STARTUP STAGE: Saba Hospitality builds tools to maximize guest and hotel staff engagement

Saba Hospitality

Saba Hospitality is building solutions for the hospitality industry using artificial intelligence and scalable chatbot technology. 

The company’s first product is a multi-language chatbot that can handle all guest inquiries, both pre-stay and in-room, including food and beverage ordering.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Our business builds fit-for-purpose solutions specifically for the hospitality industry. While technological advancement occurs rapidly in many industries, hospitality tends to lag, leading to a disconnect between how modern travelers would like to engage with hospitality businesses and how they are able to. We build solutions that focus on bridging this gap in order to provide guests with experiences that align with their needs and expectations, while keeping in mind ROI for operators considering current trends in both the hospitality and technology markets.

Our initial offering, SABAGuest, is an artificial intelligence-driven chatbot, which automates communication in order to eliminate the dissatisfaction experienced by guests due to antiquated communication methods that are inefficient, costly and no longer meet the needs and wants of modern travelers.

A 360-degree solution providing a centralized communication platform, SABAGuest not only enhances the guest experience, but improves hotel efficiency, decreases labor costs, drives hotel revenue and frees up staff to engage in truly meaningful guest interactions. The solution is capable of managing all guest questions and requests, gathering real-time guest sentiment, making recommendations, presenting the latest hotel offers and driving food and beverage revenue via our digital ordering platform. It can be customized to meet the needs of each individual property, while maintaining a consistent brand language across an entire group.

But best of all, it allows any guest, from any country, to chat with a hotel in their own native language, truly breaking down the language barriers that modern travel has brought. And it can be deployed into a single property, or an entire group, in less than one week.

What inspired you to create this company?

After a combined 50 years in the hotel industry, the founders saw trends within the industry that current solutions were failing to address. With strong backgrounds in both operations and hotel technology, they saw an opportunity to create solutions that would solve these problems and create real impact for both travelers and operators alike.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths
  • Executive team has strong backgrounds in hospitality and understands the barriers to implementing a product into the operational environment of a hotel.
  • The founders have strong and well-established relationships within the industry that can assist in getting in front of the decision makers at a property or at corporate level.
  • Our operational experience has allowed us to develop a product that considers both guests desires and operational necessity when making a successful integration. This has allowed us to recognize what features to develop in order to increase guest uptake and maximize the products appeal to operators.
  • The company sits in Macau, which is a low taxing environment and enjoys preferential customer bases over foreign companies.
  • The company and product development is self-funded and 100% owned by the founders.
• Weaknesses
  • First time to build and found a start-up at this scale
  • Lack of sales and marketing experience as well as budget restraints in rolling out a marketing and sales strategy.
  • Founders reside in different locations (Macau, Sydney, Adelaide) – communication channels not ideal.
  • Our website design and traffic is not currently reaching its potential.
• Opportunities 
  • Chatbots in hospitality rapidly gaining traction
  • Very few current competitors (especially in the target markets of Asia and Australia.
  • Current competitors appear to be targeting larger hotel groups (corporates) and have put little focus on developing the solution for smaller properties or private rentals.
• Threats 
  • Multiple chatbot developers join the market and confuse the market. Hoteliers not enough knowledge to compare solutions apple to apple.
  • Some competitors have better funding in place, which may allow them to gain quick market share.
  • Large hotel groups have their own means to develop chatbots, although they are no experts in Hospitality AI.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

• Customer pain points
  • Rising labor costs
  • Inconsistent service quality
  • Poor product knowledge
  • Different communication channels at each stage of the guest journey
  • Difficulties arising from language barriers
  • Inefficiency resulting from staff having to continually engage in low-value repetitive interactions
• Industry pain points (Travelers)
  • Overcoming the anxiety caused by language barriers when traveling in foreign countries
  • Allowing guests to communicate with a property via their preferred method (messaging)
  • Eliminating the need to wait for simple answers to simple questions

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

Thus far we have gained customers via attending trade shows, researching and approaching independent hotels and smaller groups who we believe would benefit from our solution and contributing to industry publications to raise awareness. Moving forward, we would like to implement a targeted and far-reaching marketing campaign that includes: advertising in industry magazines, establishing strong relationships with influential and effective re-sellers in the different regions, continued integration into other technologies that would open up new markets, internet marketing optimization and continued product developments that would see our product as the market leader in automated communication within hospitality.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Over 50 years combined experience in hotel operations allowed us to identify a need in the market for our solution. Additionally, there are alternative providers that supplied automated communication solutions to the market that had already established a demand for such products in the United States.

With over 300,000 hotels worldwide, and over six million private rentals, the size of the market gives us confidence that we can continue to expand and developed the business into a valuable asset.

How and when will you make money?

We have implemented a SaaS model where hotels or accommodation providers are charged on a per room subscription basis each month. We are already generating revenue following our product release in April this year.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

Three of the four founders have over 50 years combined experience in hotel operations and technology. Each have held senior leadership positions in some of the world’s largest and most prestigious hotels and integrated resorts, with our Chief Technology officer being recognized with the China Hotel Awards “Technology Leader of the Year” award in 2015. Two co-founders have previously run successful business, with one continuing to hold part ownership of the highest-rated dessert offering in Bali, Indonesia.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Prioritizing where our limited amount of capital would best be utilized has been our greatest challenge. To date, the company has been fully self-funded, with the majority of capital being used on product development and tradeshows. Each co-founder has been working full-time within the business for over a year to without drawing a salary or any profit. We have also experienced challenges in educating hospitality operators about the efficacy of technology that for many is very new. Many operators are reluctant to be the first to adopt new technology, especially from a company in its relative infancy.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

Because we are an operations company with a passion for technology, not a technology company. This gives us unique insight into the operational requirements to successfully integrate a solution into not only a single hotel, but across an entire group. It is difficult for providers who lack this ground-level operational experience to account for all the operational considerations that must be accounted for to create real long-term value.