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Join us for an enriching dialogue with Mickey Creyf, CEO of Travel Experts and BTS Travel. In this thought-provoking episode, Mickey and our host explore the profound impact of technology on the travel industry and the enduring importance of personalization in travel experiences.
As the CEO of Travel Experts and BTS Travel, Mickey brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. Throughout the conversation, he shares insights into how technology has transformed the travel landscape, from AI-driven trip planning to optimizing customer interactions.
Despite the advancements in technology, Mickey emphasizes that travel remains a deeply human experience. With anecdotes and perspectives, he highlights the vital role of personalization and human connection in creating memorable travel journeys.
If you enjoyed this episode, remember to like, subscribe, and share the podcast with your network. Stay tuned for more insightful discussions on hospitality, technology, and human experiences. Thank you for listening!
Timestamps:
[00:03:11] Adapting to Artificial Intelligence.
[00:09:54] Business travel insights.
[00:13:19] Personalized travel experiences.
[00:17:59] Traveling with cultural immersion.
[00:22:43] The evolution of travel agencies.
[00:25:12] Relationship business in hospitality.
[00:30:32] Automation in the hospitality industry.
Quotes:
00:00:13 - "I've never been afraid of technology."
00:14:59 - "And your timeline, et cetera. And then there's a lot of people who don't have time to plan all of this or to be busy with it. So there's a lot of very successful people out there. And if there's one thing that I think a lot of, probably you as well, we're short of time. And time is precious."
00:17:24-00:17:35 - "how do you individualize and how technology plays a role, but also how human elements still plays a role in building out experiences."
00:20:35 - "Sometimes you need to allow people to have that flexibility to split off into groups, maybe, you know, one-on-one or kind of split up and do different things that fit your needs."
00:23:42 - "a classic travel agency is compared kind of like with a newspaper shop that doesn't have a future."
00:26:31 - "Yeah. I mean, it's a relationship business, right? Like hospitality, you see this, not just in travel, but all hospitality, you know, it's a people business and technology."
00:31:41-00:31:51 - "Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's why I'm going to exist. We actually, our unification platform is where we help hospitality industry, you know, create integrations to do that and fit into their accounting so they can do less manual, more creative tasks. Like that's actually our whole ethos. I love that you brought that up. It's like where automation, where technology can help every industry across the board. It's amazing."
Connect:
BTS Travel Belgium: https://www.btstravel.be/
Mickey Creyf: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mickey-creyf-5170654/
Mickey Creyf: mickey@btstravel.be
Omniboost: https://omniboost.io/
Rob Napoli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robnap/
Rob Napoli: https://www.robnapoli.com/
Show Produced by: Niranjan Deshpande (Nick), Broken Frames Studio, www.brokenframesstudio.com
Creators & Guests
What is Hospitable?
Hospitable is a podcast that discusses how to make hospitality MORE human through technology.
Hospitable focuses on discussing the leading challenges facing the hospitality industry and to explore the latest trends, technologies, and best practices that are shaping the industry. Each episode features interviews with hoteliers, restaurateurs, chefs, industry analysts, and other experts who share their insights and experiences on topics such as customer experience, sustainability, innovation, staffing, and more.
Hosted by Rob Napoli
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:10:04
Kyle McCaig
As a kid, I would sit and look at sports result books and be like, oh. In 1901, Celtic beat Vale of Leven in the Scottish Cup final. So now it's just doing it in a professional environment.
00:00:10:06 - 00:00:16:06
Rob Napoli
And I should take you to Vegas. When that problem came to you and you started digesting it. What was that initial reaction?
00:00:16:08 - 00:00:28:20
Kyle McCaig
How do you even remotely start that? Okay, well, you know what? I'm not going to be bored, which is the bane of my existence. A lot of the times it's like, hey, here's the problem as well. Fine go and solve it. This was a case of nobody even knows what the problem is.
00:00:28:21 - 00:00:33:15
Rob Napoli
Data unification, obviously is very important. You try to unify and why? What's the end result?
00:00:33:20 - 00:00:39:16
Kyle McCaig
The first phase is always understanding what data you have there. And then the next phase is okay. And how do we get it?
00:00:39:18 - 00:00:47:05
Rob Napoli
Data tell a story. So getting the snackable I love the word snackable right. It's like can you understand what is actually going on into the business?
00:00:47:07 - 00:01:06:16
Kyle McCaig
An episode where Homer becomes a vigilante and he's interviewed and says, oh, people can come up with a statistic to prove anything. 40% of all people know that. And it's the same if you just provide people all data, just look into it until they find the piece they want.
00:01:06:18 - 00:01:31:21
Rob Napoli
We are back for another episode of hospitable, and today it's kind of fun. This is going to be, I think, a very, I don't know, fun discussion on a topic that some people throughout their listening are going to absolutely love. Something like, what the hell is this? but my guest today is Kyle McCaig. He is the director of technology for MCR which is the third largest property management company in the United States.
00:01:31:23 - 00:01:56:19
Rob Napoli
It is previous lives. He's ran his own company as a consultant. He's worked at big companies. He's worked at small companies all in the IT field and somehow ended up in hospitality. and then and his role in the hospitality got thrown a curveball of a big problem. we have 180 something hotels that. Yeah, 180 hotels. And we want our data to be unified go.
00:01:56:24 - 00:02:02:03
Kyle McCaig
Pretty much. Yeah. Which that's about. Right.
00:02:02:05 - 00:02:18:23
Rob Napoli
So that's we're gonna talk about today is this challenge of data unification because we know and it's kind of a hot topic in hospitality is especially with mergers, acquisitions, all these hotels, all these brands is how do you unify data. And you have multiple PMS sources. The average hotel uses eight to 8 to 10 cloud based systems.
00:02:19:00 - 00:02:23:24
Kyle McCaig
It’s whole host cloud based systems. A lot of them where I'm from.
