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Each episode of GAIN Momentum focuses on timeless lessons to help grow and scale a business in hospitality, travel, and technology. Whether you’re a veteran industry leader looking for some inspiration to guide the next phase of growth or an aspiring executive looking to fast-track the learning process, this podcast is here with key lessons centered around four questions we ask each guest.
GAIN Momentum episode #95: The Anything Cart and Revolutionizing the Hotel Booking Process | with Rich Tuckwell-Skuda
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Adam Mogelonsky: Welcome another exciting episode of the GAIN Momentum Podcast, focusing on timeless lessons from hospitality, food service, travel, and technology. I'm joined today by Rich Tuckwell-Skuda. He's the founder and CEO of The Anything Group, as well as Albie, a booking e-commerce platform. Rich, how are you?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: I'm good. How you doing?
Adam Mogelonsky: I'm fantastic. And you know, like just, uh, you know, your energy coming into this before we, before we start recording is, is just amazing. So, uh, let's start here for people that don't know the anything group or Albie , give us the elevator pitch on both of those, um, ventures.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: Okay, so, so The Anything Group is called The Anything Group because it does anything you need. If you are a hotel, hospitality, and when we say anything, you can come to me with a plot of land and say, I want to build a hotel. We have a construction arm, we have a branding arm, we have a digital marketing or full service digital marketing agency.
We have a recording studio where we work with likes of ESPN doing huge great sporting events all the way down to filming ICE at the Wing once a year. Um, ICE being the International Convention for Mortgage Advisors. By the way, I've just realized that that has a whole different meaning now. And I say record ice.
Um, and then, uh, technology. So we do PMS, we do channel manager, uh, we run a SiteMinders Platinum Partners globally and a wholesaler SiteMinder. We do furniture, we do everything. We build, we, we do everything. And then Albe is a completely different but connected, um, entity in the fact that Albe is the first ai e-commerce based booking platform for hotels that we are saying is an OTC, which is online travel collaboration platform rather than obviously just a regular booking engine or OTA.
Adam Mogelonsky: Okay. So, uh, that is a huge topic that we're gonna get into. But first, um. Tell us, give us a little background. How did you get here with TAG the Anything Group and now, uh, launching, uh, an OTC, an online travel collaboration?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: So, so I've been here, I've been in the industry 20 plus years. I started my career actually as a mere flick of a boy, as you can tell with this accent. Not in North America, in Europe. Um, buying old buildings that needed new life, um, for a number of years. I used to say that, and across all of my businesses, um, that I just created new places from existing spaces.
Um, and it was my pipeline for years. Um. I built a, a small chain of kind of micro hotels, I suppose you'd call it, back in the late nineties, early two thousands, uh, which wasn't politically correct or, or any form of exciting thing to do back then. It was just a guest house bed and breakfast we called them.
Um, so that, uh, took a technology job, came to San Francisco, um, to, as one of the kind of founding team for a company that later became one of the largest conferencing providers globally. Came up with some really cool product for them to kind of make people's lives easier. Started working within the travel vertical again with that x did that when it sold, took that money and decided that I wanted to just do fun things with big cars and expensive cars, and I'm a big petrolhead. So I formed an agency and decided that that was gonna be my life. I was gonna be a digital marketing agency and marketing agency. Um, I was super lucky in the fact that we launched a fairly significant title that's known all around the world for as a, as an LGBTQ plus platform.
Um, had that platform for 12 years. We launched cars, um, for 34 of the 36 global car manufacturers globally. created a whole TV network. I got into IPTV and travel and depo advertising and all these other really cool things. I had no idea I ever had any interest in until somebody said you could earn money doing it.
And that is fundamentally the thing that interests me the most is when somebody says, you know, you enjoy this and you can earn money doing it. So I exited that business and ended up at Avio, which was the, which, um, helped replatform their booking engine into the first AI based booking engine in the industry really honed down and focus on the guest experience and motive marketing engagement. 'cause my big passion is emotive marketing engagement, um, and the psychology of purchase and things like that. And what makes us buy the way we buy and do what we do. And then exited, uh, Avio to SHR back in 2021 and decided that I was gonna do this again.
And so here I am building more software, um, doing more fun stuff that I think the world needs. Um. One of my huge drivers because marketing is my core and I love marketing and I love what we do within the hospitality travel industry. Um, TDY is one of the highest converting, uh, marketing agencies in North America.
We look after about four 50 hotels globally, uh, with outstanding results. We build their gorgeous websites and we do all these fun things. I get to go to award shows and be insanely proud of the, of the things my, my team achieve. Um, yeah. Uh, and then we were like, you know what? The world needs an LB that nobody's doing an lb.
We should do that. So we started formulating that about 18 months ago. We hired in a phenomenal team of, of developers, and. High tech this year. Alby was born. It went out into 20 x. We didn't win. Um, didn't have enough sad pictures of my family. Um, and joking, joking. Um, and the shade comes out. Um, and then, uh, launched our first live client about six weeks ago and have several thousand signed up, going live in 2027.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. so before we dive into Albie, uh, and how you've scaled that very, very quickly and, and why, because of its core architecture. Um, part of hospitality is that it's a family affair. You work with family in a lot of ways. So, um, tell me. Yeah. Like what? What's that? Like a TAG working with family.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: Um, it's amazing. I mean, obviously for, for anybody that's listening to podcasts that knows me and probably knows Dom as well, um, Dom married for a number of years. Um, Dom was with me at ao. We then, I then found TAG and he obviously jumped ship a year later. He actually stayed with Avio for a year after I pumped tag, and stayed within their North American operations and then moved over the tag.
Uh, it's great. I mean, I think, I think when you work with ex-husbands and partners, there is definitely a 50% of the audience will say, oh, I couldn't do that. And then the other 50% kind of sees it the way I see it, which is I know these people intimately, I know their thoughts. I, I can see when they're having a bad day, just from the minute they come on camera, I'm like, oh, okay.
