The Modern Hotelier #169: How Stayntouch is Solving Problems for Hoteliers | with Bill Fanning
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Steve Carran: Welcome to a special episode of The Modern Hotelier. We are coming to you from the Stayntouch  booth at HITEC, and we're joined by the Stayntouch  Chief Revenue Officer Bill Fanning, thanks for joining us, Bill. How you doing today?
Bill Fanning: I'm doing great. Great to see you guys.
Steve Carran:  Great. So Bill, we're gonna kick things off right away. What has Stayntouch been up to since the last HITEC and tell us about the growth of the company. 
Bill Fanning: I mean, I don't know where to start here. There's a whole bunch that's happened over the course of the last year. I'm sure you guys have seen all the press. I think one of the first things that jumps out at me is just the ability of our team to be able to roll out a lot of multi-property type of locations.
I'm sure you've seen the growth of the business and you've seen some of the things that we've done recently, but. The obvious one is the cobblestone relationship that we, that we stood up there. We rolled out 139 locations in less than 90 days. I mean, from a team perspective, to be able to do that, not, not to mention the technology that can support that, it's just, it's just fantastic.
So I think that's the first thing that jumps out for sure. I. Uh, we rolled out multi-property, which, uh, I don't know if you're familiar with what we're doing there, but, but, you know, our ICP is primarily multi-property types of locations. We have plenty of single units as well, but for those that are multi-property, you can see all the way across all of those properties.
You can understand reporting, booking, uh, rolling out multiple locations really, really quickly helps facilitate that fantastic, uh, offering there. And then as, uh, at the show here, we've rolled out our grab and go. So this is a soft launch for this. We've just started to roll it out to a couple customers.
We've literally just been in market for about a month. So we're testing this heavily right now and getting all the, all the capturing, all the analytics on the backend to make sure we understand that. But it's going really, really well. 
David M.: Yeah. So take a little deeper dive in that. How does that benefit hotels that grab and go kiosk 'cause that's always one of the things when you're. Add a property and you want something to eat, you get in late or you need a, you know, toothpaste or something like that. So maybe take us through how that helps those. 
Bill Fanning: Yeah, I mean, the obvious answer is just simplicity for the, for the user experience, the guest experience, to make sure they can just go up there without having to go to the front desk and go through that whole process easily.
Either charge it to the room or what's coming out in a couple months is where you're gonna be able to just charge it directly to the card. So folks that are just passers by can do that as well. Uh, but saves time for front desk, same time as the rest of the house. So middle of the night, somebody comes in, you know, you're not bringing them in from the back office to come in and ring in a Snickers bar and a water, you can just do that right there by yourself. 
Steve Carran: Now, what does offering best in class technology mean, and why does that distinction really matter? 
Bill Fanning: Best in class Technology to me means focusing on the things that are important for property management systems. Pure, plain and simple. It means not getting outside of our lane and trying to develop way too, too wide.
And it also means being really flexible in our integrations. So if we can be great at property management system, both optimizing optimizer operations of the hotel and also driving top line revenue for the hotel. And we can leverage the partnerships that we have. We've got 1200 integrations across the board.
So it's a lot of integrations that we manage and making sure that people are using those solutions really well in a seamless fashion. With the PMS, that's what it means to be best of breed, uh, in terms of our PMS staying in our lane, doing that incredibly well and being 
David M.: flexible. So how does the Stayntouch customer feedback help shape the product and help shape partnerships?
Bill Fanning: I mean, the entire product has been built on the backs of what our customers, uh, require fortunately we've been, we started from hospitality folks, people that are in hotels that understand that and have been working in hotel technology for a long time. And we continue to, to live to that mantra to these days.
I mean, when we look at, what we've done with grab and go and what we've done with, uh, multi-property, I mean, all of those things are direct feedback from our customers that have said, we've got these issues that we need to solve. Can you help us? We go back in and figure out can we help it in a timely fashion?
Can we get them to value quickly? Is it relevant to the rest of our customer base, and is it something we can continue to sell moving forward? And when it meets those criteria, we get that thing rolled out and, and, and moved very quickly.
