In this week’s episode of the Hotel Moment podcast, we’re going back to the root of what hospitality technology is all about: data. Revinate CEO, Bryson Koehler joins podcast host and Revinate CMO, Karen Stephens, to remind us that technology built to serve your hotel’s bottom line is highly adaptable — skilled at turning down the volume of outside distractions so that you can focus on what really matters. Your data tells a story, and in order to hear that story, your technology should be channeling the voice of your data.

Tune in for a complete walkthrough of Revinate’s product history, how we’ve pioneered global industry change, and why you have the opportunity to develop a deeper and truer understanding of your guests with the direct booking platform transforming hospitality.

Meet your host

As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.

Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.

Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com

Connect with Karen

Transcript

Intro – 00:00:04: Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting-edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.

Karen Stephens 00:00:37 Hello and welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast. I am your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate. And today we have a special treat for you. This is our 100th episode of the Hotel Moment podcast. So first of all, I just want to thank everybody, all of our listeners for tuning in over the last 100 episodes. And as a special treat for you today, I have Bryson Koehler, who is our CEO, who will be joining me on the podcast. So Bryson has actually been in the position just over six months, so an important milestone for him. And as you’ll hear when we get into the conversation, during that time, he’s done a lot of traveling, a lot of talking to customers, and really has a good understanding of what the industry is looking for right now, and feedback that we’re getting from the field. So love to hear that from Bryson. The other thing that we get into is really the origins of Revinate as a guest feedback company, all the way through to the Customer Data Platform powering direct bookings, which is where we sit today. And as you’ll hear Bryson discuss, it really comes down to the importance of customer data and how we pull that together to drive profitability for hotels. So I give you Bryson Koehler, and happy 100th.

Welcome back to the podcast, Bryson.

Bryson Koehler – 00:01:52: It is great to be here, Karen. Thanks for inviting me back.

Karen Stephens – 00:01:56: Absolutely. You know, it’s a big day. This is our 100th episode of the Hotel Moment podcast, which I can hardly believe. I mean, how do we even do that?

Bryson Koehler – 00:02:04: That’s unbelievable. And great job to you and the team for putting this together. And I can’t say I’ve gotten all 100 under my belt, but I think I’ve probably gotten through 70 so far. And I love them. I think they’re fantastic. So it’s really exciting.

Karen Stephens – 00:02:18: Yeah, well, thank you. Well, it’s definitely a team effort. I mean, as you mentioned, we’ve got a whole team that does this behind the scenes, and we’ve really had a lot of good fortune with our guest lineup. So lots of heavy hitters in the industry and customers and industry experts alike. So we’re really flattered and proud to make it to 100. I think the other thing that we should mention is that for you personally at Revinate. we just crested your six-month anniversary. So congrats to surviving six months at Revinate, Bryson.

Bryson Koehler – 00:02:44: It’s fantastic. I couldn’t be happier. An amazing company, an amazing team, Karen. The culture is fantastic. Our products are amazing. And I’ve been out on the road a ton those first six months. All over the world, to Europe, I’ve been down to Australia. We’ve had NAVIGATE. We’ve just been continuous. And our customers, they love us. The value we provide is just remarkable. It’s consistent. They love our team. They love our people. They’re very excited about our roadmap and what we’re investing in. No product’s ever perfect, and we’re investing a lot to continue to improve ours. And when you walk through the roadmaps and talk, about the future, it’s just been so exciting because they’re just right there with us. And I feel like we’re all rowing in the same direction. So it’s been fantastic.

Karen Stephens – 00:03:35: I’m glad that you mentioned how much travel you’ve been doing because you really did hit the ground running. I think right after you started, we had NAVIGATE in Miami. We did a fast follow with NAVIGHATE in London. And so you’ve been speaking to a lot of customers right out of the gate. And I’ll just say it again. You’ve mentioned it before on the last podcast. Bryson is always open to feedback from customers and really loves to be in the operations of the hotel, has visited a lot of our hotels in person, which is cool. The other thing I would love to hit on, and I definitely want to get onto the roadmap and what’s coming down the pipe for Revinate. But I think what a lot of people might not know is that you were actually around when Revinate started in 2009. So a very close personal friend with our founders when we were a reputation management company. And at that time, you were at IHG. I should say that as well. 10 years at IHG, Intercontinental Hotel Group. So you can just talk a little bit about Revinate at the beginning from your perspective. And then we can maybe talk about how much we’ve changed in that time.

