News Briefs

eTip, a digital tipping and financial benefits platform tailored to service sector businesses,  announces its latest innovation – instant cashless tip payouts for restaurant workers. With this new feature, eTip empowers food service establishments to provide real-time, cashless tip payouts directly to their employees' existing bank accounts. This capability not only enhances employee satisfaction and retention but also streamlines payroll administration.

Americans are carrying less cash, and that presents a dilemma for restaurants and food service businesses. While credit card transactions are more convenient for customers, with 75% of American diners preferring to pay by card, tips made on credit cards are often a hassle to reconcile in internal accounting systems.

• 71% say the ability to integrate with other systems is driving their POS purchase decisions, according to HT’s2 2023 POS Software Trends Report.

 Worse yet, the service workers receiving tips, often motivated to join the industry with the promise of same-day pay, find themselves waiting hours or even days after their shift to receive the same funds to which they once had immediate access. With one out of four restaurant workers expecting to leave the industry within the next year, such a system that increases employee frustration is untenable.

Responding to these market shifts, eTip, the platform already modernizing tipping for some of the world’s largest hotel brands and third-party franchisees, is expanding its platform to power same-day cashless tip payouts via Visa Direct to food and beverage workers in restaurants, bars, QSRs (quick-service restaurants), and other foodservice establishments. Its connected API integrates seamlessly with a restaurant’s accounting system, making reconciling credit card transactions and tips frictionless and secure.

Major benefits of the eTip Restaurant Tip Payout Platform include:

• Improved Employee Retention and Satisfaction: By facilitating swift, same-day tip payouts, eTip empowers restaurants to enhance their employees' financial well-being, positioning them competitively in a tight labor market. In fact, 82% of hospitality workers choose instant tip payouts when presented with them as an option.
• Cost-Effective Operations: eTip simplifies and optimizes financial operations by seamlessly integrating with accounting systems, reducing administrative costs and errors.
• Reduced Administrative Burden: The platform automates tip distribution, saving time and effort while minimizing errors, allowing businesses to focus on core operations.
• Enhanced Security: Eliminating the need for cash, eTip provides a safer way to deliver tips. Additionally, eTip prioritizes data security, safeguarding financial transactions and personal information, and protecting against data breaches and fraud.

For hotel businesses that want to add eTip’s new functionality to the restaurant on their location, the benefits are greater still. Hospitality businesses can seamlessly add eTip’s cashless tipping for hotel staff and instant tip payouts for restaurant workers, effortlessly tracking and managing the funds of all the critical workers on their teams who rely daily on tipped wages.

To learn more, visit https://etip.io/tip-payouts/

Domino's Pizza Inc. introduces its new and improved loyalty program. 

Domino's Rewards offers loyalty members even more opportunities to earn and redeem points across its corporate and franchise store locations. Domino's enhanced rewards program allows customers to:

• Earn points for less
  • Loyalty members will now earn 10 points on every order of $5 or more
• Redeem points for even more menu items – and earn free Domino's after just two orders
  • Members can redeem a variety of points for more menu items:
    • 20 points: A free dipping cup, a 16-piece order of Parmesan Bread Bites or a 20 oz. drink
    • 40 points: An order of Bread Twists or Stuffed Cheesy Bread
    • 60 points: A medium, two-topping pizza; pasta; Oven-Baked Sandwich; or a 3-piece order of Chocolate Lava Crunch Cakes
• Earn more rewards
  • Loyalty perks are now even better, as members will have exclusive access to member-only deals, special discounts and opportunities to earn bonus points!

"We are thrilled to give the brand's loyal customers additional ways to earn free Domino's items more often," said Mark Messing, Domino's vice president of digital experience and loyalty. "At a time when most brands are scaling back their loyalty programs and making it more difficult to earn and redeem points, Domino's is doing the opposite. We want to make it easier to reward our customers and give them more options so they can get rewarded faster."

Marketing a LTO 

From now until Oct. 22, 2023, rewards members can take advantage of a limited time offer to redeem 20 points for a free order of Domino's new Pepperoni Stuffed Cheesy Bread, which is normally a 40-point redemption, in celebration of the product's recent launch. 

CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. International (CKE) has partnered with GuestXM powered by Black Box Intelligence in an effort to gain insights on the company’s customer experience (CX) across their QSR brands, Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s. 

Measuring CX

In order to measure CX for their international restaurants, CKE needed a solution that could capture feedback from customers across all channels, in multiple languages, and provide powerful analytics to help their teams quickly identify issues and opportunities to improve their steps of service. After evaluating several options, CKE chose GuestXM to streamline their tech stack and gain more actionable insights from a platform purpose-built for restaurants.

“With over one thousand restaurants worldwide we need to have a strong pulse on the brand experience. Our direct customer feedback through GuestXM surveys allows us to ensure that the quality of service and value of our products are always aligned to the broader brand vision, regardless of region or franchise,” said Mike Woida, President International - CKE Restaurant Holdings, Inc. “With GuestXM, we are able to measure customer satisfaction in all restaurants and identify opportunities across customer experience.”

