News Briefs

Mark Shambura has joined Panera Bread as Chief Marketing Officer. Shambura will lead all aspects of marketing at Panera, including Brand Building, Digital & Loyalty, Product Strategy & Consumer Insights. An accomplished marketing leader with broad expertise in the restaurant industry, Mr. Shambura has previously held marketing leadership roles during pivotal growth periods for top brands including Chipotle, MOD Pizza, and most recently Papa Johns.

"Mark brings an impressive background building brands and leading marketing teams for fast-casual restaurants, and we’re thrilled to welcome him to Panera Bread,” said José Alberto Dueñas, Chief Executive Officer. “As Panera continues to evolve our brand, guided by listening to our guests, Mark’s depth of experience and ability will help drive our growth as a brand that serves great food you feel good about eating.”

Shambura previously served as CMO at Papa Johns, where he led a revitalization of the brand by enhancing its iconic “Better Ingredients, Better Pizza” platform, and developing a more modern, innovative omnichannel approach to transform how Papa Johns appealed to both new and loyal consumers. As Executive Director at Chipotle, Mr. Shambura guided the marketing function through periods of both sustained growth and transition, providing leadership over brand strategy, advertising, digital, social, events/sponsorships, promotions, and field marketing, including playing a key role in spearheading its “Real Ingredients” brand strategy.

“I’m proud to join the Panera Bread team and excited to build on the momentum of the brand's transformation as it continues to evolve in service of our guests,” Mr. Shambura said. “Panera propelled and cemented its position at the top of the fast casual restaurant segment through its promise of high-quality ingredients and freshly prepared food, and I’m thrilled to join a highly talented team to help shape its next chapter.”

Prior to his tenure in the restaurant industry, Mr. Shambura gained extensive marketing agency experience, working with a broad array of top global consumer brands for over a decade. Shambura will report directly to José Alberto Dueñas, Chief Executive Officer, and officially assumed the role of Chief Marketing Officer on July 29, 2024.

Mews has entered into an agreement with BWH Hotels (BWH) to be a certified PMS provider. With Mews, BWH Hotels gains access to one of the most innovative hospitality technologies that boosts operational efficiencies and guest satisfaction.

"The collaboration with Mews aligns with BWH’s dedication to delivering exceptional guest experiences. Mews’ cloud-native platform offers flexibility and scalability, enabling European BWH properties to seamlessly integrate Mews with their existing systems and adhering to our commitment to technological advancement and operational excellence,” said Ron Pohl, President of WorldHotels and International Operations at BWH Hotels. "We look forward to working with Mews to help increase hotel operational efficiencies and guest satisfaction."

Mews offers robust features that streamline property management from guest check-in to backend operations. BWH properties can seamlessly integrate with existing systems while staying ahead of industry trends. This efficiency improves guest experiences and resource management, aligning with BWH’s goal of providing exceptional value to their hoteliers and guests.

BWH agreed to work with Mews due to the company's excellent customer support and a proven track record of successful integration. Mews will also play an important role in prioritizing guest loyalty alongside guest experience features like online check-in and a virtual concierge. These additional customized experiences are expected to further enhance brand loyalty.

"Mews is thrilled to team up with BWH Hotels," said Matt Welle, CEO at Mews. "We have worked closely with the team at BWH Hotels to ensure a seamless transition and the collaborative spirit of our teams has set a strong foundation for a successful partnership. We are excited to push the boundaries of innovation and operational excellence together to deliver truly remarkable experiences for all BWH guests.”

The comprehensive planning and coordination between both teams have ensured a seamless transition in numerous BWH properties, including the Best Western® Princess Hotel, the Best Western® Hôtel Lakmi Nice, and the Best Western® Plus Hôtel Isidore. Working with Mews, BWH Hotels is poised to further elevate their operational capabilities and continue their legacy of hospitality excellence.

Mirai, a provider of booking engine, web design and metasearch connectivity for hotels and a member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), announced that Mirai Opera Cloud App is available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace and can be deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and integrated with OPERA Cloud via the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP). Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a centralized repository of enterprise applications offered by Oracle and Oracle partners. 