Bryson Koehler – 00:04:32: Yeah, happy to. I mean, look, I was, I think, Senior Vice President of what was called at the time, Revenue and Guest Technology for IHG. And really, that was the CRS and the RMS and all of the distribution channels and the GDS connectivity back in the day. And as well as the on-property guest spacing stuff to link that guest experience for the brands on property. So really, that was an amazing journey. Loved that part of my career and background. And it was really about data. At the time, the IHG platform was a revenue management system. We did a rebuild on that, and that team was doing some remarkably advanced decision science work back in the day, thinking through machine learning patterns and alternative data sets to help make better pricing decisions. And if you kind of fast forward and kind of follow my journey as well as the Revinate journey, tt’s always a — Karen, as you know, about data. It’s about how do we bring data sets together to get a better 360 view around what’s going on. And the hospitality space is littered with data that’s not connected, littered with data that is just collecting what I would call digital dust. It’s not really being used. Maybe it’s being put onto a report or a dashboard somewhere, but the operationalization of data into the runtime of a hotel’s kind of rhythm. To me is a real fantastic opportunity. And when Marc Heyneker had reached out to me, and I got to know him through — because I was a big customer of Akamai at the time, and Akamai invited me to some of their sales kickoffs, and I was on their customer advisory board, and doing all of this to help Akamai grow. And Marc got to know me through those conferences and he reached out and said, Hey, I’ve got this great idea. And when we really started the conversation, the brainstorming on a whiteboard was, How do we use guest feedback data to help influence pricing conversations with hotels? If you’ve got really great guest reviews and guests love you, you’re very sticky, and you’ve probably got less price elasticity. If you’ve got weaker reviews or you’re going through maybe a renovation, and that feedback’s coming through and it’s bringing you down temporarily, maybe you have more price challenges. And we were brainstorming on how do you use data. And that really kind of started the whole guest feedback conversation, which was, Well, let’s make sure that we’re making it easy to collect as much data, feedback, surveys, et cetera, from guests. Make it easy for hotels to be able to summarize that and get really good insight. And how do we kind of then turn that into… like, ‘Okay, Karen, on Tuesday, I need you to do these three things. These are the three things that if you do these three things, this is what really matters. You can ignore the rest of the noise.’ But it was always about data. And it was always about how do we bring data and make it easy to operationalize it and bring it to life. And I think over the time, as guest feedback turned into CRM and CRM kind of empowered marketing. And our evolution now is we’ve evolved CRM into CDP. And we’ve added additional channels around voice and messaging. The one key theme that is consistent is data. How do we link data together to continuously improve that view of the guest, to help the hotel in real time market to the right person, create the right segments, create the right opportunities, the right message, and fundamentally with packaging the right pricing, and get that conversion through a direct channel, and then use that feedback loop on a pre-stay, during stay, post-stay cycle to not just upsell and create ancillary revenue opportunities, but also now continuously enrich that profile. And as we evolve that synthesis with kind of less static machine learning to now more and more AI capabilities, we’re able to really extract even cooler insights. And so as we think about the roadmap ahead, we can talk about that, but really what it started back in 2009 is a data conversation. And really, even then, and unfortunately still today, a hotel is just littered with technology capabilities that are not easily connected, that are siloed, that make it very difficult for an asset owner or management team to operationalize that and extract the most value. And that value is about delivering a great guest experience. And it’s about driving better, direct, more profitable revenue to the hotel. And so that journey really hasn’t changed. We’ve added a lot of products. We’ve evolved the business a ton. We’ve added, through acquisition and organic engineering efforts, a lot of capabilities across the company. And we’ve expanded internationally, and we’ve done all these great things. But that foundation is still there.

