Lamington Group's MD on Aligning Tech for Extended Stay
Sometimes you can be on some websites and just get frustrated. I wanna book direct with you guys, but you're making me put in just too much details on, like, page refresh, and you've now dropped off all my information up in there. I'm just gonna move on to the OTA. So you've gotta make those things as easy as possible.
Speaker 2:From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider, a show about the future of hotels and the technology that powers them.
Speaker 3:On today's episode, we're talking with Stuart Godwin, the Managing Director of Lamington Group. Stuart shares some strategies his team has implemented to generate over 50% of their bookings direct, including an exciting new loyalty program and a user friendly booking engine. If you're curious about bringing technology into your hotel without losing the personal touch, you'll want to give this one a listen. Thanks so much for joining us, Stuart. Really great to have you here on the podcast.
Speaker 3:To get started, I would love to hear a bit about your company and your role. If you could tell me about your group, properties you oversee, and what your role encompasses as well.
Speaker 1:Great. Yeah. Very excited to be here. So my name's Jake Gobin. I'm managing director of Lamington Group.
Speaker 1:Lamington Group is a 60 year old family business. We're based in West London, Hammersmith. We've sort of grown out of real estate background and have moved into hospitality space in the last sort of 20 years, growing out of service departments. So we have a service department brand called Lamb Service Bumps. We started that about 20 so 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:And then from that, we then grew our hometown products, so our room 2 hotel product, which is a sort of evolution from service departments taking what we see is that the best bits from service departments, Airbnb, and hotels to make our room 2 product. And we have 3 full hotels in Southampton, in London, and in Northern Ireland, Belfast. And then we have a guest service light smaller product with only 16 bedrooms here in Hammersville as well. So we've got 5 main hotels at the moment, totaling just short of 400 keys. And we've got a pipeline growing to 5,000 keys by 2030.
Speaker 1:So really building ourselves for growth with the main thrust being to our route 2 products.
Speaker 3:Do you own the properties, or you work with an ownership group and you just provide the management?
Speaker 1:So up until now, we've been previously owner operator developer of all of our sites, except the Belfast, which we're just the leaseholder on that site. We own a couple more sites, which we're we're in the ground floor at the moment, and we're working with other landlords in which to grow that pipeline. So, yeah, we do that full life cycle, which gives us a real advantage when it comes to really building products that work for us and not happy to shoehorn ourselves into buildings which don't quite work for our product.
Speaker 3:And are you focused on the UK market, or are you looking to grow beyond that?
Speaker 1:Predominantly, no, we're based in the UK. I think there's potential opportunity for our products in the UK. And I think once we get up to a bit of a threshold, we can then start looking further field. But I think we need to get to a certain threshold in the UK before we can operationally see efficiencies or effectiveness of actually moving. So then I think that could be a bit of a vanity project to keep out to our country, so I think it can get quite expensive.
Speaker 3:Tell me a bit about your typical guest. Is it mostly corporate travelers or leisure?
Speaker 1:Yeah. To mention when I sort of said that there were 2 products. Well, the key facets of that is where, effectively, if you wanna go on a second, a park hotel, so that each each of our bedrooms has its own kitchenette there. Right? So that underpinning the the fundamental aspect of our brand is flexibility.
Speaker 1:So the typical guest that we'll see is can be anyone who's looking to stay really more than, like, 2 months. Right? I guess the question is, at what point are you uncomfortable living out of a suitcase? And I think that would be different for every person, but I think, normally, you see up, like, 2 days, you're probably starting to run out clean clothes, and you might wanna use our facilities, like laundry facilities, or you might wanna cook in your own kitchen. Right?
Speaker 1:Because if you're working with colleagues, you might not wanna eat out with them every morning. You might not wanna eat cook food in the morning. You might wanna run your own diet. Right? So having that kitchen in your room really gives that flexibility.
Speaker 1:So you've got your corporate guests. You've got your leisure guests who who, again, just wanna have that little bit more, in a basic enhanced tea station so they can sort of stay in, cook their own food. But, equally, those leisure guests don't actually know that we've got kitchens. They don't really care about that because all of our spaces are uniquely designed to our our areas and that we're based in. So we pick up that sort of leisure guest.
