Executive Insight: A Platform Approach to Optimizing Revenue and Improving the Guest Experience

What challenges do enterprise hoteliers face in implementing an effective platform?

Enterprise hoteliers are amongst the largest chains in the world, usually with multiple brands that cater to various value propositions. Through their sheer size, they have the power to influence and even transform the hospitality industry. And, many of them, still on homegrown solutions, are pursuing digital transformations today.

The current hotel tech landscape is highly fragmented. As a result, global enterprise hoteliers have a range of suboptimal choices available as they pursue their digital transformation objectives.

Purchasing best-of-breed solutions requires hoteliers to build an extensive array of integrations that may result in fragile and unreliable systems, operational headaches, and high costs.

At the other end of the solution spectrum is the internal build of a custom system that spans the hospitality value chain. Although this approach can achieve the cohesiveness desired, the costs associated with this approach put the hoteliers at a permanent competitive disadvantage as they are not able to benefit from the significant economies of scale and the high rate of innovation that platforms offer.

What should an enterprise hotelier’s platform accomplish?

At Sabre, we believe an enterprise hotelier’s technology must accomplish the following: drive commercial performance, enable operational excellence, on a platform that works. These are the three core tenets of Sabre’s value proposition to enterprise hoteliers.

Driving Commercial Performance is achieved by providing our customers with unprecedented reach with connections to more distribution channels than any platform in the industry, enabling improved business agility with the ability to instantly publish rate strategies, packages, and promotions across brands, select properties or the entire chain and creating entirely new revenue streams with the ability to create and sell any product, policy, event, or service via SynXis Intelligent Retailing

Enabling Operational Excellence is achieved by enabling customers to easily integrate current and future systems and create differentiated capabilities with an extensive API library and an architecture that emphasizes interoperability.

On A Platform that Works means that our customers benefit from our "Security First" approach leveraging extensive security capabilities to protect their customers’ data. Reliability and performance backed up by industry leading availability with unparalleled transaction speed, 24x7x365 monitoring and the ability to grow with minimal disruption to day-to-day operations given Sabre’s extensive track record of large-scale migrations performed rapidly and seamlessly.

What are some of the benefits of “intelligent retailing”?

Nearly six in 10 U.S. travelers want brands to tailor information based on their personal preferences or past behaviors. If they do so, 76% would be likely or extremely likely to sign up for the brand’s loyalty program, and 36% would pay more in return for receiving more tailored information and experiences, according to “How to Win Travelers in the Age of Assistance” by Google and Phocuswright. What they want, in effect, is more and better personalization. That now-entrenched trend is at the foundation of a retail revolution in hospitality that is just beginning to take hold and that no hotelier can afford to ignore.    

Consumer expectations are being driven by retail leaders that use data well because they deliver comprehensive platforms to their consumers. As a result, consumers want relevance. They want the right offer and the right recommendation, and they also want choice. 

The SynXis Intelligent Retailing Solution (SIR) is a significant step forward in an evolution of the SynXis CR into a retailing platform for the hospitality industry. SIR empowers hoteliers to monetize every feature, amenity, service, space, event, or experience accessible at and near their properties and distributes room as well as non-room retail offers, whether owned by hotels or third parties, across channels.  

We refer to SynXis Intelligent Retailing as the “anything store”, meaning that hoteliers can configure for retail sale all manner of products and services. There is no presumed limit as to what the hotel or chain may want to sell. It allows the chain level or front desk agent to create and configure for sale any kind of product or service, such as the following: 

SIR enables hoteliers to make targeted offers dynamically for any room as well as non-room inventory. There are five key areas that offer retailing opportunities to hoteliers:  

• Selling guest rooms and hotel services differently  
• Merchandising  
• Monetizing hotel policies  
• Monetizing underutilized spaces. We’re working towards making booking an event space as hassle-free as reserving a guest room
• Partnering on local experiences and promotions  

Leverages the power of machine learning to build and recommend relevant offers to guests, increasing the conversion for ancillary purchases.  

SynXis Intelligent Retailing is leading the evolution of retailing platforms for the hospitality industry and creating new and valuable revenue streams for our customers.

How does Sabre SynXis Platform integrate with new capabilities?

Because hoteliers’ needs are diverse, we are committed to the principle of an open platform. With our 3C model – Code, Configure, Customize – we can enable a hotelier’s brand promise on our technology. Sabre’s SynXis platform is highly configurable, enhancing existing capabilities, and customizable, extending the platform through third-party capabilities. Our modern, open API approach allows for component-level interoperability. We can easily add new APIs, dramatically shortening the time to add new layers of innovation by extending the SynXis ecosystem rather than depending on a collection of one-off point systems that are not deeply integrated.

By leveraging Sabre SynXis’ open architecture, hoteliers no longer will have to choose between differentiation and scale. Sabre Hospitality Solutions knows well that reliability, security, performance, and service must remain the hallmarks of the platform, and that’s why it can deliver the capabilities that the world’s best hospitality companies expect and deserve.