00:02:24:01 - 00:02:38:07
Rob Napoli
Well, we're going to get there average restaurant uses 5 to 6, 7 cloud based systems. And then in the states, specifically, we have a lot of, on prem legacy users, which is the bane of our existence.
00:02:38:12 - 00:02:39:15
Kyle McCaig
Yeah.
00:02:39:17 - 00:03:00:24
Rob Napoli
So, yeah. So when I get into this process of data unification and talk about what it means to unify data and some of the challenges faced and how you're tackling those challenges, at MCR, because I think it's really cool how you've been able to approach it. When I came and visited you and you literally on a whiteboard had all of your systems and with your back to it, we're just naming all of it.
00:03:01:00 - 00:03:13:04
Rob Napoli
I was just like, this is fucking intense. So talk about the product. When that problem came to you and you started digesting it, what was that initial reaction to that curveball?
00:03:13:06 - 00:03:38:09
Kyle McCaig
It's a good one. part really like, how do you even remotely start that and part. Okay, well, you know what I'm not going to be bored, which is the bane of my existence. As soon as I'm bored, I know I'm struggling like, at that point, and trying to work out a lot of the times, it's like, hey, here's the problem.
00:03:38:09 - 00:04:03:09
Kyle McCaig
It's well-defined. Go and solve it. There may be no solution, and that might take a long time. This was a case of nobody even knows what the problem is other than there's a problem. Yeah. And that was interesting. So the vast majority of the first, however many months was let's go find out what data we have. Yeah. Where exists, who has it.
00:04:06:00 - 00:04:33:22
Kyle McCaig
Legally. Do we even own it? Like what's important data? What's data that exists but is utterly irrelevant. And not only should we not bother trying to get it together, we should stop paying for whatever it is generating it and. I've worked in hospitality on the digital side eight, nine years ago, and since then have been in multiple different industries.
00:04:33:22 - 00:04:43:05
Kyle McCaig
But the industries have generally been modern, I guess as a or as an overview topic word for it.
00:04:43:07 - 00:04:45:10
Rob Napoli
APIs. in the cloud.
00:04:45:12 - 00:05:16:05
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. And then like the vast majority of you're working with, it's either a startup which doesn't have a whole lot of debt in terms of data or technology, but also doesn't have a lot of like unknowns because someone was there at the start. So they may have at least a little bit of tangential knowledge about it. In this case, we're a company who okay, the company's been around 20, 30 years in a few different guises and start, but some of the hotels have been around for 50 years.
00:05:16:05 - 00:05:46:05
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. And a lot of the systems have been around since 250 A.D. Like, I don't know, some of these things. some of the modern ones look like they're from wargames, like. Yeah. So a lot of it was just and I've since then I've met at various different conferences and things like that, people who have legitimately, created companies and their job is data detection, essentially.
00:05:46:05 - 00:06:13:00
Kyle McCaig
And like, oh, you were doing great two years ago. Like, because now I don't know how much you're going to find, like, we can do a little project together, but they're finding 3 or 4 sources as opposed to 80 sources. That would have been helpful. and then the other big challenge is that if you're working with startups or data companies, they're set up with one of the core tenants being provide data to the people who need it, as well as security.
00:06:13:02 - 00:06:27:13
Kyle McCaig
When we're working with legacy and brand companies, it's not that they're unwilling necessarily to provide data, and a lot of times it's your data. Of course, they're willing to give it to you, but they were not ever built in a way where that was a core tenant.
00:06:27:15 - 00:06:43:17
Rob Napoli
I mean, that's a really important piece is that the older systems weren't like when you got on a legacy system, you were going to be there forever. Like that was not really I thought of, well, what happens if they change and how does that data get transferred? What does unification look like? You know, a PMS is a PMS is a PMS.
00:06:43:17 - 00:07:00:22
Rob Napoli
But you and I both know and most people that listen to this show know that it's not. I mean, yeah, that's the same functionality, the same thing, but the way that the data gets spit out, the way that it gets mapped into its accounting platform, the way that you leverage that data at the line level to the executive level, all makes a difference, I think.
00:07:00:24 - 00:07:08:04
Rob Napoli
Yeah. When you start thinking of 80 plus different source systems, that gets very overwhelming very quickly.
00:07:08:06 - 00:07:36:18
Kyle McCaig
For sure. And a lot of the time it was also it was either built for a hotel management company, so, you know, a Hilton Marriott or a large property management where everything was going to be the same. Yeah. I don't think the concept was ever even considered that it would be. Almost like a franchise owner. Yeah. Who may have multiple across, which is now common.
00:07:36:20 - 00:07:58:04
Kyle McCaig
Very common, but very few of these systems there wasn't even, you know, the back of somebody's mind when they were designing it. So it was just, hey, we need somewhere for this information to be that isn't paper or, you know, a book of hopefully the guest name and how much they paid. And then it gets lost and then you have no record.
00:07:58:06 - 00:08:24:10
Kyle McCaig
So they were solving a problem and they did some of them did better than others. Some of them are quite good. Some of them were terrible from the start. but a lot of them have kind of been victims of their own success where they worked. Well. Yeah. So they allowed super growth in usage, meaning that it's then very difficult to resolve these kind of new modern problems come across.
00:08:24:12 - 00:08:56:01
Kyle McCaig
Because if you've got a PMS, runs 200 hotels, you can come up with a new hotel PMS and implement it. And it's a little annoying if you're doing it for 25,000 of hotels, that's a lot of times the concept is you can't they don't think they can. So you run into that fairly major issue and all there is at best kind of Band-Aids or like quick fixes or cowboy code just put in place and like, oh, this will get you what you want.
00:08:56:01 - 00:09:04:07
Kyle McCaig
And you're like, not really doesn't it gets me like a screenshot of a report like that's really not helpful.