Speaker 1:And then you've got, like, the relocation stuff, you know, people who are deliberately relocating to an area, and they could be with us for any time of the month. So having that kitchenette aspect of the business really lends itself to a really much wider segment or segments to call from. It's not just your typical one to 2 night stay at the Etienne hotels.
Speaker 3:So I would imagine your average length of stay is probably quite a bit longer than a typical hotel. How long would you say on average people are staying with you?
Speaker 1:It's really seasonally dependent, and that depends on our revenue management strategy. Right? So, like, typically, your leisure guests are gonna pay more than your longer length of stays, so you get discounts. So you'll see in the summers, it will shorten right off to 2 to 3 nights. But in the winter, you can see that going, you know, 7 nights plus if you get a big group in who, like, on project based.
Speaker 1:So we ultimately can use that as a tool to our advantage to the legacy piece.
Speaker 3:Let's dive right into the technology piece. Tell me a bit about your tech stack. What would you say is the most critical vendor that you're using right now?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when it comes to tech stacks, you can break those down into, like, different areas. And I think, like, fundamental as, like, hotels, it's all about care taking care of our guests. But then, of course, alongside that, you've got, like, operations to make sure your buildings aren't falling apart. You've got stuff for your HR to make sure your teams are where they wanna be, and and you've got building management systems for, like, sustainability.
Speaker 1:But, like, if we just look purely, like, fundamentally, it's, you know, the guests are keep it running. It's gotta be our PMS. Right? Because it's a sort of hub and spoke type model. Everything comes back to the PMS to work.
Speaker 1:We are now fortunate to live in a time where everything's cloud based, so everything can be connected together. And that then really means that using our PMS, we use Muse. We then get to trial and plug and play loads of different tools as we grow and we marry in agile to our needs change. Using a tool like Muse means that we can just plug and play new stuff in. Right?
Speaker 1:There's no, like, need to get someone on-site to onboarding. It's all just so easy now. So that's why I'd say that the message is the most critical piece of tools we use.
Speaker 3:Have you used Muse for a while? Did it replace a legacy system? And how did you go about choosing Muse over a different vendor?
Speaker 1:We've been with Muse since around 2018, and I think we were, like, in that top 100 first customers. And we came about them because we were just looking at launching our first room 2 site 2018, and we were looking at the PMS's that are out there. And I can't remember which one we were at the time, but we were looking at 1, and it was all about there was a particular function that we wanted to do with it, something through the kiosks at the time. And then we found out it wasn't quite what they were selling us. And so we then went back back to the table and started looking around, and then we recommend that we use the type for the forward thinking cloud based solution they have.
Speaker 1:So it was sort of a little bit fortuitous that we arrived at Muse, and we'd be with them, yeah, sometime now. And we've sort of really grown and seen their growth with it. And when I came back into the family business, I'd not been in hotels. I'm a chance accountant by background. So I came in, and I haven't seen a different system before.
Speaker 1:Right? So it's usually the only thing I know. And, you know, so I I can't reflect and say, you know, how it does. Definitely, all I can say is is it certainly makes our life pretty easy.
Speaker 3:Talk me through the different integrations that you're using. What other software are you plugging into Muse, and what do you use those other pieces for?
Speaker 1:Yes. I guess, let's start, essentially, then with, like, let's sell a room. Right? So in order to sell a room, we need our channel manager. So we're using SiteMinder for that pretty standard, good kit, you know, pretty much that.
Speaker 1:Duetto, we're using for our revenue management. Good piece of kit with AI technology in there. Then we've got our GDS platforms, hotel res, open GDS, to then sub through those. We're using Salesforce as a management tool by res team to be able to wrap up and collate the quotes that come in, which is a good bit kit for ensuring we stay on top of that ability to sell stuff. Alongside that, like, customer journey pieces, we've got HiJiffy's a new tool, which we've onboarded, I said, in the last year, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Automated tool to particularly, it was be focused around helping our reservations team up just deal with routine tasks, geo parking, what you have on-site. And these are all just things that chatbots can answer. So we're seeing great automation being used through that piece of kit. That works as well because that then helps with our in house comms. So we then use that to we upgraded that.
