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The HotelTechInsider podcast interviews the top leaders at the convergence of hotels, travel and technology. Guests include founders, executives, top hoteliers and industry organization leadership. Find all of the episodes at hoteltechreport.com
The type of work will be drastically different, and everybody needs to be able to work and think more strategically and to steer software rather than to use it.
Speaker 2:From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider, a show about the future of hotels and the technology that powers them.
Speaker 3:Today, we're speaking with Philip Amano Directors of Amano Group, a Berlin based hotel operating company. Philip and Mirco walk us through their recent tech stack overhaul, including switching to a new PMS, and they explain how they've transitioned to a contactless check-in experience, which is enabled by their new PMS. And we explore how AI will change the hospitality industry dramatically. Well, thank you both so much for joining us today. Really looking forward to speaking with both of you.
Speaker 3:To get things started, I would love for you to introduce yourself, Tell us a bit about your company, your roles and what you're focused on right now.
Speaker 1:So I'm Philip Amano I am one of the managing directors of the Amano Group. We're a Berlin based hotel operator operating around 1,300 rooms at the moment. Eight hotels in Berlin, one in Munich, one in Dusseldorf, one in Leipzig and one in London. So mostly Germany based, but ventured out a few years ago into The UK. We have two MDs.
Speaker 1:So our CEO is Ariel, who is more focused on the daily operations. And my part is more on the back office and then the expansion side of things.
Speaker 4:So I'm Mirco Weber. Actually, I'm managing the processes in Amano Group. So my job is basically to base the company for the future growth in terms of tech, but also in terms of internal structures, procedures, knowledge base, so that everything has a solid base for the future growth.
Speaker 3:Can you tell me a bit about your properties? Who's your typical guest? I understand they're all urban markets. Are they limited service hotels or full service?
Speaker 1:We call ourselves boutique design hotels. So we have small rooms, bigger and more elaborate public spaces. We are very design focused. We have F and B outlets in most of our properties and are working with normally with separate designers on all our properties. So you can see and feel a red thread through our properties, but they don't look the same.
Speaker 1:We were born here in Berlin, but then went to Dusseldorf rather quickly and then expanded here when we realized that there is a niche that we filled with with our our idea. So strong F and B and then functional, but smaller rooms and limited service. I definitely think so. We always have staff on-site in our hotel concepts. We have we have we spun off basically a few years ago with our sub brand, which is called Amano Home.
Speaker 1:So this is a service department concept. It has bigger rooms. Most of the rooms have kitchenettes in there. And there we have even very limited staffing in the floors. We do have them occasionally staffed from offices, but this is more of a self-service concept.
Speaker 1:We have two of those at the moment. And, yeah, the rest of those are our service boutique science, strong F and B focus.
Speaker 3:Can you talk me through how you're thinking about technology?
Speaker 1:Sure. We experienced a complete 180 in terms of our tech stack. The whole process is now in its third year, I think. Or yeah, it's in its third year. And we've really turned over every zone and switched our TMS, our IVE, our financial ERP.
Speaker 1:So yeah, basically every piece of software that we get used, almost everything, we've switched. But this is definitely better from Mirco. Yeah, tech.
Speaker 4:What we think about tech. I mean, us, tech can be an enabler and can be a disabler. It depends on how it is set up and how everything is integrated. We started about two and a half years ago, we found basically a tech stack which was not really integrated. There were a lot of manual stops within the integrations or between the software solutions which we had in our tech stack.
Speaker 4:And due to this, the processes were a) slow, they took a lot of manual capacity, and they were also heavily subject of mistakes. So that's what we said we need to renew. We rethought once again the PMS, what we used to have, and we changed this. We implemented MUSE into our tech stack as a central PMS solution. But yeah, we also basically changed most of
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 4:components just because we wanted to change them, but we wanted that they fit to each other. So we took a deeper look at the integrations and how they are integrated. We also saw that just because they appear in the marketplace, it doesn't really say a lot because all the integrations differ pretty much between the different PMSs, for example. So we took really a deeper look at how this is integrated. We took a deeper look what it means to us, what kind of functionality we would like to take out of it.
Speaker 4:Because, yeah, the tech is finally an enabler for the automization, right? And that's the goal to automize as much as possible to make the processes streamlined, to make them less subject to human mistakes. Yeah, and that's how we look on tech. It can be an enabler if it's properly set up and also well thought through. If it's not, it can also be a disabler and you can run into serious problems with it.
