b'mine hotels CEO on Optimizing Hotel HR with Technology
At the moment, nobody really knows which company will offer the best AI product. We all know it's a future. We are starting to work with it, but nobody knows is it gonna be Microsoft, is it Apple.
Speaker 2:From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider, a show about the future of hotels and the technology that powers them. Today on the show, we have Matthias Beinlick, the CEO of Bmind Hotels, a German based hotel group. On today's show, we talk about everything from AI to business intelligence, operations, and everything in between. We talk about the AI applications in every single facet of Matthias' tech stack, how he's thinking about the future and what tools he's considering for his business right now. Without further ado, let's jump in.
Speaker 3:Matthias, thanks so much for coming on the show today. It's a pleasure to have you. We're really pumped to learn about V Mind Hotels. Do you wanna start by just telling us a little bit quick high level overview of your background and how you got into this kind of wacky world of hotel technology?
Speaker 1:Thanks, John, for inviting me. Yeah. I'm born and raised in Berlin, Germany. 46 years old. I have a family with 2 girls, and I've lived in Berlin most of my life.
Speaker 1:And, actually, I've been in the hotel business now for 25 years as well. I mean, in Germany, you have apprentice part of it. You really learn to work in a hotel, like, really starting with washing dishes and clean rooms. And, actually, my background was later on then starting in sales. I did more than decade in sales.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, now since 6 years, I'm with Be Mine Hotels. Actually, when I started as personal number 1 here, the name wasn't even created. So we created that first, and then we started to hire all the staff and open the hotels during the past couple of years. And, actually, since we are quite a young and smaller hotel group yet, yeah, with 3 hotels, we're really trying to make a change with technological, yeah, efficiency at the end.
Speaker 3:So you guys have 3 hotels all in Germany. What's the kind of room count composition like ADR? Who are your typical market segments you're going after?
Speaker 1:The 3 hotels that we are operating, they are in Cologne, Frankfurt, and in Dusseldorf. The 2 Be Mine hotels, which have the brand name Be Mine, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt, and they have the specialty of having a car lift integration, which is unique worldwide. So we are actually the only hotel group that has this feature implemented. It comes from residential buildings. And it's actually I mean, for you being in the states, it's like a motel, but not on a plane level, but on an actually, it was an elevator.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So people, not for all rooms, but, like, for 15% of the rooms, people are able to take their car, drive into an elevator, a car elevator, and then, yeah, go up in Frankfurt is up to the 10th floor and leaves the car just outside the room. And you have just a second to walk, and you're in the room. Nobody else had that, so that is quite nice.
Speaker 3:So you guys are next to the airport in the Audubon. Is it mostly airport travelers on kind of layovers coming to the hotels? What's the typical guest that's coming through your doors?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a typical business hotel, first of all. So there's a business district, one of the actually biggest business district next to a European airport in Frankfurt. So there are a lot of business travelers coming from Monday to Wednesday and then just doing midweek. And on weekends, we do have more customers that are traveling, that are flying.
Speaker 1:Of course, not all of them come with a car. Yeah? And in addition to the business customers, we have a lot of MICE customers. For example, the meeting rooms are on 11th floor. And these rooms are connected with a car elevators, so you can, actually bring a car or any heavy load up to 4 tons into the 11th floor.
Speaker 1:So we have a lot of big functions, and, yeah, this is also filling the hotel.
Speaker 3:When you guys founded the hotel, was it mostly around the marketing aspect of being on the Autobahn, having cars getting lifted to the hotel that you felt like that would create a differentiated product? Or was it based on guest needs that you saw in the market that weren't being served, have the car elevator idea come to fruition?
Speaker 1:So, actually, when you look for the specific micro, markets to build a hotel, it's not too easy to find the right spot. So and this one was available, as I said, the business district that was created called Gateway Gardens. That was a former not an army base, but it was where families of the army base lived at. Yeah? And it was just newly created, so there were spots for hotels.
