Hospitality Ventures Management Group (HVMG), an Atlanta-based, private hotel investment, ownership and management company, today announced that it has strengthened its Revenue Excellence team with two new promotions. Melissa Arana has been named vice president of revenue strategy, and Denise Hanas has been named corporate director of marketing strategy.

“Melissa and Denise’s new roles are integral in our overall Revenue Excellence commercial strategy,” said Cory Chambers, chief commercial officer and senior vice president, business intelligence, HVMG. “Their leadership and subject matter expertise in revenue strategy and marketing are second to none. Under their guidance, we expect to find and grow new and existing revenue streams as we work toward improved bottom lines throughout our nationwide portfolio of third-party operated hotels.”

Melissa Arana, Vice President of Revenue Strategy

In this newly created role, Arana will oversee the revenue strategy team for the entire company. She joined HVMG in 2011 as an assistant general manager at the Doubletree DFW Airport North. During her tenure, she progressively has taken on bigger and more challenging roles within the company, including regional director of revenue management and corporate director of revenue strategy. Prior to joining HVMG, Arana worked several property level positions at multiple Hilton family hotels. Arana earned her bachelor’s degree in general finance from Texas A&M International University.

“Melissa’s knack for driving results and building strong relationships are hallmarks of her success,” Chambers added. “For those that know and work closely with Melissa, she exemplifies excellence in all that she does.”

Denise Hanas, Corporate Director of Marketing Strategy:

Having joined HVMG’s RevX team in 2020 as a consultant, Hanas has led the company’s marketing efforts through the most challenging time in the industry’s history. In her newly created role, she will expand on her most recent consulting position with the company by overseeing the company’s hotel marketing strategy. Prior to starting her consultancy, Argent Strategic Marketing, Inc., Hanas spent nearly two decades with Marriott International in various marketing and eCommerce roles. She received her Bachelor of Science in mass communications from Boston University.

“Expect more comprehensive engagement in all things marketing as HVMG continues to grow,” Chambers noted. “On a personal note, Denise and I have been working together for 20 years. I can vouch for her hotel marketing expertise and phenomenal, results-oriented approach – she is excellent!”

Medallia, Inc., the global leader in customer and employee experience, today announced that Holiday Inn Club Vacations, a leading vacation ownership company, successfully leveraged Medallia to improve “Guest Love” scores for the brand’s customer support call center to their highest levels ever.

Holiday Inn Club Vacations (HICV) is a resort, real estate and travel company with a mission to be the most loved brand in family travel by delivering memorable vacation experiences. With a focus on creating an exceptional customer experience, the company uses “Guest Love” scores (the internal name for top-box experience scores) to understand how it can make customers happier.

As a best practice, HICV collaborates with Medallia on survey design to adjust their surveys on an ongoing capacity, ensuring they are capturing the deepest level of insights available. This often includes using Medallia A/B survey testing to quantify and evaluate the validity and reliability of questions, flow of the survey, and the impacts of different wording.

Based on the response data, HICV then uses Medallia’s AI-powered Text Analytics to analyze customer experience data, pinpoint key issues, and understand real-time guest sentiment across customer journeys. This helps identify the key areas for optimization to deliver the greatest impact to the customer experience. These findings, combined with internal root-cause analysis, enables HICV to design and implement new processes, policies, and training, ultimately contributing to gains in Guest Love scores.

Putting all of this into action is a regular practice at HICV. In one recent example, after reviewing 18 months of survey data for a support call center (24,700 surveys from Q1 2021 – Q2 2022), HICV identified a decline in service experience. Accounting for seasonality, the underperformance YoY and degradation in scores alerted the CX team that there may be an underlying issue, and that an intervention was necessary. By completing a deep-dive into Medallia scores, topics and themes, the company was able to identify the contributory factors. As a result, customer segmentation analysis was conducted, modifications to soft skills training was implemented, and top-performer modelling was developed. Within just three months of launching these initiatives and monitoring them in Medallia, HICV saw the key customer satisfaction rating increase from 78.4% in March 2022 to over 84% in June 2022, exceeding the company’s 2022 goal of 80%.

