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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
We made sure that every review, we'd know what's going on, especially early on to make sure, like, anytime there's a bad experience from what's going on, we know what's going on and how we can fix that situation. And then now it's really maintaining that throughout the process.
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 talking with Janus Krums, the managing director of Bob Hotels, which currently operates one fully renovated former roadside motel in Tallahassee, Florida under the ethos of boutique on budget. If that doesn't sound compelling enough, you'll want to listen to this episode to learn about Bob's intuitive AI phone answering service and smart social media campaign that built brand awareness with a local university. Well, hello, Yanis. Thank you so much for joining us for today's episode of the podcast. I would love to start by hearing a little intro from yourself.
Speaker 3:So if you could please introduce us, tell me your role, the company you work for, and we'll go from there.
Speaker 1:Sounds good. Thanks for having me on. Excited to share the story of Hotels. Yeah. So my name is Janis Krumbs and I'm the managing partner at Bob Hotels Boutique on Budget.
Speaker 1:Our first hotel we just opened actually almost a year ago in Tallahassee, which was a sleep in that we had purchased a year before and did a full renovation of it and created this concept. And so we've created this as the first prototype and now the goal is to expand the brand.
Speaker 3:And do you just manage the one property right now?
Speaker 1:Currently, it's only one, but we're in the process of we have about three right now that we're looking at as prospects, negotiating that trying to find the next one. And so hopefully next time we speak, we'll have a few more, but now that we have one under the belt, I mean, the first six months really was just understanding what's working, what's not, trying to get everything streamlined from an operational standpoint, from a vendor standpoint, all those kinds of things. And so now that we're kind of, you know, almost a year in, now we're having those talks about expansion.
Speaker 3:Can you tell me a bit about what makes your property different than competitors? Can you also explain what boutique on a budget means?
Speaker 1:Sure thing. So, I mean, our inspiration was my wife and I were on a road trip, I think it was during COVID, and we stayed at some of these roadside places, and they were dangerous, they were not that cheap, they weren't clean. And so we just thought like this can't be the state of things roadside. I mean, there's a lot of good products downtown. There just aren't great budget options out there that we thought, especially in that Motel six sleep in type of categories that are, you know, you just want to quickly come in for one night and just feel good about your stay.
Speaker 1:And that was the initial inspiration. We did a little study of what's out there, and we really thought there's a lot of these properties that are owned for ten, twenty years, haven't been updated that much, or they've done the bare minimum, and they just kind of exist. And there's a culture that still uses them, but, you know, by and large, they're kind of you don't know what these owners are going to do with them because they're really kind of lost in some ways. And so we found this property that was built in 'ninety two, needed a lot of work, and it was one of those deals where, you know, it should have probably been deflagged or flagged to something else because it was, you know, in really rough shape and there was really no exit from that owner, right? We were that savior who could come in and actually do something with it because we had a vision of trying to do something, but I don't think anyone else would come in and actually wanna put money in and keep it asleep in, let's say.
Speaker 1:And so we came in and had this idea of like having, first off, we want to have fun design, we wanted to make sure, you know, it's something that actually catches your eye. So the brand, it's memorable, you're gonna remember the name, you're gonna remember the experience. The inspiration to us was CitizenM, Virgin, twenty five Hour Hotel, those type of hotels from Europe. I'm from Latvia originally, my wife's French, so we kind of have a lot of those background from Europe. And we saw that there's a lot of those type of properties in Europe and not a lot in The US, especially in the budget side.
Speaker 1:So that was the initial kind of inspiration. And so then we geared and create the brand around that. So we really want to make sure it can be replicated. So if it's something that can be, you know, now that we have won, we could actually now have a playbook of how do we do this in other locations where let's say, 90% is kind of like, there's a playbook, then if you go to another location, you can kind of create that localized feel around it. We're not gonna go, you know, full graduate where it's gonna be all in on one location.
Speaker 1:That's not gonna be our playbook, but we're gonna be a little bit more than the generic brands that are popping up right now where, you know, you could interchange the names and the logos and you probably wouldn't know the difference. And so that was the initial one. It's gonna be using technologies to make sure that our experience with the guests, the booking experience to the arrival experience, the checkout experience, it is more seamless than a lot of the other options. And then it's gonna be the staff. We're training our staff to really have a different mentality than most budget places, most budget hotels have.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be more high level star rating than what it's expected. And that's the feedback we've gotten so far.