Karen Stephens – 00:09:57: Absolutely. And I was here in the early days of Revinate, not 2009 — I came in in 2013 — sold into all the big brands. So IHG was a customer. Wyndham was a customer. Hilton was a customer. It really was groundbreaking at the time just to be able to aggregate all that data. And I think, here’s the key, make it actionable. But as we’ve evolved, I think what’s exciting for me, and I feel like something that you really brought in with your direction to the company, we have been building a CDP, a Customer Data Platform, that is important to be able to aggregate that data. But I think what you’ve really crystallized the company around is what are the outcomes? I mean, who cares? If I’m a hotel, if I’ve got all of that data, at the end of the day, what am I trying to do with that data? And I think you’ve really crystallized it for us. And that’s to drive direct bookings. I mean, at the end of the day, that’s it.

Bryson Koehler – 00:10:46: It is it. I mean, look, I think I don’t want to be seen as a technology company in the hospitality space. I don’t want to be seen as like some SaaS business in the technology space. Want us to be seen as the direct bookings platform outcome business. That’s what we do — is we help you fill your hotel with the right guests, through the right channel, into the right room, the right rate, maximize the profitability of that guest through ancillary capabilities, and then harness the power of the data signals that that whole process gives off. It’s emitting signals throughout the whole process. Our job is to continue to collect all of those, link them all together, remove the noise, and get it right back. And more and more what we’ll see going forward in a fully automated way. I think the holy grail is the autofill easy button. And there’s been lots of channel management over time and revenue management. And I think that’s not a new concept. But those have been very focused on just very specific tactical pieces of the puzzle. I think linking all the way through, and powering that with really rich data sets, to me, is driving the differentiation of what we’re up to.

Karen Stephens – 00:12:00: Absolutely. I mean, you talk about the easy button. So we’ve always had the philosophy as a software company that our user interface has to be easy to understand. We know what the turnover is like if you talk about staff on property, it has to be easy for people to put campaigns together, whatever channel they’re doing, whether that’s voice, text message. It has to be easy to execute. But then the buyer of that platform — and it’s really the owners and the asset management companies — their main concern is going to be net operating income. That’s going to be the bottom line. So can you talk a little bit, as you mentioned, you came out of hospitality and working in technology, all parts of it, from AI all the way up to huge, huge data sets. But some things haven’t changed in hospitality. What do owners care about, and how do we help them improve profitability?

Bryson Koehler – 00:12:47: When I moved from the hospitality industry, and did a stint in the media industry, and really got into the big tech industry, and then data financial services, and I’ve boomeranged back to my favorite industry, hospitality. When I left, I would say the average hotel was probably around 15% kind of third-party OTA business. And unfortunately, as I sit here today, it’s double that or higher. And so I think the owners are struggling. I think that, look, if you’re a big branded organization — it’s my time at IHG — whether you’re Marriott or it doesn’t matter, the brands are doing remarkable things on the brand side and doing a great job growing. The technology side just gets harder. That’s a big ship to turn. And so I think that the programs to try to really help drive more of that profitable direct business just are hard. And then if you’re an independent or a small group, keeping up with the technology and just the number of options that you have out there, also hard, especially if you’re not like a really skilled technology kind of minded, data-minded person. How do you know what your kind of hotel-in-a-box architecture should look like? And so I think those challenges remain today. And as I walk in and spend a lot of time talking to asset owners, my view is the challenges are getting harder, not easier. I think that we see that in a reflection of net operating income headwinds. I think we see that with guest satisfaction scores that, unfortunately across the industry are kind of flat to down, at least over the last several years. And what’s driving that? Well, what’s driving that is to really run a great hotel, a great property day in and day out, you need to invest in your people, and you need to invest in your property. And that requires constant investment. It’s not something that you do it one and done. It’s ongoing every day. And if you don’t have the ability to invest the levels that you need, you’ll fall behind. And with the headwinds of the cost of capital being up, the headwinds of the cost of labor being up, energy up, insurance up, food up, beverage up, I mean, you just go down the list. There’s not a cost that’s not up dramatically. And in most parts of the world, certainly here in the US, I mean, there are always exceptions and big markets here or there, but by and large, occupancy is kind of flat to down. And if it’s not, it’s the mix of more leisure, less business, which could change your profitability there is certainly changed. And occupancy is flat to down, kind of following our rebound years that we had a few years ago. So you’ve got occupancy flat to down, rate flat to down, and you’ve got massively increasing costs over the last several years. None of that is adding up to an amazing opportunity to invest more in your people and property. And when I look at those challenges, there’s many levers that management teams can pull. But the one that we’re focused on and the one that I think matters a lot and is probably one of the easier ones, relatively speaking, to adjust if you had a knob. Is to how do I get my direct contribution up? Better direct contribution because it costs me dramatically less. And I have way more opportunity to upsell and provide ancillary capabilities, and know more about that guest and delight them when they come than other options. And so this need for, How do I drive better direct demand?, whether it’s through your voice channel, where you probably have really great conversion. We certainly see that in our res sales offerings — great conversion, the highest ADR of any of the channels, just an awesome… And, you know, you had a recent posting about that a few weeks ago, and spot on, which is just because we’re in 2024 and we’re all very digitally minded natives at this point, the voice channel is incredibly powerful and best conversion, best ADR. Really, you can do the math, one of the most profitable channels. So that’s important. And then you’ve got your web channel, your mobile channels. These direct channels continue to get better. And the capabilities that we’re providing, our customers that are using us to the maximum are seeing 20, 30, 40x ROIs. You’ve been publishing a bunch of white papers and case studies on that, showing the data and proving that out. I mean, that’s just remarkable. Remarkable. And that’s exactly what hotel asset owners and management teams need right now. They need a real partner, a friend who’s on their side. We’re not here to build the Revinate brand. We’re not a consumer business. We’re a B2B business. And we’re here to be the partner to that asset owner and that management team. They got a lot of challenges. We’re here to help them bring their data together, make sense of it, operationalize it, and convert that into the most profitable guests that they can have, as well as delight those guests because they’re actually then able to bring that guest experience to life with the insight and knowledge that they’ve pulled together. That’s really the key. And I think that’s what’s on the mind of owners, Karen. I think that they’re really going, wait a minute, I need more help. What we’ve been doing, not only is it not working, the problem’s getting worse. And we need help and we need help now.

