Hotel Tech Insider

SPEAKER_01:
Most of our hotel and restaurant general managers didn't get into the job to sit behind a desk, right? They view their desk and their office like a prison, right? They want to be out and about talking with guests, talking with associates, right? And so we have to find ways to get them bite-sized pieces of information and data that they can consume and then take action.

SPEAKER_00:
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider, a show about the future of hotels and the technology that powers them.

SPEAKER_02:
In today's conversation, we connect with Matt Schwartz, the very first Chief Technology Officer at Sage Hospitality. Drawing on his past experience at retail companies and startups, Matt turned Sage's IT from a cost center to a profit center. We cover a lot of ground in this one, from democratizing data with Microsoft Power BI to enhancing cybersecurity. Matt shares his best practices on leveraging AI, his ideas for using VR headsets, and even how he's deployed robots at Sage Properties. Well, I like to start the conversations by getting a feel for your background. I would love for you to walk me through your career so far in the industry, where you've worked, what sorts of roles you've had, and then ultimately what you're doing now at Sage. I would love to hear more about that, too.

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. So it's really interesting. So I was an economics major in college. And then it wasn't until I went to business school at MIT that I really got really into tech. And after that, went through a bunch of startup companies, landed a job with Staples doing retail work that led to a job at PetSmart. That was really my first exposure to hotels because PetSmart operates like the largest, I guess, franchise of pets hotels. And so, you know, a lot of that kind of hoteling aspect. And then I got it really into hospitality, I would say around 2010 when I started working for a ski resort company here in Denver and I was traveling. North America, rolling out a center reservation system. Got to spend a lot of time on property and get my hands dirty with center reservation systems, call centers, property management systems, et cetera, et cetera. So that job led to working at Sage where I joined in 2015 and it's been a great experience ever since.

SPEAKER_02:
And what's your role currently at Sage and did you start in a different role?

SPEAKER_01:
So I'm currently the CTO, Chief Technology Officer at Sage. I report to our CEO. I've always been the head of IT here, but I'm the first CTO Sage has had in the 40 year history of the company. You know, most of the history of Sage IT has really been a cost center, kind of your classic keep the lights on type organization. And when I joined, you know, I tried to position IT as really could be a an innovation center, a profit center, not just an expense center. And so a lot of the initiatives I've been working on over the last eight years have kind of got us into that mode of thinking.

SPEAKER_02:
Can you tell me a bit about Sage as well? How many hotels do you operate, branded, independent?

SPEAKER_01:
So Sage is celebrating its 40th. year in business this year, in 2023, I think our actual 40th anniversary is in March of 2024. And we're on pace in 2023 to have a record revenue and profit year. So this is a great year. I mean, three years coming out of the pandemic to be hitting the biggest year ever in the company's 40 year history is pretty amazing. We operate approximately 65 hotels and 40 restaurants in the continental US. And as a combination of branded and assets from Merit Hilton Hyatt Choice, as well as Independent.

SPEAKER_02:
And is the company growing? Is the acquisition of focus?

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. No, the company is definitely growing. We have four main parts of the company. We have a hotel management division, we have a restaurant concept division, we have an investment arm called Sage Investments, and then we have an in-house design studio called Sage Studio. And all four are growing. And I think that's a compelling offering when we're talking to owners. You know what it's private equity or read partners the fact that we can bring all four of those points of view and skill sets the table is very unique in the hospitality space and we're talking about other third party management companies some people talk about having. representation in those four areas, but we have a really strong track record and a big portfolio that we can demonstrate to folks to really prove out like, hey, we have expertise in restaurants, we have expertise in design, we have expertise when it comes to investment.

SPEAKER_02:
And when you're operating full service hotels, does Sage usually operate the restaurants as well?

SPEAKER_01:
Yes, so we manage all the restaurants regardless. Our restaurant group manages the restaurants that are typically more than $2 million a year in revenue. And we target for 80 to 90% or more of those guests to be from outside the hotel. So it's really like you're sitting there on a Friday night, and you're not thinking to your significant other, hey, let's go to the hotel in the Marriott. You're thinking about, hey, let's go to Urban Farmer, or let's go to the Emporium, or let's go to Toro. And that, to me, is the real big difference between a hotel restaurant and a restaurant that happens to be attached to a hotel.

SPEAKER_02:
And I'm sure that brings all sorts of complexities when thinking about tech, since you're looking at not only typical hotel systems, but also I would imagine restaurant, POS, other systems you'd use to run a restaurant.