Speaker 3:So I can imagine you're certainly using tech on a different level than the average roadside motel might use it. What would you say is your most critical technology partner right now?
Speaker 1:We're trying to use every vendor that we're using as kind of modern. We were in the system with choice, and I think they haven't updated things in a couple decades. So, to us, we wanted to make sure that, first off, it's intuitive from a user perspective. So, our website's on Webflow, you know, quickly, easy to change. I can edit things really quickly.
Speaker 1:I don't need a developer to make quick changes. Our booking engine, we're using Olive, which is a startup that's a couple of years old, but their whole pitch is trying to eliminate unnecessary steps. So, you should be able to book a room with the goal is three clicks, right? Like we just want to make it as super easy as possible. And the PMS we're using is a stay in touch and it's another very straightforward for our staff.
Speaker 1:And so, those have been the forward facing well, guess Olive is more forward facing than stay in touch, but stay in touch kind of powers the back end obviously. And the other part is really the communication that I mentioned before with guests, because I think that's for us, we need to know if there's an issue with the guests, you know, checking in, whatever's going on, our GM needs to know, our front desk needs to know. And so we use IKEA for text messaging, making sure that there's a pre arrival guide. Once they check-in, there's another text message that comes out telling them about the property and any issues they might have. And so we want to make sure that during that experience, if there is something our GM will see any negative issues and they will reach out directly.
Speaker 1:And that's been super helpful. I mean, over this year we have now on Google over 1,100 reviews. We're rated 4.8 on Google, where we went from, you know, non existent on TripAdvisor to the number two rated and number one value property in Tallahassee in less than a year. And that's really about just kind of surprising our guests because when they come in and they pay usually between $80 and $120 they don't expect much just because of the experiences they might have had in other locations and other type of hotels. And we've been compared to a Disney, a Chick fil A where they really feel like the staff actually cares about the guests.
Speaker 1:And that's been the biggest driver for training and making sure that our employees understand that, that this is not just, you know, you can't have your headphones in and looking at your phone while you're checking somebody. And you know, you gotta make sure you're actually engaging with that person. And it could be just as simple as, you know, how's your day? And you just check them in without, you know, a lot of conversations, but it's making sure that they understand that they actually are being seen. And so those are probably the biggest things that we've kind of emphasized during our operations.
Speaker 3:Talk me through your mentality composing your tech stack. It sounds like you had the unique experience to kind of start from scratch once the Choice systems were out of there. How did you go about shopping for vendors, doing demos? What was your thinking there as you're building your ideal tech stack?
Speaker 1:I mean, as kind of an outsider, my background was in tech but not in hospitality. So I used some contacts that are in the industry. I used, you know, Hotel Tech Report. I used other sites just to kind of understand what's out there and what's recommended, and also try to streamline the process as much as possible. From reservations to, you know, optimizing marketing to messaging, all those kind of things.
Speaker 1:So initially, obviously it starts with the PMS, and so we experimented with conversations with a few of the, you know, the biggest players, the CloudViz, the Muse, the those type of PMSs. I ended up sticking with Stay In Touch, and that's been a very good experience. Their customer service has been great. Their employee experience has been really good, and they're very responsive. And so also from a trainings perspective, it's been very easy for our staff to come in and really understand the systems because they're pretty intuitive.
Speaker 1:If there have been another legacy flag properties, pretty quickly within a couple hours of training, they already know what's going on. So that was number one. And then to me, number two was visibility. So I want to make sure that we can see, you know, a property can be seen properly and that we can market and get out there, especially as a brand new product. So initially we were definitely leaning heavily on the OTAs just because we had no brand equity, nobody knew who we were, so we were making sure that we could at least be seen there and make sure there's a lot of deals out there.
Speaker 1:So that was kind of like our initial push to just get people in the door. That led to revenue management. We actually ended up going with Diamo, and they've been a partner since opening, and they obviously had a little bit of restructuring, but they're coming out of that pretty strong. And they also do digital marketing as well. So you can work with them to push the meta search, the, you know, SEO, SEM, OT, you know, travel ads, all that through their platform, which is pretty nice just to not have to worry about them.
