Transcript: Episode 198: Elevator Pitch at HITEC (Part 2)
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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor HITEC edition. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/198.
[00:00:14] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.
[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. This is Susan Barry and I am back with part two of our HITEC elevator pitch series recorded live from my recording studio right outside the trade show floor, where I invited brave souls to come and share their best ideas, weirdest stories and hotel tech hot takes. In this episode, you will meet a hotelier who faked his way through a piano brunch, A CEO who accidentally crashed the wrong panel, and a server whose champagne tray hit the floor at the worst possible moment. We also talk AI, spa software, direct booking, and what happens when someone tries to bring a monkey to a hotel. Let's hit the elevator button and ride all the way up to the top floor.
Elevator rings.
I am here with James Hanson, vice President of Business Development for Reeco. You may remember hearing about Reeco when we interviewed their founder, one of their founders, Omri Schelev. James, give me your elevator pitch.
[00:01:53] James Hansen: Well, thank you, uh, Susan. I appreciate the introduction there. I'll make it a quick elevator pitch. We are the leader in P2P, which is procurement to pay. The reason I say we're the leader is because we are the one single group out there, Reeco is, that is using AI to drive the procurement process for hotels.
[00:02:14] Susan Barry: Interesting. Tell me more.
[00:02:15] James Hansen: Okay, I will. Well, in the traditional age old field of buying things for your hotel, we've been doing a lot of manual processes over the history of hotel purchasing. As a hotelier myself, I can recall using a pen and paper for many years to place orders, make orders happen, make stuff appear to operate your hotel. And so in this day of innovation and technology and certainly with the creep of hearing AI for just about everything, we have actually built a platform that allows you to take better control of that ordering process for your hotel. So think about your supplies, your food and beverage, everything it takes to run that hotel every day. You can now order in one AI driven marketplace. Which is our Reeco platform. And let me tell you, innovation is what we're about.
[00:03:02] Susan Barry: Well, I have to say, that was a pretty smooth elevator pitch, James. I wonder if you can sustain this smoothness down at the loading dock. What is a story you would only tell me on the loading dock?
[00:03:16] James Hansen: Uh, wow. As a career hotelier, I have a lot of stories to tell. I'll pick out one that sticks out in my mind. And it's kind of a funny one that involves me personally taking on a role as a superhero in a situation. In a situation that called for me to do something that was completely outside of my realm. So I was working at a hotel, which will remain unnamed, but it had a very famous Sunday brunch. And one of the things that made the Sunday brunch so significant was they had a gentleman by the name of Bob, and Bob was an amazing piano player and singer. So while this, again, very famous brunch was going on, Bob would be in the background playing his piano, playing his music, singing the songs of you name the famous musician. He could do it. This was what Bob was about. So the challenge was I was manager on duty on that Sunday, that weekend, as a matter of fact.
[00:04:11] Susan Barry: I'm shaking my head. Manager on duty, never good.
[00:04:15] James Hansen: Yes, it’s first thing in the morning, manager on duty. I get the call that the world famous Bob is not gonna make it to brunch. Now, we had 250 reservations at this famous brunch, and I can't tell you what it would be like if 250 disappointed customers showed up 'cause Bob wasn't there. So guess who stepped in to play piano and sing?
[00:04:30] Susan Barry: No sir!
[00:04:33] James Hansen: That was me. Now mind you, I have not been known for my voice. I'm known for a lot of things, but a singing voice is not one of them. And the other thing I can't do is play the piano. Okay? So I show up and lo and behold, I get set up behind Bob's piano. Now mind you, Bob notoriously was a great singer, but he also partook in a lot of the champagne mimosas that were happening. So as the brunch went on, he became a better singer. You can imagine after a lot of mimosas. Well, guess what I found out?
[00:05:01] Susan Barry: Do tell.
[00:05:02] James Hansen: I sat down, I got prepped, I got a mimosa ready in case I needed it to get the cur, the liquid courage up to sing. Well, there was a button there and it said play. And so what did I do? I pressed play and as it turns out, Bob wasn't much of a piano player. The piano itself was playing the music the entire time.
[00:05:17] Susan Barry: That's amazing.
[00:05:19] James Hansen: And he would crank the volume loud enough so the piano was louder than his voice. And it turns out that Bob was not a piano player, nor was he much of a singer as it were.
