Why Your Hotel Manager Spends Hours on Dashboards (Hint: They Shouldn’t)

Glenn: [00:00:01] Hey, everybody, it’s your hospitality friend Glenn still at high tech, even though I’m probably by my pool in the backyard right now. But I had to stay here late weeks past the event is over because I found even more. I said, I got to talk to this guy about what’s going on in the world of AI. Steven, you know, I’m excited to talk about AI because as we talked about before, I haven’t heard of it. I know, right. I know it’s such unexplored territory that I know we’re gonna dig deep and have fun. But really realistically, one of the things that I’ve been saying is we need to have more actionable insights. Stop talking about the theoretical. Let’s talk about the practical. How are you turning the theoretical into the practical, into actionable insights over at Actabl?

Steven: [00:00:40] Yeah. Long census, end of the week, by the way. Great question. And I think there is a lot of philosophical to go into. And it’s interesting. The headline is AI will transform everything, including hospitality. So some of the things that we’re doing, I mean, we’re looking at it in a couple different ways. The most exciting thing we have is altitude. So you’re a VP of operations. You’re in an airport lounge, you’re about to get on a flight, your owner asks you a question.

Steven: [00:01:05] You don’t want to have to log in and pull a report. Look at a dashboard, identify the insight. You can just have conversations with your data and say, hey, what’s this data point? I need to pass it along. Pull up a quick dashboard, a quick report, and then send it off. So I think the timeliness of that data is really interesting. And then so let’s give a real let’s give a real world example. You know, hey hey, I’m curious as to what my labor expenses were for the last two weeks or something. That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. Or what was Reeve for this group of hotels year over year? Right.

Glenn: [00:01:37] What were some potential drivers of that. So beforehand, what would I have to do. I’d have to go click click click click create, create, create and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Right.

Steven: [00:01:46] That’s right. Well, I, I really like our, our products, even though we’re not using them in the same way that we used to, but you would have to log in, you’d have to pull a report, you’d have to go to the right thing. You’d have to check the data. You’d have to identify, you know, compare different things. So this just makes it a lot simpler. Yeah. And that’s really what the whole point is, giving people more opportunities to do other things, to focus on their core competency instead of doing stuff that they shouldn’t have to do in order to find success.

Steven: [00:02:11] Yeah. Well, exactly. And I think taking that a step further, how can you compress and help above property or get above property to help on property even a little bit more? Yeah. And in that way, then you have something where someone on property is doing what only they can do. You know, the physical interaction with a guest, the physical interaction with the building. So let’s get them away from screens. Let’s put some of that on above property. And I think you can do that with some of the tools that we’re launching.

Glenn: [00:02:37] Oh that’s awesome. So where is all of this going to be headed? Where is this going ultimately, where do you hope this technology is going to take you so your customers could find more success?

Steven: [00:02:46] Yeah. Well, the name of the game for us is profitability. Profitability is lower than it was pre pre pandemic. I think there’s still a lot of pressure there. So at the end of the day, how can we generate more profitability without sacrificing, but actually enhancing the guest experience, enhancing the associate experience. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think finding those efficiencies to focus on profitability.

Steven: [00:03:09] I know there’s a lot of conversations about how can you drive revenue? Those things work really well together. You can have both of those things at the same time.

Glenn: [00:03:16] And I’m going to do the old improv. Yes. And yeah, because what we’re really talking about is stripping away the things that people don’t like to do, to be able to focus on the reason why they got into hospitality in the first place.

Steven: [00:03:29] Exactly. And I’m a big believer, and I’ve said this before, if you’ve seen some of my other things, I think these types of technologies lead to better employee engagement, which will lead eventually to lower turnover, which will then lead towards more property successes. And I think that adopting the right type of technologies like yours and really help create that virtuous success circle of profitability.

Glenn: [00:03:49] Yeah. So well said, very well said. Maybe we should have said it right there, but screwed this up. I like it. All right. So before we wrap up, make sure you check out actable.com. That’s actable.com. And if you give me the timestamp for when Michael, when the Michael Jordan of hospitality appeared in the back of this image, I’ll give you some kudos. Yeah, bonus points for that. He’s Stephen, I’m Glenn, I have an amazing day. See you all later. Bye.