An existing pressure on hotels to adapt to evolving technology and customer behaviours has only intensified during the pandemic and travel disruption, as managers struggle to gather and make sense of data while rebuilding customer trust with reduced manpower.
Painting a picture of hotels’ customer relationship management (CRM) journey today, Brad Noe, chief technology officer with Cendyn, said: “Hotels are now completely reliant on the data they gather themselves and the technology they use to manage their data. Hotels need to combine data with the human experience to enhance operating procedures, so they’re fit for purpose. Finding ways for these two elements to interact is how we can adapt to evolving guest expectations and therefore revolutionise the guest experience.”
Hotels need to combine data with
the human experience to enhance
operating procedures, so they’re fit for purpose.
– Brad Noe, chief technology officer with Cendyn
However, hoteliers are also faced with a “sheer volume of data points being captured across the entire tech stack”.
“Without a way to wrangle this fragmented data and unite it into a single view, hoteliers are unable to truly leverage their data insights,” said Noe, who added that Cendyn is on a mission to make CRM technology more accessible and easier to use for hoteliers and their customers.
Noe believes that a customer data platform (CDP) has the potential to revolutionise a hotel’s operations to make it more efficient and guest-centric. A unified guest profile from the CDP, coupled with data that is constantly in sync and available across departments, primes the hotel for peak performance.
Cendyn’s recent convergence of its CDP with Pegasus’s central reservations system (CRS) will enable the company to deliver on its mission of personalising and enriching the guest journey, opined Noe.
“Hotels now have a way to collect data and then leverage it to increase revenue — all through one trusted vendor,” he said.
The Cendyn-Pegasus merger sets the foundation for the Cendyn Hospitality Cloud, which gives hotels the tools to take control of their direct-booking channel, enhance brand loyalty, and drive profitability.
The Cendyn Hospitality Cloud is a vertically integrated, cloud-based platform that empowers revenue, ecommerce, distribution, marketing, and sales teams with a single source of truth. It offers a unified view of every guest, and a system of record for rates and reservations.
“The combination of these critical data elements in one platform ensures teams across the business can act on their data to automate, personalise, and transform the experience for every guest at every step of their journey,” explained Noe, adding that the platform is all the more valuable “at a time when hoteliers are being forced to do more with less”.
“They are looking for strategic technology partners who can provide them with the scale, reach, and stability to drive efficiencies and performance as the industry returns to recovery and growth. That’s where the focus of the Cendyn Hospitality Cloud comes in.”
Noe shared that the Cendyn Hospitality Cloud was made possible by Cendyn’s two decades of expertise and “the incredible companies we have merged and acquired over the past few years”.
The company is on track to launch even more new products and enhanced existing ones within the Cendyn Hospitality Cloud throughout 2022.
Meanwhile, Cendyn’s representatives will continue to conduct and speak on numerous webinars on hospitality technology.
In 1H2022, representatives will attend the HSMAI Revenue Optimization Conference Asia. Later in the year, it plans to be at ITB Asia 2022 and Travel Tech Asia 2022.