00:09:04:09 - 00:09:24:16
Rob Napoli
And you think about like 180 plus hotels with any, as you said, different brands. you know, MCR has some really cool hotels and brands out of their under their umbrella from Marriotts to Hilton's to, you know, the infamous I love the TWD hotel here at JFK. and now expanding internationally with, Aladdin. Right?
00:09:24:18 - 00:09:26:12
Kyle McCaig
Yeah, the BT tower
00:09:26:14 - 00:09:26:22
Rob Napoli
Yeah the BT tower.
00:09:26:22 - 00:09:34:18
Rob Napoli
So, you know, it's really, exciting, but also like, okay, how do we process all of that?
00:09:35:23 - 00:09:49:19
Rob Napoli
It's something that I think, you know, from us being a problem solver is, I think that's is definitely fun for you. And the way that you're whether like when we're in the room together and you had was it like 85 different systems. And I think you know we went through and you're like this connects to this and this all out of your brain.
00:09:49:19 - 00:09:59:08
Rob Napoli
I was like, there's no way that this man is doing this right now. But you it just I'm sure you like it so much that it's just like second nature. You probably mumble it in your sleep at night.
00:09:59:10 - 00:10:18:14
Kyle McCaig
There's that but there's also, honestly, like, as a kid, I would sit and look at sports result books and be like, oh. In 1901, Celtic beat Vale of Leven in the Scottish Cup final two nil and McBride scored both of them. And now I know that's true. Like I still remember this. So now it's just doing it in a professional environment.
00:10:18:16 - 00:10:19:19
Rob Napoli
And I should take you to Vegas.
00:10:19:23 - 00:10:30:01
Kyle McCaig
Yeah but you know, you tell me, like, you ask who I was in a meeting with three weeks ago, and I, like, there was a meeting three weeks ago, so, you know, it's. No, it's true.
00:10:30:06 - 00:10:51:02
Rob Napoli
Very true. So, you know, and I think this is really cool. And, you know, being by the MCR you know, Omniboost has been brought in to help with the data unification, which is I think we talk about all the time doing data unification platform. And we've embarked on this, kind of journey together. What you got out there, say the heavy lifting done as far as, like trying to understand your source systems.
00:10:51:04 - 00:11:13:21
Rob Napoli
So as you look at MCR and 180 hotels and you're trying to make heads and tails of the data, what is the like? Data unification obviously is very important, today's society and ecosystem. But it's really easy to say what actually what are you try to unify and why. What's the end result and how is that going to better the hotel operations?
00:11:13:23 - 00:11:17:11
Rob Napoli
At the front line, but also at the executive level where MCR sits.
00:11:17:13 - 00:11:49:05
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. And it's in some ways the challenges unique for the industry. And in some ways it's very similar to similar challenges I've had in other industries, in other companies where the first phase is always understanding what data you have out there, and then the next phase is okay, and how do we get it? And then the third one and the unification piece of it is, and how do we normalize it or make it even remotely helpful.
00:11:49:07 - 00:12:21:10
Kyle McCaig
And a term that gets thrown around in hospitality is stratification. but people will often get I guess they'll miss the big picture of, well, why does it matter? Like if you're not going to use the data when you've got it, then it was a fool's errand and. There's, we're talking before this about The Simpsons and there's, an episode where Homer becomes a vigilante and he's interviewed on their equivalent of Fox News and says, oh, statistics can be used to prove anything.
00:12:21:10 - 00:12:48:07
Kyle McCaig
68% of people know that. And it's the same if you just provide people all data, just look into it until they find the piece they want. Yeah. So, and people who've, you know, listened in the past will of, hopefully listen to the one with Jacob Messina where I was in a meeting with him and our, CEO Tyler Morse, where he used the term snackable for content.
00:12:48:09 - 00:13:07:03
Kyle McCaig
And it's a term that's being used for, you know, your TikToks and your reels, and it is, you think a 3 or 4 minute instructional video used to be like the height of brilliance, but he didn't have to go through a 500 page manual. Now people have got the attention span of a gnat, so it's 15 seconds.
00:13:07:05 - 00:13:42:11
Kyle McCaig
So a lot of what we're doing is not just getting data and then providing an excel doc of thousands of pieces of data, millions of pieces of data, which isn't actually helpful unless you're an excel wizard and a data analyst. Yeah. It's okay. Get it, normalize it, and then provide the actual data and the trends and, reporting and sometimes visualization is what you need to the people actually need it so that they can actually make data driven decisions.
00:13:42:14 - 00:14:03:01
Kyle McCaig
People talk about it all the time, but what they actually mean is just backing up what they already decided with any data they can find to support it. We don't want to do that. We want to be like, okay, you're a GM. Here is how your property did in revenue. Here's how your property did in expenses. Your, CEO here's how your entire company did.
00:14:03:03 - 00:14:27:19
Kyle McCaig
Here's some problem areas you're in charge of dealing with utilities for 150, 180, 500 franchises or whatever happens to be. Here's all of that information and some red lines and some green lines and things like that. So that's what we've been trying to do. And we're at various stages. Basically, as soon as we find data, it's like, wait, you have an open API?
00:14:27:21 - 00:14:49:08
Kyle McCaig
All right. 20 minutes later we have the data and we can start sending it out. Oh, you can maybe send us an excel doc that's unstructured. Okay. Maybe in six months we might have something good here. But the end goal is really getting the skill positions that I like to call it, the information they need to do their job best.
00:14:49:08 - 00:14:50:03
Rob Napoli
Yeah.
00:14:50:05 - 00:15:03:05
Rob Napoli
And I think you hit on a couple key topics here. So kind of break it down. But I think it's easy to talk about buzzwords in the industry, data unification, data driven decisions I mean buzzwords for the last half decade, if not a full decade.
00:15:03:07 - 00:15:04:23
Kyle McCaig
And in every industry.
00:15:04:23 - 00:15:26:20
Rob Napoli
Yeah, yeah. But you make a good point about data can tell a story, and you can leverage data in multiple ways to tell the story you want it to. so getting the snackable, I love the word snackable, right. It's like, you know, quick, look, whatever that may that that parameter may be, can you understand what is actually going on with your business?
