Challenge
Ostays operates like a hotel chain but is not a hotel chain in a true sense, takes inventory from condo owners, investment pools, and property developers, and brands, lists, manages and markets and sell owners’ inventory. Ostays had been using proprietary property management software, which was not customisable and would not allow channel management even on popular OTAs. The platform to be built had to be something which would work from the word go and can be improved incrementally. The product needs to work with multiple currencies. Provide a seamless search experience and provide a user-friendly booking experience. The software had to be used by guests, front-desk staff, revenue managers, house-keeping agents and maintenance personnel, which brings its own set of challenges of access management, interoperability, security and ease of use for each set of users. Since guests could book same property from different websites, inventory management was a big pain-point.
Solution
Since Ostays was already using off-the-shelf software and business was in operations, we needed to build a quick, usable version of the application with all basic functionalities intact. We brainstormed and came up with an initial MVP. The fully functional initial MVP was released in 60 days time, post that we started adding features and started making changes. Customers/Guests were offered a user-friendly portal to search properties and book them at their convenience. Payment was made seamless using Stripe integration. Email notifications and pre-stay instructions were automated. A dashboard was created for revenue managers to track daily, weekly and monthly sales, revenues, occupancy, ADR, RevPAR etc. Front-desk staff were provided with a password protected control panel to view, modify, cancel bookings. It facilitated for easy relocation, check-ins and payments. A separate module was created for maintenance manager and her associates where the manager could create tasks and assign them to the right people and schedule them as and when required. Channel Managers were developed for popular OTAs like Expedia, booking.com etc. so that the inventory is up-to-date.
Results
A web application was created matching guests with suitable properties. Each User-type has been provided with their own dashboards. Channel Managers streamlined the bookings and inventory management processes. Maintenance and housekeeping tasks could be tracked and finished on time.
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