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, hotels, restaurants and spas, and it's just means more systems. And so, you know, I joke with my leadership peers that if you think about a typical hotel, there may be 20 systems that a hotel has, many of which connect to the PMS, you know, whether it's the phone system, whether it's the key system, credit cards, music, TV, internet, You know, there's just a lot going on there. And so now you add restaurant and restaurants have their own set of systems, you know, typically separate wifi, separate music, separate payments. You know, now you have a point of sale system on top of that, or maybe they have a seating, you know, or an open table, and then you add a spa and you add even more. So at any given moment, there's something that's down and something that's being upgraded.

SPEAKER_02:
Well, given all of the systems that you're working with across the portfolio, what do you consider the most critical technology partner?

SPEAKER_01:
What I would tell you is, as the CTO of the company, I focus my time on five key areas where I think technology can have the greatest impact this age. The first area is business intelligence and analytics. So it's all about how do we take all this data that's out there across our hotels, restaurants, spas, guests, competitors etc and digest that down to something that the front line staff and the leadership at the hotel whether it's the general manager or the restaurant general manager, something that they can actually consume because most of our hotel and restaurant general managers didn't get into the job to sit behind a desk. Right they view their desk in their office like a prison right they want to be out and about talking with gas talking with the associates right. And so we have to find ways to get them bite size pieces of information and data that they can consume and then take action. So that's been really interesting over the years to try to find ways to do that whether that's i don't want them to have to log into a system to get reporting for example everything is pushed out and how do you push it in digestible chunks. With you know the most sophisticated ways you can do so. Business intelligence i think is a big area except the amount of data that's going on in the world weather it's weather data airline data associates coming and going date whatever it is that's only growing and scale. And so the challenge becomes increases every year to kind of make that into the bite size version. One of the things were piloting in this space is chachi pt on top of our data so that if you're a general manager for example you can just ask questions as opposed to logging into a system. as opposed to waiting for a report to come to you, or as opposed to asking your director of finance, right? If you just want to know what's been happening or how you're doing compared to your comp set or how you're doing compared to other similar brands in the area, whatever it is, you can just ask that now to ChatGPT. So that's kind of a big part we have going on.

SPEAKER_02:
Curious what vendor you're using for BI. Is there a particular platform you're using?

SPEAKER_01:
So we've standardized on Microsoft Power BI. We like the Power Platform. Once you're licensed on Microsoft, you have both the desktop and the mobile. And Microsoft making the big investment in OpenAI has a really good integration with the chat GPT on top of the data. And everything's cloud-based. So we're all up in the Microsoft Cloud. So that seems to be working really well. So the second big area is CRM. So when I joined Sage in 2015, we have all these independent hotels, all this guest data, but there was no centralized repository for all that data. Nowhere where you could merge and dedupe. So I was an M. Schwartz record in one hotel, a Matt Schwartz record in another hotel, a Matthew Schwartz record in another hotel, all with different email addresses, different phone numbers, et cetera. So in 2016, I worked Really close with the operations group to roll out the first what i call CRM one dot oh and we standardized all the hotels on sundine. And we had i think our peak maybe five six hundred thousand unique guest records what we called golden records. Right where we would take the best of the best data wise you know to make sure we have the right phone number right email address all your preferences in one place to do email marketing off. And then in 2022, we made the decision to kind of upgrade that to salesforce.com. And in 2023, we've been busy moving all of our independent hotels to salesforce.com for transactional email, promotional email, and once again, the guest golden records. And we're now exceeding 1.5 million unique contactable guest records. in sales force which is huge because now we can go talk to prospective hotels and owners and say hey join sage join our independent platform our ecosystem and day one you have access to one point five million. You know unique independent hotel travelers. And really the hard work there has not been so much integrating the PMS across the independent hotels where we use opera cloud stay in touch and in for it's really been that and. These other systems so we've integrated spot your book for time we've integrated open table reservation data we've integrated our wifi data we've integrated delphi for group bookings we've integrated lots of additional data sources to really augment that database all once again with independent hotel travelers so that's been a huge initiative. And one that I think starting in 2024, we'll really start paying dividends as we use that as a sales tool, not just for our existing hotels, but to get new hotels.

SPEAKER_02:
And having all those data sources piping in probably gives you unlimited personalization potential. You can get so granular with who you're targeting and what sort of offers you're sending out to guests.