Steve Carran: That's great. You mentioned you have 1200 integrations. How do you manage not only those integrations, but also the partnerships that you have, and how do those, how do, how do those benefit your customers?
Bill Fanning: Yeah, so managing the integrations is a two part system. We've got an open API where folks can write to that API to make sure it works really well. We do a lot of testing to make sure that, that, uh, those integrations have been written appropriately. And many of those situations we'll write those integrations.
Toast is a great example of that where we've got a two-way integration that we built directly to make sure it's, in fact, it's one of the only, uh, two-way integrations with, with toast in this, in the. In the industry, but you're right, it's a lot of integrations to manage over time. And when you have the API set up in the right way to begin with, and you've got those integrations set up correctly to begin with, we don't change the underlying data structure so that we're not breaking integrations from that perspective.
We've built it really well from the beginning to be sustainable from an integrations perspective. How we manage partnerships is a little bit, that's that. There's more to that for sure. Um, we know exactly how many integrations we have with all of our partners, so we know where, from a tier level perspective, where all of our partners stand and how we need to continue to drive communication and make sure they're up to speed with what we do.
And then when we think about new partnerships, we spend a lot of time really trying to understand, is this gonna be value to our customers? Usually it's our customers bringing it to us, saying, Hey, we've got this platform we really want to integrate with. Can you help us? But we need to figure out is it gonna be valuable not only to that customer, but more broadly to other customers?
And if so, then we'll lean into that and, and get that developed. 
David M.: So what challenges are you seeing in the hotel space and how is Stayntouch addressed on them? I mean, some of the obvious 
Bill Fanning: challenges that that come out right now are just the uncertainty and, and, and travel and spend and those types of things.
And we're seeing that certainly with our hotels as you look at just pay processing volume and those types of things, especially those that are affected by, uh, Canadian travel, for example. That's the obvious example. You know, in, in those situations we've gotta be able to help the hotels do a couple things.
One, we've gotta figure out how we can drive more revenue in the top line there and keep them, uh, consistently, uh, adding any add-ons that they've got or making sure they're monetizing the spaces appropriately. Um, so we really help in that. And then understanding from a user experience how they have opportunities to simply be able to add on different things as they're booking, uh, to add to the top line.
Um, and two. Um, we, we really need to focus on making sure from a labor perspective, we're putting them in a situation where they can quickly train folks. They don't have to spend months to figure out how to use the system. They may not even want to have someone at the front desk if they're airing more on the side of more of housing versus hospitality.
They wanna just leverage a kiosk or those types of things for a. A no interaction type of system. We've had over a 75 increase in kiosk adoption over the course of the last year. Uh, and some of that's been driven here recently with a lot more folks who bought into kiosk originally, but are just rolling it out now because from a labor perspective it makes a lot more sense for them to be able to have that check-in process automated.
Steve Carran: So Bill, final question. What's next for Stayntouch? 
Bill Fanning: Yeah, we've got a lot on the roadmap ahead of us here. A lot to do and, and, uh, it seems, seems like there's never enough time to get it all done. So prioritization of those things is really, really important from a software perspective. You know, we think a lot about continuing to enhance the guest experience and we, while we feel great about the guest experience that we provide right now from pre-check in to post check in all the way throughout that process, we think about how can we continue to get better in that particular area.
We're certainly leaning into that. We think about how we can also help hotels, uh, automate the process of communication with the front desk or with different, uh, employees within the organization through ai, through all kinds of different things that we're building into the solution. More to come on that late this summer.
I don't want to make any commitments on timeline, but there's some really exciting stuff that's coming out there.
David M.: That's great. Well, bill, thanks for sitting down with us. Can you tell folks how they can get in touch with you or Stayntouch?
Bill Fanning: Yeah. My email bill.fanning@stayntouch.com. You can always come to the website, stayntouch, and there's plenty of opportunity for you to, to get connected to, to the sales team, to marketing team, however you'd like to do that.
David M.: Great. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. 
Steve Carran: Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill.
Bill Fanning: Thank you.