Speaker 1:We were using just simply WhatsApp for our guests to communicate with us, But you couldn't track it, and you couldn't really do an awful lot with that. So the upgrade to Hijipi was cool because now we can send out blasts to the whole hotel and say, look. Live music just starting the bar. Come down and see us. So that really helps with sort of communication.
Speaker 1:And guests also feeling enabled that they can catch us at all times. Even though we have 24 hour receptions, like, it's easy if you can just do that. Obviously, we we don't have phones in the hotel rooms, but everyone holds a mobile device in their pocket now. Right? So we don't need to install that hardware in the hotels and make those efficiencies.
Speaker 1:We recently installed mobile locks, Go key locks, which are pretty cool. We singled those guys out on them because they specifically have PIN code entry entry into the rooms, which I for me, we use that in our service department because that's where we don't need to see our guests. They can get straight to their rooms, unlike our hotels where, you know, the brand really leans in the idea that we wanna be meeting our guests so that they're really building a relationship once that they stay. But in our sales department, they the length of stay there is it's a very long term. It can be months.
Speaker 1:In some cases, you know, years. So, actually, those guys just wanna live like they're locals. And so, yeah, using PIN code entry there will be a help to that.
Speaker 3:Going back to your tech stack, any highlights of back of house software, like accounting or HR?
Speaker 1:Are are
Speaker 3:those integrated with Muse as well?
Speaker 1:They are not integrated with Muse. So back out, we use hotelkit for, like, housekeeping operations, and that's good for housekeeping, organizing housekeeping, and then using it for logging any maintenance issues. So that centralizes that. So that works well there. HR wise, doesn't integrate with Muse.
Speaker 1:We'd love it to integrate with Muse because so is Harry, and it's it does all of our onboarding. It does all of our people management. And we'd like it to create Muse because it could then sort of work with forecasting staffing models, but that's not there yet. But, yeah, they work well to just streamline centralizing payroll and people management. Historically, we've had those in, like, several pieces of kit, and you can have your team members before you know it, your team have got to have their own personal email addresses, you know, 5 or 6 logins, you know, to do what they need to do.
Speaker 1:To streamline that just makes everything a lot easier.
Speaker 3:Curious to hear if there's anything on the horizon that you're planning to implement or anything on your wish list that you'd like to implement, maybe with or without Amius integration. Curious what is in the future for you.
Speaker 1:Well, not so much in the future, but what's the current thing we're working on at the moment is our loyalty program, and that's, of course, heavily integrated with Muse. Bearing down until 2 years ago, we sort of decided that we wanted to go down the route of creating of increasing our loyalty, ultimately, with the end result of driving more booked direct. Right? So we can have that commercial impact to the bottom line and also drive greater brand awareness and loyalty. So we see I started about 2 years ago, and that was a big project for us and our team.
Speaker 1:It really started with having to to move away and find a new booking engine to better create a journey for our guests, which reflected our brand and reduce the number of clicks and really enhance that journey. And then from there, we could then build in login pages and areas for our guests to interact more with our brand. So we launched our hometown club, months ago now, and that's been really successful and cool for engagement with our guests. It's within it, our guests can access perks, which they couldn't do otherwise. So such as 24 hour stays within our hotels.
Speaker 1:So check-in at 2, check out at 2. Maybe it's a free drink. Maybe it's an upgraded breakfast. We can tweak those member perks and push different things in different seasons as as it sort of fits the need of the business.
Speaker 3:Is the member's program available to anyone who stays at your property, or do you need to book on your website and go through your booking engine?
Speaker 1:Yes. So you need to book through our website, because, also, that's the bottom line of what we're gonna get to. You're gonna get that direct booking with us. And, yeah, once you go to that, you can sign up for free. Right?
Speaker 1:So with it, you get perks of, like, free at a 10% F and B discount in our F and B outlets. You get a free stay on your birthday, provided you stay responsible. That's a cool perk, but you gotta come with your ID that's on the day of your birthday. So anyone can put a member's free, and it's not a point accumulating program. We're not big enough for that.