Medallia’s Agent Connect has helped HICV identify what behaviors separate top-performing agents and what customer behavior styles agents need to be skilled in handling. The team has incorporated these learnings into training modules that focus on soft skills, new hires, and onboarding. Agent Connect also provides coaching and training for agents in the contact center, making it easier to learn and improve.

“The insights we receive from Medallia have given us a much better understanding of what matters most to our owners, members, and guests. We are able to take action on this information immediately and that is what enables us to give our guests exactly what they want,” said Nicole Myers, Vice President of Customer Experience. “Medallia allows us to capture and categorize feedback through different channels: surveys, online reviews, and social media interactions across the customer journey. We are excited to see that the actions taken based on our guests’ feedback are resulting in an exponential growth in satisfaction across the board.”

“Leading organizations know how critical understanding their customers and guests' experience is to the success of the business,” said Gabe Benavides, EVP, Global Sales and Marketing at Medallia. “In an industry built almost entirely on customer experience and loyalty, Holiday Inn Club Vacations has set themselves apart by their commitment to listening to their guests and continuing to take action to improve the customer experience.”

OTA Insight, a provider of cloud-based hospitality business intelligence, announced the launch of Rate Insight+, a solution that gives hoteliers a complete view of their competitive landscape by combining hotel and short-term rental data in a single platform. The new short-term rental data will be available as an upgrade to the core Rate Insight product.

Rate Insight+ offers hoteliers a comprehensive view of competitive short-term rental and hotel pricing in their specific market, providing crucial data to enable better pricing decisions based on demand, occupancy, and rates in their market. With the addition of short-term rental data, Rate Insight+ also saves time and effort by providing a single source of truth - hoteliers now have both the hotel and short-term rental data they need, in one simple and easy-to-use tool.

As the short-term rental industry continues to rapidly grow, professionalize, and increase market share, hoteliers face a host of new challenges.  Short-term rentals are now a mainstream competitor to hotels: 46% of those who paid for lodging in 2021 stayed in a short-term rental at least once. Potential guests compare factors including price, value, and experience offered by both short-term rentals and hotels when booking rooms. But until now, hoteliers have not had a solution to truly understand this new short-term rental competitor, leading to a major blindspot across their competitive landscape.

"With the majority of booking sites offering both hotel and short-term rental accommodation, market convergence is accelerating, and traveler habits are changing," said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of OTA Insight. "Our Data Science team has surfaced some powerful insights to help hoteliers understand the impact of short-term rental properties in their market on their commercial strategy. We're excited to introduce Rate Insight+, the first solution of its kind in the industry. Rate Insight+ enables hoteliers to take a comprehensive approach to analyze their market, understand the impact of short-term rental supply, and gain a competitive advantage."

For over ten years, tens of thousands of hoteliers have relied on OTA Insight to provide real-time, high-quality market data to capture demand at the optimal price. The winner of Hotel Tech Report's Rate Shopping and Marketing Intelligence category for three consecutive years, OTA Insight is a proven innovator. The new Rate Insight+ will help hoteliers gain a much richer view of their markets, enabling them to price with confidence in the face of an ever-changing competitive landscape.

HotelKey, a cloud-based hospitality platform, added its Central Reservation System (CRS) to an already existing portfolio of HotelKey products in use at Extended Stay America (ESA). ESA has worked with HotelKey for its Property Management System (PMS) since 2018, and for the HotelKey Call Center Module (Find & Reserve) since 2020. HotelKey’s next-generation cloud-based CRS product includes direct connectivity to leading OTAs and GDS systems, an easy-to-use Call Center module, integration with Channel Managers, and seamless integration with the HotelKey PMS.

HotelKey Co-Founder and President, Aditya Thyagarajan, said, “We are excited to further expand our relationship with Extend Stay America. ESA has an unwavering commitment to innovation and adoption of next gen solutions. The new agreement is not only further validation of that commitment, but also brings HotelKey one step closer to our vision - helping enterprises across the hotel industry implement full-stack solutions that support owners and franchisees and hotel managers to effectively manage their properties from anywhere.”