“After optimizing our surveys, we were able to extract more information with less heavy lifting from our reviewers,” said Karen Reel, Senior Director of CKE International Ops Services & Training. “Not only are we getting a higher volume of reviews, but our completion rates are increasing, giving us more context behind how well we’re delivering on customers’ expectations.”

In a competitive QSR segment, CKE’s new CX intelligence and tools will bring differentiation to the market. 

Weldon Spangler, a longtime TGI Fridays board member and highly experienced restaurant executive, has been appointed CEO of TGI Fridays, effective immediately. He succeeds Brandon Coleman, who has resigned for personal reasons.

Spangler will lead implementation of the growth plan to revitalize the brand on a global scale. There are currently 700 TGI Fridays restaurants in 51 countries offering high quality American food and drinks. 

Spangler brings extensive background in the restaurant industry and his impressive career spans over 30 years of experience, during which he has built a reputation for his unwavering focus on customer experience, store operations, and marketing with successful tenures at Subway, Papa Murphy's, Dunkin' Brands, and Starbucks.

Rohit Manocha, Co-Founder of TriArtisan Capital, a New York-based private equity firm and the controlling shareholder of TGI Fridays with extensive experience in the restaurant sector, will continue to collaborate closely with Mr. Spangler and the dedicated team at TGI Fridays in his role as the active Chairman of the company.

RoomRaccoon, a hotel management system for independent hotels, has partnered with HyperGuest, a hotel distribution and connectivity platform. This strategic partnership will empower RoomRaccoon users to tap into a worldwide distribution marketplace and directly market and sell their rooms to B2B demand partners at scale.

The two-way  API connection with RoomRaccoon’s Channel Manager ensures that inventory and rates are communicated to HyperGuest across all channels in real-time so hoteliers can capture more bookings at low commissions from travel providers like agencies and consortia, specialized OTAs, and corporate travel services.

“As we continue to expand our hotel distribution connectivity marketplace,  we are excited to partner with HyperGuest and grant our users access to their extensive B2B distribution network,” says Stevie Reffin, Head of Partnerships at RoomRaccoon. “The partnership will empower hoteliers with streamlined rate management and  heightened visibility for their properties, leading to higher occupancy rates and greater profitability.”

With transparent booking data, the integration with HyperGuest gives hotels more control over the guest relationship. Unlike other OTA bookings, RoomRaccoon users can access guest information from the moment of booking for more personalized services. Additionally, with RoomRaccoon’s automated upsell feature, RaccoonUpsell, hoteliers can automatically upsell and cross-sell amenities and services to maximize the value of each guest. 

Kristine Meyer, Strategic Partnership Manager at HyperGuest, says: “We're thrilled to announce our collaboration with RoomRaccoon! This partnership is a significant milestone for both organizations. With shared visions and a passion for innovation, we believe this alliance will extend HyperGuest's reach and provide substantial added value to RoomRaccoon's customers.” 

The RoomRaccoon and HyperGuest integration is available to hoteliers worldwide. 

OTA Insight, a provider of cloud-based market intelligence for the travel & hospitality industry, has rebranded to Lighthouse. The rebrand consolidates multiple products and acquired companies into a single, unified commercial platform. This shift marks a significant milestone in the company's continued evolution as a unified platform that fundamentally reimagines commercial strategy for the travel and hospitality industry.

The name Lighthouse was chosen to symbolize the company’s role in illuminating insights, transforming confusion into clarity, and enabling confident decision making. "Our capabilities and vision have outgrown the OTA Insight name," said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO.  “As Lighthouse, we bring the most accurate, real-time data from multiple sources into a single platform, process that data using the latest AI & machine learning techniques, and complement it with amazing customer service. We listen to our customers and continuously innovate to deliver straightforward, intuitive tools that save time, boost revenue, and remain user-friendly.”

The enhanced Lighthouse platform introduces new business intelligence capabilities, new short-term rental insights, and a new look and feel to enhance the user experience for commercial decision makers. Data from strategic acquisitions, including Transparent and Kriya RevGen, is now seamlessly integrated into the Lighthouse platform. 

Core Lighthouse products and capabilities include:

• Rate Insight: Rate shopping and competitive price intelligence for both hotels and short-term rentals
• Market Insight: Forward looking market demand monitoring to improve forecasting, room price setting, and marketing strategies
• Benchmark Insight: Performance benchmarking with market, category, and competitor intelligence
• Parity Insight: performance management tools to measure room price parity across a multitude of distribution channels
• Business Intelligence (BI): BI solutions for single-property, multi-property and multi-brand portfolio revenue managers
• Pricing Assistant: AI powered room price recommendations with automated workflows 
• Distribution Insight: API monitoring and analytics to measure and optimize distribution performance
• Destination Insight: supply and demand analytics for DMOs, hotels and short-term rentals
• Hotel Data Solutions: tool sets to access the largest and most accurate hotel and short-term rental data set in the industry

Lighthouse currently serves hoteliers across 185 countries. The company’s platform is built on data sets covering over 725,000 hotels and 19 million short-term rental properties globally. Revenue and hospitality professionals, destination marketing organizations, asset managers, and short-term rental professionals all rely on Lighthouse to make decisions with confidence. 

In conjunction with the brand update, Lighthouse has also launched a new official company website. To learn more and explore the new site, visit www.mylighthouse.com.