Speaker 1:We get instant rewards, and, yeah, the inter rewards are the discount codes to our product suppliers and the discounts that we can push and change as we go. But standard discounts sort of standard perks will be mattress menus. You can choose a soft mattress or a firm mattress. You can choose to have a 24 hour stay. And to say, you know, free members drink, you push your breakfast discounts in there, free breakfast or free upgrades.
Speaker 1:It becomes slightly versatile tool for us. And then it will continue to develop and work for to enhance the customers' journey through us to keep commerce. And when we launch new properties, of course, we can then push exclusive discounts on through that as well.
Speaker 3:Can you share out some of the things that you're doing to get so many direct bookings already?
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, we do have a great product. And it's not me telling you that. Like, we're the number 1 ranked hotel in Triplebyte in Southampton. We're the number 2 ranked hotel in Belfast. Like, it it is a great product, and people do really engage with the brand.
Speaker 1:Because of it being a lifestyle product with the kitchens, it does tend the people sort of come to pull up, and they then go, oh, a Hong Kong Estate Board can get discounts. So I think, like, that naturally lends itself to that. I don't think it's, like, secret sauce for it. And we see varying amounts from different products and how long they've been in the market for. So, like, certainly, you launch a new product, like, you haven't got that big percent that, wasn't it?
Speaker 1:But as soon as you get your custom base in and, you know, also means the corporates being good repeat bookers because our product is unique. It's not a typical corporate hotel. People can really genuinely feel relaxed and have their stays enhanced with us. So they come back for it, and they tell their colleagues, and we'll, of course, look to give them a corporate rate, and that corporate rate will then have their own login to our website so that they can then see and track their and have an ease of booking program through that. So it's taking away those pain points and making it as easy as possible to get that booked direct and best prices direct.
Speaker 1:You know? Like, you've gotta really fight against the OTAs for that parity. That'll make that difficult. So there is something, I guess, on, like, hygiene issues to hygiene factors of of being booked direct, and that's gonna be make sure we parity having a great product. And then it's behind the scenes, it's making sure that it's as easy as possible for someone to do it because the OTAs have just such great platforms for booking.
Speaker 1:Like, I know what it means. So in terms of book direct, but sometimes you can be on some websites and just get frustrated. I wanna book direct with you guys, but you're making me put in just too much details on, like, page refresh, and you've now dropped off all my information up in there. I'm just gonna move on to the OTA. So you've gotta make those things as easy as possible.
Speaker 1:And I guess that's part of what we do with the booking engine. There are lots of little steps along the way.
Speaker 3:Well, shifting gears a little bit, you mentioned growth is a big priority for the company right now. Can you talk to me a bit about your biggest business objectives right now and how technology fits into those goals?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we know that we'll have proxies launching in time. One of the ones for sure is, like, building that blueprint of, like, what it looks like for us to operate multiple just blueprint what we've got now, the tech stack we've got now, pick it up, and just drop it down again so that you don't have to start again. So making sure that we've got that sort of pretty well tied up. So we've got, like, a year or so to really start to be, like, just, you know, kicking the tires on what we've got and the program, making sure it's all slick as we can so that we know that 3, 4, 5 months out, we can then just start signing up one more site and just picking it up and dropping it on.
Speaker 1:So that's box ready to roll on to the next one. So I think that's something which we'll be looking at in the next year to pin those down for that future development. I think, yeah, developing that on hotel club and that loyalty piece and developing the brand through that is gonna be another one. It helps them launch our future sites when we drive that membership program as well so they can see it, they engage the brand, and they they wanna come for the weekend or they wanna come stay in midweek and not on new sites. So, yeah, I think those are 2.
Speaker 1:Developing and really honing in on that tech stack to make sure it's doing what we want it to. It can be picked up and dropped in, and then the home tail club.
Speaker 3:So thinking about the tech stack, talk me through how you think about finding the ideal tech stack, and at what point do you take a step back and revisit all the vendors that you have in place right now? How do you decide what's working, what's not? When is it time to replace a vendor or add something new? How do you think about that?
Speaker 1:I think, first of all, with the techs that we've got, we've been working it pretty hard to get to where we are. And I think there are always grunts. Like, when we mean to me is if I had a pound for every time someone said, in opera, this could happen, or in opera, this could happen. You know? I've got a lot of change in my pocket.