Speaker 1:You can see your performance through their platform as well. And we've been doing really well there once we started going through our after a couple months of visibility, our travel ads were performing north of 30x ROAS and our search, we were 20x, which I think industry standard's about 6x. Those are really the tech stack that we're using now. Really, the first six months, was awareness. I mean, on Expedia, pretty quickly we got recognized as a VIP hotel, actually I think the only one in Tallahassee.
Speaker 1:And so we were, you know, featured prominently on search results. Mean, so all those small things, we made sure that every review we know what's going on, especially early on to make sure like anytime there's a bad experience or what's going on, we know what's going on and how we can fix that situation. And then now it's really maintaining that throughout the process. And another thing that we do is we use Jot forms for our shifts so that every shift we know if there is an issue coming in from the front desk or when anything our GM gets an update every eight hours as well, every shift. So it's like, so that way all the management team, everybody is understanding how what's performing, what's not performing.
Speaker 1:And if there's an issue we need to address, we're all aware of it. So it's kind of hands on, but at the same time, we're now kind of automated a lot of not automated, but like we've created processes in place so that it's not overwhelming. It's just quickly understanding if there's a problem from a staff perspective or from an operations perspective or from property level where we need to maintenance or whatever, we can pretty quickly address it and take care of it.
Speaker 3:So you mentioned the focus on guest reviews. Are you using any reputation management system or how do you and your team ingest reviews, read them, and then perform any appropriate follow-up?
Speaker 1:We use guest review for just an aggregate, and they do a good job of just kind of showing us what's going on. Price point wise, they're really good compared to some of the other legacy companies. So they were kind of a no brainer for what they do and what they from a cost perspective. And then otherwise, we have some templates and things of how to answer questions. Initially, we were very hands on at the management level, but now we've given the reins over a little bit to our staff to be able to answer with a certain Bob Flair.
Speaker 1:If you go on our Google reviews, you'll know what I mean. Just to kind of have some fun there. And so we've created some frameworks that they follow of how to answer. Number one is being respectful, but if there's someone who's being very unreasonable, we might call them out on it. Because as we all know, hospitality has a lot of characters and sometimes, they might not be always right.
Speaker 3:You mentioned for the first two months, actually, hotel opened that you were quite reliant on OTAs, third party channels. Can you talk me through how you built up your direct channel? And if you could share your channel mix as well, what percentage of reservations come direct versus through OTAs?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, we were very heavily on OTAs. I mean, I would probably say we were probably like first few months, 70% probably OTAs. We're now slowly getting to more closer to 50% direct and hopefully fast, you know, climbing that. But really it's gonna be the brand. What we've done is we use the revenue for our CRM and guest communication.
Speaker 1:And so we will do, especially in the summer, initially we thought summer was gonna be very slow, but actually we've been last month we finished at 94% occupied in June, so it was not very slow. So we've done some email marketing, things like that, but it's just been a process of slowly kind of creating this because we really don't have a brand yet that people know about. And so really, people who come through Tallahassee, if they're coming to Tallahassee, typically it's either going to be for FSU or Florida A and M. FSU obviously drives a lot of that, and on the government side drives a lot of it during the beginning of the year usually. And then it's a lot of transient.
Speaker 1:So we will pick up, in a typical day, sometimes up to 40% in one day of guests coming in. We drive everything online. They're coming in as well, obviously. And so that's a massive pickup where they're not really planning it. The only time they're really planning ahead to stay in Tallahassee is graduations, FSU football games, and legislation.
Speaker 1:If there's something big going on, you'll see a lot of, you know, the government work type of bookings. But otherwise, we'll have our base of, you know, people coming in a few days ahead and then day off we'll have a major pickup just because people are driving through for whatever, you know, wherever they're heading to. And so now that we know that, we also are creating our pricing strategies accordingly because we know that we don't really need to drop our prices if we're at 50% because there's a very good chance we might finish at 80 plus percent by the end of the day. And so, like, just because now on Google, we will rank really well because of our rankings through reviews. On the other channels, we are highly ranked as well.
