How a Portfolio of Luxury Hotel Residences Provides Personalized Guest Experiences via Its PMS
AKA is a portfolio of 12 unique properties in prime locations including New York City, Los Angeles, London, Washington DC and Philadelphia. What makes the AKA Collection distinctive is its long-stay business model that offers sophisticated furnished residences with exceptional business, wellness, and lifestyle amenities. AKA balances the space and comfort of a fully appointed luxury residence with the style and hospitality of an intimate hotel. Its resident mix is comprised of business executives on extended assignments, entertainment companies on location for film shoots, and sophisticated travelers seeking more space and flexibility than a traditional hotel experience.
Reena George, Director of IT for AKA said, “Each AKA property is unique and caters to varied clientele seeking luxury accommodations for stays of a week, a month, or longer. To manage our 11 US properties, we needed a property management system that would support our flexible stay options, deliver multiple ownership and management reports, provide powerful data analytics, interface with many 3rd party systems, have professional North American 24/7 support, and manage it all on a single database system in the Cloud. We also wanted a remotely hosted system that required minimum property infrastructure. The Maestro Web PMS Multi-Property System was the perfect software solution for the AKA Collection.”
One of the main reasons AKA Collection decided to implement Maestro Multi-Property was the systems flexibility and its team’s ability to understand AKA’s requirements and meet them. AKA’s business model is a hybrid, geared towards longer stays and different than a traditional transient hotel. This impacts many operational areas. Housekeeping is one example. There are many packages offered based on many factors one of which is length of stay. Maestro handles all these requirements. Another example is AKA’s reporting which requires specialized financial and performance reports that may be different for each property. Maestro’s Analytics Business Intelligence data mining delivers great transparency into performance at portfolio, property and resident levels. AKA’s Team leverages operational, financial and ancillary data in Maestro for business-wide insight.
George noted that Maestro’s flexibility extends to 3rd party system integration. “Our properties each have different 3rd party systems that must communicate with our front office system. Maestro’s platform provides an open API capability that makes it very easy for our other system vendors to interface with the PMS. This saves us time and development costs.”
Maestro also provides guest-facing functionality that personalizes the guest journey. AKA Collection residents are experienced travelers; they expect to be recognized and their preferences known. Maestro’s single image guest database tracks and records all past stay requests and experiences and presents them to AKA’s staff before check-in so they are prepared for their arrival with their favorite amenities. AKA uses Maestro’s Guest Experience Measurement, GEM.
AKA Collection offers residents seamless check-in experience. Maestro’s iPad Mobile Check-in and Signature Capture lets AKA’s front office teams meet the customer expectations, provision resident interaction and offers quick check-in. Maestro support was also important to AKA’s decision. Maestro’s support is 24/7 based in North America and its team members are hospitality professionals that understand AKA Collection’s business and its unique processes.
The Maestro Property Management System delivers flexible and scalable deployment options with an identical full-featured web browser or windows solution available in the cloud or on premise. Maestro’s revenue-generating hotel management software tools and services increase profitability, drive direct bookings, centralize operations and provide personalized and mobile guest service tools to enhance the guest experience.