Karen Stephens – 00:18:32: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. And one thing I love about our platform is that all of those channels you mentioned, email marketing, voice, messaging, as we start to drive direct bookings across those channels, we’re also gathering that intelligence and putting it back into the engine. So it becomes a flywheel. And that is what’s really interesting. So if you’re a reservation agent, being able to see a rich guest profile that has data about what that guest bought before when they were on property, what kind of offering you should make. So that only serves to drive the conversion higher, and then you couple that with an email marketing campaign that has similar messaging. It is that multi-touch, multi-channel approach that is able to drive that. So can you talk a little bit about what you see coming? We’re in the middle of some pretty cool upgrades for our customers. But what are you excited about in the next, call it six months to a year, in terms of what our platform is going to be able to do?

Bryson Koehler – 00:19:29: It’s such an exciting time at Revinate. The business we talked about earlier, the journey it’s been on, and now the opportunity that the business has had over the last couple of years to really fundamentally invest, and not just kind of bolt a bunch of stuff together, which we see a lot of. And that’s not helpful. Bolting a bunch of things together, that’s what already exists. We’ve been trying that in the industry for decades, and where has it gotten us? It’s gotten us to basically, we depend on our own systems last, and we depend on third-party systems more. And that’s opposite of where we need to be going. And so what Revinate’s been up to in the investments over the last couple of years were really very foundational. The core rebuild of our CRM onto a graph-based modern technology stack that brings all of our channel capabilities together is a foundational investment. We’re not like feeding data to other systems. We’re actually bringing the systems to the data. And the foundational rebuild of our voice capabilities, we’re not just like bolting more things together. It was a complete startover with modern capabilities that now give us industry-leading AI and capabilities that are going to, I think, improve the conversion rate, the handle times, and all of the efficiencies that we see there dramatically, right? And so it’s great. It’s great that we’re upgrading customers as we speak. I think you and I were in the same meeting yesterday where we were talking about, I think we’re upgrading 22 next week, and we’re just going through the list. And that’s really exciting to just see the pace because you can’t just flip switches. Humans are involved and we need to make sure we bring our customers along with us. So I’m really proud of the team there. And on the CDP side, I think the upgrading of another, I don’t know, 60-some odd happening kind of as we record this that’s occurring. And those are all these big foundational changes that then unlock our ability to go further. And I think where you’ll see us continue to focus, and I would just say to everybody listening, when you’re making a technology decision, look, whether you choose Revinate as your partner, or if you want to choose one of our competitors, my guidance to you is you’re placing a bet on the partnership of where those companies are going. Not, where they are today, but where are they going? Where’s the puck going? Where are the people going? Where’s the culture going? Where are their investments going? The good part, and I can speak for Revinate, is we’re not having to invest in all of these integrations of one-off things. We’re investing in real core capabilities across our product lines. And so in our underlying data environment, really what you’re going to see there is continued data capabilities on new data types, new data sets, not just data coming in from hotels. We’ve got a great collection of data connectors, PMS and spa systems and reservations for restaurants and golf and all of those connections. We’ve got a ton today, well over a hundred, and we’re willing to build out any connection for our customers that they need us to, and we’ll always