Speaker 1:And we took especially the one next to the Autobahn so that is is visible, that our car lifts are visible and everybody can see that. The cool thing is the hotel is so soundproof that being inside the hotels is you neither hear the autobahn nor any airplane just flying close by. So it's pretty cool. It's like watching TV. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're sitting inside. You hear nothing, but you see everything. It's quite neat.
Speaker 3:What's the vision for the company? So you guys have developed 3 hotels in the last 6 years. Where do you guys wanna be in the next 5, 10 years? How are you guys thinking about the business? And are car elevators part of every hotel going forward?
Speaker 1:Not on every hotel. I at the moment, only the to be mine hotels are having this integration of the car elevator. The hotel in Cologne was a takeover. So it's called and repeat. We just actually rebranded this with our own brand name there.
Speaker 1:We want to grow organically. I mean, currently, it's not so easy with all the financial interest rates. Yeah. There are not many investors that really want to invest in new hotels, but there are chances. So we are looking at these, and I believe looking 10 years into the future, it has probably gonna be like up to 10 hotels, probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It could be something between 5 10 hotels. Yeah. So you guys wanna grow steady, organically. And, yeah, it would be mine, but also probably with some takeover, so other hotels where it doesn't make sense to integrate that elevator.
Speaker 3:So I imagine from a guest experience perspective, the car elevator creates a completely different guest journey than any other hotel. Right? What does the check-in process look like? Do you guys have a lobby? How does all of that work from a guest journey perspective?
Speaker 1:As I mentioned, only, like, 15% of our rooms are carlofts, which have this feature integrated. All the other rooms, and we are talking in both hotels of more than 200 rooms. So only, like I said, a small part have this feature and the others are more or less normal hotel rooms. So we are full service hotel, and we have a typical guest journey, and we also have a digital guest journey. So there is a front desk.
Speaker 1:There is restaurants and, lobby bar, and we have all the stuff. But you can also do the check-in fully digital. So you get the message before via email. You check-in, you get your room key, which at the moment, you still have to download an app. But with the mobile key, you then just either for a normal customer that has no car loft, you just use the elevator and go to your room.
Speaker 1:And with the car loft, it's a bit different because then with a mobile key, you have to drive to the car lift first. Yeah. There is like a little column pillar where you have to use your Bluetooth low energy. You have to open the elevator. And the interesting part is that the elevator has to know exactly where it needs to go next.
Speaker 1:So you're not driving in there and then pushing a button. Now you need to go to the 5th floor. But at the moment where you using your, actually, door key, it's more or less the same. The elevator comes down and knows exactly, okay. I'm taking this car up to the 5th room, and I have to open the front door because the elevators opens on the front and the back.
Speaker 1:And you should not arrive at a different hotel room, like normally as well. Yeah. So we needed to integrate that.
Speaker 3:So technically you have to integrate with the PMS, a booking system, and the elevator altogether?
Speaker 1:Yes. The booking system, the key system. So everything needs to be integrated actually with the car lift and the calendar. Yeah.
Speaker 3:What PMS are you guys on? Have you been on the same one since you've founded the company?
Speaker 1:We have been on the same one. Yeah. And we are, at the moment, looking at other ones as well. So we are on a clock PMS, but we have spoken with, of course, Opera Cloud is the market leader. Muse is quite interesting now and Guestline, so all these cloud based ones.
Speaker 1:And it's actually was quite interesting because, like I said, 6 years ago, most of them just started their business recently. And need at least for within a typical cloud PMS. So back then, everybody was more or less on the same level, but there were so many changes over the last 6 years. And some of them really developed great and other ones were left behind. So that's why we now actually look at other ones as well.
Speaker 1:It's the same with AI at the moment. At the moment, nobody really knows which company will offer the best AI product. We all know it's a future. We are starting to work with it. But nobody knows is it gonna be Microsoft?
