CAMO Launches Marketplace Dining Platform for Hotels
Hospitality Industry veteran Kevin Rohani today announces the launch of CAMO, the first and only hotel-centric marketplace dining platform, built to provide direct ordering, a marketplace of restaurant brands and instant off-premise demand. Utilizing existing infrastructure and at no cost, hotels can optimize dining revenue and efficiency while offering guests an enhanced Room Service experience.
With the rise in popularity of ghost kitchens to create add-on demand, CAMO is a hybrid-offering. This enables a hotel kitchen to service its own guests while simultaneously aggregating nearby hotels’ Room Service orders through its direct ordering system and marketplace offering. CAMO’s proprietary platform uses market data and analytics to seamlessly develop highly efficient, sustainable, and on-trend virtual restaurant brands. This provides guests direct access to multiple food genres with freedom, flexibility, and convenience to mix and match orders, putting power into guests' hands.
Hotels have been losing a vast majority of their dining revenues to third party marketplaces. While the ghost kitchen sector could reach $1 trillion by the end of this decade, hotels are left with limited options to capitalize on this trend. Outdated brand standards, long wait times for Room Service, limited menu offerings, and high fees limit a hotel's ability to generate demand, even with a built-in audience. This drives guests to look for off-premise or third-party delivery options. Additionally, F&B operations for most hotel segments aren’t built to generate any dining revenues from the community.
From 2014 to 2018, DoorDash’s room service orders grew by 900 percent in New York City and 550 percent in San Francisco, according to Bloomberg Second Measure. Currently, according to a survey by the American Hotel and Lodging Association less than 25% of US hotels offer room service, and since 2014, digital ordering and delivery have grown 300% faster than dine-in traffic, as reported by Upserve. Hotels lose money on food and beverage services, and many have decided to end their relationship with traditional Room Service. “We have absolute certainty that the majority of hotels leave millions of dollars on the table, and the nature of our system is to capture and redistribute those revenues,” said Rohani. “Our test launch showed incredible promise and we were instantly and consistently generating greater than anticipated Room Service orders, with over 80% of our orders across 3 to 5 brands, often with check averages breaking the $200 mark.”
“There is nothing in the market comparable to what we are offering with CAMO. The platform is turnkey and built to enable hotels to keep dining revenues on-premises. Each hotel will be able to grow its own visibility and reach utilizing our culinary concepts, hotel-centric technologies, and aggregated marketplace demand,” said Rohani. “We needed to develop something with staying power, more dynamic than third party marketplaces and built into the hotel stay.”
The platform is currently built for a broad consumer market, targeting independent and limited-service hotels that historically lose money on F&B. The company is simultaneously developing highly efficient and sustainable marketplace menus for all hotel segments and kitchen types to meet its rapidly growing pipeline. CAMO either operates hubs in high density hotel markets or licenses the platform as an add-on to existing hotel restaurant operations needing to drive incremental revenues to reach profitability.
Born with a passion for hospitality, Rohani has more than a decade of leadership experience with top tier hospitality, development, and design firms. Early in his career, he worked at sbe before transitioning to Gensler, originating an innovative approach to programming and design. This catapulted him back to hotel management and development, driving global growth for Dream Hotel Group. In 2019, returning to his roots at sbe as SVP of Development, he drove massive expansion efforts for the company leading to its ultimate acquisition by Accor. In 2020, Rohani joined Accor as Head of Development for Lifestyle Hotels, to oversee the growth of one of the world's largest hospitality companies.
Rohani serves on the advisory board of the Entertainment and Hospitality Management Program at California State University, Fullerton, his alma mater, as well as modular construction and logistics company, SG Blocks, Inc., and hospitality tech startup Jurny, Inc.
CAMO has partnered with leading technology service providers to create an exclusive omni-channel platform centered around hotels and has assembled an unparalleled team of mission-driven investors and talent, recruited from global leaders across hotel, culinary, technology, and logistic sectors. With a robust and scalable pipeline, the company plans a series of new announcements that speaks to its momentum and projected growth. Rohani intends on partnering with over 1000 hotels in serving millions of guest orders annually.