[00:05:27] Susan Barry: He was just a lush.
[00:05:28] James Hansen: He was just a very good mimosa champagne drinker. So moral of the story is when you get called into play on the piano. See if there's an easy button, press the easy button and the next thing you know, you're like Chopin playing on a piano.
[00:05:39] Susan Barry: That is the best story in the history of piano playing stories.
[00:05:44] James Hansen: Listen, shout out to Bob. I don't know where he is today, but man, he was good at faking the music and faking the voice. And faking the experience.
[00:05:51] Susan Barry: Rock on Bob. James Hanson, thank you so much for riding up to the top floor.
[00:05:55] James Hansen: Oh, thank you for having me, Susan.
[00:05:58] Susan Barry: I am here with Eric Lutz, co-founder and CEO of Olive. Eric, what is your elevator pitch?
[00:06:06] Eric Lutz: Olive is an AI powered booking experience that transforms any hotel website into the booking experience to capture guests when they're on your hotel site, get them to book direct, but most importantly provide a digital experience that is almost as good as the experience that you're providing on property.
[00:06:24] Susan Barry: I have to tell you, I have heard an elevator pitch for Olive from your co-founder, Yamina. And one of the things I loved that she said was that your experience is designed to look like the way people are used to shopping online, not the way that hotels are trying to force them to shop. Is that an accurate characterization?
[00:06:50] Eric Lutz: That is a hundred percent accurate. I think we should have Yamina on here. She can do a better job than me with her marketing background. But yes, it's really important for us to understand how guests are interacting with any type of digital experience today and how we can support a similar digital experience in the hotel space. 'Cause to your point, we have all different types of guests with all different types of needs. So being able to meet them wherever they're at on the journey with a brand-forward, consistent, simple, intuitive experience is what guests are looking for today.
[00:07:21] Susan Barry: I know that you work with independent hotels. Have you seen anything at HITEC this week that you think is really cool for your customers? So not from your perspective, but like if you were an independent hotel, you're something that you would wanna buy.
[00:07:39] Eric Lutz: A hundred percent. I was just talking to the team at Hover yesterday, which is a really, really cool product that's leveraging incredible content that either hotels have created themselves or user generated content to build that into the hotel websites, build it into the booking experience. Because in 2025, content is king, a 10-15 second video sells most properties better than an entire hotel website. So we love seeing that content leveraged today.
[00:08:06] Susan Barry: It's absolutely true, and in fact, we talked to Jason, their founder, and CEO a few years back at the Hunter Conference. So he was your predecessor in sitting with me on a conference podcast stage. Alright, Eric. I have to ask, what is a story you would only tell me on the loading dock?
[00:08:28] Eric Lutz: Ooh, I got many stories, but one that really sticks out in my mind is: so we all know that the name of the game in hospitality is discretion, and discretion is important. So sometimes there can be situations where you might have to disclose things that you don't really want to disclose. So one day when I was working at the front desk many years ago, I got a call from a woman and she asked for a copy of the Folio. Super easy, confirmed the name, confirmed the email, confirmed the last four of the credit card, sent off the folio, happy days. Well, about 20 minutes later, I get a call back because the folio had a room charge and a room service charge. So she asked, oh, could I please get the itemized copy of the receipt for the room service charge? I said, sure, let me go talk to in-room dining. Get that over to her. So I went and talked to our friends in in-room dining, got a copy of the check. The check had a bottle of champagne and strawberries. And so I took that and went and put it in the scanner, sent it off to the woman. She calls back a few minutes later, she says, I noticed that it just said one guest on the in-room dining check, is it possible there's only one? Or, you know, could somebody else have been there? And I said, you know, typically they'll ask, but I couldn't say if it's one guest or two guests. And she said, okay. Very good to know. Well, that was my husband and he was on a work trip, so just trying to get to the bottom of this story.
[00:10:00] Susan Barry: Oh, no.
[00:10:01] Eric Lutz: So, we tried to do all that we could. I think, you know, if you're going to engage in maybe some activity that you're trying to hide, you gotta be a little bit more slick about it. But that's one that always sticks out that I had to be the unfortunate bearer of bad news in that situation.
[00:10:17] Susan Barry: I mean, it's a real rarity that you order champagne and strawberries for one.
[00:10:23] Eric Lutz: Yeah. I can't say I've ever done that.