Speaker 1:Is it Apple? Whoever which PMS system is going to have the best AI. So we all don't know yet. In 5 years, we definitely know more. That was the same with our cloud tools that we are working with 5 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was more like AI now.
Speaker 3:Are there other solutions you guys are evaluating today or there's gaps that you guys are looking to fill right now or maybe at some point in the next 12, 24 months?
Speaker 1:The interesting part is when we started off, we were looking for all kind of tools. And I was always interested in technology. In my private life, I love listening to podcasts, this technological stock market. What's going on there? Yeah.
Speaker 1:So that is really I mean, tech stocks are quite interesting. And actually, it fits a bit to our market as well because there are always tools that come up which might be interesting for us as well. So like I said, when we started, we were really looking to get tools and systems for all part of our hotel group. Yeah. For all departments, starting from operation, which is now hotel kit, which is really like enhancing the communication from head office to the hotels within the hotels, which giving us all opportunities on really ground level.
Speaker 1:And also from I mean, you can name a department, and I tell you at least 1 or 2 tools we are using for this department. So we are really technological wise, quite enhanced. The challenges are usually the connections, how to integrate them with each other because there's just no true base. They all tell you there's an open AI, but usually, you have to develop some kind of connection between them, which is really a pain in the neck sometimes. Doesn't make it too easy.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, we didn't wanna work with Excel sheets and everything. I mean, we work with Microsoft. Yeah. But, usually, we want to have tools for all parts of this.
Speaker 3:Let's say we're booking for ITB Berlin next year. Hotel tech reporter wants to book a meeting space at the Be Mine Hotel near the airport. What does the process look like when I fill out your lead form on your website for a group booking? What happens? Is it still mostly manual in terms of the interaction with the sales team?
Speaker 1:Actually, it is still manual. I mean, me having a sales background, I actually feel like sales. Probably a lot of people would say differently now, but I still feel sales is a people business. And I do see actually still the appreciation in people's faces when a person calls them, when a person invites them to have a site inspection, to look at the meeting space, to look at the rooms. I mean, Frankfurt was our first Be Mine Hotels being opened.
Speaker 1:And me having the sales background, probably for the 1st year, I did the most site inspections of all our people there because it was so much fun. And I I loved it. And the people loved it as well to see the hotel and feel it and having a human being just showing them around. We all learned that as we do now in our podcast, yeah, we are looking at each other remotely and we all learned that this is working and that we can actually, especially when there's a lot of space in between us, that it's the easiest part to teach about specific features and to show them. But I do believe people's business, face to face business is also quite important still.
Speaker 3:And for those long distance sales, do you guys ever use, like, virtual touring or 3 d software like Matterport or Visiting Media, any of those companies?
Speaker 1:We start off with them. Yeah. Not too much with actually, mostly, we're using just Teams to presentations and same thing with all the other ones. Now we need to recess now what companies are out there, what are the possibilities. We're looking in AR or VR functionalities, but we are not yet there.
Speaker 1:Just like you said, we started now from the scratch looking at what we already have, and now we will look into the other ones that are coming up.
Speaker 3:You mentioned that you guys are using on the AI side also trust you for review responses. How has that been perceived by guests? How has that been received by your team? What kind of training went into that, them learning your brand voice? How's that whole process been going from manual review responses to AI based review responses?
Speaker 1:First of all, the team appreciated it a lot. As we mentioned, we have challenges finding enough people for all the open spaces as that we have. Answering reviews are just time consuming. I mean, to do it manually. Now with AI, with having the tool entrust you, it's a lot more easy than it was at the past.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you have complaints, of course, you need to look into them. You need to check what really happens because you just cannot have AI send an answer saying whatever. Yeah. Inventing something. So you really have to look into that.
Speaker 1:But for most of the reviews, which are usually positive in our hotel, yeah, you can really define the tone. You can define the language. And it's just time is just minimizing a lot by now. So when it usually took 10 to 15 minutes maybe to to answer a review, now it takes only 1 or 2 minutes. So this is really awesome.