00:15:26:22 - 00:15:47:13
Rob Napoli
And, you know, we see it from sales functions all the time. There's always these Salesforce KPIs or whatever your CRM KPIs, reporting structure, the market is a good process is when you look at that, can you understand how the business is doing, how your reps are doing and with a quick glance, understand what your pipeline looks like. If you can't, then why do you have it right?
00:15:47:13 - 00:16:09:21
Rob Napoli
And that's like a watered down, singular version. Expand across 180 hotels, different brands or systems and different functions. And that's what I think. I mean, that's why I love this project. And obviously I get to be on the inside of it working with you as we help with unification, with helping with data like data warehouse, the automation AI tools that we're using to source that data, you know, taking those big sources of unstructured data.
00:16:09:21 - 00:16:37:03
Rob Napoli
And what we do well is creating structured, unstructured data into different flows. so it's been interesting to see, but I think it's really impactful how you kind of highlighted this, the buzzword and all these tools that kind of show it versus the corp, why are we doing it? And the why behind it is very important when we talk about data and how we want to leverage it because of its data for data, say, well, that makes no sense.
00:16:37:09 - 00:17:07:03
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. And you can see it doesn't even have to be a professional or a mass level. I, see like patterns and do things in real life all the time. Be like, oh, weird. And maybe just 30s goes through my head. And then, you know, ten years later I go, hang on. But, your local power or gas company or whatever, you know, and long hours PSG they'll be like, hey, here's your usage.
00:17:07:03 - 00:17:27:03
Kyle McCaig
And I'll be like, you provided me loads of data for absolutely no reason, but what am I as the person who has to pay the bills? Not a choice. Yeah. What am I going to do? Then they start being like, oh, you could do x, y and z. I'm like, okay, well now there's a point to what you provided.
00:17:27:03 - 00:17:54:14
Kyle McCaig
It's like, oh, try this to reduce your power. And okay, I can see where you're going from here. And it got a little better there. And so when you extrapolate that to a large organization or even a small organization, that piece is often missing. Yeah. Where it's just an especially if you're talking about like an on property leader, you know, a GM at one property, they're expected to be the jack of all trades.
00:17:54:14 - 00:18:13:03
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. But they're also expected to be the master of all of those trades. And that's impossible. And a lot of times it's like, oh, here's all of the information you need. And they're like, I don't have time to analyze this. I don't necessarily know what it means. I don't have time to go and research all of this means or even know where to go to find that out.
00:18:13:05 - 00:18:51:14
Kyle McCaig
So again, it's got to be targeted for a reason. You shouldn't be trying to lead someone down in certain ways because of the data, but you should be like, here is this snapshot that you need to see. Yeah. And one of the kind of challenges, one of the things we initially looked at when we're trying to do this is there are no companies out there who claim to unify all the data and provide it to you, but they're putting their filter and their spin on it and not going to name them, because didn't really have great experiences with any of them.
00:18:51:14 - 00:19:15:02
Kyle McCaig
But the ones that are out there that listeners will probably know of have conned people into coming to use these where they're just like, hey, is this, this and this? And that's the approach we didn't want to take is is it an improvement on having 80 different sources for 100 and however many as at the time, properties? Yes.
00:19:15:04 - 00:19:38:02
Kyle McCaig
But it doesn't actually solve the problem. All of a sudden you're now giving people dashboards of information they still don't understand. Yeah. So our approach was okay, well, let's own our own data and bring in a partner who will work for us and with us to get what we actually want, which is a single source of data that's normalized in numerous different ways.
00:19:38:04 - 00:19:47:11
Kyle McCaig
And then we can work on automation and reporting and to people who actually need it, access to the data in a usable format.
00:19:47:13 - 00:20:06:07
Rob Napoli
Hi, we're Omniboost. No, I mean, a little bit of tongue in cheek, but, you know, that's, I think a really, I like I always said of what the mission is of our data insights team and why we actually like, show whole data insights and data projects team, which you've obviously worked very closely with and built out.
00:20:06:07 - 00:20:37:02
Rob Napoli
And I think the intriguing part and the thing that I love and I've, you know, I get to talk to a lot of these, really cool hoteliers and getting in this space, you I think I joined the hospitality space. We, we joined about the same time. Yeah. In the last year. Really, full on hospitality and a different way that we're in our roles and talking about these different challenges and really around this like everyone's like data, data. data and it's the one, you know one tool, the other one, it's like well they the one tool to throw them all at the end of the day comes down
00:20:37:02 - 00:20:56:14
Rob Napoli
To your accounting system and making sure your books are in order, and then everything else works back off of that. Which is why we started those with getting all the accounting system in the stack and then built backwards with this really cool thing about the data piece that I love talking about, as I call. That's all good and all, but what is the reason that you need X?
00:20:56:16 - 00:21:20:04
Rob Napoli
When you start asking that question, that's where you start to see people are like, well, we need it because reporting okay. What exactly do that report for? What is that piece of data? What is that report doing to make your job easier? Yeah, what is that doing to make your job more efficient? What is that. And I think you're solving that challenge at that level is really cool.
00:21:20:06 - 00:21:31:09
Rob Napoli
So when you think about solving that and that's the challenge we're trying to you're trying to solve the what we're working on. What was your biggest fuck moment. Like, oh shit. What did I get myself into.
00:21:31:11 - 00:22:07:10
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. So It's an interesting one because the. What I discovered in a lot of times is that we're like, maybe three people who are the recipients of whether it was a report, raw data, an email that was irrelevant, garbage of somebody's mind that actually knew what this was for. And it was like, oh, great, I got all this information and they're like, oh, cool.
