In June, SnapShot Travel, a data analytics company in Berlin, opened up its core product to hoteliers.
As Tnooz noted when we first profiled the company in a 2013 Startup Pitch, its vision is that the hotel’s commercial team, its operational team, and other teams should all look at one mobile dashboard of data, which they informally call the “single version of the truth”.
Its free analytics product makes use of data from the property management system (PMS) along with other key sources.
Some critics in the industry say SnapShot has built a solution in search of a problem. The critique is that not enough hotels need a single window into all of their various technology systems and that building a sustainable business model will prove elusive.
SnapShot has had to adjust course from its original product offering of "demand management", back in 2013. The company now aims for a mass market product.
Yet its investors seem confident. This summer's broad product release came a year after the startup raised a Euro 25 million investment round.
We recently sat down with CEO Stefan Tweraser and co-founder and COO David Turnbull to find out what’s new with their 70-employee company. Interview has been condensed for brevity.
Tnooz: It took you three years to get here?
David: It's three years since we first started putting down code for our hotel analytics dashboard. But ultimately, we're an aggregation company, right? Building up all of that backend takes a lot of time.
We went live with pilot hotels on February 15th. We have driven measurable gains in conversion, even over such a short time.
Tnooz: What’s next?
Stefan: We really want to have a substantial group of customers on the free product first, see how they interact with it, and learn from what they like, what they don't like, before we take the next plunge.
Tnooz: Are your investors patient?
Stefan: Luckily, we have a great group of investors who believe in a longer-term vision. They come from China, from the US, and from Europe. They are active and, to a certain extent, patient investors.
Tnooz: General managers are busy. They’re worried about how the elevator, or lift, is broken and how the wifi is not working in some rooms. Why do hoteliers need an analytics dashboard?
Stefan: The answer is already in your question. Because they have so many systems they should be looking at but they don't have that one place to check at the start of the day to see whether the key systems are actually delivering what they promised to deliver.
Tnooz: How's the product typically used?
David: Imagine a GM arrives in the morning at the property. He or she would like to know what's going on in terms of pricing, but they're not on the mailing list for STR's benchmark report because that goes directly to sales and reservations.
They wouldn't even know how to access the PMS. Every day they need to have a morning meeting, a physical interaction with the rest of the team so that they can get their snapshot of what's going on.
Now that verbal communication is very important. But the discussion is better if the GM can see the data in a dashboard directly. Many customers are now ordering LCD screens to put up in their general manager's office so that all of that aggregated data of SnapShot can be on display.
We’re not replacing the morning meeting but we’re replacing the charts and binders with reports with our dashboard.
Tnooz: That's theoretical. What's a real world case in which this product has been shown to be necessary?
David: During one of our pilots from several years ago in the UK, we had a hotel group with approximately 10 properties.
When we asked the managing director for feedback of what she would be looking for in the product, she said, ”Every Friday at 5:00 p.m., I simply want a report that shows me the key performance of each property, my benchmark data, and how the hotels are doing on TripAdvisor. Will I get that? To that date, I cannot get that once a week on Friday at 5:00 p.m., because it's impossible to get that. Give me that and I’ll be a very happy person."
We took literally that specific feedback and built that as the cornerstone of our multi-property edition.
If someone like her looks at this data now, she sees negative or she sees positive trends straightaway. As a general manager, that's like a traffic light system but that's the simplicity that they're looking for.
If there's a problem, then I know I need to address it. Or I can look at this screen and go, "Everything's fine. Next."
Tnooz: Are you behind in the race of getting the word out and scaling up?
Stefan: Given that we've launched a product only a couple of months ago, middle of February this year, we frankly over-exceeded what we thought would be possible in that short span of time because it is, to a large extent, really door-to-door, group-to-group, signing them up.
Tnooz: So this is for small properties and small groups?
Stefan: That's not a small business owner/operator. That's big hotels where you need to move on to the next thing just as urgently.
Let’s say you work for a chain.
At the regional level for a group, every day you need people trolling through Excel sheets. There’s a danger of copying the wrong formula, not rechecking it. There’s a need to send the final final copy. "No, no, use the final, final, final that I emailed you at 9:45." We've all been there.
Tnooz: It sounds like a small feat to replace that manual stuff.
Stefan: When people look at the same data, they develop different habits.
