Infor announced that Chichester Park Hotel has deployed Infor Hospitality Management Solution (HMS) and Infor Sales & Catering (SCS), a fully integrated, event-management software solution. The new cloud systems have streamlined and amalgamated key processes, laying the foundations for continued business growth.

The 86-room hotel in the heart of historic Chichester, England, was looking for a new solution to replace its incumbent system that was unable to keep pace with the demands of the growing business. Following a thorough assessment of the market and a six-way competitive pitch, Chichester Park Hotel chose the two solutions from Infor.

In particular, Chichester Park liked the ease-of-use of the solutions and their ability to not only integrate seamlessly with each other, but with other solutions and technologies, too. Infor HMS and SCS are already delivering benefits for the business, securing valuable efficiency savings and providing more insightful and accessible data than with the previous solutions. Infor SCS is helping to facilitate a frictionless guest experience, automating the entire booking process with an intuitive workflow at every stage of the customer journey. System integration furnishes the team with comprehensive business visibility at any moment in time.

“Put simply, the systems work for us,” comments Kam Sanmukhani, Chichester Park operations manager. “The seamless integration of our core business processes has led to a more streamlined and efficient experience for both staff and guests. For example, when it comes to advanced deposit postings, we can now automatically charge cards in a couple of clicks, a process that used to take 90 minutes to do manually. The reporting functionality is excellent, too, enabling us to filter the data in a multitude of ways to reveal valuable business insights.”

“Infor SCS gives us the ability to automate the entire booking process, from initial enquiry through to the final invoice. In combination with the functionality of Infor HMS, Infor SCS puts the scalable foundations in place to ensure sustainable and profitable business growth, helping us to deliver exceptional customer service whilst maximising revenues,” Sanmukhani added.

“Infor HMS and SCS are built to meet the exacting demands of the hotel industry,” comments Paul Griffiths, Infor hospitality business development management for UK and Ireland. “As the team at Chichester Park has recognised, our flexible and scalable solutions deliver quantifiable business benefits, automating core processes to deliver that all-important quality experience for guests and staff alike. The efficiencies and valuable insights that our solutions deliver continue to make them the ideal choice for hotel businesses keen to pursue ambitious growth strategies, boosting customer satisfaction as well as profitability.”

Alliants, the customer experience specialists, has appointed Kashif Yamin as SVP of Data & Strategy.

As a commercially astute leader with a deep knowledge of data driven decision making, Kashif is devoted to helping hospitality and travel companies optimise their customer experience and make winning decisions.

He commented: “There has been a massive increase in the amount of data that companies are collecting, but there is still a big gap in terms of their ability to translate that into real insights and actions.”

“Alliants is at the vanguard of closing that gap by improving customer experience and creating better outcomes in terms of customer satisfaction, retention, upselling, and ultimately customer lifetime value through its Alliants Experience Platform and data-rich service capabilities.”

Kashif is returning to Alliants, having previously worked with the customer experience experts as Client Director from 2011 to 2017.

Tristan Gadsby, CEO and co-founder of Alliants, said: “We are thrilled to have Kashif back on board and, in some respects, he’s never been away. In the intervening years, we worked together on the machine learning platform Incisively, which has delivered great results for several hotel clients including Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts.”

Kashif was the CEO and founder of Incisively Limited and the eCommerce optimisation lead with Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, resulting in significant conversion and customer experience gains for the luxury brand.

His career spans marketing, product, operations and commercial functions across a host of travel and hospitality businesses, most recently as Commercial Director of Travel Republic, an Online Travel Agency.

Kashif said: “It’s fantastic to be back at Alliants. It is a business that has developed enormously since I left. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with professionals from hospitality and other sectors and helping them find those next levels of innovation to stand out from the crowd.”

In response to the rapidly changing meetings and events landscape for which meeting organizers need to book meetings and events ever more swiftly, Radisson Hotel Group’s Book It Easy platform allows planners to organize events seamlessly by simplifying the venue sourcing and booking process online. Planners can simply enter their event details, check real-time availability of meeting spaces, view the room options with ground-breaking 360 technology, book their preferred venue, and receive instant booking confirmation. 

Book It Easy key functionalities include: 
•    24/7 real-time availability of meeting spaces
•    360-degree views of rooms 
•    Best available rate guaranteed and transparent pricing
•    Custom-made packages, including AV equipment or additional amenities
•    Easy and secure online payment

“We are incredibly proud to have launched our Book It Easy tool successfully across key hotels in our EMEA portfolio over the last 12 months. Radisson Hotel Group has a strong reputation for delivering world-class meetings and events facilities, and we are now making the booking process even easier. We conducted extensive research with our valued meetings and events partners to create this new platform and to ensure it includes all the technology and information required for a seamless, real value, and real time experience,” says Chema Basterrechea, Global President and Chief Operations Officer at Radisson Hotel Group.

Radisson Hotel Group has developed the Book It Easy platform in partnership with EY. The tool is fully compatible with the Group’s unified technology platform to allow for real-time availability and transparent pricing based on event requirements throughout the booking process. Built with a microservices architecture, the tool provides a swift and seamless user experience and scalability, backed by rigorous privacy and security testing.

The Book It Easy platform is the latest offering from Radisson Meetings which promises the same personal, professional and memorable experience. Radisson Meetings provide tailored solutions for any event or meeting, including hybrid solutions placing guests and their needs at the heart of its offer. Radisson Hotel Group’s world-leading 100% Carbon Neutral Meetings offering automatically offsets the carbon footprint of every single meeting and event taking place at any the Group’s hotels worldwide, at no cost to organizers. In partnership with First Climate, one of the world’s largest carbon offset organizations, and through projects that help reduce emissions and have a positive social impact, Radisson Meetings strives for environmental best practice.