He's having a bad day. Now is not the day to talk about these things, which means that the business runs smoother. The team. Are very aligned with the fact that they're, you know, I don't keep my relationships with, with my partner who also works for, for TAG and Don and actually an ex-partner who also works for TAG.
Um, you know, all of those, I know it's like, but it's super easy 'cause says what's the last 20 easy date in history? And I just said the C-Suite, I, it's super not a C-suite because three of the C-suite and bake. Um, but it's that whole thing where I think so long as you're open and honest about these things, it's very difficult to hide in our industry.
When you are kind of, when somebody you are related to or somebody you're married to or an ex is inside your business, it's super difficult to, to hide that anyway, because we're a cottage industry. Everybody knows everybody. And I have spent my entire career preaching about transparency and about the fact that we should just live our best lives in front.
And if you haven't liked that life. You don't have to engage with me. Like, if you don't like what I stand for and who I am, then don't hire us. Don't be around me. Because for every one person that doesn't like you, one person does. If you've got a 50% hit rate, amazing. Like, and if 70% of people can stomach you, perfect.
Like that's amazing. If you're expecting a hundred percent success, like rate in the, in this world, nevermind this industry, you're about way too high on, on the average. So yeah, it's fun. I mean, it's great. And actually again, you can kind of, it just means that when you travel, you're traveling with friends, you're traveling with friends, only people that know you, you know who's gonna be up at seven o'clock in the morning and who is gonna be still out at the cloud of beds party at 3:00 AM and the person on your phone going, remember, we have to be on toast straight.
Ah, not your dad. I'm on, do what you want. So, you know, it's fine. It's great. I love it. I wouldn't, I actually wouldn't change it.
Adam Mogelonsky: yeah. You know, it's, um, the ups and the downs of working with, with family and friends, but ultimately you develop that shorthand that makes things just operate so smooth, right?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: and and again, I mean everybody that that is in my life unfortunately is subjective to what I do for a living constantly day in and day out. And I am of the belief that if I have a team of experts around me, 'cause they have had to listen to me, bang on about this stuff day in and day out out, then why would I not have them inside my business?
They understand the roadmap, they understand the vision, they see the passion. They know a workaholic, they know you. They can get hold of me at 11 at night because I'm still working and. Like proxy, as you know from being around me, my enthusiasm for product is very, very kind of contagious. And so everybody that's around inside the business and around my personal life is ex is so excited about everything they do.
They're as excited as I am, like because they're meant to be, because I need a bunch of cheerleaders around me constantly. Oh my God.
Adam Mogelonsky: Awesome.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: Take your head the oven.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. So, um, let's take that passion and let's shift it to, or redirect it towards Albi because, um, before we came on we described it as the anything cart and, and, yeah, well it's all yours. Pay me a commission, you know, at some point, or take me out to a, a nice dinner somewhere. Nice. Um, so the anything card, I guess is the way to describe it because it, it's revolutionary in that you can basically take any object and book it at any time independent of it being, you know, specifically hotel nights, booking, and then try to force people into these
flows. Can you talk about how Albie works and how it's different from traditional booking engines?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: So, so my biggest pain point in the industry, both as a Hotelier, and again, in, in between that whole little journey thing, I also ran a fairly sizable hotel company that was brand of hotels, many Marriots, Hiltons, and I hgs. Um, and I ran that very successfully during COVID during the COVID year. my biggest issue is that we insist that guests are forced to book in the way that we, as, as a software house or as a hotel, have got to mandate that booking.
Oh no, I need you to do it in this order. 'cause if you don't do it like this, Amazon, Netflix, all of these things have completely changed the way that consumers view online purchase. And it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's travel, whether it's a hotel, whether it's a, an iPad or or other things are available.
Obviously think hats, whatever we're calling them, it's changed the way the consumers view things. They do not want to be forced to buy something that is configured in a journey that they don't want it to be bought in that order. They are now used to being told what their friends bought. They are used to being able to book anything in any order.
And if something is on offer with something else they've already done, the car automatically tells 'em and says, no, don't do that. Do that. Do it this way. Click this button and we'll save you money. Everybody is used to that now. And one of the biggest things that we know, again, I've been involved in three booking engines in this industry in the last 20 years.
The biggest thing we know is things like golf, spa, the, the big ancillaries, the big stuff that we know. They will sleep in closets. They will sleep in linen cupboards if they need to in order to get the tea time or the massage with a therapist. They want. Why am I as a hotel gonna force somebody to book the room, then go to the ancillary, which is the reason they come into my property, to then book it only to find out that the day I've just booked the hotel for that masseuse is not available.
So now I go back and back around again. I changed my dates and eventually, after 15 minutes or not, 'cause I got bored trying to do it, and I just gave up, I then get the, the perfect slot and, and that's it. I send the journey. Thanks very much. That's right. Offie pop. Okay. But I had seven other things I needed to do.
I'm actually, I'm, I'm traveling there in a rental car, so I need to book a rental car. Oh. And then I'm going from there to Miami and I need another hotel in Miami, but I don't have a in Miami. So this, I can't do anything for you. It's ridiculous. We have forced this journey for the last 15 years since a opin came into our industry and said, you all need to hate each other.
You're all competition. Everybody is gonna take the the food off your table so everybody can compete with Embody. Oh. But we, we are gonna sit on top of that and we're gonna bid against you. We're gonna constantly drive all your traffic to our stuff, and then we're gonna sell you back the stuff that you could have sold if you just adopted our Journey methodology back to you for 22%.
And you're gonna say thank you, and then you're gonna give me your last rooms. You're gonna control everything and then I'm gonna do all the payment processing, and I'm gonna save all the money, and I'm gonna keep charging you. And you're never gonna, you're never gonna change that. So I, I kind of thought there's got to be a way where we can put this industry back together.