00:22:07:10 - 00:22:19:21
Kyle McCaig
I look at this, I look at this, I look at this, I'll fire off an email to this person because there's an action item that's good to know. I'll file this here. Other people were looking at it, and when you ask them why, they were like, oh well it gets sent and the CEO sends it, so I guess I should read it.
00:22:19:24 - 00:22:55:16
Kyle McCaig
You're like, well, how is that remotely helpful? And it's more like protectionism rather than actually trying to use it and improve. Yeah. not criticizing any ways of doing work I anything it's just not how my brain works necessarily. I I'll look at some things get sent to maybe like irrelevant delete. Yeah. Which I'm hopeful that anything I've worked on and or sending out people aren't doing that because either I've messed up, that person shouldn't be getting it.
00:22:55:16 - 00:23:32:13
Kyle McCaig
And in which case, you know, they're wrong distribution lists or recipient lists. So one of the biggest challenges was first to understand who needed what and what the end result was for. And a lot of the time, asking the person who received it wasn't helpful. Yeah, but once we managed to kind of dive past some of those and like, okay, why does all of the data need to come from PMS is about revenue and expenses and taxes and the other things that, like hospitality books and PMS need to include.
00:23:32:15 - 00:23:59:01
Kyle McCaig
And once we finally worked out the key ones of those, it was really what is our bottom line is the number one is, are we making money at each hotel? Are we making money as a company? And that then filters down to oh, we're not here. Yeah. Is there data that can provide answers to why? Or at least enough where they can look at it, analyze and go, oh, that's why we need to spend more on marketing.
00:23:59:01 - 00:24:22:02
Kyle McCaig
We need to cut costs and we're over staffing or whatever happens to be. And what it really came down to is the biggest I will have. How the fuck do we fix that was our accounting system, wasn't up to what we needed to be, didn't have all the information in it, and was either designed for a much smaller company or just not designed.
00:24:22:08 - 00:24:52:23
Kyle McCaig
Yeah, depending on various different use cases. And it's easy to say in hindsight like it's that's 2020, whereas trying to envision what you're gonna need 15 years down the line is very difficult. But that was our biggest issue where we were like, is the information in our current accounting system accurate? Yeah. The closest to, affirmative answer I got to that was probably I'm like, what the.
00:24:53:00 - 00:25:21:14
Kyle McCaig
And so honestly we're switching. Yeah. Everything our accounting system does and everything it works. And it had to go straight back to the raw data, how it's currently processed, where it goes to how is reporting, is the information that certain people are getting remotely accurate. You know. And how do we fix that. So it's going into an accounting system that actually works and has the right information.
00:25:21:16 - 00:25:56:05
Kyle McCaig
And day by day we find, oh, well, there's revenue coming that is not accounted for anywhere. Yeah. Or bills or what happens to be. And that was the real challenge which I had to essentially go and work out what hospitality financial accounting was and how it works and do all this kind of stuff. And it's like it's a I still, you know, I am no accountant by any means, but I now have an understanding of how it works and how it definitely should not work.
00:25:56:07 - 00:25:57:20
Kyle McCaig
And which got us somewhere.
00:25:57:20 - 00:26:05:19
Rob Napoli
Yeah, that's a pretty big I mean, huge, huge kind of oh shit moment and one that I think is big.
00:26:05:21 - 00:26:31:07
Rob Napoli
Obviously I know the kind of solution and the fix and what we're working on. And I think it's when it's all said and done going to be much better. And I think and I really like how you said this, right, is when you started to do data driven results, it's easy to think of, okay, I need and you see these systems that are like, oh, this is reporting to help with optimization of X, optimization of X is great if your base layer is there.
00:26:31:09 - 00:26:49:24
Rob Napoli
And, you know, I used to run a sales agency back in the day. So I always kind of take it back to sales. What one of the things is my best kind of base layer. But one of the things when I was working with a lot of companies, when I was working as a consultant, I'd go into these companies and look at their sales machine, what they are using, their data, how they're leveraging a CRM and building out kind of pipelines.
00:26:50:01 - 00:26:58:18
Rob Napoli
Right. And as a sales person myself who hates to track everything, bane of my existence.
00:27:00:06 - 00:27:21:21
Rob Napoli
As we don't have the raw data correctly populated in your system, optimization of X means absolutely nothing. And so many times the biggest issues with most organizations on their sales side is that they either did not set up their CRM properly, did not pipe that properly, or have their sales team not leveraging the to power the tools that their base data is not right.
00:27:21:21 - 00:27:38:06
Rob Napoli
So the reports are off and the reports are telling a false story. Yeah. And I think the cool thing that you've done is you went back to okay, all right, profitable or not. And then it's okay. Let's build out how do we solve that problem? Where are we not profitable? Why? And then once we figure that out, it's okay.
00:27:38:08 - 00:27:52:08
Rob Napoli
What can we what kind of data can we give them to? Hey, this is our path of profitability. And those are the kind of things that I know you're working on, the challenges that you're solving, and I think that is what the initiative needs to do more of. It's not just optimize data. We even use data unification platform.
00:27:52:08 - 00:28:16:13
Rob Napoli
But Omniboost is a data unification platform. But I always have to take a step back. What does that actually mean and why? Yeah, right. Because data unification is a buzzword. We are a data unification platform and there's a whole reason story behind it. But you have to go back to that why. Right? So something and I think it's really important why I love chatting with this topic is it took you a long time to figure out the why of it all and the crux through all the data and all the systems and then which to us systems can we remove?
00:28:16:13 - 00:28:36:03
Rob Napoli
Which systems can be replaced? How do we merge all that? You know, what do we do with our data to own the data? And then how do we keep like a base level and a manipulative level and all those things. Right. We can get super technical. We're not going to. The problem is if you're out there and when you're setting up your PMS, when you're setting up your accounting systems, you're setting up your point of sale.
00:28:36:05 - 00:28:54:01
Rob Napoli
You need to have that base level understanding of what we need and why set that up right the first time that was, say, so many problems that our support teams is down the line. All these things. So I think that's a really cool way to look at it. And it's kind of fun to hear how your brain works on it when you weren't like by nature, hospitality.
