The Modern Hotelier #213: An All-In-One PMS that Enhances the Guest Experience | with Venkatesh Sakamuri & Krishna Talasila
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Steve: Welcome to another episode of The Modern Hotelier. We are coming to you from the Independent Hotel Show in Miami. We're now joined by Venkatesh Sakamuri, the CEO of Stayflexi, and our good friend of The Modern Hotelier. Thanks for joining us Venkatesh. How you doing? Thanks, sir. 
 Venkatesh Sakamuri: Thanks for guys. I'm doing great. Awesome. It's good to catch up my old friends. 
Steve: Yep, absolutely. So we're obviously familiar with Stayflexi from working with you in the past, but for those that might not be familiar, can you tell us a little bit more about Stayflexi and what you all do? 
 Venkatesh Sakamuri: Yeah, so Stayflexi is a all-in-one hotel management platform, and data intelligence and revenue management platform as well, uh, based out of San Francisco, backed by Y Combinator. And we are kind of growing really aggressive in US and, uh, Asian markets and offering pretty much everything built in one single product you don't have to take multiple products and integrate them. So that's the unique piece. And yeah, so we are doing really well. 
David: So you took a little break, now you're back in the US Yeah. You've got a new product called IQ. Yeah. Can you talk to us about that? 
 Venkatesh Sakamuri: Yeah. So IQ is our data intelligence and revenue management platform. So it is kind of built post ai, uh, the revolution era because most of the revenue management platforms are built like pre the ai, the era where.
You know, how you get the data about the market, about your, uh, competitors. It's a little different the post era. So we have a unique wed into, you know, how the data intelligence should be for the holier, especially for the independent holier because they cannot afford to buy like this multi-thousand, uh, the contracts from the, the big intelligent platforms.
So we made like really easy to use and they can just chat with it, uh, using our AI and get the intelligence about the area, about the competitors and everything. So I can give a little bit more insights into, you know, what prompted us to build these things. Um, but yeah, we are back in the us um, growing really aggressive here with a new product offering called IQ. We excited about it. 
Steve: Yeah, that's great. That's great. And you went to Carnegie Mellon? You're in established engineer. Very good at what you do. And you're the visionary behind the IQ product. Yeah. With the wave and popularity of ai, can you give us a sneak peek into how the future of data intelligence and AI and hospitality 
Venkatesh Sakamuri: Yeah, of course. Yeah, so the unique insights, what we have is like whoever has the, the data. The data is, the data is the king. Mm-hmm. We, we all kind of seen in this AI era, so whoever has the data so they can do lot of more intelligent decisions about how they're selling the rooms or upselling to the guests and, and pricing the, the right way, without PMS offering, what we realize with independent hotels is like, Hey guys, PMS is fine, but what we are really missing out here is like, how can we bring more demand to our hotels? Right? So, coming from this CMU computer science background and working at Oracle for many years, we are hardcore data scientists and, and coming that background helped us to quickly come up with a product that can really satisfy this huge gap, the independent s what they can do with the data, and then the intelligence about the location and everything.
How they can better position themselves to compete with the brands. So, that product offering is pretty much boils down to two things that demand intelligence about the area and competitor intelligence and then the a on top of these two things where they can directly, you know, talk to the A and get it. Like if you're a hotel owner, you can basically, Hey, what do you recommend? What prices do you recommend for next one week to me? Right? It does all the work for you and then can recommend you. If you just use it, then you are, you are like, you don't need like a seasoned revenue management guy. You can just talk to the AI and get the things done. So it's a big deal. Yeah. 
David: So you are a big advocate of an all-in-one platform. Yeah. Which obviously helps reduce the amount of integrations needed is that still your stance today? 
 Venkatesh Sakamuri: Yeah. So, whatever is core to the guest journey, like the touch points of the guest, right from the the room reservation to the check-in, to the in room experience the same. The story which I had been advocating for the last five years, I stick to that. The guest touch points should be built in, into the PMS system. And if you see the evolution of other PMs system, they're heading the same direction. Uh, but integrations, whatever, is like outside of this guest touch.
