1. Give us a brief on the rising role and demand for SaaS, CPaaS and AI tools in hospitality sector?
Close to 50 million people lost their jobs in the hospitality sector during the pandemic and 50% of them are not willing to join back the industry, creating a shortage of available talent pool willing to come into the industry. However, looking to improve their margins, hotels are attempting to reduce cost and therefore cannot afford to hire staff in large numbers, increasing their reliance on software that can replace human cost and provide more productivity.
This is creating a need for tools that can come at a lower cost – are easy to install and can provide deep insights. Both of these needs can be solved for SaaS and AI – and therefore we see a rising trend in more hotels moving to solutions that can provide them both.
While SaaS reduces the total cost of ownership, AI gives the edge in improving productivity, identifying new pockets of opportunities and also adapting to change faster for hotels to deal with the volatility.
2. Who are generally your ideal clients in the hospitality sector?
Our solutions are relevant for anyone who is responsible for generating revenue for a hotel. From the revenue manager to the Director of Sales and Marketing, to the General Manager and now Director of Operations. Our products are focused on generating new revenue for our customers as well as helping them in leveraging the power of Artificial intelligence easily using a simple web browser.
3. What exactly is the role of content and images in the hospitality sector, Explain AI’s role in beautifying image and content?
Social media has led to the democratization of information, which means that users anywhere in the world – have the right to access information about any service they want to take. This extends to hospitality as well and becomes more critical – as travellers invest a significant amount of money, time and effort in planning their stay – and always want the best experience.
Content on OTAs and Search engines help the travellers truly understand what to expect at the property, before making the booking. This process allows them to make an informed choice, and ensure that the property also received a good review after the experience.
While putting out content and images, might seem pretty routine, the nuance that hoteliers often don’t understand is that Instagram has really changed the way travellers look at hotel images – and to be able to engage them on OTAs , hotels need to put their best images as well as optimize content that helps in making decisions.
How can hoteliers understand what to correct in an image as well as which content is critical for conversions is driven by AI and RateGain’s Content-AI product is able to do that
4. Why content is important for hotels? Why hotels should invest on content?
The COVID19 pandemic has made the consumer more research oriented. Also with the rise of sustainability, and personalization all travellers and consumers now carefully look at the details of hotels to understand and determine the experience they will have during their stay. Updating this content across all relevant websites becomes critical for a hotel – as missing content might not make them show up in search results, filters or even impact conversions.
5.     How can hotels move to conversational commerce using right content and image?Â
While hotels are able to provide the booking experience through OTAs and their own website – a key gap in the experience today is the gap between booking and arrival- and the ability of a guest to speak to a property easily and share their preferences.
Millennials and Gen-Z prefer speaking to properties on their personal devices instead of calling customer support, as the process is extremely cumbersome. Most guests have to rely on customer support or messaging provided within the OTA – however they don’t have a direct connect with the property, limiting the property’s ability to increase revenue or reduce cancellations. Conversational commerce or virtual concierge can help hotels in solving this problem and ensure that conversions from OTAs don’t get cancelled last minute.
Using the right content and images in your conversational commerce app or platform can ensure that all queries can be addressed easily and with complete details.
In the absence of the content and images, users or potential guests will search other forums and will find information with varying degree of accuracy impacting your conversions and reputation
6. What is the current penetration of RateGain in the current hospitality and travel sectors?
RateGain today works with the Top 23 of 30 Hotel Chains, Top 25 of 30 OTAs and powers over 191,000 hotels in processing ARI, bookings and content.
7. Where does the company see itself in the next 2-3 years? What would the expansion look like?
Our vision is to provide a revenue maximization platform to the industry through which commercial teams can identify and unlock new revenue opportunities at each step of the guest journey. We are looking to either build or buy capabilities that would allow hotels to have one platform to have a complete profile of the guest and identify opportunities to unlock new revenue through guest acquisition, retention and wallet share expansion