Speaker 1:And guests don't recognize it. They don't see it, yeah, at the end. So I wonder when we come to a point when answers via AI have to defined or declared as AI answers actually. Yeah. Same with the voice you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty sure at one point, it needs to be a declaration that you're talking to a bot and not to a human being. I believe so. Yeah. I mean, probably in 2 years, I don't know if if the 2 of us would look at each other or 2 bots would look at each other. They are talking about the same issues.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Taking a step back in the AI. So we talked about the labor shortages in the industry, and AI is one way to alleviate some of these labor shortages, and the other is getting better at recruiting. And I've long looked at recruiting and people and the HR function hotels. It seems like you guys have been more strategic in your HR function at Be Mine. Can you talk to me about what your point of view is on recruiting and people and how that plays into the Be Mine business?
Speaker 1:I mean, as we spoke about after COVID, human shortages in employment is a big issue. And so we actually started from the beginning looking at tools, how we can make HR more easy and more visible, really going away from typical Excel sheets and everything that I used to know from from my past. So with e to n, we actually have implement, like, it's a full human resources management tool. So everything from work time to profiles to even the complete payment, everything is actually in that tool, which makes it a lot easier now for us to work with our employees to connect with them and actually so they also know how many vacation do I have? How many days off did I have?
Speaker 1:Where where do I have my last document for my salary? I mean, all this is now implement into a digital tool. Yeah. There's no sending letters anymore or looking at, I don't know, ex like I said, Excel sheets helping us a lot. In terms of recruitment, e to n is not a recruitment tool.
Speaker 1:We implemented team Taylor. And team Taylor is like the employee pool where you have, like, all the employees, everybody that has been in contact with our company in one system. And it's pretty much like Pipedrive for sales, where you have your pipeline and you put in yeah. Like, there's a contact. There's the first, no contact via Teams, and you have an interviews, and you have an offer.
Speaker 1:So it's like a really pipeline for all jobs, which is really cool. And the most important part is that it's connected to all the recruitment websites that you have. Yeah. So in Germany, there's like hotel career, which is like a very specific website, only for hotels and restaurants. And there's like Indeed and all the other ones that you have, and it's connected.
Speaker 1:But actually, the most important of all is that you have somebody in HR that has an interest to work with this tools. We just have yeah. At the beginning of this year as well, hired a new chief people officer, Peter, actually, he's called, and he's interested into technology. And he's so keen on really understanding what's, the advantages, how we can connect even more sites like online websites to the tools. And it's really cool because now we see that we get more and more applications every day.
Speaker 1:But you have to be interested how to use it. Yeah. I believe there are a lot of tools out there, but usually we use like 20 or 30% of them. If you really start using 50, 60, 70, 80%, then we're talking about really the usage of these tools.
Speaker 3:The one thing I wanted to circle back on is you had mentioned your app. Who's building that app, and what percentage of guests are actually downloading the app, and what are the typical jobs to be done or use cases that are driving the most value for you guys?
Speaker 1:The app is called Gustafo, and actually, I think it's based in Austria as far as I know. And we wish it would be downloaded more than it is at the moment. I believe for the hotels, it's like about 10% are using the mobile key. Yeah. And it should be more.
Speaker 1:We probably need to be more radical and really pushing our customers to use this app. We're not there yet, but that needs to be done. Like, the self checkout in stores now. Yeah. You really need to push people to do this.
Speaker 1:And functionalities, I mean, you have the mobile key, you're using this just, like, instead of a key card in the hotel, which is quite good. And also, you have the full, of course, hotel directory on it. All the information needed that you have within the hotel. And what we're gonna do in the future, it's not implement yet. There's also gonna be the chatbot implementation for the guests to connect with the hotel, usually with a chatbot, but then also with any staff members if needed.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You mentioned that you guys use dialogue shift. That's mostly for reservations chatbot on the website. That won't go into the operational side?
