In these times, it helps to look ahead and try to understand where the hospitality industry is headed. This is even more true when you’re working with the IT systems for hospitality groups. We spoke with Markus Felinger, IT systems and analytics expert, about his approach to data, tech, and guest experiences, and how the three are deeply interconnected. We also chatted about the tech strategy he and the team at Falkensteiner Hotels & Residences developed for their 30 hotels in seven countries throughout Europe.
Falkensteiner Hotels & Residences are an impressive hospitality group with an innovative IT strategy. With over 30 hotels in seven countries, they are industry leaders in Central Europe and are well known for their smart use of tech in their marketing and brand awareness work.
Shiji: Let’s start with your work at Falkensteiner. Tell us about the group.
Markus Felinger: Falkensteiner has 30 hotels, 2 camp groups, and a variety of 4-to-5-star leisure hotels and city hotels, but mostly leisure. They’re headquartered in Vienna with hotels in Southeastern and Central Europe and the EU: Austria, Italy, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. The group was started by the same family owners with a small traditional guest house in Italy over 65 years ago and today has grown to 4,700 rooms.
What was your role at Falkensteiner?
My career with Falkensteiner started in the Finance department. I was there to build up reporting and take over reshaping the controlling structure. Then, three years ago, I took over the systems department and with all the knowledge gained in the process, streamlined the system landscape.
I had to be aware of trends in the industry: What new tech is out there and what fits the brand? Where do we want guests to have a better experience? Reevaluating different systems and asking, “How do we want to enhance the guest interactions?” and so on.
Then, looking at employees: How can we automate things like sending offers? We automated our offers in the last year and reduced the workload by 80%. We tried to digitize the guest side and also the backend on the employee side. 
How did you address such a diverse group of guests?
We wanted to be able to address the guest in their own language as the hotels are in seven different countries and guests come from even more countries. We tried to personalize the experience as best as we can, for instance, allowing them to book on whatever device they’re using.
In your mind, how does tech play a role in better meeting guests’ needs and expectations?
Try to eliminate or avoid things that aren’t suitable. At Falkensteiner, this was a kiosk system. We didn’t feel it was appropriate for leisure hotels as front desk staff wanted to give additional information to help guests or upsell.
I take pride in extracting data from each individual system to be used in reporting and analytics. I try to extract as much as possible. This helps data quality. Try to capture information once, so guests don’t have to provide it again.
From a data analytics standpoint, we need to get a better understanding of guests, increase automation, make things more personalized, and interact with guests on more of a device level.
If you focus on managing experience like in restaurants booking, you can say, “Did you see that there is a spa appointment available tomorrow?” It’s all about enhancing the guest’s stay.
Data quality is important. If someone inputs their own name and street address, that information is more likely to be correct than if someone at the front office is retyping that same information. Data quality improves when the customer supplies the data themselves.
At Falkensteiner, we created a portal for tour operators where they can see their bookings or manage their bookings from a tour operator or travel agency point-of-view. They can book directly, manage their reservations, and push promotions with B2B communication. We tried to digitize as much as possible.
How do you manage tech for a big group like Falkensteiner?
You focus on a few core systems. A CRS is the place to maintain all the promotions and rates sold internally and externally. It’s one stop to manage all your sales so try to do as much as possible with your communications out of the CRM systems.
Whatever is necessary for the local side is on the PMS. At Falkensteiner, we had a lot of custom developments. Our offer sending functionality was custom developed with an agency. Whatever we needed and couldn’t find, we would develop ourselves either in-house or with agencies.
It’s important that APIs are well documented so you can interface with those main core systems. Whenever you make a decision about a core system, investigate the data extraction possibilities. That should be the main deciding factor behind every decision made whether in-room, tablet or F&B systems. At Falkensteiner, we did this by implanting our BI solutions and got the data we needed.
What are the challenges in managing IT strategy for a large hotel group?
The basic challenge in all of the hospitality industry is the interfacing between those main systems. The most challenging part of this is that most interfaces are sold as having a two-way interface but when you look at the details, the data filters will leave something out. If your core system is changing you need to be able to meet those changes.
That’s why it’s good to be in quite close relationships with all your main suppliers. For them, it’s also good to understand the needs of a customer so I like to be very open about planning. It’s good to take a lot of steps to understand software and what a supplier is capable of. Then you can aim to build long-term partnerships because the longer you work together, the better you understand each other.
What does the future of tech look like in your mind? What might the IT strategy for a hotel group look like in the future?
From a data analytics standpoint, we need to get a better understanding of guests, from my point of view, increase automation, make things more personalized, and interact with guests on more of a device level.
The website needs to be completely mobile-ready. Messaging will be more popular. Guests should be able to message you on WhatsApp if they want, and choose their communication channel. Some guests will want to talk on the phone, but others will prefer messaging. We’ll use chatbots or conversational AI to help with some of these methods.
I think the hotel website will no longer be static, but personalized for each visitor. Whoever lands on the site, via lookalike modeling, you’ll see a different website based on your preferences, needs, and time.
Whoever understands the best tool to connect each data point will likely have the best guest experience. On the other hand, our industry has had issues with finding new employees for the last 5-10 years, but with COVID it has gotten worse. A lot of people who were in the industry before have left, so we’ll likely deal with an influx of new people without hospitality backgrounds. For someone who has never made a check-in, the UI needs to be intuitive for them, so it’s easy to understand how processes are done. That’s a big challenge in the process design.
This is the challenge, not just that the guest might change, but also the employee might be different, too. Understanding their needs and work-life balance, for instance, will be crucial. We used to work 365 days, 7-days a week, even on Christmas. Today, companies will need to be more flexible to get more employees into the business as well.