00:28:54:03 - 00:29:01:24
Rob Napoli
You and I didn't come in this industry growing up in industry like some other, you know, folks did. I think that also gave us fresh eyes to solve a very different problem.
00:29:02:04 - 00:29:30:24
Kyle McCaig
Sure. Yeah. There's. And then this isn't unique to Australia. Industry, like any industry I've been in, is you need people who are that industry expert so that they know all the bells and whistles and the dirty secrets of how it works and how it doesn't work. And is the person who gets an answer quicker than your research will, but they also then have the challenge of trying to think outside the box when they only know the box.
00:29:30:24 - 00:29:55:04
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. like, you know, it's the dog that finally gets out of the house that it's been trying to do for years and then goes, I don't know where I'm going, so I'll just stay here. Yeah. You're like, come on. And it the CRM point of view is, is the one I've seen so much where when I was kind of consulting and things of that I.
00:29:55:06 - 00:30:17:11
Kyle McCaig
A lot of it work was through like word of mouth personally. Oh you worked on this. Any change in anything but this one? Like I can work it out and then you do like a three month project. And at one I was basically going in like, oh, we brought in salesforce. It just doesn't it made a difference. I'm like, congratulations, you've paid a lot of money for a fantastic platform for no reason.
00:30:17:13 - 00:30:37:17
Kyle McCaig
Not saying it won't be the reason you want and not no slight on salesforce, but you never worked out what you were trying to do. Somebody has magpies you where you like move shiny object. Let's go and get that and spend money that's going to improve things like it might, but you haven't set it up properly and isn't working and people don't know how to use it.
00:30:37:19 - 00:31:00:24
Kyle McCaig
It's not changing anything from whatever your old process was like. Changing process or implementing process for process sake changes nothing and in a lot of ways makes it worse because people then stop stressing or stop remembering the things they had to before because like, oh, Salesforce is starting. Like, how did it get it? Did you put it in then?
00:31:00:24 - 00:31:31:03
Kyle McCaig
It doesn't happen. Yes. And that's why the last piece of everything we're trying to do is automation, where as soon as you're relying on humans to make the machine work. Through multiple phases, they don't understand is where it's going to fail. You want humans to be the start point and the end point, yes. And ideally nothing else. Unless it's like pushed to act.
00:31:31:04 - 00:31:53:21
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. Confirmed. Like, yeah. If you do it that way. With the things that can be automated, you're freeing up their time, their expertise, their brainpower to do the things that can work that way. You know, and a hotel space that's dealing with guests. You can't automate how a guest is going to be. Honestly, at a lot of hotels, it's the same issues you'll visit.
00:31:53:21 - 00:32:13:11
Kyle McCaig
But you know, the way that the front desk agent deals with Linda, deals with K, deals with Vikram is going to be different. Yeah, you can't necessarily automate that, but I can automate how you get the data about the person so that when they come and ask you the question about their bill, it's right there. Yeah.
00:32:13:13 - 00:32:41:04
Rob Napoli
I think that's super, super important. And all these things is understanding like the why and mapping out first, like you have to do the manual process to really figure out automation like automation is great. Automation is supposed to make things quicker, but it's not supposed to replace things, right? Like it's supposed to set you up where you can have scalable, repeatable processes to make things more efficient and better and better experiences.
00:32:41:04 - 00:32:47:10
Rob Napoli
But if it's not properly mapped out and properly handled, that it's automation for automation sakes it never, ever works.
00:32:47:10 - 00:33:08:17
Kyle McCaig
And or if you automate something that doesn't work, you know, like congratulations, you're now doing it wrong faster. Yeah, it's not actually bad. It's like, no, I mean, that's what I was at, a roundtable a month or so ago on generative AI where so many people were just saying like, oh, we're investing in general AI because it basically FOMO.
00:33:08:19 - 00:33:20:01
Kyle McCaig
And I'm like, you have no real use case. And it's not actually solving a real world problem. You just don't want to be left behind. Yeah. Good luck wasting all of your R&D budget. Yeah.
00:33:20:03 - 00:33:44:05
Rob Napoli
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about, you know, Omniboost where we're leveraging some AI tools and we obviously do a lot of automation. Yeah. but all of our automation came from years of manual work, right. Like going through that process and doing all that. And, you know, if you talk to some of our early support reps, they're like, yeah, we used to manually do some of this stuff because we were we knew that we always wanted to automate it, and that's what we were built off of as automation.
00:33:44:07 - 00:34:06:20
Rob Napoli
But in order to build the automation logic, do the manual logic, and I think that is such an impactful piece. And, you know, I want you I love that you use the front desk kind of agent, experience because the guest experience to the point and what you'll see is when hoteliers and management companies and hospitality groups have the right stacks in place and they empower the actual hotel.
00:34:06:20 - 00:34:21:21
Rob Napoli
The end of the day, we're looking at like, you know, obviously you have your KPIs for the executive level, right? That you're CEO sees in looking at the overall big picture. But end of the day for hotel to be profitable, well run, hospitable.
00:34:21:23 - 00:34:49:24
Rob Napoli
Is do they have the systems in place? Do they have the process of where are they empowered to do the job they need to do? And when you can simplify those things and make it easy for them to be having these conversations, they win every time. And that's where the data unification really matters. In an organization where you have 180 plus hotels with different brands and different franchises and whatever, but you want to create experience of, you know, you said at MCR hotel
00:34:50:01 - 00:35:16:10
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. And I think part of the challenge is also the communication around it. Yeah, a lot of people hear automation in the same way they hear AI or robotic or, you know, whatever buzzword or, tech word is, is used and saying all they're trying to do is save money and replace jobs. I'm not gonna pretend that isn't the case.