Mirai enables hotels to manage their direct channel booking engine natively from the PMS without additional software (no channel manager or CRS needed).

This new integration allows hotels to easily differentiate their direct channel strategy from that of the OTAs and offer unique advantages to their customers to book direct. Both ARI (Availability, Rates and Inventory) and reservations are integrated so hoteliers can focus exclusively on helping maximize the revenue of their properties and optimize their channel mix over a simplified tech stack. 

Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a one-stop shop for Oracle customers seeking trusted business applications and services offering unique solutions, including ones that extend Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.   

OCI is a deep and broad platform of cloud infrastructure services that enables customers to build and run a wide range of applications in a scalable, secure, highly available, and high-performance environment. From application development and business analytics to data management, integration, security, AI, and infrastructure services including Kubernetes and Vmware, OCI delivers comprehensive security, performance, and cost savings. In addition, with multicloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud, and dedicated cloud options, OCI’s distributed cloud offers customers the benefits of cloud with greater control over data residency, locality, and authority, even across multiple clouds. As a result, customers can bring enterprise workloads to the cloud quickly and efficiently while addressing the strictest regulatory compliance requirements.  

“Easing our clients’ operations and developing direct integrations with the best partners in the hotel industry has always been our goal. Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Mirai is a solid and reliable technology stack that will help hoteliers reduce manual work and focus on what really matters: optimizing revenue, reducing distribution costs and running the business,” said Pablo Delgado, Managing Partner at Mirai. “Mirai’s participation in Oracle Cloud Marketplace further extends our commitment to the Oracle community and enables customers to easily reap the benefits of our solution. We look forward to leveraging the power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to help us achieve our business goals.”

Up Hotel Agency has launched Chameleon, the first dynamic AI-driven website tool specifically designed for small and independent hotels to compete with big brands and OTAs in delivering personalised and curated website  experiences with a focus on conversion.

Up Hotel Agency, an award-winning specialist hotel digital marketing agency, developed Chameleon as a unique and innovative toolkit to improve usability and website personalisation for every visitor. With the focus on increasing conversion for direct bookings, Chameleon automatically learns how a user interacts with the website. By using recognised patterns, AI, and site analytical data, the tool adjusts and optimises the website content to be tailored to the needs of each individual user offering a slicker web experience.

Drawing on many years experience building hotel websites and improving conversion working with cutting-edge technology, Up Hotel Agency developed a unique and cost-effective offering specifically to enable independent hotels to compete on a level playing field. Chameleon cleverly blends into the website dynamically, tweaking and customising the content to provide the best booker experience.

Key features include Auto-booking Search for remembering visitors booking search data with pre-populated fields; Smart Room Order to surface the most viewed room types; Currency Conversion using the visitor’s native currency with up-to-date exchange rates; Suggested Page Section to present pages appropriate to key conversion paths including recently visited pages; Seasonal Media ensuring the websites imagery and messaging adapts to changing seasons and key events all-year round from spring to winter, Christmas and Eid to St.Patrick’s Day.

Beyond presenting the hotel and room packages, Chameleon can be configured to drive product and service upsells, promoting a range of offers to help convert the guests or encourage them to enter the booking flow using a range of pop-ups, call out tabs and intent messaging.

“We were frustrated that many great technologies were unaffordable for many of our hotel clients. For smaller groups and independent hotels, budgets made it impossible to custom-create enhanced, dynamic and AI features - and therefore unable to compete with large groups or OTAs,” Said David Ohandjanian, Director and Founder, Up Hotel Agency. “So, we set out on a mission to unleash these technologies for all our clients to benefit from. We have combined the knowledge of our team with the power of AI, dynamic content, personalisation and conversion in one central evolving tool at an affordable monthly subscription for hotels.”

Up Hotel Agency creates the entire web experience for small and independent hotels. Visitors data is stored on the User’s browser avoiding any GDPR and data privacy issues saving another headache for hoteliers.