[00:10:26] Susan Barry: Well, Eric, thank you so much for riding to the top floor with us.
[00:10:29] Eric Lutz: Thank you for having me.
[00:10:31] Susan Barry: I am here with Shawn Tarter, president of Realtime Reservations. Sean is going to give us his elevator pitch.
[00:10:41] Shawn Tarter: Thanks for having me. So we really work on the single guest itinerary. Everything the guests would like to do before they get to the property, they could do with us. We're fully integrated across the hotel. Now we have some more exciting things happening with spa and other things that they could do with the property as well just coming out today.
[00:10:56] Susan Barry: Excellent. So walk me through the guest journey. What happens if I am a guest and I'm using your product?
[00:11:04] Shawn Tarter: Yeah, so are informed, right away and they can see everything the hotel has to offer. And they could book ahead of time, they can see what they wanna do, all these different experiences and opportunities in the property. So they can reserve a cabana, reserve a a spot treatment. The kids are in the kids club, the waivers already signed, and they get to the property. They get to enjoy their stay. So all of our products have always been focused around the guest itinerary, what the guests wanna do. All ancillary revenue things, getting the guests excited. We realized early on that when guests are making a restaurant reservation, they're making a pool reservation, a cabana reservation, they also wanna make a spa reservation. So we got really into spa about two years ago, teamed up with Trilogy Advisors and said, how do we build the best spa product out there? A couple of really popular ones are in the industry right now. They don't do certain things. How do we get yield management as a focus? How do we really get back to - really the spa staff - for the revenue directors and things like that. So we built out spa, we launched it this week.
[00:12:07] Susan Barry: Oh, congratulations.
[00:12:09] Shawn Tarter: At the Plaza Hotel in New York. Super excited to be part of this. Aand we go from there. It's just part of the guest itinerary, part of the checkout, and part of the reporting, everything in one place.
[00:12:20] Susan Barry: Awesome. Well, Shawn Tarter, thank you so much for riding up to the top floor.
[00:12:24] Shawn Tarter: Thanks for having me.
[00:12:27] Susan Barry: I am here with Mark Cedarloff, CEO of VSR. Mark, what is your elevator pitch?
[00:12:35] Mark Cederloff: Thanks, Susan. So we're a cloud telephony provider. We focus all of our business in the hospitality vertical. We've been doing this for about 35 years. We've focused heavily into better creating a better guest experience, providing a better set of technology for our hoteliers, and also keeping in mind cost is very concerning to them. So that makes sure that we can provide this complete solution for them that helps them provide a better solution to their guests. So we have a couple different things that we do. One of them is a cloud telephone system, so that we're able to go into the property and displace any old school technology, old PBXs out there, put in something that's new, that's all cloud-based, that doesn't require any maintenance and functionality and leverage their existing investment. So a lot of hotel hoteliers love that because they want to get up to the next generation technology. And this was real prevalent in COVID when these hoteliers had to make some drastic changes into their technology and they couldn't get anybody on site because it was an old technology. No technicians can do a truck roll. So having a cloud solution, all of our customers, it was a non-event. Anything that they needed was able to be changed immediately.
[00:13:51] Susan Barry: Got it.
[00:13:52] Mark Cederloff: And then our new product, which we're real excited to announce here at HITEC, is the VIA product, our second generation conversational AI assistant. It supports voice. It supports chat. It supports email and texting. So whatever means that the guest wants to communicate with the property, we can provide that interaction for them. And so we automate a lot of the mundane tasks of providing general information about the property or specific information, but then we go into more detail and more abilities to provide a better experience and more workflow automation so that if somebody wants to order housekeeping or amenities, we can automate that whole scenario so that we could post the event over to the workflows management program, like Core or something like that. And the whole, the whole process is automated. We can do other integrations with PMS. We can book rooms, we book shuttles. We can book tickets, dining reservations - pretty much anything you can think about doing on a web, but you can do it now through a voice. So voice is still a very, very prominent platform.
[00:15:00] Susan Barry: Got it. Well, as I understand it, there may be a couple of things you can't do with your product. So tell me, Mark, what is a story you would only tell me on the loading dock?