Speaker 3:I would love for you to walk me through your tech stack. So you mentioned Muse is your PMS. What sort of integrations do you have plugging into Muse? What do you use for some of those supporting systems?
Speaker 4:The main integrations are definitely SiteMinder as a channel manager, because we also have quite a significant stake on OTA business. And also GDS is connected via SiteMinder directly then via the channel manager into Muse. We have Duetto as our RMS integrated into Muse from that side. We have for housekeeping and technical maintenance, we have Flexkeeping, which is now Muse, latency, because it got purchased. Different integrations are our latest decision to run a CRM, we have chosen BookBoost.
Speaker 4:We try to agentic automize workflow behind BookBoost with D3x, which is basically the chatbot, but it goes way beyond being the chatbot. So if due to the integrations to the CRM, to the PMS and also to Flexkeeping as the housekeeping module and technical maintenance module, we streamline tasks to this to those modules. We have the capabilities to integrate up sales directly from guest requests via WhatsApp or per mail. I would say these are the main biggest integrations In terms of events and group sales, we have also Event Temple in our tech stack. So we are making basically the B2B sales, the group reservations and also the entire event business.
Speaker 4:We structure event temple before it gets streamlined to music. I would say this is the main TechSec integration which are connected, let's say, to the PMS.
Speaker 3:Have you seen any business outcomes? What has the impact been? Greater efficiency? Or have you seen a revenue impact? Like, I'm curious.
Speaker 1:This is really hard to tell, especially the business impact, because our concept is running on a very high occupancy. So we're running north of 92 Percent in all of the properties all year long, basically. So there was no impact on the occupancy. But in terms of ADR, so revenue wise, top line, it is hard to say because of how the market evolved during that time. We've had a very strong year of 2024, very strong '24.
Speaker 1:And then when we started rolling out at '25, the market, especially in Germany, cooled down quite a bit, which we felt, which everybody feels, or felt and still feels. So the top line is hard to tell. And on the bottom line, it's also a mix between our pre openings that's starting, that have been ramping up, and then also the projects itself cost a lot of money and resources. But in terms of productivity and quickness and task efficiency, I would say we definitely have improved quite a bit.
Speaker 4:Yeah, especially I would say in the properties because with the switch to the new PMS, we do not only perform the system switch, but also a concept switch. So with being way better able to perform online and kiosk check ins, Ariel basically decided to remove the front desk at the day when we switched to PMS, or the day of the go live. And from that point, we completely switched to a different concept, to the ground floor concept, where the ground floor staff or the former front office staff had way less administrative tasks to do due to the online check-in and the kiosk check-in, which was really streamlined with news. And we could care more about really facing the guests with F and B services. I think from the efficiency point of view, that was definitely a big change.
Speaker 3:Can you talk me through that change a bit more? It sounds like previously you had a more traditional front desk. Did you switch to a fully contactless check-in process?
Speaker 1:We had a very traditional classic front desk situation with operators checking in every guest and checking out every guest. And this was part of the reason of our reasoning why we said we need change here. Because especially if you came into our one of the bigger properties on a Sunday morning around 10:11AM, you always had a big line of people checking out. This is, as we all know, this is a super frustrating experience when there is nothing more to do. Normally bills are paid and I just want to hand back the keys basically, but have to stay in line for ten-fifteen minutes just to check out.
Speaker 1:So this was part of it. And then specifically Ariel decided, let's be radical and tear down the front offices, the front desks literally, and put in kiosks between one and five in our lobbies, depending on the size of the property. And then having ground floor staffs being more hospitable, being able to serve guests to help them check-in if needed or check out, and then being able to not look onto a screen, but look the guests in the eye and actually have a lot of experience.
Speaker 3:Is there a vendor or a piece of software that you've seen on the market that looks really interesting but you haven't adopted it yet? Maybe it's on your wish list or something you're planning for the future?
Speaker 4:Yeah. We are actually looking to automize even more the event and the group business. The group and the event businesses in terms of making a reservation or performing a contract is a 100% manual process. So if you want to have a reserve more than 10 rooms, you have to go through a manual process. And this is something we would like to automize even more that we will make it bookable also via the IDE with automized pricings.