It can be like payments processing and a few other things. You, you need to work with the payment processors, right? You don't have to build those things. That's not, you know, your core. So I still believe in like the fundamental thesis here is the guest. And the touch points of the guest, wherever it enhances, the guest experience should be built in. So that is our stance from the beginning, and that will be our stance going forward as well. 
Steve: Makes sense. That's great. So it's been fun to watch Stayflexi grow over the past five years. Where do you see Stayflexi in the next five years? 
 Venkatesh Sakamuri: We will be fundamentally disrupting the data intelligence and the revenue intelligence side of the segment because we see some unique, uh, insights into what we are building. And to whom it can really be helpful, especially the in independent segment is again, our core from the day one, our, um, the vision is to empower the independence. The naturally there'll be more and more independence, so the more the independent segment grows, we grow as well. So we see ourselves like maybe 10 x where we are, we are right now.
Wow. We might be in. Not on the revenue side, but we always look for like how many gifts we are importing a daily basis, how many independent hotels we are importing. We might be touching some maybe 10,000 independent hotels in the next five years. We are all up, we are all geared up for that. 
Steve: Venkat, we appreciate you setting aside some time to chat with us. We're excited to hear from your colleague Krishna about more details about Stayflexi. Thanks a lot guys. 
Steve: We are now joined by Krishna Talasila, the CIO and Co-founder of Stayflexi. Thanks for joining us, Krishna. How you doing today? 
Krishna Talasila: Doing good. Steve, David, thank you again for having me. I'm very proud to see how far The Modern Hotelier has come. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate. Thank you, appreciate. 
Steve: So, Krishna Stayflexi made a strategic decision to focus on India in 2022. Now you're coming back to the us. What takeaways did you learn by going to India? 
Krishna Talasila: So Stayflexi started during the pandemic and India was going to reuse digital transformation during that time. And we also realized that building an agile team is more possible in India than us. Okay. And India has a very large independent Hotelier base and most of them are on pen and paper. And with this huge diverse geography because there are like 30 languages spoken in that country. So there are a lot of operational challenges.
So that's when we thought it's, it's, it's if you build something there and if it really works, it'll definitely work here. And it worked out that we are from there. We also run hotels there. So we build a great team and we craft some very important state. Like uh, we are funded by the Indian Go Central Government and we crack like state tourism boards.
And we got a, a bunch of awards. Wow. And now we are coming back here and we are coming back and we're trying to get as many customers as we can coming back with a lot of momentum. A lot of momentum. Yes. Yeah, that's, we have around 3,500 properties globally 3000 of them in India itself 3000 notices. Imagine so many different kinds of permutation and combination that we all had to solve in the product. Right. So we have a great, uh, the market fit there and we, I'm sure we'll have it here. It's great. 
David: Yeah, so we've been very impressed. We've seen the IQ platform. Is that a separate platform or is that actually built right into the state Flexe platform?
Krishna Talasila: Yes, it's a separate platform. So in the US, integrations are a big thing, as you know. So we wanna make sure at least the hotel is get a taste of product without them having to replace the entire PMS. That's why we launched State Flexi iq. It's a standard own market intelligence product. They can configure that. You know, closest hotels com compar rates, and then get all the data that they need. And once they move to our platform, it'll be a natural transition. All that data is fed in and it's an AI power platform. It'll make their life easy with all that data. 
David: That's great. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. Can you let people know how they can get in touch with you or find out more about Stayflexi? 
Krishna Talasila: Yes. Uh, please. Uh, please, uh, see as r join or Stayflexi dot com. It's a quick five minute onboarding signup. And then we, we will get in touch with you right away. 
David: Thank you. 
Krishna Talasila: All the best in the States, man. Thank you to you so much. Thank you David and Steve.
David: Thanks.