Like as a business. We are, we're a whole industry full of hospitality. The very nature of hospitality is working together to ensure that the guest has the best experience from Ggo. So, so, 20 years ago before this world existed, if I walked into a hotel and that hotel was fully booked, that GM would've walked me out to next door and said to the hotel next door, Hey, this guy's looking for a room for tonight.
I've got nothing. Well, have you got anything that GM would've bought? The other GM a drink? Thanks very much. I've. I've got a booking and that guest is super happy 'cause they have still got somewhere to sleep at night. What we now do is we have this journey where one hotel says, I can't work with anything around me because everybody's out to get me.
And what EE was designed to do was say, the world is not there to get you. The world is there to collaborate with you. So the guest raising journey, the guests can book anything in any order they want. So if I come to a golf property on Albie, for instance, my first question is not what room do I want. It's what do you wanna do today?
I wanna book golf. Okay. 'cause that's your driver. Bang. Straight away. So my journey is a hundred percent guest facing Neil. That is the booker's decision to make. Book that for golf course desk. Okay. Here's my tee time. Perfect. Okay. Hey, guess what Mr. Golfer? This is a mandated stay course, which you know because you came to my hotel website and knew that I'm a hotel golf course.
What room do you want for the nights that you're in my golf course? Do you One or two nights? I want two nights. Cool. Okay. This is the availability for both those nights. What do you wanna stay in? It's a queen room or it's the closet. I'll take a queen room 'cause I don't care. 'cause I've got my golf tee time.
But were you going anywhere else? Oh yeah, I'm going in New York. Okay, cool. Well, as a group of hotels, I'd have three hotels in New York. So here's my three hotels in New York. Book it at the same time. I then have to check out No, no, no, it's fine. Just book it there. Okay, cool. So I put that one in and then the same question again.
And if that hotel in New York is part of my group, perfect. If I don't have any hotels in New York, anything else that's on alb, that's a hotel in New York that this hotel has said it is happy to work with, can now be offered up. And Hotel B says, you know what? I can't buy you a drink, but what I can do is give you 5% commission for that.
And if that was coming through an OTA, you'd be paying 15 to 28%, which is obviously, as we know, not the actual real rate anyway, because by the time I put in all my other costs, my effective rate for an OTA booking is anywhere from 25 to 33%. But I'm now paying a fellow hotel 5% commission as a thank you for giving me a reservation that has now come through as a mandated.
I, I now know everything else you're doing. I know that you came from Hotel A, I know you were in hotel A for three nights. I know you're coming to me for three nights. Ooh, I'm guessing you ding a broke trick. Or it's a work travel day. Cool. Where else you going? I'm down in Miami. Perfect. Here's the four hotels.
The, that the hotel in New York works with in Miami. Or if Hotel A has hotels there, these are the hotels from Hotel A. Let's just take this back and, and close the loop. And so now as a group, it doesn't matter if I have one property or 50 properties, the guest, which is the number one priority, is able to see all of my resorts or none of my resorts, along with everything else on highway.
So if I go to New York, for instance, and I have a hotel in New York by half, no ancillaries in New York, if there are three spas, two golf courses and a Times Square tour on Albie through one of our other partners, I can now sell that. Oh, you were looking for New York Times. Perfect. Great. Thanks. It's not about the $4 commission I'm gonna earn from the tour company for the Times Square tour.
It's about the fact that that guest now sees me as the seat of knowledge. I'm a New York hotel recommending New York based product that I have approved to be inside my journey. And suddenly that I would work with. I'm only gonna, as a New Yorker, I'm only gonna choose the partners that I see inside Albi that I know, that I trust, that I know is gonna create my feel with that guest.
And everybody's winning. Everybody knows where the guest is. The guest knows their journey. The guest can come to one cart and say, I have these five things I'm doing in New York. These two things I'm doing in Miami, this hotel Miami, that hotel Miami, and actually from the middle of next year, this flight, this, this, everything I can book in one place, and now every single hotel that's on Albie, every single spa on alb becomes a whole ecosystem of travel.
Whole ecosystem of of tourism that anything can be booked in any order on and in multiples. So again, if we look at the current market, the number one thing that frustrates me, and I'm sure it does for you 'cause you travel almost or probably more than I do, actually drives me nuts when I'm traveling with the team and I cannot book different check-in and checkout dates for different rooms inside one reservation.
Why, dear God, do I have to have five reservations for five different people? 'cause they fly in and out at different times and are not gonna be in same motel at the same time. One waste of my life, just let me keep adding things to a car, please. I want room number one. This is my check-in dates. This is my checkout dates in the cart.
Room number two. Um, I don't like them that much. So they're not getting the queen room. They're getting a standard room. They're coming in on the Thursday, leaving on the Sunday in the cart. Who wants breakfast? Well, actually there's two people in that room, but only one-on-ones breakfast. Okay. So instead of mandating that everybody in the room gets charged for breakfast, I used to have one breakfast. I used to have one breakfast, please for three days of my five days stretch in the cart. Done. Nice and simple. Consumer gets the best possible price because they're not cha being charged for things that they don't want. Hotel actually earns more revenue because again, they're being charged for stuff they wanted on the days and quantity they wanted instead of not taking it.
'cause they were gonna be forced to pay $300 for breakfast for two people. And then one person was eating breakfast for three days. Like the logic baffles me as to how we have stayed like this for so long as an industry. And then all you hear is, yeah, but it's all about revenue management No, no, it's not.
It's about inventory management. It's about understanding that guests don't want to be put into the pigeonhole that your existing software makes them buy things in. They want freedom. They want choice. They wanna be able to move between groups. Yeah, I would love to be a chain of 15 hotels that were everywhere my guests wanted to be.