be doing that. But what’s new and interesting is the third-party data. How do we bring in additional third-party data elements that enrich the understanding? So we’re going to be expanding beyond just the understanding that that hotel has about Karen. But what else does, do we know about Karen? What does the universe say about Karen? And so this is nothing new, but it’s, I think, new really in the CDP CRM capabilities across hospitality is to have prebuilt hospitality focused third-party data elements that are helping target and improve what that guest is experiencing in the booking process, and the marketing process, and across that journey. So on the CDP side, more AI and more data, I think, is the key there. And AI will be a common theme, not just because it’s the topic du jour in technology circles, but because it really has an opportunity to help offload and automate and create more efficiencies. And frankly, that provides a better guest experience. And so on the voice side, you can imagine we’ve got a lot of work going on with our messaging capabilities, our chat capabilities, being able to summarize agent feedback and give them feedback in real-time. Lots of things that are going to drive a lot of, I would say, workforce efficiencies on the voice side of the house. I think on the marketing side of the house, you’re seeing great things like our AI-powered email composer, which is taking, what we do today, but really putting it on steroids. Again, at least giving the marketing teams a really solid base too. It’s faster to just tweak it and hit go than it is to start with that blank screen and a blinking cursor going, Huh, what am I going to write? So you’re going to see things like that. Better segmentation capabilities, more advanced segmentation. The new Revinate Guests App is awesome. It is industry-leading. It’s class leading. It blows away anything else that I have ever seen in this space. If you haven’t seen it, I would absolutely do yourself a favor and at least get a demo of it. Just get a demo of it. And that guest capability, you’ll see more advanced recommendations. Hey, have you thought about this segment? Hey, segments like this worked elsewhere. Maybe you should think about this segment. Hotels like your hotel have found really great results with this. So the recommendations, more automation on the segmentation, just helping coach and guide. I don’t think anybody’s ready to just completely turn everything over to the machines, but we want to continue to be a better coach and better guide and trigger ideas. And so, you’ll see a lot going on there, on the Revinate Guests application, which I think is great. And, as we think about Guest Feedback, our investment there is really going to be focused on more data sources. We want to just continue to bring in, there’s always a new data source somewhere. And we’ve got to make that really easy. Now, if in your local market, you see that new data source, we want to be able to very quickly add that and make sure that we’re bringing that to you inside of our feedback application. So if you kind of go across the universe, Karen, it’s really all focused on more data, using that data in more automated AI-powered ways, making the job of filling your hotel easier, more successful, and one that doesn’t take increasingly more manpower to do.

Karen Stephens – 00:26:28: I love it. Well, we will leave it there. My guest has been Bryson Koehler, who’s the CEO of Revinate. Thank you so much for the conversation, Bryson.

Bryson Koehler – 00:26:36: Always great to see you, Karen.

Outro – 00:26:42: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.

About Revinate

Revinate empowers hoteliers to directly connect with their guests.

Our Guest Data Platform and communication solutions unlock revenue for hoteliers and put them in control of the full guest experience — initial research, booking, check-in, throughout the stay, and even after check out — all via the communication channels that guests prefer, whether it's voice, text, email, or web.

More than 12,000 hotels globally bank on Revinate to drive direct revenue and deliver delightful guest experiences.

Ask us how we do it. Visit our website to get a demo.

View source

Related