They can rely on the data and spend more time leveraging the data and serving their guests better. That's when they are freed up to talk internally. What do we want to do with this data? How do we want to make hospitality better?
Tnooz: What about a general manager or a revenue leader who is responsible for multiple properties?
David: Whether you are a regional GM or a cost of revenue manager, or the MD of a property, or even an asset manager with different assets, you can create your own unique property sets in our tool.
Stefan: That's very relevant, for example, for the asset market.
The concept of an asset management group that holds 50 hotels from four different brands. All those four different brands potentially come with different PMSs.
If you want to have a joint report of those properties, that's a huge pain because integrating those different PMSs into one giant Excel spreadsheet is, on the one hand, a requirement, while on the other hand, it's very difficult to achieve.
The reporting of one PMS alone is already very challenging. Imagine you had four or five of those.
You then have to look at what each one’s definition of a channel is? How does each one calculate a revenue metric? Reconciliation is a pain.
SnapShot integrates all of that data, standardizes, and simplifies it for an apples-to-apples comparison. If you have, say, 15 hotels, you can group them by city, by brand, by target group, by what-have-you, and it still has that one version of the truth.
And the drill-down. You can go to your individual hotel and get to every single data point and then go up again for a bigger picture view.
Tnooz: There are a lot of me-too intelligence platforms out there who are very much focused on trying to predict rate changes and telling hoteliers how to manage demand. How to compete?
David: Actually, we're solving a much simpler pain point, and that's the representation, or communication, of a hotel’s performance in a clear, easy-to-grasp way.
That's something that you need to be an aggregator at heart to achieve. We excel there. We also avoid the trap of client-led customized reporting….
Stefan: Other approaches want to gamify more or give more customization. Our goal is to boil it down to what's really essential.
David: I hate to quote Oscar Wilde here but he said, "If I'd had more time, I would have written less."
There are so many data companies out there that if they invested a little bit more time on the visualization of that data, they would have less to show but it would have higher impact.
That's something that, with our UX team in particular, we had to resist this temptation to keep cramming the dashboard with activity.
Tnooz: What about the cost of acquisition of guests?
David: Cost of distribution has been the cornerstone of our product development since day one. The P&L, to a degree, is an ineffective document, because it's reflecting the money that went out in a particular month.
Tnooz: The sales and marketing budget is not capturing a lot of the ...
David: Correct, and nor are any cost of distribution and cost of acquisition benchmarks within the budget at the moment either.
We encourage staff at the property-level to use SnapShot Analytics to understand what is the profitable contribution that each channel has made.
Our tool can help a hotel figure out how do we accommodate a metric like Net RevPAR into the daily workflow of its commercial team?
Stephan: This is not an exact science at this stage. There is no official definition of what is the cost of distribution, or of acquisition. What is a good channel for one hotel may be a bad channel for another.
As a hotelier, you have to start by tracking different fixed and variable costs. Maybe you want to include more acquisition costs like labor within the sales department, within the reservations department.
That's then when the hotel starts to learn a channel, "Hey, wow, a team of six people I'm employing in reservations is a pretty heavy drain in comparison to other channels."
David: Cost of acquisition is very property-specific.
Tnooz: Priceline Group through its Booking.com brand and Expedia, Inc., seem to both be interested in the hotel B2B services space. Expedia PartnerCentral, the extranet for hoteliers, has a dashboard. Booking.com is looking to have a dashboard. Compared with these behemoths, who have huge networks of established relationships with hotels, how can you compete?
Stefan: I would assume that as a hotel, you're only prepared to share so much information with a very dominant distribution channel. You're probably somewhat hesitant to really, even if they swear that they won't look at the data, put all your PMS information into their cloud.
From a competitive positioning, our very neutral positioning, our focus to integrate with as many PMSs as possible, and everything about our business strategy is to be absolutely non-competitive with any hotel. That’s a different proposition from the OTAs.
David: We're the neutral stack compared to the single stack.
Stefan: We've based all our data processing agreements on the strictest requirements that we found, which was the German data processing law.
Tnooz: Strict data privacy?
Stefan: Yes. We deliberately said, let's take the highest hurdle. We want hoteliers to trust us that we will not misuse the data from a legal perspective but also from a strategy perspective….