[00:15:18] Mark Cederloff: We did do a demo for a customer on the product. And during the process of asking questions to book the hotel, it asked a series of questions, and one of them was, can I bring my service animal? So the guest made a joke and said, can I bring my pet monkey? And so the system recognizes that that's probably not a standard animal, service animal. And so it very politely said, well, if you have dogs and cats, we'll be happy to accept those as your furry friends to bring along with your stay. But no lightly said no monkeys.
[00:15:50] Susan Barry: No pet monkeys. I think that was probably a wise move, on behalf of the hotel, if nothing else. Well, Mark, thank you so much for riding up to the top floor with us.
[00:15:59] Mark Cederloff: Great. Thank you so much for your time.
[00:16:02] Susan Barry: We are here with Mike Medsker, co-founder of SIV, and Mike is gonna give us his elevator pitch.
[00:16:11] Mike Medsker: Hey Susan. So at SIV, we are helping hotels to respond to every group lead instantly in a personalized manner. Today, it takes hotels 37 hours on average to respond to any type of inbound group lead.
[00:16:24] Susan Barry: Holy mackerel.
[00:16:25] Mike Medsker: I know, and it's even worse on weekends and evenings. Beyond that, what we typically see is that first touch point generally feels a whole lot less like a value add and a little more like digital waterboarding and asking for answers that have already been provided.
[00:16:41] Susan Barry: Haha, digital waterboarding.
[00:16:43] Mike Medsker: So where SIV steps in is the moment a lead drops, we route it to the right member of the sales team. We initiate a communication workflow on their behalf, and we utilize text message, email, calendar invites, voicemail and even telephone calls in order to get you connected as a hotelier, much more quickly with the planner. Gives you a great opportunity to differentiate and really stand out from your competitors.
[00:17:08] Susan Barry: This sounds like a dream come true and something I wish I had when I was on property. Mike, how can people find out more about SIC?
[00:17:16] Mike Medsker: They can go to sivconverts.com. There's actually a demo on the site that will give them the ability to see the planners side of the equation. And just know that everything's fully customizable, so you can use your brand voice, your verbiage, and actually we even provision numbers on behalf of your sales team that are directly responsible for provisioning that communication.
[00:17:38] Susan Barry: Excellent. Well, since I know you, I know that you have to have a good loading dock story. Please tell me something crazy that's happened to you in your career.
[00:17:50] Mike Medsker: Oh, that's tough. I've got so many good stories from my operator background before I moved into technology. It's gonna be challenging to choose. So I actually just had Demo Mike enabled by SIV leave you a voicemail. We'll, go ahead and let him choose.
Mike’s voice plays from a voicemail message: As a server at my dad's restaurant in southern Colorado, but I had never done tray service, so this was my, my first chance to do tray service at a big banquet function. And they sent me out with a tray full of food and went over and set it down on the stand and served it. Miraculously, the entire dinner service went off without a hitch. I felt great. I thought all the high stakes were over. And as they're getting ready to start to toast, the banquet captain actually calls me over and says, we want you to do this as well. Well, this was a little bit different. They sent me out with a tray of champagne flutes, and we didn't drop it off at the stand before serving at the table. I was holding the tray with one hand, serving with the other. I got the first couple glasses off. Everything's great. It's a breeze, right?
And finally I gotta take, I think it's like the third or fourth glass off, but I didn't really know about weight distribution in tray service at this time. So as I took that glass off, everything started to slide. It was slow motion. I saw it. I heard all the champagne glasses just come tumbling down. Father the bride is starting a speech, so everybody stopped and, and was staring at me. But thankfully they were really gracious. Father, the bride came up to me afterwards and told me there was no reason to be embarrassed or sorry. I guess moral of the story is if you're gonna do tray service, make sure that you have a solid understanding of weight distribution and what happens when you don't keep your tray balanced.
[00:19:40] Susan Barry: I cannot believe you dropped the entire tray. Are you kidding me?
[00:19:44] Mike Medsker: What can I say? Clumsiness is a little bit of a known commodity with me.
[00:19:49] Susan Barry: There's a reason that you moved into tech instead of staying in food and beverage. Mike Medsker, thank you so much for being with us and for revealing your deep, dark secret.
[00:20:00] Mike Medsker: Thanks Susan. Appreciate you having me on and appreciate everything you're doing for the industry.
[00:20:05] Susan Barry: I am here with Jen Barnwell, president of Curator Hotels and Resorts. Jen, what is your elevator pitch?