ClearCOGS will introduce AI Operations Manager, a new chat-based tool for restaurants to gain control of their operations, at MURTEC 2023. The AI Ops Manager is powered by ChatGPT and it sits on top of both historical and forecasted data to allow restaurants a full past and future look at their business. This product offers a new way for restaurant operators or managers to find solutions to their day-to-day challenges and ask the questions that need immediate answers.

"We've had the AI Ops Manager vision for a while," says Matt Wampler, CEO at ClearCOGS. "We're able to execute that vision much faster by employing ChatGPT tech."

Since the start of the company, ClearCOGS has been using AI to do restaurant demand forecasting. By accessing the data that already exists, they can generate detailed and accurate predictions on what to expect from each upcoming shift. This is crucial information for restaurants that, on average, have razor-thin margins. What this new ChatGPT feature will do is allow restaurateurs access to vital information at pivotal decision points. "What's really exciting is not just that it's a translation layer," says Matt, "but it's able to add value to the data."

ClearCOGS states that the system will be able to answer questions as general as, "How was business last week?" and as specific as, "How many plain bagels should I bake today?"

The ClearCOGS AI Operations Manager will be unveiled on March 6. For more information on the AI Ops Manager, visit clearcogs.com.

Reserva Alecrim Eco Suites Resort has maximized revenue per guest and more quickly realized its growth strategy due to the implementation of an intuitive, integrated hotel management solution from SIHOT.

The eco resort accommodation provider not only increased guest ratings on Booking.com and Google, but also achieved a 60% increase in guest spend by offering more services and experiences, with it’s F&B business unit benefitting from a more than 70% uplift. The digitalization of its operations, financial, administrative and booking processes allowed it to significantly reduce pressure on staff by nearly eliminating the need for 44 hours overtime per month as a result of automating time-consuming tasks.

Reserva Alecrim has also seen massive improvements to team communication across the 24-hectare site, and now provides an enhanced guest experience for billing and check-out - securing 70% increase in upsells throughout the property. 

SIHOT was installed in January 2022, with the resort now using SIHOT.PMS, SIHOT.POS, Channel Manager and SIHOT.TRUST. Previously, the resort’s staff were challenged by manual systems where the PMS could not integrate with other systems. The technology lacked the ability to add experiences and services to a room bill, causing delays in compiling single guest payments. With SIHOT’s cloud-based solution, the team can access reports from anywhere and process invoices within a few minutes, resulting in a 75% time reduction.

“It’s about making processes simple and with SIHOT, that’s possible. Even training new staff is quick: they’re up and running within a week. We have taken steps to further improve our offering and guest experience while improving our communication and pulling all the teams together. With more information we can achieve what we want. We simply couldn’t have grown with our former PMS,” continued Alves.

Reserva Alecrim is able to better manage its daily operations. The improved visibility of reporting has helped revenue generation, with department heads able to incentivize their teams to upsell when needed. 

SIHOT’s solutions enable the resort to integrate with a range of technologies, including channel managers capable of selling to 35 OTAs today compared to none previously. Its integration with the resort’s billing system has helped it grow business, including partnerships with international travel agencies that required integrations for live availability. 

“Lurio and his team have demonstrated the value of turning around processes by using technology to their advantage to reduce pressures while improving the experience - not just for the guest, but also quite clearly for themselves. It’s fantastic to see a hospitality company make such significant gains in a short period of time where they have every confidence to continue their growth,” said Carsten Wernet, Chief Executive, SIHOT.

“A site of 24 hectares has become very close. With SIHOT, we feel that we are not that far from each other anymore. SIHOT has helped us grow, and is enabling us to plan an exciting future,” said Lurio Alves, Hotel Manager, Reserva Alecrim Eco Suites Resort.

Tattle, the hospitality industry’s go-to source for customer feedback management and data-focused operational insights, is exhibiting at MURTEC booth 118, at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, from March 6-8.

Attendees interested in unlocking proven ways of turning guest sentiment into actionable items that can drive sales at a more than 80% confidence, can visit Tattle leadership at Booth 118 for a demonstration. Tattle continues to be the provider of choice for both rapid-growth brands, like Dave’s Hot Chicken, recently named the fastest growing restaurant in the country, to established beloved concepts, like MOD Pizza, known for its amazing hospitality to go along with its equally fantastic pizza.

Tattle is an improvement-focused customer feedback technology platform built with an open API in order to collect guest feedback and measure satisfaction across all-digital ordering channels. With nearly 30 integration partners across POS, digital ordering and loyalty sectors, Tattle can dramatically boost the feedback volume and completion rate for restaurant locations through automation and data centralization. Using AI (Artificial Intelligence), Tattle recommends the most high-impact operational area for improvement across restaurant and ghost kitchen locations to drive the greatest increase in guest satisfaction.

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

“2023 has been a year of momentum for Tattle, from partnering with both rapid-growth and established brands who are now using our category-leading technology, to adding new functionality like Menu Item Level Feedback,” said company founder and CEO, Alex Beltrani. “We’re looking forward to demonstrating at MURTEC how Tattle can add bottom-line value to brands of all sizes.”

Additional Tattle integration benefits include:

• Omni-channel guest satisfaction measurement across Dine-In, Takeout, Delivery, Drive-Thru, and Curbside
• 7% total guest feedback penetration and a 94.3% survey completion rate of a 50-60 question survey
• Causation-based survey format to identify factors, i.e. Topping Distribution, that negatively impact an operational category, i.e. Accuracy
• Leverages AI to identify and recommend high-impact operational categories for improvement across each location
• Automated location-level Monthly Objectives that results in 84% probability of guest satisfaction increase
• Incident Management System leading to a 70-percent-plus guest recovery rate.