00:35:16:10 - 00:35:45:17
Kyle McCaig
In some places. And that, again, is cross-industry. But. At least the way I'm approaching a lot of it is it's not from that being the purpose, the real use case is think of it from the front line person. You're a head housekeeper? Yeah. How can we track? The rooms need to be cleaned. Whether it's done where my staff are.
00:35:45:17 - 00:36:16:15
Kyle McCaig
Are they turning up who's who's on the roader? and. Do they have all the inventory they need to be able to do their job? Yeah. Here's lots and lots of bits of paper. Here's an Excel spreadsheet. Here's 20 emails. Not really helping them do their job. So all of the challenges and all the complaints that person will have are still going to continue.
00:36:16:16 - 00:36:44:08
Kyle McCaig
You put in something like a system or a tool or an application that helps them count inventory and auto order. Yeah. And you're doing that based on data from not just one hotel, but from all of the hotels in comparable markets and comparable brands and quality level and size, all items that we are trying to collect in our centralized data, it makes our job easier.
00:36:44:10 - 00:37:07:17
Kyle McCaig
It we're not trying to fire them and put, you know, a robot that you see in like stop and shop, they're going around cleaning. You're literally just trying to be, hey, you no longer have to now be an expert in excel to work out those things. Yeah. Your job is to train your staff, improve them, or, you know, tell them when they're doing things wrong and you don't have to worry about anything else.
00:37:07:17 - 00:37:36:15
Kyle McCaig
The rest is just done. You go to this cupboard. There's always pillows. There's always towels. It's automated. And rather than just, hey, can we collect all the data on what we do? It's. Yeah. And how is this helping solve the real world problem? And there's thousands of those in every single industry and every walk of life where if that's your goal, you can do all of that to make the job better, to make it easier.
00:37:36:15 - 00:37:44:02
Kyle McCaig
And as a byproduct, you'll save money and you'll keep better quality staff and all of the kind of knock on effects. Yeah.
00:37:44:04 - 00:38:04:04
Rob Napoli
Yeah. And I love how you kind of, you know, life is a series of problems, complex problems we have to solve. And so every time you solve one process problem, it opens up opportunities to be more creative and do more things which come with more challenges, which I think is this is where whatever we like it all scared that AI is going to take over and take it.
00:38:04:05 - 00:38:11:12
Rob Napoli
Yeah, so people lose jobs, but it's going to open up new jobs and new opportunities, new challenges, new ways of doing things. And that's the exciting piece.
00:38:11:16 - 00:38:12:13
Kyle McCaig
Yeah.
00:38:12:15 - 00:38:37:06
Rob Napoli
That can really open up kind of the door. I know we can talk forever on this stuff, but what are you most excited about as we look at, like, the hospitality data unification and the things that are happening, what are you most excited for kind of trends that you're seeing as you're kind of deep in the thick of it for the industry as we think about hospitality as a whole, technology and hospitality.
00:38:37:08 - 00:39:05:12
Kyle McCaig
I think it's been bandied around for as long as I've been even tangentially related to the hospitality industry. my wife, prior to her job, was working for, large hospitality firm based in Asia, and they were saying the same thing is modernization. People have been talking about it again in every industry forever. But it was also just a buzzword.
00:39:05:14 - 00:39:42:17
Kyle McCaig
I think what we're seeing now from the big brands and the big tech players is not just the need for it, but an actual path forward to do so. So the move to the cloud and, you know, Marriott's power of M Hilton switching to new PMSs there, there seems to be a clear idea. And whilst every brand and every company just approaching it differently with potential different angles, overall they're centrally trying to do the same thing, which is.
00:39:42:19 - 00:40:05:12
Kyle McCaig
Kind of just remove the red tape. And a lot of ways to be able to say, look, here are the tools you need to be able to be successful as opposed to here's our way, go and do it now. There's a lot of challenges and I'm seeing a lot more of the big one that's coming down is identity management and security.
00:40:05:12 - 00:40:27:17
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. Which in hospitality is just light years behind. Yeah. and we are personally trying to work on some things that help MCR with that. But I think the brands that's the thing I'm excited to see how they try to do that. Yeah. Because it's a massive problem. and their kind of current solutions are very restrictive. Yeah.
00:40:27:21 - 00:40:59:08
Kyle McCaig
And not actually helpful. So I'm excited to see how they do that, because a lot of the modernizations they're bringing are necessary but not particularly groundbreaking. It's following other industries and things like that. There's an opportunity in an industry like hospitality, with so many people in the workforce from so many different walks of life and such a high turnover to do something actually quite interesting with that.
00:40:59:10 - 00:41:26:04
Kyle McCaig
So I think that's one of my very. I don't know if I'm excited for or petrified, but I'm certainly intrigued. Yeah. To see how that comes along. And yeah, every time I meet anybody who's kind of like a player in there, I'm like, oh, I just like, kind of bend the rules a little bit. But like, so any input you want to give me here and see what you're going and that's going to be an interesting one.
00:41:26:09 - 00:41:57:01
Rob Napoli
Yeah. I, I like how you say modernization. Right. And with the modernization comes data integrity. What's data integrity comes data governance, data security. And that's a really interesting thing, especially when you still look at those that are on prem legacy, moving to the cloud and all those things. And I do think you made a good point that the hospitality space is the way travel and the way that we travel the places with, whether it's business, it's pleasure, whether it's the leisure travel.
00:41:57:03 - 00:42:25:06
Rob Napoli
You know, some people still hate QR codes for ordering systems. They want to order off a menu, some love having a full on concierge. Some people choose to go to fully automated hotels where you barely interact with a human. Yeah, and we have all those options for us. And whether you're, you know, somebody who's digitally savvy or not, you have brands and hotels and all of them are working to capture that time and attention and really figuring out like, what that space in the market is.