Speaker 1:So now there's that reputation that people can trust that they're getting a good property when they're staying with us. And so any FAST guest, we try now to remarket obviously to them. We'll start engaging them about coming back. But it's been a slow process of getting all that database and kind of like slowly working through that. But mainly we focus on really the paid channel on Google and travel ads as our kind of like getting in front of, but then slowly we're cultivating, you know, hey, there's an event or whatever's going on, or there might be a summer deal for longer stays and we'll do those things.
Speaker 1:But we're still in the experimenting phase right now, seeing what's working. And we were genuinely surprised how much demand we got last month. So we'll see how July will finish up for us. So far it's been pretty strong still, which July typically in Tallahassee is very weak.
Speaker 3:So with such high last minute pickup, how have you handled staffing? If a week in advance when you're putting your shift schedule together, if the occupancy on the books ends up being very different than the day of. And if you could explain a bit more about how your pricing system accounts for that last minute demand.
Speaker 1:Sure. So on the staffing side, we've just seen steady pickup. So we've just added a few more housekeepers. And honestly, we kept them because we haven't had a need to have less hours. We were actually running north of 90%, so we had full staff.
Speaker 1:And we kind of know that I mean, we use Lighthouse for our kind of projection and forecasting, so we can see the demand in town and then we see what we're doing. So that can give us a little bit of a boost there where we know what's going on ahead of time a little bit, but because of how we're performing, the demand in town doesn't really affect us as much because we know we're outperforming the demand. So we're taking the market share from our comp set there. And so we're at full staff right now. And so we just have our crew that we are.
Speaker 1:We thankfully haven't had to decrease hours or, you know, like anyone go, which usually typically you'll have summers will be much softer. So the GM will usually pick up some shifts and things like that, but we have not seen that yet. And typically July is very soft and then mid August will pick up heavily for move in and FSC, you school starting and everyone being back in town. And then on the pricing standpoint, yeah, mean, we just kind of set, like I said, we use Lighthouse and, you know, like I said, Diablo kind of automates that process for us so that I don't have to we have certain rules based on occupancy and then we can kind of set up our floor and ceiling rates. And I'll monitor that and we'll have kind of a understanding where we are and we'll adjust as needed.
Speaker 1:But it's really based off of just our occupancy and then also on the comp set of what's going on, if there's anything if they're up performing. But so far, it's really based on our data just because they aren't adjusting their rates really. You know, some cities you'll see more dynamic price changes. Tallahassee does not do that as often. And so we're the ones doing a lot more of the adjusting because if we see that we have softer demand, we will lower our price, you know, towards the end of the day just to fill it up a little bit.
Speaker 1:But typically, we're looking at it from a percentage basis and then maybe adjusting a little bit. But we try not to once now that we kind of know what we're getting towards the end of the day, we anticipate we will get it. And so we try not to mess with it too much.
Speaker 3:We've talked quite a bit about your current tech stack. I'm curious if there are any vendors or any products on the market that are on your wish list that you haven't implemented but are maybe considering for the future.
Speaker 1:Nothing that really stands out right now. I mean, everything is AI enabled, so who knows where things are going. But for us, I just wanted to get the basics right. Make sure that, you know, someone finds us, gets on the website, it loads quick, it's simple. We've been adding a little bit more social proof on our website to showcase that, a, we're a real hotel, the Bob Hotels is just only one of the, so a lot times people still are very skeptical.
Speaker 1:So the social proof for us is huge. But yeah, for us it's making sure that these basics work and then it's understanding how we can, if we're spending time somewhere that's very time consuming, then I would look for a vendor that could solve that. But right now I think we're in a pretty good spot. It's just understanding, you know, probably the next phase for me is going to be, you know, understanding understanding our budgets to really understand where we can cut some costs. Maybe some of the vendors may be a little bit too much for our property.
Speaker 1:And especially if we know we don't maybe need a certain software to perform at the same level, we're going look at all of those as well just because there's a lot of innovation happening. You know, I'm just seeing every day there's new announcements of different AI tools and their capabilities. And so that's probably pretty interesting. We're experimenting with AI front desk answering service that's initially answering our phone calls. And that's been a very interesting driver for actually direct links to our website because a lot of times people just wanna ask what the rate is, what's going on, where can I book, and you'll get an instant text message to your phone?
