Navis may have been founded in 1987, but you could say that the boot-strapped technology company, which focuses on serving independent resort hotels, has sped up its metabolism lately.
The Bend, Oregon,-based company specializes in helping independent hotels, especially resort brands like Hershey, Greenbrier, Pinehurst, and Destination Hotels, convert more of the demand they’re already generating.
Over the past six years, Navis has increased its headcount three-and-a-half times, to 300 employees. This spring it entered Mexico, its first foreign market.
It is staking its claim to what it calls "rev tech", or technology that helps hotels derive more revenue from their multiple channels by bringing together the key revenue systems for reservations, sales, and marketing under one data warehouse.
In its words, it breaks down department and data silos, produces business intelligence from that data, and making the insights available and actionable at all levels, down to the point of sale.
It claims that its typical client sees a gain of $4,000 more revenue per room, per year, by using its full system. It also says it retains 97% of its clients, via its month-to-month contracts.
One Navis specialty is combining data from call centers with data from online traffic. For instance, it helps in managing leads from people who call the property and for whatever reason don't book.
Its marketing automation system (using email and more) pursues those leads. If a traveler calls, say, a Hershey resort, but doesn’t book, then within a day or two, a message could be emailed out automatically.
New platform
Navis says it has an open API structure, which lets hotels be selective about which of its sales and marketing technologies they want. Hotels can choose to use its data in other vendors’ tools as well.
To stay flexible, the company is investing in a new open-source tech stack, written in Clojure, that will be highly scalable.
It is about to release a survey product built on this tech stack that enables surveys of guests to be tied back into the customer relationship management (CRM) system at an individual guest-level, the company says.
For example, if a guest is a VIP (big spender) and something has gone off the tracks for him or her, that’s noted, so that when the guest later interacts with the front desk or calls by phone, the staff member can respond knowing that he or she is a top guest who wasn’t happy about something recently and how many times he or she has stayed at the property.
As the software learns more about the guest, such how he or she interacts with the website, it can collect inferred preferences, and then automatically address the customer in more relevant ways. Navis CEO Kyle Buehner says:
“Travelers, especially millennials, are not really interested in loyalty unless they're road warriors for business. What they're interested in is you, the hotelier, being loyal to them and creating a unique experience. That's right in our sweet spot.”
The company will also soon release a reporting tool (based on a data-mining technology it bought a few years ago) that it says is fast and highly configurable. Says Buehner:
“This is going to produce a report that takes the property management system (PMS) data, the CRM data, all of our different product data, and allow the client to see roll up reports of just about anything. This week versus last week. This market versus last year. Right now, the PDFs that come out once a month are considered great. This is much slicker. No one else is doing it”
Between summer and next year, it will roll out new products that will take the same principles around data integration but apply them to other parts of the hospitality sector.
Industry step-change
Before using Navis, many hotels were using old-school, manual systems, says Michelle Marquis, vp of sales and marketing at Navis.
“Some hotels might even do little tick sheets when reservations come in, like '5 calls, 1 booked'. The problem is that either it's manual, it's latent, or it's in three different places, so when they finally combine it and look at it, it's six weeks’ past and not actionable anymore.
A lot of clients will tell us they don't trust the data because it's put together by a few different people from several different systems. Things don't match up. The contrast is that we provide a single source of truth that enables smarter decision-making.”
Navis claims it can teach reservation teams how to go from being basically a clerical department to an effective sales department, and that it helps marketing teams communicate on more of a one-to-one basis with their guests and prospects and more accurately measure the return on investment for all campaigns.
A common theme of recent Tnooz stories is that many hotels are saying that creating more demand is their top goal in 2016. But Navis offers a different approach of converting more of the demand -- even unconstrained demand that they already have -- by efficiently tuning up their reservations and marketing efforts. Given the difficulty hotels face in boosting direct demand, this could be an appealing sector for Navis and other companies to grow in.
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