Speaker 1:DialogShift is the chatbot we actually have implemented now, not only on our website, which is probably the most common part, but it's also implemented in our social media sites. So when you're on Instagram or Facebook, there's also the chatbot already included. And DialogShift is quite a interesting company here in Germany that has, yeah, one of the few our first AI driven chatbots. And they are is very specific in the, hospitality industry. The chatbot is just they are using no GPT 4 as well, so it's quite good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's learning a lot by now.
Speaker 3:And how you measure the success of that tool? Is that based on revenue generated through chatbot bookings, basically?
Speaker 1:Actually, what we are interested in to get that the customers having questions where they typically actually took a phone and called our reservation department or called the front desk at the hotel, is that they are now actually satisfied with the chatbot. So if actually, we're looking at at the end that 90% of the questions are actually answered by a chatbot instead of a human that has to pick up the phone, talk a couple of minutes, and for questions which are usually quite easy to be answered. And now with, self learning chatbot with AI, I mean, the question can get more and more difficult, and it still is able to answer them. In the near future, but I don't know if we're gonna do this with the current PMS. Of course, there should be a reservation functionality as well.
Speaker 1:Actually, everything should be connected. But, again, we are not there to something for the future to integrate.
Speaker 3:Well, we're coming to the end of the show. This has been incredible. I really appreciate your time. We have one question that we always ask our guests at the end, and it's about a contrarian view that you have on the industry. And we ask, what is one thing that you believe is true about the future of hotels in the realm of technology that you think most hoteliers would disagree with you on?
Speaker 1:I believe that we will see a shift or actually that the hotels from luxury and budget will drift apart. What I believe in, like, we have a full service hotel with still lots of team members. And in the future, there will be either hotels with human assistance, with real service, where you probably have to pay a lot of money to have this. And on the other hand, you will have fully automated hotels, which is currently more or less budget. I believe there's will be not much in between anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're not talking about the next 2 or 3 years. We'll probably talk about the next 10 to 20 years. But the human factor has to be paid eventually.
Speaker 1:At the moment, it's not being really paid. But at the future, I believe this will make a difference. But what I don't know at the moment is how robotics will maybe change that point of view. Yeah? Because robot with AI could be the game changer.
Speaker 3:Do you think that maybe that could also make some luxury more affordable? Or do you think that the price of luxury will just continue to skyrocket because there's labor costs going up? Or do you think that if you can pull out some of the labor in luxury and make it more efficient that maybe you can give luxury to more of the market?
Speaker 1:I don't think luxury will ever be affordable because it's not the goal of luxury to be affordable. Luxury always will be for just a little percentage of people. No matter what actually is easy, the profit is. I guess it's I mean, looking at other luxury companies away from hospitality, it's not about profit in itself. It's more like being luxury being for just small percentage of people.
Speaker 1:Maybe in the future, and it's a maybe, like I said, with human rights, robots, and AI, you could build up hotels, which could make you feel like a little bit more comfortable. It has less to do with humans, but it has to do with service, with maybe less people then, but still a lot of service. And this could be affordable, but I'm not quite sure about that yet. Let's talk again in a couple of years and discuss that.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Well, this has been an amazing conversation.
Speaker 1:I appreciate the time. It was nice talking to you.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:That's all for today's episode. Thanks for listening to Hotel Tech Insider produced by hoteltechreport.com. Our goal with this podcast is to show you how the best in the business are leveraging technology to grow their properties and outperform the concept by using innovative digital tools and strategies. To So don't wait until tomorrow to try something new.
Speaker 3:Do you
Speaker 2:know a hotelier who would be great to feature on this show, or do you think that your story would bring a lot of value to our audience? Reach out to me directly on LinkedIn by searching for Jordan Hollander. For more episodes like this, follow Hotel Tech Insider on all major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