[00:20:14] Jen Barnwell: Thank you for having me. So I am part of Curator Hotel and Resort Collection. We strictly work with independents and boutiques to try to drive value for them. So if you're in this space, it is very, very rewarding. But also very challenging compared to being part of a big brand that provides a lot of these things for you, kind of automatically, very low cost. So we're in the space for independents and boutiques to help them with scale and leverage, which they don't have on their own.
[00:20:52] Susan Barry: Excellent, and people can listen to episode 150 of Top Floor to hear more from Jen and more about Curator. So what are some of the latest and greatest things that you've been offering to your members?
[00:21:07] Jen Barnwell: So, obviously being here at HITEC, we're looking at all the tech platforms that are out there. And some of the latest things we've come across that we're interested in and are working with are specifically a platform that helps your sales team basically immediately respond to group sales RFPs, 'cause that's the one of the main reasons why you may lose business is because you don't respond quick enough.
[00:21:33] Susan Barry: Would that have been our friends SIV and Mike Medsker?
[00:21:37] Jen Barnwell: Yes, exactly! Yeah, we are partnered with them and we're doing some pilot tests, which is typically what Curator does with new technology or new platforms or products or services. We have a great list of properties that we can kind of test things out with first, and we're feeling really good about SIV and really confident about it and we've got it in place at a couple hotels.
[00:21:58] Susan Barry: Oh, very cool. Thank you so much for riding up to the top floor.
[00:22:01] Jen Barnwell: Thank you for having me.
[00:22:01] Susan Barry: I am here with Tessa McGoldrick from Revenue Analytics, and she is going to give us her elevator pitch.
[00:22:12] Tess McGoldrick: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. I was a little nervous. I've never done anything like this before, but we recently launched a new AI report generator to supplement our product called Entry Pricing. So we were always built around the philosophy of having AI powered analytics, machine learning, but now that gen AI is the hot new topic, as we continue to give revenue managers back time in their day, we wanna give them something else to do and a way to make their lives even easier, leveraging gen AI on top of all of their really robust data.
[00:22:41] Susan Barry: That is amazing. And that is the thing that I have been talking about since the advent of chatGPT sort of coming to the public that reporting in hotels is the absolute place where this needs to live.
[00:22:56] Tess McGoldrick: I mean, when you have all of that data sitting on top of it, we first went into this thinking we were just gonna build a reporting suite. We identified 12 reports to build. We had wire frames. And now that we've put this AI layer on top of it, we're all kind of looking each other like, “Do we need to go build the rest of those reports? Or if you ask it to put the chart together for you and you give it feedback for what you wanna see instead, isn't that better than a canned report?”
[00:23:20] Susan Barry: Oh wow. That's really cool. And especially, you know, there are so many revenue strategy leaders who have to produce different looking, but not necessarily different content reports for different ownership groups. So that really makes it like super flexible and malleable for them. That's cool.
[00:23:40] Tess McGoldrick: It's flexible. And what I liked too is like it's an editable report canvas, so it'll give you what it thinks is the right answer. And we all know that you have to have that partnership still between the human and the machine. So instead of just firing it off, right? Our revenue managers are gonna be able to go in there and tweak the story and tell the story a little bit better for each owner, make it look like how that owner likes to see it, and gives them a lot more. Easier to start from a draft than it is from a blank sheet of paper.
[00:24:06] Susan Barry: Excellent. Well now that I have gotten you to be very serious, Tess, I need to know if there is a story that you would only tell me on the loading dock.
[00:24:18] Tess McGoldrick: So it's actually a really… it's a little bit of a travel story into a hotel story that you've had time with Dax Cross before. He and I were traveling together internationally. We're coming back from Shanghai, had a layover in Seoul. And to actually get to like the terminal airport, like that's beyond security but everybody that could give us a boarding pass had closed down already. So we talked our way through airport security with printed confirmation sheets, and I promise I'm really real. I had to do the same thing at the hotel check-in. They're like, we need your boarding pass, we need your passport. And we're like, we promise we're traveling tomorrow. Security was fine. And then we talked our way into duty free as well to let us buy a bottle 'cause the lounge was closed.
[00:25:07] Susan Barry: How do they close if there are flights still taking off? I don't understand that.
