Watch our Hotel Tech Stack Insights from our team at the Cloudbeds 2023 UserCon
- Adam Harris – CEO & Co-Founder, Cloudbeds
- Nancy Huang – VP of Marketing, Cloudbeds
- Edward Kennedy – Director & Co-Founder, The Percentage Company
- Wassana Suwanbenjapon – Director of Sales & Marketing, Phuket Bay Group
The Percentage Company was delighted to be featured and interviewed for the global 2023 Cloudbeds PMS UserCon. As Cloudbeds PMS power-users both in the PMS installation, training and configuration space, but also as key participants in the Cloudbeds app store or marketplace with The Percentage App Booking solutions and accounting solutions.
As part of the global Cloudbeds conference, The Percentage Company was selected to provide a case study for 1 of the dozens of hotels in Thailand that the Percentage Company installed the Cloudbeds PMS. Read the video transcript from the Cloudbeds PMS 2023 UserCon here:
Adam: We have 1 more and I think we have to go all the way around the world for this one.
Nancy: Yes. Lets go over to Phuket Thailand
Adam: Ok nice,
Nancy: That’s another place that’s known for its beautiful landscape and for this story you’re going to hear from a long time Cloudbeds customer and ambassador Edward Kennedy.
Adam: Yeah nice, from The Percentage Company.
Nancy: Exactly. So The Percentage Company is a digital marketing agency. It’s based in Thailand and what they do is help independent hotels close the technology gap between them and larger chains.
Adam: Well that’s something that we are really passionate about so I can’t wait to hear what Edward has to say. Let’s roll the tape!
Edward: I’m the director of The Percentage Company, we are a hotel digital marketing agency. We work with hotels around the world. To date in the last 5 years around 500 hotels in various shapes and sizes and basically our aim is to provide a 360 degree solution for the hotel digital marketing and technology needs.
My first experience was working with perhaps more legacy systems.
Edward: When I first came to Thailand I installed and used them and I got quite familiar from an IT perspective and from a revenue management perspective. and i came across Cloudbeds as i happened to have a mutual friend who worked in your fantastic team and basically i was looking for a solution that would, as i said, bring the smaller properties up to a slightly higher level and to automate some of the processes that they didn’t have the staff or ability to be able to implement.
Edward: Whether that be things like email automation or just getting access to your data, which was a new experience for me in the hospitality business. So yeah, we thought it was a great mix of extreme value for money relative to the competition. I studied it. I studied 12 different systems at the time and I studied the processes of each property with my co-founder Paolo, and we basically reverse engineered the whole hotel and we found that the best fit and by far the best value for money was Cloudbeds and it resulted in around 70% cost savings for that first property.
Wassana: My name is Wassana Suwanbenjapon. I’m the director of sales at the Phuket Bay Group which is made out of 3 hotels, Patong bay Hill Resort, Patong Bay Residence and Kudo Hotel and beach club. PAtong bay hill has 389 rooms. We have a lot of facilities for guests, ideal for family, for a single traveler or even a couple looking for a place to party.
Wassana: We have a good location. We’re just not far from the beach and not far from Patong Nightlife. At breakfast we have a menu for guests to try local ingredients and local food. We support local people. The struggle that I had with the old system was when I had to go on a sales call, I had to work remotely. It’s now easy for me to access the information that I need to.
Wassana: Cloudbeds has been used by our reservation team, front office team, sales team and the management team. Cloudbeds has benefited us in the way that the booking is automatically integrated with the system so we can save time to input the information in the system.
Edward: We’ve worked with some very small properties five six sort of villa properties up to 400 rooms we’ve installed cloudbeds with, so each one has slightly different requirements well that’s why we like the app store that comes with Cloudbeds, a marketplace, because it means that you can build a customized tech stack for whatever your size. You can find the right mix of Technology and the tools to be able to get you where you want to go.
Edward: With the challenges of accessing data in legacy systems, I would say the open API, the concept of it, i’m a coder as well so i’ve always been on the open source side of the force, if you like. I like to have access to data so that you can manipulate it and that can inform your marketing strategy in building the presence of the property. The email automation is a wonderful feature. For me it’s been extremely powerful in terms of removing day to day admin jobs I used to do as a revenue manager trying to build that relationship with customers. It just automates those processes so you can focus on more important aspects of the job.
Edward: Basically, we’ve reached 90 countries working with Cloudbeds as an ambassador. You know, at the end of the day, we’re a small company, but we’ve managed to touch all corners of the globe and reach properties and help properties around the world, especially with the accounting integrations. and yeah, we find it just an amazing thing that we can sit on the beach and still help people across the world with our Cloudbeds partnership.
Wassana: I will say that the system is very easy to train the new staff so is the reduction of time to train the staff. It’s easy for me to access the system from anywhere. When i work remotely or sales call ro dealing with a guest. The system is very helpful. Instead of going back to the office, I can access cloudbeds from my phone or tablet so I save time.
Wassana: With the group module, it’s easy for us as a large hotel so we can organize the group, the bills and the rooming. Our team would like to provide the best service and we try to improve each day to give our guests the best experience at Patong Bay Hill.
Edward: I think if we can leverage that technology to take away a lot of the manual admin that goes on behind the scenes at every hotel in the world, the back office work, all these manual processes shouldnt be required really. So I think the next step will be leveraging those technologies so that the team on property can actually spend their time focussing on the guest and improving the guest experience because that’s something AI cant do, is having that face to face connection and that engagement with the guest as they come through the door.
Nancy: Wow, what amazing stories!
Adam: What I love about what The Percentage Company does is they really help our independent properties punching above their weight class. It really is special.
Nancy: Now and that’s only just a small sample of the stories we have to tell. There are countless others and every time I get a chance to speak with a Cloudbeds customer, I always come away inspired by their innovation and their commitment to the art of hospitality.
Adam: How lucky are we to get to work with all of our customers all around the world every day? It’s why we do what we do. Nancy, thank you so much for taking us on a tour around the world.
Nancy: Absolutely, I loved it.
Adam: To everyone watching, thank you so much for continuously pushing the limits and creating new possibilities.
Are you looking to change your hotels PMS? Are you looking to bring your hotel into the 2024 with a new tech stack and need help with implementation? Reach out to The Percentage Company today and find out about our suprisingly affordable packages for PMS integration or indeed our digital sales and marketing packages. Get in touch with our team at The Percentage Company today for your free audit and proposal.
