NEW YORK—Successes, milestones and new innovations describe SevenRooms’ past year since Hotel Business profiled one of its co-founders, Allison Page, in 2016. The CRM platform serves the hospitality industry by tracking guests and their preferences throughout the customer journey.
Since then, the tech startup made a lot of progress and earned some street cred. It has secured a deal with Jumeirah Group, the Dubai-based luxury hotel company and a member of Dubai Holding. Other notable clients on the roster include Ian Schrager’s new Public Hotel and the Standard Hotel in New York City, Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills and Faena Hotel Miami Beach.
While these hotels have distinct vision, they do have something in common: the importance is placed on the food and beverage operations, noted Joel Montaniel, co-founder and CEO, SevenRooms, based here.
“There has been success on the customer side, and then, there’s also the new product innovation. We’ve been fortunate to expand our hotel outlets using the platform,” said Montaniel. “On the product innovation side, one of the biggest features we released recently is for hotel call centers. It’s for multi-venue outlet booking. It allows you to—in one click—search across all 10 F&B venues and tells you what’s available, eliminating two minutes of a phone call and providing a better guest experience. It creates efficiencies for a hotel.”
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Before striking a partnership with Jumeirah Group, SevenRooms began with a pilot program after the company reached out to them.
“We took their buffet, one of their busiest restaurants, and then we also did their lounge at the top of the Burj Al Arab, reflecting a spectrum of experiences and operations. They had a homegrown system that was conceivably customized to their needs, but what was lacking was connectivity with guest data. Jumeirah prides themselves on phenomenal service. These guests expect a really high-touch service and because F&B was disconnected and lacked data, they wanted to keep up the level of service. If we could bring in a new platform to share this data easily with the F&B team, then we could provide consistent service throughout properties.”
As a result of the pilot, Montaniel explained that one of Jumeirah Group’s busiest restaurants saw an 18% increase in revenue. It helped maximize occupancy and capacity, getting as many seats filled as often as possible.
“That was enough for them to say, ‘It’s giving us all the capabilities and driving incremental revenue so let’s do a long-term partnership deal,’” he said.
In terms of what’s coming next, SevenRooms is expanding its sales and marketing efforts to ensure the world knows about its services.
“Getting our name out there is our mission. If the industry doesn’t know about us, we’re not doing our job. From a product standpoint, we’re working on integration and being an open platform,” he said. “We want to connect any and every system a hotel has—property management, loyalty or gaming systems. We’re an ever-changing and growing platform. The operators that work with us are relieved to find a partner that wants to use technology to embrace their business and can understand that they have a complex organization and will work with them as a partner, not just a vendor. What they find really refreshing is our partner approach, ability to customize and work with them in a way that makes sense for them.”