[00:25:12] Tess McGoldrick: We like, flew into Seoul and then we were flying back the next day on a different airline and then had to get into the country to then enter the country again, to go into the hotel that was behind security. It was a mess.
[00:25:25] Susan Barry: Oh my gosh. Well that sounds terrifying and also kind of amazing that you guys were able to pull that off.
[00:25:32] Tess McGoldrick: You send the, the cute little lady through on the, like try to get that and then Dax was the muscle of duty free to say, well, if your lounge is closed, we're at least gonna have a good time on our own. So.
[00:25:42] Susan Barry: Excellent. Excellent. Well thank you so much for your story and for. Riding up to the top floor.
[00:25:48] Tess McGoldrick: Awesome. Thank you so much. It was great.
[00:25:50] Susan Barry: I am here with Tanya Pratt, Global Vice President of Oracle Hospitality. Tanya, what is your elevator pitch?
[00:25:59] Tanya Pratt: Oracle Hospitality delivers a suite of solutions that enables employees to deliver authentic hospitality to their guests. So we have a composable, unified platform that it helps bring different departments on property together, working off of the same data in a unified way. Because we ultimately believe that when you unify the data and you unify the employees and remove the friction, they can deliver absolutely the best service to their guests.
[00:26:25] Susan Barry: So what are some of the departments that are touched by your suite of software?
[00:26:30] Tanya Pratt: So for front office and reservations, we have our Opera Cloud property management system for our banquets and catering and sales functions. We have Opera Cloud sales and event management for revenue management teams that are always looking to generate additional revenue. We have upselling through our NorOne tool for data analytics teams or marketing. We have our Opera Cloud reporting and analytics. We've recently introduced Opera Cloud Central and distribution, which helps enable above property users, so whether they work in revenue management or in distribution, and they need to price and sell their products outside the hotel. That component, that's part of the Opera Cloud unified platform, which again, same data shared across all customer touch points, enabled them to absolutely go out there and compete to best of their ability.
[00:27:21] Susan Barry: Excellent. Well, I know that you are an expert on what works for hotels because you have worked in hotels, so I'm curious if you have a story that you would only tell me on the loading dock.
[00:27:35] Tanya Pratt: Absolutely. I have so many stories. How do I pick? Some that will make you cry.
[00:27:39] Susan Barry: Okay. I'm a crier, so it doesn't take much.
[00:27:41] Tanya Pratt: We're gonna go with that. So I remember a story that - it was a couple that stayed in one of the properties, and I have two, maybe I tell two. And this was a few years ago. And so they showed up to the hotel and it was a woman on her own and she was checking in and said to the team member at the front desk, “I haven’t been here for fifty years.” And so the last time that I was here, I was on my honeymoon. And my husband had just recently passed away. And so that front desk team member went back to her management team and said, this is what happened. They looked back and guess history in some archives and surely enough they found and they took this woman to the top of the hill near this hotel where they recreated the picnic that she had with her husband. How I’m keeping this in - I think I’ve told this story many times. And so to me, you can't put that in a brochure. You, you can't put that on a website, right? But it's what I love about hospitality the most. It's the people that take the time, that know, that it's like, I'm gonna make this moment into a memory. And it's what I. It's the reason why I think people stay in hospitality for so long, right? It becomes part of your DNA because everybody has a story.
I have to tell another one, I put this social. Back then we didn’t have social media. So we had quite a few events through Europe last year. So I get from one city to the next, to the next. I flew into Canada from London, it was like six o’clock in the morning. I show up to the front desk and there’s a young millennial kind of checking me in and we know the new generation of talent that’s coming in sometimes have attention span. Anyway, she was just amazing. She looked me and said, “Where are you flying in from?” I said I came in from Canada, but I've spent the last couple of months on planes like, look, my skin, it's all dry. Go up to my room, think nothing of it. Went out for the day, came back in and on the desk in my room there's a note and a mask. Like one of those facial masks that you put on. And a note that said, you know, Here, hope to like refresh your day. And I thought, again, it's like, it's not in a training manual. Right? It's not in something. But what happened within that hotel, just like the previous one, is the person was given the time, they were empowered, they were told you can spend $10 in a drugstore on a mask for this person. But it's a story that I'll tell forever. And so to me, anything that we can do from a technology perspective through the use of our solutions, through use of embedding AI and solutions that frees people up to be able to give thought. Because everyone has it in them, they just don’t have the time to do it. That is our goal. That is our focus.