Speaker 4:But also there were contracts come into effect we could improve here way more and we're actually in talks with meeting packages. We would like to integrate this maybe in this triangle which has already a proven track record between Event Temple news and meeting record. So that's what we're actually looking forward. While the rest is reporting and BI based, where we are actually building up a complete data warehouse. The
Speaker 1:thing
Speaker 4:is that literally every application offers now a BI dashboard or a certain kind of a reporting tool, but it's isolated to the solution. So it means you have no harmonized overall reporting, which you can then distribute within the organization also regarding the levels and the access rights. So we try to harmonize this by building a data warehouse and then adding a BI or an automized reporting system on it, where we think this will give us way more clarity of our performance, of our potential chances where we could still perform better. This is one thing that we actually have a main focus on.
Speaker 3:Switching gears, sounds like you both have had varied experience in the industry. What do you think are one or two skills that are important for hotel leaders to have today in order to be successful?
Speaker 1:I think it really helps to have an open mind towards what's going on in tech. And not only in hotel tech or hospitality, but in the tech world itself. Because only then can you actually see what is possible and then try to implement little pieces of what is possible into your own processes. Although the systems, they are open, but they are only open for developers basically, for people who know how to plug into systems and get data out of them. But if you don't understand what's possible, you don't know what you can and learn and how to streamline your processes, to actually make them faster and with less friction and less mistakes along the way.
Speaker 4:I think the biggest challenge is what I saw so far is that the hospitality is still by nature, it's a people business. And the biggest challenge is how to transform a people business into a process driven backbone. Because software can only process, right? Humans are not thinking in processes mainly. But if you want to digitalize and automate the things, the processes in the back end, you need to start thinking also in processes.
Speaker 4:And this is a pretty big challenge to think people orientated in the front end and to think process orientated in the back end organization and how to get that in line. It's challenging for some people, which we also experienced during the past two years. Some adopt pretty fast. Others have really problems with this. Yeah, okay, but we have this and we have that.
Speaker 4:And if the guest wants this and this guest wants this and yeah, okay, might. But we need to find a compromise between individualization and automation.
Speaker 3:Last question, always a favorite. I'm curious to hear what is one thing you believe about technology in the hotel space that your peers or competitors would disagree with? So what's your hot take?
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know if it's something that others don't believe in, because I think as soon as you familiarize yourself with the topic of artificial intelligence then and what it is capable to do today, you can very easily see and where we're coming from two years ago, you can very easily see that in two years time, everything will be drastically different. And I would say either we have the advantage of of having brick and mortar in good locations or in in triple a locations. So this now I can help someone in a worse location to up the how attractive the location is. But that said, if we want to stay where we are or even grow towards compared to our competitors, we need to think AI in everything that we do. Like every little process, we need to think about AI.
Speaker 1:Because I believe most of the processes, of the manual processes that do not involve or even that do involve interaction with the guests, not all of them, but some of them, we will see AI being playing big roles. And therefore, we need the open systems and then we also need to have the mindset to implement.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we discussed this just the last couple of weeks and where we are heading to. And I mean, so far we have a human to software system. So we express something what we would like to have or a need and someone is entering this into the software or is handling the software as trying to tell the software what to do. And yeah, with this agentic AI, I mean, legitimately this will completely resolve. When you think about multi agentic AI where basically agents are discussing a solution which you tell them and they're steering the systems, then this will be a huge game changer.
Speaker 4:The possibilities or the effects, we can only assume so far. But what we can assume is that the change will be drastic and it's coming pretty fast.
Speaker 1:I think everybody needs to start thinking more strategically rather than operationally because a lot of the operational work will be taken over by tech. This is probably the hot take that we have. So a lot of it will be taken on. We will not No one can run a hotel business without people. So we definitely No one has to be afraid that their jobs will be gone in a few years.
Speaker 1:It's just going to be very different. So the type of work will be drastically different and everybody needs to be able to work and think more strategically and to steer software rather than to use it.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 4:Thanks a lot. Thank you.
Speaker 2:That's all for today's episode. Thanks for listening to Hotel Tech Insider produced by hoteltechreport.com. Our goal with this podcast is to show you how the best in the business are leveraging technology to grow their properties and outperform the concept by using innovative digital tools and strategies. I encourage all of our listeners to go try at least one of these strategies or tools that you learned from today's episode. Successful digital transformation is all about consistent small experiments over a long period of time, so don't wait until tomorrow to try something new.
Speaker 2:Do you know a hotelier who would be great to feature on this show, or do you think that your story would bring a lot of value to our audience? Reach out to me directly on LinkedIn by searching for Jordan Hollander. For more episodes like this, follow Hotel Tech Insider on all major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.