Curator Hotels VP on Why Labor Costs Drive Every Tech Decision

Glenn: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality friend Glenn here with Brent Hayhurst of Curator Hotels. But before we get into an awesome conversation, I want to thank my friends over at Unifocus. Unifocus, Workforce Management Redefined. Please check them out unifocus.com. All right, so here at HITEC. Yeah, right. Doing that sort of thing. And I want I wanted to stop you and say, what are you thinking about? Technology is such a big, widespread issue. There’s so many things you could be thinking about. You can’t think about everything at once. Right? So what’s top of mind for you these days? Yeah.

Brent: [00:00:30] I mean, we’re still very focused on innovation. You know, how technology continues to drive operations. But I think like our primary focus, like it’s hard times right now, like operators costs are going up. Labor is the largest line item on any on any owner’s balance sheet. And so we’re really focused on looking at tech and how tech is helping to help to mitigate, redeploy people, help them to, to do better work at and maintain current cost.

Glenn: [00:00:58] Yeah. So, you know, obviously if you’ve been watching any interview that I’ve done over the last year or so, I’ve been really focused on how to increase profitability and finding new ways and systems to do that. And AI has been huge with that. We’ve been talking about that and been talking about that because you have to do more with less. We don’t need to talk about AI, but how are you thinking about doing more with the resources at the property levels for your member hotels to make sure that they can achieve that ultimate profit?

Brent: [00:01:27] Yeah, we’ve been doing a lot of work. I mean, not to not to use the buzzword, but AI is coming up like it’s helping us to save the front desk from taking that call, focusing on the person in front of them and connecting more back office workflows.

Glenn: [00:01:38] Yeah. You know what I’m thinking? I think for my next interview, not you, because we’re too deep into this, but like, I want to make sure no one uses the word AI. Yeah. I did a panel recently where I’m like, you cannot use the word experience, the quietest hour I’ve ever posted, but that makes a lot of that makes a lot of sense to me. So how are you looking at technology today versus a year ago versus five years ago? What you thought was possible, what you think is possible, and the reality of what’s going on now?

Brent: [00:02:08] Yeah. I mean, Integrations are are out there. They’re plentiful. We’re still seeing a great kind of camaraderie between the tech companies in order to like, work together, figure out how to make those connectors and make it easy for the hotels. Add to that guest help them to have a better experience.

Glenn: [00:02:27] Yeah. I’m also seeing when you’re putting together the the, the tech stack, there’s just so many companies out there. How do you figure out the, the right ones to go with at any given time? Because it takes training and implementation and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah. The process of, hey, this will be good, but does it actually going to work in the what we’ve already done before this kind of scenario must be coming up a lot.

Brent: [00:02:51] Yeah. And a lot of times, like with incubator, we look at just because that’s the way it’s been done. That’s not the way it has to be done. I love that attitude. We’re looking at what’s new, what’s coming up. Like what’s on the fringes of the of a floor like this. And also we’re having lots of really thoughtful conversations with current partners to understand how they’re continuing to transform, evolve and really continue to serve the customer who is ultimately the hotel operator.

Glenn: [00:03:14] Yeah. I love what you said on the fringes because. Here. Here? No. For real. For real. Because here at high tech, right. The ones on the fringes, like the outsides are probably the newer companies, right? So they don’t have the depth of resources that some of those massive booths that we, that you see around here visit our friends over at uni focus, by the way. But so they’re the ones with the new ideas because, and they don’t necessarily have the money to have big splashy appeal. So yeah.

Brent: [00:03:39] But they’re out here building awareness and we want to like give them that, that chance to tell their story and like figure out what their, what their vision is for the, for the industry.

Glenn: [00:03:45] So how do you suss out the real deal versus the ones that are trying versus the ones that aren’t going to go anywhere?

Brent: [00:03:53] Yeah. I mean, it’s a lot of the time is just having the conversations, understanding the pitch deck, you know, is there a need, is there an opportunity to pilot? We love to test things. Cool. Really understand like how it operates. Is there, are there certain KPIs you’re looking at or did that not quite work out the way we thought, but it actually opened up an opportunity for something else. Always just trying to figure out like what, what it is that they think they’re trying to achieve and ultimately help them to gain a little bit of visibility on a customer voice as well.

Glenn: [00:04:20] That’s pretty awesome. I love that you want to try new things. It means you’re not afraid to fail. And what do you learn when you try new things and they don’t necessarily work?

Brent: [00:04:31] I mean, you either look, you either are looking at again, open up opens up like potentially like a brand new concept. Like is this, is this something that needs to be layered on? Is this something that’s driving either a change in efficiency, a change in revenue? You know, what else can we do if that didn’t work? Does that open up another path for us to like, look at something completely different? Or are we trying to make an existing solution better and giving that feedback and helping to, to drive more change and evolution, right?

Glenn: [00:05:00] There’s so many layers of things to think about and complexity and stuff. So where do you even begin? How does that all, how do you think about your tech strategy overall and then how much their discovery processes for being events like this? Does it kind of change stuff?

Brent: [00:05:16] Yeah, we a lot of times it starts on a floor like this. Yeah. You know, that’s where you kind of learn what’s happening. We also take a very mindful approach into how we are collecting feedback from our members. We want to understand what they’re using. We have a good idea, like what their tech stack is, how we’re helping them to have different conversations, look at different technologies, and ultimately, we just want everyone to enjoy what they’re doing, enjoy their work, enjoy what they’re doing to service our guests.

Glenn: [00:05:42] I gotta tell you, I think the these tech minded folks are really in the spirit of, of learning multiple, many, many, many folks in your position, the decision makers are telling me they love going around and learning and, and having just interactive conversations, not necessarily thinking about buying, but learning together, which is, which is pretty awesome kind of thing.

Brent: [00:06:01] Yeah. And that’s the benefit of high tech. Yeah. Everyone’s here one place, you know, you can, you can have 14 conversations within two feet.

Glenn: [00:06:08] Yep. Yeah. And that is literally true because you move two feet and you run into other old, old friends. Right. All right. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it, Glenn. Thank you all for being here. Really appreciate you. Please like, share, subscribe, all that kind of stuff. Check out my friends over at Uni Focus workforce Management Redefined. Have an amazing day. Love you guys. Bye.