Yobe, a provider of intelligent voice technology, announced the launch of its newest product, VIENNA (VOICE INTELLIGENCE EXTRACTION FOR NEURAL NETWORK ANALYTICS). VIENNA is a cutting-edge voice extraction solution designed to revolutionize how businesses capture and analyze voice data, making it easier than ever to extract clear, valuable insights from conversations, even in noisy environments. This new solution builds off of Yobe’s proprietary AI-powered software, which excels at extracting meta-data enabling machines to focus on target speakers and helping businesses derive person-specific insights. Yobe’s launch of VIENNA marks the beginning of a new data-driven era of intelligent voice technology as the company continues to expand its impact in the sector. 

Yobe's new innovative solution was meticulously designed based on groundbreaking AI and signal processing science developed by Yobe’s Chief Scientist and co-founder, Professor Hamid Nawab. VIENNA allows for seamless integration from users, requiring only access to raw voice input data to begin delivering value. VIENNA is available now for organizations across various industries, from healthcare and retail to transportation and customer service, that are looking to harness the power of voice data for better business outcomes. VIENNA can be deployed flexibly—on the edge as an app or embedded system, hosted on the client’s server or soon available via a web-based API call. This versatility allows organizations to easily incorporate Yobe’s powerful technology into their existing systems, ensuring they can quickly unlock the full potential of their voice data. With the launch of VIENNA, Yobe solves the long-standing challenge of isolating and transcribing speech in complex, real-world settings. By leveraging Yobe’s unique blend of voice biometrics, intelligent voice activity detection and leveraging powerful large language models (LLMs), VIENNA ensures that only the most relevant speech is captured and analyzed, filtering out background noise and irrelevant chatter. More than just transcribing conversations, VIENNA captures emotional cues like frustration or satisfaction, helping businesses gain deeper insights into customer sentiment, improve operational efficiency and deliver enhanced user experiences. 

This infusion of perceptual information allows for deeper, more meaningful analysis from voice communication, user interfaces and data analytic platforms. Companies can use VIENNA not only for tasks like identity verification and improving human-machine interaction but also to drive new product development by analyzing customer feedback and preferences in real time. For example, healthcare organizations can use VIENNA to gather patient feedback during consultations, improving care quality and patient experience. In retail, businesses can analyze voice interactions to better understand customer preferences, opening up opportunities for upselling and personalized shopping experiences. Additionally, in a customer service and support setting, teams can benefit from VIENNA's ability to detect emotional cues during live interactions, which allows them to address customer dissatisfaction in real time, refine products and services and improve agent performance through data-driven feedback. By offering unmatched accuracy in noisy environments and the ability to extract actionable insights from unstructured voice data, VIENNA enables businesses to not only transcribe conversations but also turn the insights gained into opportunities for innovation, resulting in more efficient operations and reduced data processing costs. 

"With VIENNA, we've made a significant leap forward in voice technology," said Ken Sutton, CEO & co-founder of Yobe. “Our solution not only enhances the accuracy of speech-to-text in noisy or crowded environments but also transforms the way businesses operate by providing actionable insights from the data extracted. With advanced emotional intelligence and personalized user experiences, our technology enables organizations to not only understand customer sentiment in real time but also anticipate their needs. This empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, optimize customer interactions, and ultimately drive growth and efficiency, revolutionizing how they communicate, engage, and serve their customers.”

"Having worked closely with the team on the board, I’ve seen firsthand the groundbreaking work being done here. Voice technology has come a long way— the latest breakthroughs with LLMs help machines to understand what we mean, not just what we say, but we still need to help machines listen to human voices, to distinguish voices from background noise and each other,” said Daren Gill, Member of Yobe’s Board of Directors and former product leader at Google, Spotify and Amazon. “Now with the launch of VIENNA, Yobe is unlocking the full potential of voice technology in the physical world for businesses and individuals. The team is setting a new standard for the sector, and I’m excited to help lead Yobe into its next chapter of innovation and success."

Yobe has already successfully deployed VIENNA in partnership with a major airline, showcasing its capabilities in a bustling airport environment. VIENNA's ability to isolate and process specific voices in this context has proven invaluable, enhancing both operational efficiency and present and future customer service interactions. By providing unparalleled accuracy in complex environments, VIENNA enables organizations to not only streamline interactions but also derive actionable insights from every conversation.