But I also understand that if I wanna compete with OTAs and 189,000 hotels they have on their platform, I need more choice. And I'm not going to get more choices, as 15 hotels, but with 65,000 properties on Albie I am part of 65,000 hotels. I am part of the biggest chain of hotels ever in the formation of hotels globally.
I have a hotel in every town I ever, I guess, is ever gonna wanna stay in seven and a half thousand at fillies. I have an ancillary one, whether it's kayaking or mountain climbing, or reading a book by a beach. Somebody somewhere does it and they're probably gonna put it on Albie and then bang. So that's it.
And Albie actually stands for advanced learning, uh, booking intelligence engine or intelligence
engine.
Adam Mogelonsky: it's like a Tony Stark al, uh, naming there, right?
Well, I mean, uh, you know, just to go back to something you mentioned earlier, the, the duopoly that should not be named and. You know, uh, the whole thing there is they, they really came in and they pitted all hotels against one another. And their argument was, oh, okay, we give you distribution. And, uh, and then people are coming to our platform because we offer that, that end, end booking between, um, planes, automobiles, and accommodations.
uh, but therein they, uh, they kept the datas themselves and they charged a very hefty comm, uh, commission. And now essentially you're leapfrogging them by offering that same amount of convenience in terms of having an anything cart that where different, different rooms can be booked at different times with different, uh, ancillaries, all independent architecture, but, bridged in in a way that is fluid.
and then from there it's, it's, you know, why do you need that, that that convenience at, at a third party, when that convenience is even better, even more frictionless through the direct channel, which is almost like an online collaborative concierge tool.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: Yeah. Well, and more importantly, as per your point, I, I as hotel
retain guest.
So, so I have been given my user's name, email address, phone number. I don't need the credit card details anymore. This is the only thing that drives me nuts in the industry is this obsession with credit card information. We've gotta have the credit card information for PMS.
Why? Because two people, two companies told you it was life and death. If you didn't, you don't need it. The last thing you want is credit card information inside your system. It's huge. It's a nightmare to manage the PCI compliance, GDPR compliance, all this other, I was about to say bad word stuff you need to do, you know?
And then, and I'm not saying anything about anybody because I firmly believe in people that champion our front desks, but you get one bad apple who has access to a credit card information and you see the damage that does to your brand. You see the damage that does your guest's life. Anything I can do to keep hotel away from having to take all of that nonsense on board done.
So when we built our people an entire trend up with an entire e-commerce platform, does all the banking, does everything takes the money for you? If it's an advanced purchase, great. We take the money at point of, uh, uh, booking. If it's a pay on property, no problem at all. I'll take the money for you at midnight when they're due to check in, so it's already in your bank account before they arrive.
Good luck getting any one of those two companies or half the payment processes in our industry to give you your money the same day that the guest checks in. Most of the time you're waiting for a week, two weeks, 30 days, whatever it is. They're. I'm sorry. Why is, why is my cashflow being dictated by a third party that doesn't own any property and has nothing to do with my business? I don't think so. I would like that money. Please. Thank you very much. 'cause they're sleeping in my sheets and I have to play the person that's gonna change those sheets and I can't do that if you've got my money for 15 days after that guest has checked out. So we built this whole thing to just make this as frictionless as possible and make everybody be able to, you know, if I wanna recommend a hotel over there and get paid 5% commission, ah, I don't want a contract with that hotel.
I don't wanna send an invoice. You're right. The system will do it at the point of booking, if I'm a management company, oh my God, why am I charging franchise fees, uh, on an invoice a month after that gets estate? I'm a brand. I gave you the booking they booked with you because my name is on the front of your hotel.
Why am I waiting 30 days to send you an invoice for my payment source? No more invoicing, no more. Did they guest stay? Is that the right franchise fee? No. No. We checked them in. They came on property. You need to pay and for all those. But they didn't check in, couldn't credit me that they didn't check in.
So guess what? We didn't charge. So we didn't, we didn't charge you 'cause they didn't check in. So we just de fogged would be what I'd say. We just defo all this, these pain points and trauma points for independence and brands and soft brands and managing companies and guests and just said, you know what?
This is what it should be like. I should just be able to book what I want when I want. And whoever's involved in that process should get their fair due at the point that the guest has paid the money. And then more importantly, let's protect the guest. And let's say to the guests, don't worry about it. If this all goes tits up, there's an insurance policy here.
There's this thing. You've got this massive bank backing you. Everything is safe. Your guest data is still behind this wall, but all these hotels know who you are and they can contact you when they want because you've bought something from them. And if you need to cancel anything, don't worry about going to 15 different websites.
Go back to Albie. Go back to one of the hotels. You booked that journey in and in there, put in that reservation number that was emailed to you, and there's your itinerary for that trip. Whether you booked 25 hotels and 15 and zero to one hotel, that's what you booked. Here's the reservation numbers for everything.
This is what you paid for everything. This, you've already paid this. You're paying when you check in. This is being taken 24 hours before. What did you need? This whole thing you've done costs $15,000. But don't worry, it's all on your credit card. It all came off at one point of cart, but to multiple different things done.
Adam Mogelonsky: So. You, you still, you stole the words right outta my mouth. In terms of, uh, discussing the e-commerce platform that you've built that, uh, underneath Albion Powers, um, this whole system, uh, of, you know, flexible, anything can be booked at any time. Uh, hopefully it's clearer the value that is given in terms of just having better cash flow and needing to spend less resources.
Uh, following up on, uh, AP AR and all the various accounting processes, that's huge. As well as also, um, hopefully being able to negotiate better rates as well, that you get off of, um, uh, processing. However, it's, it's blended or, um, interchange Plus. Plus. Yeah.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: Yeah, I mean, and, and that's the point. I mean, we are going to, we are going to the processes that we have aligned with, and we are getting wholesale rates of processing direct from Visa direct, from MasterCard, throughout. We, we are getting the best rate we possibly can, and I'm not marking it up by 5% to make a profit.