Speaker 1:But, you know, like, particularly if you back to, like, a team and you can see that they're gonna develop things with you, it's worth staying around for it. I think changing tech status like, the grass is always greener on the other side. Right? Like, you're always like, oh, I might go off and and find that thing. You might might have solved that problem, but you don't know what you're open yourself up to.
Speaker 1:Because as much as you wanna do due diligence in a way it you're never gonna find out everything until you've actually gone in and tried setting up and, like, oh, that's not quite right. So I've been, like, pretty hesitant to change the major tech stack softwares we have. I think you sort of recognize when some piece of kit aren't quite doing what they want when you get the feedbacks from the teams that use them. It's a little bit incumbent. Or you look at implementing your processes, and it becomes a bit manual.
Speaker 1:And you're like, where can I fit that? And then if you start to recognize that you've got several overlapping pieces of kit, then you're probably at a good time to start seeing if there's something that can amalgamate them. But certainly when we're a younger company, there was a cost prohibitive issue. Like, there were some softwares that just weren't for us at the time because it's gonna be too expensive to onboard. And then we've moved up to them as we've got brewing some of the other ones.
Speaker 1:So I think they sort of become apparent in time.
Speaker 3:That sort of makes sense. Shifting gears a little bit again. I'm curious to hear, based on your experience in the industry over the last few years coming in from a different industry. What would you say are 1 or 2 skills that are necessary for a hotelier to have in today's dynamic environment?
Speaker 1:So even in, like, the last sort of 7, 8 years, I've been involved, like, being tech savvy or or at least you got to be tech savvy. You just gotta be, like, open minded to it. I think in the hotel world, like, there there are people who've been in the business for a long period of time, and they've got ways of working and be that like a paper sheet or doing housekeeping, whatever. Right? Like, times are changing very quickly.
Speaker 1:And if you're not willing to engage in technology now, you are gonna get left behind. But I struggle to see how, like, any hotel companies now can't be fully engaged in it because no one's onboarding old kit now. So I think, like, the skills particularly, it's just that open mindedness to technology. If that's of your legacy. If you're new in the game, then the amount of tech that's out there that can enable and do stuff at your hotel is as much of it could do everything and as much as you want it to, provided that ties into what you wanna achieve with your brand.
Speaker 3:And maybe along the same lines, I'd be curious if there's anything that you believe about technology that your peers or competitors might disagree with.
Speaker 1:Hotels now are all tech enabled. And when you hear tech companies saying they're tech enabled, it's a bit like saying you're a lifestyle hotel now. You know, like, every hotel's basically you know, like, 5 years ago, you're falling over yourself, but, like, you know, like, a lifestyle hotel opens up once it's upset. Now we're all tech driven. Like, no one's getting their abacus out.
Speaker 1:No one's looking to go backwards to pen and paper processes. We are all now tech driven, and it's now just, like, constantly refining that.
Speaker 3:For sure. Yeah. I like the analogy of lifestyle hotels. Like, it's kind of a buzzword at this point.
Speaker 1:It's come and gone now. Right? Like, we're you know, everyone's lifestyle tech driven forward hotel. Cool. But what do you really?
Speaker 1:You know? Like, how do you really stand out from that? You know? Like, because no one's working on a PMS, which is, like, locked in a computer anymore. No one's using locking key, you know, actual physical keys.
Speaker 1:Like, we are all using the tech. So we are all enabled in that way. And now it's just making the most of it. Now it's like, what's our customer want from us? What service do we wanna provide to them?
Speaker 1:And then how are we gonna do that most effectively and efficiently for them? What tools do we need for our efficiencies and for our guests getting the best journey that we want to deliver them?
Speaker 3:Great. Well, thanks so much, Stuart. Thanks for taking the time to be on the podcast and share all of your experience and talk about how you're using technology in your company.
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. I encourage all of our listeners to go try at least one of these strategies or tools that you learned from today's episode. Successful digital transformation is all about consistent small experiments over a long period of time, So don't wait until tomorrow to try something new.
Speaker 1: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.