[00:30:49] Susan Barry: Absolutely true. Well, thank you so much for riding up to the top floor.
[00:30:53] Tanya Pratt: Thank you so much.
[00:30:56] Susan Barry: I am here at HITEC with Steven Chen, CEO of Phunware. Stephen, what is your elevator pitch?
[00:31:04] Stephen Chen: Well, fun, uh, Phunware, we're a public company and we bring intelligence to physical spaces. We turn buildings like hotels into smart environments and we layer in location, technology, mobile engagement, and agentic AI.
So what does that mean?
So that means that when you walk into a hotel, we can help you monetize every square footage of that space because our tech will let you know where you are physically. In the space as well as who you are and customize offers to you. So for example, early check-in late checkout, because I know that you arrived too early. I know that you're still on property, even though you know your time is off, I know that it's lunchtime and you're off the property and I can offer you a discount or offer to come back onto property.
[00:31:48] Susan Barry: Ah, got it.
[00:31:49] Stephen Chen: I can help you proactively book an excursion, proactively book a hotel for you. I can give you a sample itinerary, I can email out to the tour guide, book it all for you, including sending the credit card, all without you doing a single thing.
[00:32:07] Susan Barry: Okay, so that was gonna be my question. Does a guest need to download an app or do something else in order to do this?
[00:32:13] Stephen Chen: We can use any channel. So, we can interact with a guest by text message, FaceTime app, FaceTime video call, emails, whichever way that the client wants. WhatsApp, whatever way that the individual is happy to interact 'cause we're able to read, from the hotel's perspective, we're able to read the screen of what's is showing on the PMS system, on the POS system, on any of the room service software tools, and there is no need to download anything at all. We're able to integrate into all systems without APIs, which means that your technology team won't be all mad because they have to redo everything on it.
[00:32:59] Susan Barry: Got it. And from the guest journey experience, or perspective, how does a guest know what to do?
[00:33:08] Stephen Chen: Well think of our concierge service as the super concierge. So what we do when we come onto our property is we talk with, you know, the very best, most engaging concierge. We follow them around for about two weeks. And we then replicate that person. We clone that person. So from the buyers, from the guest journey perspective, it can begin months in advance where it comes with a text message that says, Hey, you know, beautiful picture of, uh, of Turks and Caicos today. Can't wait to have you come join three months down the road. Um, you know, this is Mikey. He does all of our sailing excursions at nighttime.
They oftentimes fill up, uh, if you want, we can offer you a 20% discount. Put down your name. It's fully refundable if you don't go. But you know, we'd love to have space for you. Got it. Uh, right now, uh, would you like to, you know, would you like to have that locked down?
[00:34:00] Susan Barry: Understood. Well, Steven, do you have a story that you would only tell us on the loading dock?
[00:34:07] Stephen Chen: Uh, a funny story. Yeah. You know, we are, you know, we add intelligence to physical spaces, but sometimes, uh, you know, as we do rapid prototyping, you know, uh, things happen. So I remember one at one hotel, uh, conference we were at, um, you know, uh, our tech. Uh, suggested that as we walk by one of the breakout rooms that I should walk in and give a talk about our proactive adjunctive solutions.
Me not looking at what it actually said on the outside sign. Uh, I realized that it was around, uh, you know, operational capital improvement instead of the AI that we're talking about. Um, but the funny thing is, um, you know. Uh, I got on, you know, I was a speaker, so I got on stage and I, and I talked about it and you know, as I got quizzical looks from people, I, uh, you know, ended up, uh, talking about Genta gay, you know, uh, got thumbs up, uh, a rousing sort, applause at the very end, and, you know, made a bunch of lifelong friends from that experience.
[00:35:10] Susan Barry: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for riding up to the top
[00:35:13] Stephen Chen: floor. Thank you so much for having me, Susan.
[00:35:16] Susan Barry: That's a wrap on part two of our HITEC coverage. Huge thanks to all of my guests for the insights and the antics, and of course, thank you to HFTP for hosting another stellar event. And for giving top floor, a front row seat to all the action.
If you missed part one, go check it out. And stay tuned for more stories soon from top floor. Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at top floor podcast.com/episode/1 98. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.
[00:36:23] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor Podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 8504049630 to be featured in a future episode.