I'm not mandating anybody using my software because payment and processing is the only way I'm making any money. I know what my software's worth, I know what my platform is worth. You're gonna pay for that because that costs, it's a 10th of the price that you are paying now anyway, and replaces 15 different pieces of software.
So it's significantly cheaper, but more importantly, I'm now saving you 5% or 3%, 2% on your payment processing. It's a win-win. I mean, and, and if you don't want me making a percent, oh well. Go somewhere else. Go go to the other eCommerce platform that does all this stuff for you and saves you hundreds of thousands of dollars and your team tens of hours of reconciliation time and management and stress.
And
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, the, the, the total cost involved in just managing payments. Uh, but I'm just looking at it straight as, uh, saving, saving basis points off of a top line, uh, in terms of payment. That alone can give a hotel enough bandwidth to put back into buying a whole other person just to work with Albi and set up those relationships to add more things to the cart possibility, and thereby unlock totally new forms of revenue to then fuel, uh, further guest experience expansions it.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: and, and if you think logically. We know that 40% of all travel is multi destination. It's not point A point B, it's point a, point B point, at least sometimes four or five different journeys. Well, if I am ho, if I am any of the hotels in that, in that journey, and let's say your average hotel is $2,000.
If you're going on a, on a three or four day business trip, you're in the middle of nowhere. The hotel is 800 bucks. You've got all this other stuff you need to add to it. You know, if I'm running 5% of that, that that's another room night. In my own hotel, I only used to do that five times a day, and my hotel just got five rooms bigger, 365 days a year because every single guest gets the same experience in every single engine.
So, yeah, and mean we're working with some fairly major software partners. So, so the plan for this, uh, all the, all the, what has been already kind of put into place here, there'll be at least 67,000 hotels. I'll be in the next year and a half.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: There'll be at least 10 Aries plus flights, plus car plus cruisers.
So I, all different providers working together.
Adam Mogelonsky: therein the question is, uh, you know, you've, you've only been developing this for 18 months. How do you manage that rapid scale of onboarding new accounts?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: we have been a recruiting team from day one. Um, so we, I think at the moment we have five developer positions. Outstanding. We have five onboarding. We have a full implementations team. We're already quite a big company. We're, we're like 60 plus people. Um, and most of those people are tech and onboarding project management for, for new clients.
And then account manager, um. The big thing for me was that we built in platforms that were easy to develop. So, so, and again, Albi is an independent hotel's booking engine. When I set up one hotel, when I just take out saying, Hey, I don't want any of that other stuff, I just want it to be my booking engine on my website because it's cool and I like the journey and I've got a spa.
When I set that up, Al only has an AI algorithm and it basically proofs any content I put in it. It SEO makes, it makes it SEO friendly, it uses the most optimized search terms. It allows me to scrape my existing booking engine from my website and pre-fill everything. If I'm a group of hotels and I, every hotel has five rates, but they're all the same five rates.
I set up those five rates once and then disperse across platform. Same with room types, same with images, same with everything. So if I'm 50 hotels and they're all the same. Let's say I'm a a mid-sized brand. I have the ability set of one booking engine, replicate that 50 times. So now I can onboard and all I need is somebody inside that hotel to sit down, which takes a couple of days, obviously, and go through 50 engines and make sure that Yep, yep, that's right.
Quality control by the client. That's good. Okay, press go. Done. Um, same with our, same with our integrations. So direct integration with opera will be, uh, launching in January in info will be mid-January. Site library is already live. Muse is already live. Stay in touch will be mid-February, I believe. Um, I think we're, there are, there are several others.
Um, but once they're done, the integration is identical. So it's the same process. I mean, I'm PMS is opera for all 50 hotels. Drag and drop in pop and it's done. So we are able to implement at a much higher quality rate and timeframe than I think anybody else in the industry.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. Uh, that's, uh, music to my ears about, uh, having that direct mapping, um, built into PMSs and, uh, making all that work. Um, okay, so we've talked about the e-commerce platform. We've talked about the flexibility of having an anything cart. Um, one other feature that I really like is the whole idea of dynamic room upgrades or. Could you talk to us about, uh, what that is and how that can unlock value for hotels?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: So we just call it dynamic optimization on, on everything. So the whole process being, if I come in to a, to a hotel's website and I'm on a budget. All of the budget rooms are booked, but 20 of those rooms are with an OTA. We know the OTA cancellation rate is high. Let's say for instance, in this instance 30%, which I think would be me being very generous 'cause it's more than that.
But let's say I have 10 rooms booked out to an OTA, three of them are gonna cancel, but I have to be looking for that room now direct and I have no inventory for them. So the system says three of them are gonna cancel anyway. So we're gonna upgrade one person into the next room up. And if that next room up is also full, we're gonna great upgrade one person from that into the next tier.
So it's a cascade effect. I'm gonna keep cascading people in upgrades until that availability is left. None of these guests are gonna know about it 'cause there's no requirement yet because I'm not overbooked. As soon as that OTA cancellation drops out, everything returns back to how it was. So by dynamically rippling my occupancy to make sure that every room is full at every auction, and again, if I'm a hotel and I enlist on on an OTA, why do I want an OTA selling my most expensive room when I can put a guest I already have in the next room down where there's probably a, and let's say in the worst case scenario, a $300 difference.
If that NTA is selling a thousand dollars a night room, it's costing me $300 for that booking. Why would I not put the guy that's already paying me $700 into the thousand dollars a night room for free and have exactly the same money, but give that guest an amazing experience where he checks in, gets told he's just got the green room that he couldn't afford or offer it to.
him So the system, the, the system has two different functions. It'll cascade and cascade back as required to make sure that all OTA cancellations get filmed by a direct book that has been put somewhere else. What it will then do is it then says, oh, actually we've upgraded all these people another hotel is full.
