With heightened sensitivity around social-distancing, connecting with your guests on digital platforms has never been more important. BookingWhizz, a booking technology and online marketing firm, has seen incredible growth over the past year by implementing guest engagement tools that allow guests to connect to the hotel through their favorite messaging platforms.
By partnering with Hapi, BookingWhizz can integrate with the leading hotel Property Management Systems by writing to a single API. We recently caught up with leadership at BookingWhizz to understand how the tools have led to increased efficiency and additional revenue for partner hotels.
1. How are you helping the hospitality industry innovate?
There are more than 4 billion instant messaging users and we discovered that this, for most of the hotels that we have worked with, has been an untapped source of revenue.
We discovered that the hospitality industry is not leveraging the available messaging channels that are widely used by its guests on a daily basis. We're integrated with some of the world’s most popular messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Facebook, to bring the hotel's message directly to the guests' most used messaging apps.
We have discovered that among other channels, WhatsApp has the highest open rate (96%) and the partner hotels who have started using this have seen, on instances, over 500% growth in its upsell and extras sales.
We also discovered that the same channels, along with email and SMS, can improve the overall guest satisfaction ratio, by constantly communicating with the hotel using our Guest Journey feature.
These are completely customizable and a hotel can set these up and start communicating and selling in a matter of hours.
2. What do you see as the biggest trend in hospitality tech in the post-COVID era?
We believe that there will be a huge demand for tech around customer's experience in the Post-COVID era as the guest will prefer hotels that offer online check-ins, in-room services, the flexibility of the booking terms and booking customization options, and the ease of communication with the hotel staff.
3. How has Hapi helped BookingWhizz and your customers?
Before discovering Hapi, we were in the process of integrating directly with the major PMS systems. Hapi has saved us the time and effort involved with such complex integrations that vary from system to system and can be very costly in the long run. Additionally, Hapi's experience with the hospitality tech industry has meant that we have been spending our time developing our own applications and do not have to worry about the PMS related issues.
As Hapi is evolving, we can see more and more of the most popular PMS solutions being available, and we can easily connect with any of them using the same API. This means that our go-to market time has been significantly reduced.
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