fidelis hospitality & SIHOT

fidelis hospitality is an owner-managed, medium-sized hotel management company. With a selection of branded properties in major cities across Germany – including THE hotels, Felix Hotels and ibis – the company focuses on providing an optimum guest experience within the comforts of stylised hotel properties.

Using technology throughout the business, fidelis hospitality continually explores how to create an optimum hospitality company. With seamless and intuitive digital guest experiences underpinned by a reliable tech stack to support a diverse workforce – the company has managed to drive efficiencies and ensure commercial sustainability across its portfolio.

Challenge: 

Remaining competitive – not just with other hotels but also OTAs like Booking and Expedia – is imperative for fidelis hospitality. As these big digital businesses evolve, fidelis is continually looking at how it can secure bookings and increase guest spend. Therefore, having the ability to offer additional benefits to guests will add to their experience, creating opportunities to capture repeat bookings.

Technology has become a defining factor for the business, with four key goals:

• Time and Resource Efficiency: Where and how to reduce the need for staff – particularly during off-peak hours – in an industry suffering from staff shortages and inexperienced personnel?
• Guest Data: How to efficiently gather, categorise, share, and track guest data?  fidelis needs a streamlined approach that not only simplifies data management, but also enables them to personalise future offerings and maintain ongoing communication with guests.
• Security: How to protect guest data and payment details with increasing regulation. How can they remove employees from the process to no longer handle or see credit card information?
• Guest driven: As guests become more digital-centric, they will compare the digitalisation levels of properties. How can fidelis provide the right level of digital service?

The goals defined by fidelis have enabled them to prepare a blueprint for prioritising which processes should be digitalised first, and identify the functionalities that hold value for the hotels’ target groups.

Solution:

fidelis hospitality moved to SIHOT.PMS in 2019  to work with a single partner that could offer a fully integrated solution to manage all their operational and commercial requirements. SIHOT perfectly met their needs, and over the past few years the business has been able to implement digital guest services throughout its properties to improve the guest experience.

Guest services

Managing guest satisfaction was a key area, and fidelis recognised the importance of digitalising many of the guest touchpoints – while reducing pressure on hotel teams, especially reception. Recognising that different generations of customers are looking to engage with the hotel differently, digital communication was a crucial addition to the guest journey.

Fidelis uses SIHOT.PRE- & POST-STAY emails to keep in touch with guests, and provides SIHOT.GO! for guests to process their own check-in, which is saving hours of reception work. Recent additions to the hotel arrival stage include contactless check-in with SIHOT.KIOSK – which fidelis was involved with developing – and digital reservations available in Google and Apple Wallets.

Commercial management

fidelis is looking to increase direct bookings, and the implementation of SIHOT Booking Engine has enabled their website to be more effective with driving conversion. Furthermore, the Mirai connection ensures marketing teams can better manage Google advertising to target customers more precisely to reduce commission costs.

With the need to reduce staff pressure, the channel manager integration connects all distribution channels without requiring constant administration. This is supported by IDeaS RMS G3 – which is fully automated – removing the need for continual revenue management and manual pricing updates.

Operational efficiency

Since SIHOT.PMS acts as a central data hub, SIHOT provides fidelis with some key integrations that massively improve operations:

• SIHOT.POS consolidates all purchases and guest billing, and the connection of payment technology from Adyen provides greater fraud protection and tokenisation of payment details while automating processes, massively reducing financial errors.
• Assa Abloy room keycards, and soon to be launched Vostio for digital hotel keys, are connected to guest accounts.
• Properties can offer EV charging through LADE and bill directly to the guest’s room – allowing fidelis to sell packages and parking spaces online – and switch off charge at reception.
• SIHOT.MOBILE is digitalising paperwork across the property where maintenance, housekeeping and operations provide updates on roles and job functions in a central app.

Fidelis uses SIHOT.PMS, SIHOT.KIOSK, SIHOT.GO!, SIHOT.POS, SIHOT.MOBILE and SIHOT.PRE- & POST-STAY.

“I’m a fan of having everything in one platform. With a small team, it is time-consuming to monitor multiple partners – this leads to failures and problems. At least with one provider, we know who to call, there is someone to help, and we can collaborate on developments. With SIHOT we get exposure to new applications and functionality as it is launched, which allows us to evolve quickly.”

Maurice Nickelsburg , Head of Commercial Development, fidelis hospitality

Results/Summary:

The goal for fidelis is to digitalise the entire guest check-in and check-out process with intuitive tools for staff and relevant communications with guests. The implementation of kiosks in the lobby and digital reservations has massively reduced the pressure on the front of house team.

Working with SIHOT, fidelis hospitality has been able to analyse existing processes and identify how they can be improved and digitalised. This has saved huge amounts of staff hours and reduced errors in administration and data management. Ultimately, this is freeing commercial staff to look at new revenue opportunities, and addressing staff shortages where guest service is at risk.

In working with one system, data is collected and centralised offering better security without needing to place this responsibility on staff.

“Things are changing all the time. We now have a good infrastructure to work from. This has put fidelis in a position to discuss adopting new hotel projects – with the plan for these to be fully digital. Now, with SIHOT, we have the solution to plug in and make a success of these initiatives quickly.”

Maurice Nickelsburg , Head of Commercial Development, fidelis hospitality

“SIHOT has been outstanding from day one. We feel very involved in every process of product development. In fact, everything we noted as a ‘customer wish’ is now available in the SIHOT platform.”

Maurice Nickelsburg , Head of Commercial Development, fidelis hospitality