of, people working in the hotels because it's gonna be much. More fun, all the repetitive work is done. you, will imagine hotels that has no lobby or front desk. It's just a lounge and restaurants, and meet people looking in the eye, talking to them.
of course they can, they will be more commercial because they can, talk products with you. But, that's gonna be completely to something much more nice and cool.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow, that, that is a very bright future to look forward to because right now everybody's talking about the labor problems, right? Where are we gonna find good people? Where are we gonna find talent? And you are offering a solution right there. Yeah.
Nikolai Kronborg: Exactly. it should be. We haven't gone to that part, we, from the heart. Mean it when we tell, hotels that they should, when they're looking for new people, they should market that they are a digital hotel and they have the modern systems and services because that attracts talent.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. No, that's, it's beautiful. It's poetic and it's a great way to finish off.
Nikolai Kronborg: Great.
Adam Mogelonsky: Nikolai, thank you so much for your time. It's been a delight just talking about, guest management systems, CRM, ai, all that fun stuff, and just mastering the basics, like moving your check-in to digital. Yeah.
Nikolai Kronborg: having me. It's been a, it's been a joy revisiting all the challenges again.
Adam Mogelonsky: Nikolai, thank you so much.
