The Modern Hotelier #175: Inside One Of Europe's Biggest Tech Companies | with Estella Hale
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Steve Carran: Welcome to a special episode of The Modern Hotelier. We are coming to you from the Dallara IndyCar Factory in Indianapolis, Indiana. We are joined by Estella Hale, VP of Commercial Strategy from Zucchetti, North America. Thank you for sitting down with us, Estella. How you doing today? 
Estella Hale: My pleasure. I am very happy to be here. Thank you for having us in this wonderful event. It's an exciting time. 
Steve Carran: Thank you. Estella, how many HITECs have you been to? I have a feeling this is not your first?
Estella Hale: I'm not going to date myself, but I will say more than 15, sometimes as an exhibitor, sometimes just as an attendee. But it is an event that I try to be at every year and it's been many times.
David M.: So talk to us a little bit about Zucchetti and the companies and how you're helping hotels solve problems. 
Estella Hale: Sure. So Zucchetti is a very big technology company. The biggest one in Italy, one of the biggest ones in Europe. So when we brought it to North America, we wanted to focus on what is, what makes us distinct excellent, and how can we augment that?
And we get the independence to be able to choose what are the products that fit our market Because we don't do technology for technology say, so what is it that was filling our value proposition? We start with distribution that has been in our DNA and something that we've been doing for over a decade.
So we started to look at what products could we bring that made that distribution better and easier for hotels. So with that, what we are trying to focus on is we want to bring, we are bringing pricing decisions where buying decisions are made because we control the booking engine, we control the distribution.
We are now bringing a revenue management system that is fully integrated beyond the minimum common denominators, beyond what has been done with other legacy technologies to really bring that dynamic ability of pricing where guests do their buy. That's in a nutshell, what we're doing. 
Steve Carran: That makes sense? Yeah. That's great. So some hot topics at HITEC this year are AI data, automation. How is Zucchetti incorporating those tools to help hotels service better? 
Estella Hale: The way that we do it is first we start looking at the job that our solution is going to make, the job that is not doing, and what is the pain that it needs to relieve.
Some examples of this is we have a booking engine that uses generative AI for certain functions. So we looked at what are the functions that hotels have to do today to make that booking experience more attractive? You have many tools that allow them to be dynamic with pictures, subscriptions, currency, be dynamic with, you know, just a lot of information that they have.
But it's a tool. Here it is, and you use it. We then brought generative AI to fill the function that the hotels did not have time to make. So instead of having them go search for the perfect picture, our booking engine will take the description of that rate of that package and will generate an image that will have an impact, direct impact into that booking engine.
It will do the same for translation. It will do the same for bringing answers to common questions via chatbot. That comes standard with our technology because again, we're not connecting to channels, we're connecting to guests. 
David M.: Yeah. And so you and I have seen it, there's just been every year more and more technology getting introduced to the tech stack and for years everyone's been trying to solve this integration issue. So maybe talk a little bit about integration in Zucchetti and how you guys are working in that area. 
Estella Hale: So, I mean, that can take us down the rabbit hole, David, that could be like, okay, we're gonna talk about the holy grail there. No, I think what we do is because we control the aspects of that integration, particularly with our technologies, we always go beyond the minimum common denominator to prove that something can be done to give you an example, our CRS brings any denial data. When you said no because you're booked or you have a two-night minimum, what have you, we're creating a data lake, putting that information in and bringing it into the RMS, our RMS. That information will be available for other RMSs, but because we can go beyond the minimum common denominator, that's what we can do on our part.
We have over 400 channels that we are connected to. There are some that we must support the minimum common denominator because it's about speed, but where can we play our part? Those places where we can push the A PIA little bit more and then make it available to others in the industry. 
Steve Carran: That's great. So what is Zucchetti North America promoting at this HITEC, and what's next for you all?
Estella Hale: Oh, absolutely. So we have a press release that just went out. The press release is about Libra, RMS. So Libra, RMS, again, is our revenue management system that we're bringing into the market. What we're doing with Libra is. We're bringing a modular system that can allow hotels to use what they have in their every day.
They have to do that manually, whether it's bi and analytics, whether that is pricing when they are out on the weekend, or whether that is being able to respond if they will accept a group or not. Right. The group displacement, you know, Steven is a very important technology and solution that hotels have to use.
But now they have to respond even faster than they did before, so it can become a race to the bottom. What we're doing is bringing the tools that hotels can adopt that modular, so then it can free up the time for them to be strategic. When they are strategic, they can fully embrace the automation that an RMS have.
It is simply not fair to impose a team to say. Start doing automation. Don't do things manually. You have to replace the manual tasks first so that they, they can decide what they're going to use automation and understand where it will make an impact. That's what we're bringing with Libra. 
David M.: Great. Great. Well, we want to thank you for stopping by. We want you to have a great HITEC, but more importantly, have a great night and it's always a pleasure to see you. 
Estella Hale: Thank you so much for having me. 
David M.: Thank you.
Steve Carran: Thank you.