Tnooz: You’re looking for more PMS partners in the US?
David: Yes. We’ve learned in Europe that we can avoid a lot of pitfalls when it comes to the on-boarding hotels by having really great relationships with PMSs, in particular….
We've got integrations with STR Global (one of our investors), with Booking.com, with Google, and with social channels like Facebook….
Tnooz: Among the PMSs you have an integration with Oracle Hospitality, right? If US customers are on that platform, they can seamlessly sign up with SnapShot?
David: Yes, we're a certified partner of Oracle, which means that we can work with customers whether they are locally installed or in Oracle's data centers. But of course, we work with many other PMS companies already who operate globally.
Tnooz: It sounds like a broad integration with many PMSs is a critical thing, especially in the U.S., to be able to appeal to a lot of the asset groups and others. Is there a certain threshold you have to get by the end of the year?
Stefan: I'd say if we have fewer than 30 PMS integrations in the US specifically by the end of the year, then we haven't done our job.
The PMS business is really very local and really a very inhomogeneous and fragmented market… The number 30 is quite a benchmark. But we have to go the extra mile with integrations with high-quality PMSs.
Tnooz: There would be a halo effect there, I’m guessing.
David: Compared to Europe, the demand for dashboard on top of the PMS is a conversation at the moment in the U.S. whereas in Europe there's a lot more kind of, "Have you considered this?" Whereas in the U.S. I get the feeling the market is at a more mature stage, which probably reflects that fact that many people have come back to them saying, "Hey, look what I did in Tableau. Could you do something like this?"
Tnooz: About how many employees do you have?
Stefan: It’s a moving target. We're around 70 as we speak. We have our biggest commercial office in Berlin. We have two development offices, one in Poland and one in the Czech Republic. Then we have a lot of business development people touring the world from China to the US as we speak. And we're hiring.
Tnooz: You've partnered with some schools for workshops and so forth. What’s that about?
Stefan: David kind of invented what we are doing with universities, and the idea was based on the fact that we need to change the behavior of how hospitality managers interact with data because, quite rightly, none of these people should actually care about data too much.
They should care about the guests. Everything they have to do with data to a certain extent needs to become more natural.
But if you want to understand the data, you need to have a different mindset.
We decided to partner with universities, leading education institutions as well as the online course platform Coursera, to build that foundation of looking differently at hospitality data.
David: Our Coursera course launched in November with six-and-a-half thousand people who have registered.
At the moment we have about 1,500 active users with basically no marketing push, which is fantastic.
This is looking forward the next five years and not just a new way of talking about what we've always been talking about. We've had a lot of good feedback from that point of view. ESSEC Business School created the course, but we’re an industry partner, along with Duetto.
Tnooz: As hoteliers have been playing with this SnapShot Analytics dashboard, what’s struck you about their behavior?
Stefan: Three things are most remarkable. The first thing is the the easy setup.
Tnooz: How easy is it for a hotel to sign up?
Stefan: A hotel connects their systems, their Facebook, and their Google, and their Instagram, and their STR, and their competitive set and all that stuff, but also their PMS, to the SnapShot Analytics database.
Most of those systems are easy, user name and password. But when it comes to validating data, making sure that actually what you see on SnapShot is what you see in your accounting system, for example, there are a bazillion things that could be interpreted differently.
We are prepared to go that extra mile and make sure that people are comfortable that the data they see in their PMS is the exact same data in SnapShot Analytics.
David: You don't have to train people in how to do use SnapShot because it's intuitive like your smartphone. If you want to use it for advanced techniques, training can be done online.
Stefan: The second thing that we see is, depending on the user group, it is that people rarely go beyond the overview page. We've obviously managed to put all the relevant stuff already on that first screen.
David: It is the pure snapshot.
Stefan: In most instances on this page, if you see a green light there, it already has saved you hours on your day or on the day of your support staff, because you don't need to do the deep dives.
The third element that users comment on is, if you go deeper, for example, on your TripAdvisor stuff or on your STR comp set stuff, as you go two or three levels deeper into your data, you rarely need to go to the source.
Tnooz: What do you mean?
Stefan: Hoteliers say that now they have the confidence that they need. They don’t feel they have to go to the original data source because we've found the balance that they have a great overview, they can go two levels deeper but usually for everybody operationally, that's all they need.
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