Speaker 1:Boom, you can book right there. And that's actually been a really good channel for acquisition of direct bookings that way as well, where that way it frees up our front desk. Because we are running such high occupancy, they don't get that call. And obviously, if the guests choose to have a real person to talk to, they just say that, it's really simple. It's not one of those 15 step processes where you're like, can I just talk to a real person?
Speaker 3:What's the vendor that you're using for the
Speaker 1:We're using GoodCall for that.
Speaker 3:Shifting gears a bit, I'm curious to hear from you, given your kind of fresh perspective on the industry, what would you say are one or two skills or characteristics that someone should have to be successful in hospitality?
Speaker 1:I mean, number one is it's a people business, right? Like I was the GM for a few months in here and you just have to be able to connect with people and enjoy that process. Because if you don't like that process, definitely shouldn't be in hospitality. That's number one for me. You really have to understand because everyone's coming in, there's so many different stories every day coming into your hotel, and you need to be able to kind of have that good relationship with people and the staff because it's, you know, you meet you have it's such a personal thing every day.
Speaker 1:It's, you know, making sure that that's a very good experience. And then, I mean, me, another characteristic really, it's such a dynamic environment too. There's always something new happening from either it could be something on the operational side or it could be a vendor. So you just being able to deal with issues and fires as they come up and be able to kind of like manage that stress in spite of the other one and it changes. I mean, when we took it over as a sleep in, there was different type of stresses and different type of issues that we were running into.
Speaker 1:Now we've tried to elevate this property. You're now creating a really curated experience for people to coming in and they really expect now a little bit something higher level than just a bed. And so you really try to then have a different experience. So it's ever shifting, but that's, I mean, to me, that's a business. You have to kinda adjust on what's going on and you see what the requirements are and you have to address those.
Speaker 3:So thinking about the future of BABA hotels, you mentioned you're interested in growing. What would you say is the goal for the next five years?
Speaker 1:I mean, our goal really is to find partners and other properties that can be, I think, initially converted. I think there's a lot of these type of properties out there that are a little bit older, they might not know what really to do with it, and we're kind of showing the playbook of how to level up an older property. And so for us, it's finding those type of, both from, you know, we're right now trying to acquire ourselves as our group, but we've been approached to potentially franchise this concept or have conversations that way as well. I think initially we probably want to have a few more of these just to be able to have a real playbook of how we want to expand and how we, you know, what tech stacks can be the final one, or at least we know exactly if you open one, to do it efficiently. But those are the plans right now.
Speaker 1:We have two properties that we're looking at in Florida that, you know, would be interesting for us just because they are older and, know, need a lot of work. But I think that's the niche that we're sitting in, where we can come in, have a good acquisition price, and then we have a hopefully a low renovation cost as well. Current environment is a little iffy, but hopefully we can get good price again on this one. And that's how we're approaching it initially to understand this first year was really a lot of questions being answered and then how we want to run this type of property. And now it's really, okay, now that we feel like we have some answers, how do we want to expand?
Speaker 3:Before we wrap up, I'd like to ask this question at the end because sometimes there are some hot takes. Curious, what is one thing you believe about technology in the hotel space that your peers or competitors might disagree with?
Speaker 1:I think being an outsider coming in, I think a lot of the bigger companies in the space will need to really level up. I think a lot of the incumbents just don't have products that aren't that good, or they're priced extremely high for levels that maybe don't make sense for what they actually deliver. Because I've, you know, tested a lot of them and I think that's one of the reasons most of the companies, except for one or two, are startups or very younger companies that we're using just because they try harder. If not the CEO, I can talk to the almost the CEO. I talked to a few of the other incumbents, and I honestly don't think the sales guys knew their own product.
Speaker 1:I think I asked more questions about their product than they knew. And so I think that's probably the biggest thing that I've seen in this industry. You know, coming in and outsider, I think there's a lot of opportunity for younger companies to come in and take market share just from what I've seen so far.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you so much for your time, Janis. It was so great chatting with you and really excited to see where Bob Hotels goes over the next couple years.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Adrian. Thanks for having me
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to Hotel Tech Insider produced by hotel tech report dot 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. 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?
Speaker 2: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.