Skytouch PMS Adds AI Tools for Front Desk and Ops

Glenn: [00:00:00] Everybody at your hospitality friend Glen. I’m very excited today because I got Charlie Green over at Skytouch Technology. We’ve been great partners for years. And you know what? This product is moving forward into the modern era, helping associates with artificial intelligence. How cool is that? Great to see you, buddy.

Charlie: [00:00:18] It’s always good to see you, man. And it’s super cool.

Glenn: [00:00:20] Yeah, this is great. I can’t wait to learn all about it. But before we do, Charlie, I want to know the why. What made you guys say now is the right time to move forward with really enhancing that Skytouch platform?

Charlie: [00:00:34] Well, you know, we have a history at Sky touch and choice of innovation and leaning into new technologies. You know, there was a time I didn’t work here. And at that time I worked for a competitor. And I remember choice announcing that they were going to launch this cloud based platform in the early 2000. And I have to say, I thought they were a little nuts. Right.

Glenn: [00:01:01] Let’s give a little history lesson real quick to you younger people out there. Believe it or not, there was a time when all of the hospitality hotels equipment was on site, so everything was there, and Skytouch with their PMS platform was one of the first to really move everything into the cloud, which is kind of, as you know, you live it every day transformed how we do business.

Charlie: [00:01:21] And where you do business.

Glenn: [00:01:22] Right?

Charlie: [00:01:23] Exactly right. Yeah.

Glenn: [00:01:24] Right. Like I remember in our early days, we were talking about how you could do as a general manager, you could be your kid’s soccer game doing everything on your phone, right?

Charlie: [00:01:31] And now you can still do that and you can be in your kid’s cricket match in India.

Glenn: [00:01:36] I love it.

Charlie: [00:01:37] Right. And doing all this. And so with that heritage, we’ve leaned into making sure we’re using the tools that are available to us and technology to deliver better experiences for our hotel operators. And so we just could not sit back and ignore AI.

Glenn: [00:01:56] Right. And you can’t. And it comes at a great time because you’re all out there struggling. You know how hard it is to find enough people to work in your property. I personally believe, Charlie, we need to get out of that, thinking that we’re going to find more people and adapt to who we have and how to give them the best tools in order to find success. And I think that’s where your enhancement of this product comes in. That I think is going to help newer associates in particular feel a lot more confident right off the bat.

Charlie: [00:02:25] Oh, absolutely. I mean, I don’t know of another entry level position where out of the box, they’re going to give you AI tooling to do your job. Yeah. And so that’s really where we focus. We said, where can we use AI, you know, corporate, we’re using it for everything. This was with AI. I mean, yeah, this video by AI.

Glenn: [00:02:45] I’m actually AI right now.

Charlie: [00:02:48] I’m on a beach in Hawaii.

Glenn: [00:02:49] Oh damn.

Charlie: [00:02:50] It. That is my.

Glenn: [00:02:50] We’re on a beach in Hawaii together. Together.

Charlie: [00:02:54] Yeah. So how do we use that? And really what we get to do so often and what we’re really known for is that ease of use, right? Is that low cost of entry for new team members when you bring folks in? We are acutely aware of turnover as a top perennial problem at hotels and finding team members and work.

Glenn: [00:03:16] Specifically, we’re going to be you know, AI is a catch all phrase. Ai is becoming part of everything. So what does that mean specifically? You’re going to be utilizing AI here to help help hoteliers, young associates or any associates behind the front desk, for example. They don’t know anything. They’ll suddenly be able to know something. Explain how all that works.

Charlie: [00:03:37] So we took a focus on how do we think about the people that use our platform, which are people operating the hotel? Yeah. How do we use AI to improve hotel operations? We believe that making information more readily available, making information right there when you need it is one of the best ways. And giving not just data, you know, we’re used to these systems and platforms are tools, right? They tell you what happened. They don’t tell you anything about what to do with it, right? They don’t give you any insights into why it matters that you have 32 dirty rooms at 4:00 in the afternoon, right? And believe it or not, when you first come into this business, your first front desk clerk job, you might not understand that right away.

Glenn: [00:04:22] Of course, you don’t understand it right away, because I think that we all live in a world of we don’t know what we don’t know. And if you’re just starting out in a hotel position, how are you supposed to know any of this kind of stuff? Exactly. And the training, no matter what training you get, it’s such a deluge of information, you can only remember a small sliver of it up front. Exactly. Yeah.

Charlie: [00:04:41] So we focused on improving operations, using artificial intelligence in a way that really could drive impact to the properties. And so happily, we’ve already got it in some of our hotels and we’re getting great feedback. And we use AI not only in the product, but also in how we build it. So we’re able to react very quickly. So we can make improvements and we’ve got big things coming. Right now, we use the artificial intelligence as kind of a second brain to help you understand how do you do stuff? You know, where do I get things? What happened?

Glenn: [00:05:18] Specific examples. We’re out of waffle mix. How do I get waffle mix? A guest needs to change rooms. I don’t know how to do it. Oh. How does it get. How do we change rooms? Boom. It appears.

Charlie: [00:05:29] How do you know it does that?

Glenn: [00:05:30] Because you ask me to try to mess with the system. And I kept asking a bunch of questions. It even told me a joke, and I thought I was going to get away with crashing the system on that. But, Charlie, you are too smart for me.

Charlie: [00:05:43] Well, it is, yeah. It is.

Glenn: [00:05:45] Also, they named it Charlie. He claims it has nothing to do with him. Nothing. Customer demand. We’re sticking with that. Absolutely. Charlie, what else do we need to know about this? I think the story we’re taking away from it is it’s going to make the owner’s lives easier. It’s going to make the associates lives easier. It’s going to create a higher level of engagement, remove a lot of labor from the process, which will give, I think, the associates a chance to make guests a better experience. Oh, you told me one good example. It’ll like check out 30 rooms at once on its own. And you don’t have to do something like that manually.

Charlie: [00:06:19] The absolute plan here, the roadmap that we have, is to take it from just being smart and being able to tell you and answer questions, but actually do things for you. You know, what are those mundane tasks that nobody likes that can be completely automated. You know, looking at insights that are forward, things that, hey, you have a big group you might want to look to see. Do you want me to organize which rooms to clean and which order to help make sure you facilitate that group arrival. Right? And it’s all really about improving that guest experience. Because when you improve operations, when you have people at your operation, at your hotel who know what they’re doing, they make better guests, they make better guest service. And I think what we know today in this economy we’re in. It’s. The one thing people are paying for is good experience.

Glenn: [00:07:08] That is absolutely.

Charlie: [00:07:09] True. And this ties.

Glenn: [00:07:10] Back, dude, if you can’t win on experience, well, you’re going to wind up losing. Everybody’s feeling a little bit financially stressed out there. And there’s no reason why they’re going to come back unless they feel special, unless they feel loved and have an incredible, incredible time at your hotel. Any final words, Charlie?

Charlie: [00:07:27] Thank you. Always good to see you, man. We’re super excited. The future is nothing but crazy and exciting and full of promise. Yeah.

Glenn: [00:07:37] All right, so I got to go because I got to go try to break their systems before the conference year actually starts. Yeah, it’s going to be good. It’s going to be a good challenge. I got my work cut out for me, but I’m I’m confident, probably unwarranted confidence, but confident nonetheless. Check out Skytouchtechnology.com skytouch. Great PMS out there. Charlie. I really appreciate.

Charlie: [00:07:58] You, Glenn.

Glenn: [00:07:59] Thank you guys for making it to the end. Like, share, subscribe and remember you’ve got one life so blaze on. Peace out.