00:42:25:08 - 00:42:59:18
Rob Napoli
And I think that's an interesting thing that the market is doing as a whole. And I will say, you know, you being European Scotsman, Europe has done a much better job than the US, modernization and moving faster to more innovative solutions around webhooks and APIs in the cloud, where here with the bigger brands that are slower, because when you think about all that data and the fact that you have to keep data for a minimum of seven years of anyone that comes through a hotel, all those rules, it is scary.
00:42:59:20 - 00:43:00:16
Rob Napoli
Hence.
00:43:00:18 - 00:43:01:15
Kyle McCaig
Yeah,
00:43:01:17 - 00:43:20:04
Rob Napoli
You’re Challenge of 180 hotels and all that data, so on and so forth. So I'm really excited. I think it's a really fun challenge. You're seeing a lot of movement in the industry, a lot of mergers and acquisitions, hotel brands making big changes in moves, partnerships forming. and I think it's going to be really interesting to see.
00:43:20:04 - 00:43:36:07
Rob Napoli
And it is a fun challenge, and it is going to be interesting to see with all the movement happening this year, how that all gets captured and how people really leverage the power of technology to better increase and better make that, a smoother process for sure.
00:43:36:07 - 00:43:58:22
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. And something I think is going to be fascinating is to see how. The big players approach it, you know, hostile. You think of hotels, you think of, you know, various travel and you think of airlines and I do not think airlines could have done a worse job than they have over the past 20 years. No one likes flying anymore.
00:43:58:24 - 00:44:23:00
Kyle McCaig
The biggest growth seems to be people finding ways to do cheap private flights, because it's so much better of an experience and. Hospitality can't go the same way because if Hilton and Marriott and IHG and all of the big brands go one way and people don't like it, there are other options. Yeah, so it will just screw those companies when it comes to flight.
00:44:23:00 - 00:44:45:01
Kyle McCaig
Like I can't start an airline and really do anything differently because of the so much regulation and everything. Yeah. So it's going to be interesting to see how the big brands really approach it. If they go insular and try to be like, oh no, you can only do things the X brand way, it's not going to be successful.
00:44:45:01 - 00:44:48:13
Rob Napoli
Yeah, not about it.
00:44:48:15 - 00:45:16:15
Kyle McCaig
Prevents invention I guess in the industry. And that will eventually have a knock down to a worse guest experience. And the reason why is an interesting industry is it's always going to be a growth industry when it has downtimes. Because, you know, if we have a global pandemic or maybe there's an economic pandemic or whatever and says it's going to come back because humans in their nature want to travel and experience things.
00:45:16:17 - 00:45:47:08
Kyle McCaig
So you've got almost a guaranteed market. It's just can you get there market. And it's going to be really fascinating to see the approach that they take. And you know, Marriott's all the power of M in theory is here is to, you know, people like ourselves. Here's everything you need to be a great Marriott provider. Yeah. If they do that right then they've an absolute winner.
00:45:47:10 - 00:46:07:02
Kyle McCaig
If it goes wrong and is very restrictive, that's gonna cause issues. So I'm very intrigued to see how they all approach it differently. Yeah. And I put everything back down to sports the exact same. You get a team and they try one way and it doesn't work. Person gets fired and they start again versus you know, someone else goes, you know, the moneyball method, which is everywhere in every sport.
00:46:07:04 - 00:46:10:10
Kyle McCaig
I'm gonna be like, how are you guys going to do this? It's interesting.
00:46:10:12 - 00:46:26:07
Rob Napoli
Yeah, I'll be interesting. I think maybe, we'll do our end of the year podcast where we, kind of come back to some of these topics and see why and how the project's doing a bit, too. Yeah. How the markets changed. It'll be interesting. Yeah. Kyle I appreciate you for jumping in. And honestly, this is one of the things I love talking about.
00:46:26:07 - 00:46:41:18
Rob Napoli
It's kind of technical and whatnot, but I think it's so unique and some really cool things that are happening. And it's really cool that you have put so much time, energy and effort to kind of create that base layer with your small team and, and our teams are growing slowly but surely as this project continues to get bigger and bigger.
00:46:41:18 - 00:46:42:11
Kyle McCaig
Getting there.
00:46:42:13 - 00:46:56:03
Rob Napoli
But we're excited to be partnering with you. And thank you for coming down. it's great. you know, I know usually I come to your office on the 86 floor the One World Trade, but, coming to Soho. Yeah, switch it up a little bit. Obviously. Never a bad thing to walk through Soho on your way home.
00:46:56:03 - 00:46:57:13
Kyle McCaig
Exactly.
00:46:57:15 - 00:47:02:16
Rob Napoli
How can listeners find you? How can they get in touch if they've got questions or things of that nature?
00:47:02:18 - 00:47:22:14
Kyle McCaig
Yeah. I, I don't answer my phone ever. So that's not a useful way to get in touch with me. true. But, you know, LinkedIn is probably the best method. I have multiple emails and 5000 emails a day, so it's not always the best way. I think LinkedIn is probably the best way, but yeah, anybody has anywhere to wants to reach out, ask questions. Happy to answer
00:47:22:16 - 00:47:43:17
Rob Napoli
Awesome. I'll make sure to link Kyle's, LinkedIn in the show notes. So if you're interested, get in touch with him, add him on, LinkedIn and definitely reach out. He is, weirdly enough, he's actually very available and he will get back to you just in different methods. somebody who he knows very well. but, we appreciate you, Kyle.
00:47:43:19 - 00:47:58:08
Rob Napoli
Thanks for coming down. And we'll definitely be, chatting again soon. And I'd love to have you back. I think one of the things we should do is, When Jacob's finally back in town for a hot bet, the three of us just, like, chop it up. I think we could cover some fun topics. And for sure.
00:47:58:13 - 00:48:14:24
Rob Napoli
So we'll, we'll set that one up. Until next time, y'all, stay well, make sure you like subscribe rate review. Hospitable. If you have, guests topics, things you want to cover. You want to join yourself? Please let us know. We'd love to chat with you until next episode. Take care.