John Laplante, Chief Information Officer at Extended Stay America, said, “We are pleased to continue working with HotelKey, with the addition of its CRS product.” He concluded, “HotelKey has helped enable innovation of our tech platforms and further provides strategic value to our business.”

The addition of the HotelKey CRS brings ESA even deeper, more comprehensive operational benefits from a suite of integrated software solutions that are helping more than 4,000 hotels worldwide to  streamline operations and costs. HotelKey and ESA will work closely together to implement the CRS system across its portfolio of hotels with the goal of converting all hotels by the end of 2023.

Bear Robotics, a Silicon Valley-based innovator of hospitality robots, announces the launch of its new robot, Servi Plus, a service industry game-changer featuring increased capacity, enhanced user experience features, and the smoothest suspension engineering in the industry for transporting liquids and traversing ramps.

With an expanded 88 lb (40kg) payload and a 16+ dish capacity, Servi Plus is the heavy-duty answer to hospitality workflow automation. The latest addition to Bear Robotics’ renowned Servi lineup, Servi Plus is a bigger solution for alleviating repetitive work like running orders and bussing dishes so that team members may stay on the floor and focus on creating exceptional guest experiences.

In addition to its strong carrying capacity, Servi Plus features industry-leading suspension for liquid delivery, allowing it to traverse a variety of flooring, thresholds, and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ramps. This new product has the ability to carry four oversized serving trays or bus tubs and is adjustable for custom tray configurations.

Servi Plus also includes an array of visual and user experience enhancements, such as a full perimeter of responsive LED lighting for visibility and communication and a dot display matrix for custom messaging.

“This addition to our product line is something our entire company is very proud to launch,” says Juan Higueros, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Bear Robotics. “It is a testament to our team’s ability to collaborate with our partners and support them by bringing products to market that immediately fit their operational needs.”

With the release of Servi Plus, Bear Robotics is setting a new standard in the hospitality space. This new product allows for seamless service across many verticals. Whether it’s a restaurant, hotel, senior living community, sports arena, ghost kitchen, or family entertainment concept, Servi Plus is equipped to provide a superior collaborative robot service for operators, employees, and customers.

Paytronix, a provider of guest engagement for restaurants, transforms the management of mobile apps with Paytronix Mobile Experience Builder. This new self-service tool enables brands of all sizes to publish content in real time to their mobile apps, something that had only been available to those that could invest heavily in custom mobile app development.

“Restaurants and convenience stores must meet guests where they are, and more than ever they are on their mobile devices,” said Paytronix CEO Andrew Robbins. “Many of our clients need to communicate in real time with personalized information, but simply don’t have the budget or need to build a custom app.”

Today, more restaurant orders come in digitally than through any other channel, and the primary digital tool for many is now the mobile device. This means that every restaurant and convenience store, no matter the size, must have a mobile strategy that includes real-time messaging and functionality for a truly engaging experience. The new dynamic designer puts marketers in control of branding and the guest experience with the ability to publish real-time updates and limited-time offers (LTOs), without the need for a fully custom build.

“This is the tool we never knew we needed until we had it. It’s made it faster and easier to update messages, images, and offerings in real-time,” said Reed Daniels of Red’s Savoy Pizza. “We want to lead in technology. Getting a fully functioning app with online ordering, gift cards, and loyalty, all integrated, is well beyond the budget for a brand of our size. The only way we can do that is with a partner such as Paytronix.”

Making App Personalization Faster, Easier, and Cheaper

Paytronix Mobile Experience Builder enables marketers to create hyper-personalized messages and promotions by using advanced segmentation. It also provides access to geofencing tools, enabling the delivery of store-specific promotions and messages.

WATCH: A video of Mobile Experience Builder

In short, it eliminates the need for costly third-party designers and developers and modernizes the management of branded mobile apps with real-time updates that save time, money, and energy on app maintenance. It also ensures that guests have access to up-to-date information, including announcements and LTOs.

Paytronix Mobile Experience Builder is available today with a Paytronix mobile app. For more information, see us at MURTEC booth 401, visit https://www.paytronix.com/solutions/mobile-experiences/, or call 617-649-3300, ext. 5.