So we need to start monetizing those upgrades. 'cause although we're now running a hundred percent occupancy, so the 70 we would normally, now I wanna monetize that. So it's gonna start emailing all the people and messaging through the system, all the people that are in those rooms to say, Hey, did you know you could upgrade for 20 bucks extra a night and could be in this room?
Do you wanna just do that now? 'cause we can just do that now before it gets expensive. Oh yeah. Okay. I'll do it. And we'll resolve as many of those as possible to generate more revenue if there's a decline and nobody wants to do it. Okay, so then front of house can make the decision when those people walk through door, you know, who saved your property before?
They're the one that gets the upgrade. And again, you don't have to give it to them, just offer it to them. And when they turn it down and just say, you know what? You've stayed before. Like we all have because we've all worked front of house. I
just, I don't care. Because fundamentally what I needed was I needed all of you people out the way so I could book the five night stay in my standard ring that netted me $1,500 that I would not have had if I hadn't moved all of you people out the way into empty inventory that potentially was never gonna get full.
Or I would've paid an absolute fortune to an OTA for a booking in that ring anyway. So I'm improving my cost flow. I'm improving my occupancy. Let's say the hotel is a hundred percent full. Okay, fine. I have no availability. What do you wanna do? Do you wanna go on a wait list? Yeah. Okay. So instead of all, there's other wait lists or you just gimme an email address.
What do you want? Let's, let's not waste your time offering something you don't want. What room did you want? Okay, cool. So build that, stay out. When that stay is available, I'll send you a link and you can book it when that becomes available due to an OTA cancellation automatic email link out to the guest.
Hey, that two night, three rooms stay. Whatever it was, you want it, it's available. Click now to book it. One click and I book the room all in. Do put my credit card details anywhere. Stay without before my credit card details were already there, whether it anywhere in the Albie network I've stayed. If I put my credit card details in and said, save them, they're there.
So I now my, my simplified card is done. And then again, if I don't wanna go on the wait list, well, hey, there's these 15 other properties in our network that are within the area. Do you wanna book one of those? Because if I'm not gonna get the booking, if I don't have the availability for the booking, if I'm too expensive for the booking, the guest is gone, I've made nothing from that.
It still costs me $3 for the PPC click to get that person to my website. Call back, go book with a guy next door and he's gonna give $50 for your booking, which is still saving him $150 on what he would've paid one of the OTAs for. So he's winning and I'm winning 'cause I just made $48 profit on my mark and everybody won.
The guest won 'cause they got somewhere to sleep for the night and we all won 'cause we didn't spend any money on inmates.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. Uh, you know, it's, it's almost mind blowing about the cascade effect and just ensuring that you can maximize, uh, your availability because you know what percent of people book the lowest room tier? The, the standard room, right? So that sells out fastest, right? And then you can surprise and delight a direct booker versus an ate booker by giving that direct person saying, Hey, you know, you get a free room upgrade.
When actually it was the cascading mechanism that was determining that behind the scenes.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: Well actually when your marketing material as a direct booker is hey, book direct. And we guarantee if we've got a room available to upgrade you into, we will. You're gonna get the best price you're gonna get upgrade offers quicker than anybody else. You're gonna get all these other benefits and you can do all this other things that you can't do with an OTA.
I mean, you can't book an OTA for two different with two different entry points. So if I'm a group booker booking for business and I've gotta book five rooms, my execs are going to York, that's five different OTA bookings, five different reservation numbers, five different emails. Wonderful. I'll just book that in one cart.
Thanks very much. And have five different reservation numbers in the same place. And then when I have to move things around or change things, I don't have to affect everything. I have to go through my emails trying to find which reservation it was for her. When? When's Dan coming in and when's Adam coming in?
When's Joe coming in? That's all that. Joe's coming in that day. Dan's coming in, then Adam's coming in, then it's Adam, I wanna change, click on that one, open the reservation, modify it. I'm done. Super simple like, and again, from a, from a refund perspective, because the platform is a full commerce platform.
If I've booked three advance purchase rates, but they're refundable, if I'm canceling that room or amending or or modifying that room in line with the hotel's policy for a refund, I'll be's gonna refund on the money. We haven't really sit to the hotel, we had it in holding account because they haven't checked in yet, but the minute they're on site, they get the money.
But why would I not protect the guest at the same time from the perspective of the hotel? And God forbid, you know, we know that hotels do go under and we've just recently seen everything that's happened with Sonder and stuff you, which is super unfortunate. Those guests have been left dazed and confused and wounded.
If they'd had a, if they had a platform that was protecting them by holding that money and not giving it to 'em until they checked in, these people now wouldn't be chasing around, wondering if they're ever gonna get the money back, how they're gonna do this, insurance and claims, and blah, blah, blah. Very simple
Adam Mogelonsky: Right.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: time for everybody, not just the guests.
Time for everybody.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, I mean, you know, you, you talk about, um, how 40% of travel is multi destination. One, uh, two or more. And you know, for me personally, when I'm traveling around, when I'm designing a client roadshow, I have this massive spreadsheet I'm researching. I'm, I'm going up into 20 different booking engines, and then I'm computing it all into this one master guide that just has everything.
Uh, when, uh, if I were measure my total time on that, it would be like 10 hours to complete a, a 10 day trip. Right.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: I got IB coming up. I, I've gotta book five people to go to Madrid. I then need to fly people back to London. Some people gotta go back to Columbia, some are going to Argentia. Then a load, more people are going into Berlin. That's kind of, and again, it, it's me. I mean, because of who I am, I'm gonna take control of that.
'cause I wanna make sure my, my team is safe when they're traveling and, and they've all got what? What they've got. That's gonna be two, three days of my life out trying to find hotels, trying to this I can just go to Alby and do that in one quick thing. Madrid. Okay. Where are you going next? London, Berlin.
Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Thanks so much.
Adam Mogelonsky: And all attached to one, uh, company. So therefore, it's one thing to off your, uh.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: And more importantly, because you can print off the itinerary from Alvy as well. You can show reservation numbers in a, in a simple screenshot. Just screenshot that. These are the reservation numbers. This is how much everything was. Everything is a single point, uh, pull from the payment from the credit card anyway.
'cause otherwise you'd never get anything through. 'cause everything would be $25,000 in America expressed up a breakdown. So everything is invoiced that way anyway. And it's, and it's a data check. And if it's not an advanced purchase, so fundamentally I can just send one screenshot while itinerary and say, bang, that matches up with my credit card statements.
These are the reservation numbers. This is the amount I did that was the holding deposit. 'cause it was listed separately. So we gotta a watch for that to be returned. But we know it's gonna move down because it's Alby that's returning it, not the hotel. Because that's the other thing. I recently checked into a hotel in Miami that I used to stay in a lot.
A lot. Like I'm, when I was living between Miami and LA and I checked in and the guy, oh my God, we haven't seen for ages. And I said, yeah, you know, it's just life. It's, it's kind of been super busy. Um, and he said, I've just been looking at your thing. Do you know we didn't release your deposit the last time you were here?
And I'm like, oh. And he is like, so I'm, I'm not gonna take a deposit this time. So he said, and he's no job. I was like, Albert, just do me a favor. Like, can you check back and see if you didn't return any other deposits? And he said, well, do you not check? And I said, no, four and half thousand dollars in deposits I had on book with this account.
They had never in 24 stay returned a deposit. I have never ever done his hotel room or not. And literally he's like, I, I'm gonna have to call the gm. I was like, you call the gm, I want my four and half thousand dollars back. Like, nevermind keeping the deposit for this stay. You're gonna need to refund me that money. And, you know, bless them. I mean, they say it was oversight on their part. I don't think there was anything malicious in it. Will I ever stay in that hotel again? Absolutely not. But, and they released four and half thousand dollars worth of deposits. But, but again, if I had a system like alb, I, I now was a hotel.
No longer need to worry about that. But ALB send wasn't that, unless you click a button that says do not return the deposit, they wrecked the place, which are do in the PMS anyway because it's a two way interface. So I say in the PMS, no don't. Or I say deduct 50 and I gonna send, respond the remain back and it's done.
It's in a completely separate platform. The guest sees it, they see it, everybody sees it. It's smooth, it's frictionless.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. you know, now, uh, we're looking at 2026 and. You're talking about things that are so fundamental in terms of payments and the friction and management of payments, which is a huge, huge labor expense. Meanwhile, everyone is looking at ai, AI search, and that's a huge thing as well. I saw you roll your eyes.
I saw it. I saw it. Uh, but, uh, we would be remiss if we didn't touch on it in terms of, um, people are looking at it in, uh, in terms of readability for sites, uh, book ability for, uh, payment rails. Um, where do you stand on this and what, what tools are you looking at to, to enhance the booking experience?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: so we have already set the system up to be completely compliant and able to work with things like Chat, GPT, and US Chat and all these other AI agents and things. Um. We are looking at partnerships with those various different providers to enable Albi to be the place that people come and they can book all these different things.
Um, do I believe this is gonna happen in the next 24 months? Absolutely not. If it happens in the next 24 months. Alan, you are more than welcome to play this back to me. Um, do I believe that the vast majority of bookers, I saw a stat the other day that said 70% of travel bookers are now booking through chat gt and I literally laughed.
Ridiculous. 70% of
track,
Adam Mogelonsky: 1%,
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: it's one. This is a $600 billion industry and you are trying to tell me that 70% of $600 billion shifted to chart GPT don't. Crazy, like we're just making this stuff up as we go along because we were sleeping that that's gonna fuel adoption. It's 1%. Next year it'll be 3%. The year after that it'll be 10%.
And in five years time, we will be having a conversation about the fact that 30% of travel is booked through AI travel tools and we are set up and ready for that. We've been ready and set up since we, since we formulated it, we put AI inside the platform to make it easier for hotels to be able to adopt the platform and work the platform and run the platform.
Um, there are, there are definitely, we have used AI tools in there to minimize workload required to roll the platform out and manage the platform. And it's set up super book on it when that is a thing, but I think we're way away from it. Yeah,
I certainly trust chat GPT with my credit card details that I can tell you for
Adam Mogelonsky: no, no. Uh,
yeah, the PCI, right? I mean, that's the whole thing, right?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: And we've also forgotten this whole GDPR thing, that there is a fairly major thing. So we're gonna let this, the, these AI companies that we dunno from Adam that are three, no offense, Adam, that are three years old, max three years old, with all this unproven technology that we have no idea how it's gonna self populate, self generate, self-learn.
And we're gonna punch all of our financial information into it with a big tick box that says, yeah, charge anything to what I told you to. In what world do we think this is gonna actually happen in the next 10 years before Fundamentally the people that are coming through now that think this is even remotely a good idea and fundamentally because they see it as a way of getting out, doing any work.
I think just a person, you know, I just. It's nonsense. I'm not playing my credit card details into anything, but I am not fundamentally overseeing that I see has a big PCI compliant badge on it that then out and anonymizes.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned, uh, GDPR in terms of, uh, you know, the one year wipe, uh, that has to happen. And, uh, you know, these algorithms that are determining these, um, AI search and AI booking, they are reliant on data that exists for longer than one year. So, you know, everything in that modeling is fundamentally based on historical records.
And, you know, if you're, if you have to be, uh, GDR compliant, then every single LLM that's built is not GDR compliant.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: Well, and I mean there, there's, there's the whole other raft of stuff. We have to, we have to also play into account here, which doesn't, which none of this stuff takes into place like, um, uh, a DA, compliance, all these other various things. But you know, this, this, this, this system doesn't know whether our near side or shore site, it doesn't know if I need an aada, a compliant or ring.
It doesn't know if I need to know how many stairs or there's, there's this whole raft of information that we've just forgotten in our excitement about the fact that something may save us 10 minutes.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, it's exciting.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: This is, and it will get there. It's gonna do amazing things. And in 10 years time, you and I will be both organizing our travel and our diaries by just thinking it probably God, I really hope so. Um, we just think it and it happens, but I think we are a way off that yet, and I think we have numerous legislative things that need to happen.
Consumer safety purposes for that to be where, where they're dreaming. It's gonna be
Adam Mogelonsky: well, a lot of consumer, uh, legislation only really comes when things break, right? I mean, But that's essentially how GDPR emerged. Uh, this first one, it was the digital protection, um, to protect people, uh, and their records after several data breaches.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: now because two of our major hotel chains have huge data breaches that expose millions of people's data to a bunch of criminals and suddenly we had a problem.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: And it's the same credit card breaches. It's never PC compliance wasn't a thing until somebody, somewhere in deepest, darkest somewhere when you know what I should do, I do hack into this band and credit card details and go do my shop
Adam Mogelonsky: but like, listen, all this, it's dynamic, it's changing, it's evolving, it's, it's exciting. And, um, you know, to close out here, uh, tell us what is exciting to you in the coming years. A general technology, uh, level as well as, uh, for ALB coming up, either new, new rollouts, new features, everything.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: So for Albie, I mean we are, I would say we have got the next three years worth of amazing features already on the roadmap, already done. And they range from huge things like putting into place, you know, multiple, multiple different like airline bookings and things. We are in talks with some fairly major, um, event softwares, shall we say, that would enable me to start selling tickets to concerts and things like that.
If I am a hotel. Somebody is trying to buy a concert ticket and now I can marry up and book my hotel at the same time in this seamless journey, or I'm a hotel in the location and I'm not, I'm not aware that that concert has happened and now suddenly everybody starts looking for hotels around that concert venue and I'm in it.
I'm now perpetuating booking and saving a fortune on marketing and knowledge that I need because the system is already doing it for me. So I think there's some exciting things coming from an integrations perspective for us. I think we have some exciting software partners that we'll announce in January when those integrations are fully completed and done.
And I think for me, when I see the First Island using ALB as the port of entry for a tourism board to say, Hey, you wanna come to our island? You can book everything you need in this one space here. Visit, whatever it might be, and that is al be powering that. I, I find that very exciting.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. so, uh, I wanna wrap this up by focusing on one specific thing. You talk about an island and booking everything. One specific use case that has always intrigued me is how cyclists book their travel. And I mentioned cyclists because they are, uh, they largely go by the OTAs nowadays because it's the only thing where they can quickly find what they need and where they're gonna be based on how far they go.
Right? And so what you're, what you're saying is your platform can, they can rent the bike, they can then book a spa treatment, uh, and find out which places have spas and they can do the multi hotel. Um, packaging, uh, for, for a cyclist who's going, you know, uh, doing a trip down the, uh, Adriatic right or something, one of these once in a lifetime cyclist trips.
So, to close out here and to summarize, tell me how Albi would help a cyclist to really make their travel experience multi destination, multi ancillary. How would it make it exceptional?
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: So I go on to, I go onto the first hotel, and actually in 2027 we will launch albie.com which will be an open face portal to, for guests to come in and book. So I just put Milan and it says, Hey, this is everything that's in Albie in Milan, and all those hotels are paying 5% instead of 25%. So they're happy all those ancillaries.
But anyway, so I go in on a mat, I say, this is my route. Show me hotels every 30 miles. I'm gonna do 30 miles a day on the bike. Show me hotel every 30 miles. Show me ancillaries as well. My search turn comes back, Hey, this location, these hotels, these ancillaries, this, this, do you wanna book that? Yeah. Okay, fine.
Next location. These hotels, these ancillaries, what do you need that this next one, I can plan an entire road trip in map view just by, by charting my course. Or I can look at the, sorry if I don't need to do it that way. I just book the first hotel, look at the map and say, right, um, there, I wanna stop here.
Show me everything. There There I'm building out my itinerary in one place. All my reservations in one place, and I'm, and I'm adding to my cart exactly the same way as I do when I go to Amazon, eBay, any of these Multiple Rakuten, whatever it is. Um, I'm building out multi-vendor cart. Based on where I need it to be, not where the vendor tells me it's, which is probably actually the biggest, most exciting thing about Albie is from a room trip perspective.
And we know that our beloved North America is at South America, Latin America are huge road trips. Tourism, which involves me doing multi destinational. If we look at the Caribbean Island hopping my ability to say, Hey, I wanna go to Sacia, Barbados, and then Jamaica. Perfect. Okay. This is Sacia, this is Barbados this is Jamaica.
I learning. Done five minutes. Didn't have to sit on, no. Didn't have to try and understand 30 different properties. I just said, show me five star properties without standing guest ratings, because Alby has all those features and functions in it. Show me five star function. Show me this. Show me something with a spa.
Bam. Search Return these five hotels.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. I think that's a great, that's a great summary of the tools and, um, you know, I hope that people who are listening are seeing that, uh, there are solutions to really ramp up direct bookings. Uh, but also, you know, the ability to manage commissions all in one place, to save money on accounting, uh, or time on accounting, as well as other tools like the dynamic room upgrades, um, and just that cascading feature.
There are amazing things happening. Rich. This has been a mind blowing hour to, uh, just to learn about the latest, uh, latest and greatest in Albie and, uh. Times ahead.
Thank
you for coming on the show.
Rich Tuckwell-Skuda: thank you for having me. It's an absolute, as always.