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, just the more that our marketers have, the more dimensions they can market from, to your point, the more targeted the email can be. Or an SMS text message, an email, a welcome letter. It could be lots of different ways of communicating with the guest, but the more you know about them, the more kind of angles you have. If you have a dog and it happens to be a dog event happening there, or you're into, we know you ate at one other restaurant in another city, and now that same restaurant exists in a different city where you're going, we can say, hey, you had a great meal at Urban Farmer in Philadelphia, now you're in Denver, we have an Urban Farmer in Denver as well. So getting all that data across all the hotels, restaurants, spas, et cetera, is just a huge plus. And then those extra data systems outside the PMS has been a real big plus. So that's kind of number two. So business analytics, CRM, a lot of time spent there. Number three is cybersecurity. This is the project that never ends. You know, this is the classic, it's not a matter of if, but when. I always tell, you know, my team and our hotels and restaurants, no matter how wide I make the moat or how tall I make the wall, you know, the bad actors will find a way to tunnel under or helicopter over. So it's going to happen. you will be attacked. And for our board of directors, we define cyber in kind of three states. There's incidents. So think of an incident as someone kind of creeping around your house to the point where you feel like you need to call the police to investigate. And we get hundreds of incidents. There's millions of cyber activities going on, but there's a couple hundred each month that Escalate to the level of us having to call the police, which for us is a formal investigation by our cyber team. The next phase is a compromise, which is like proof that someone broke into your house, right? So the police come to your house, like someone actually broke in, like the door's open or the window's cracked. And then the third would be evidence of a breach, which would be exfiltration. So someone actually stole something, you know, like the bad guys walking out of your house, carrying a TV. And so we've been really fortunate. Even though we have millions of cyber events happening all the time, those boil down to roughly, you know, hundreds of cyber incidents, very few compromises. And in the eight years I've been here, fewer than five actual breaches.

SPEAKER_02:
You mentioned there were five buckets. What are the other two?

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. So Business Intelligence, Analytics, CRM, but Salesforce. So Business Intelligence, big partner being Microsoft. Chachapiti Now, CRM, the big partner being salesforce.com. Cybersecurity, the big partners are probably CrowdStrike. Arctic Wolf is our network monitoring. We use one called Abnormal Security. They're an indefinite up and comer in the email security space. We use Okta for all of our single sign-on and multi-factor authentication. Those are probably the four big kind of partners in that space. And then we get to associate productivity is number four. So if you think about where we've come over the last three years from an associate labor perspective, there's a big labor shortage for a variety of reasons. You know, a lot of folks exited industry back in COVID. We've had, you know, challenges with immigration in this country. So there's a shortage of labor and the labor we do have has seen escalating labor rates. So, We owe it to our owners and partners to find ways to really make our associates more productive. And we do that in a variety of ways. So first is enabling them with the right tool set, the right productivity tools. So if you think the major partners we have from a productivity tool perspective, we use Microsoft Office 365. They're rolling out what they call Microsoft Copilot, which is their AI engine on top of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. For all of our web conferencing and phones we use Zoom and Zoom has their AI assistant that'll help summarize meetings and take action items and email everyone on what's going on and things like that. And then also we use Box.com for all of our document storage and file collaboration. And Box has a new Box.com AI assistant that is super powerful. If you think of a chat GPT goes out to the external web, Box AI is inward looking and we have 40 years of files, you know, for our company that can learn from. And so creating a new memo or a new SOP or standard operating procedure saying, Hey, use the voice and tone of these other 50 SOPs and create an SOP around, you know, X, Y, and Z. It has a really good starting point to work from. So is that productivity kind of comes number one in those productivity tools and those partners of Microsoft box and zoom. But it also comes in labor management. So we're deploying labor management systems and we've standardized on hotel effectiveness as part of the actable family and heath on track. Hotel backness and heath on track will be deployed at all of our hotels, restaurants and spas. And that's really about Finding the right balance of labor. If you overschedule labor, then you have a labor expense hit to the middle of the P&L and that impacts your financial profitability. If you underschedule labor, you have a potential negative impact to guest service. So we're always trying to strike that right balance of how much labor to have at each hotel, restaurant, spa. So that part of that productivity is really labor scheduling as well.

SPEAKER_02:
I hear AI is used in a few different verticals here. What's your philosophy on using AI? When does it make sense? When does it not make sense?

SPEAKER_01:
What I would tell you is, in the eight years I've been here, the five focus areas for me are pretty consistent. Business intelligence and analytics, CRM, cybersecurity, associate productivity and we haven't gotten to the fifth one yet which is the guest experience but to me is just another tool set to layer on top of those five focus areas i didn't exist i'd still be focusing on these five focus areas except now is give me a whole new tool set a whole new arsenal to really throw at it so as i mentioned my business intelligence or putting chat gpt on top to make it easier for folks to access the data. When it comes to CRM, salesforce.com has their AI called Einstein. That'll help you have even more targeted emails, more targeted campaigns, you know, surface different guest preferences, things like that. Cyber security all of our cyber tools whether it's drought strike the abnormal you know i mentioned they're all based on learning trying to connect the dots. Add activity you know adrian's never opened an email from paris at two a.m. and downloaded a file more than one meg. You know is that suspicious activity or not ok maybe i'll work the security center for them to investigate. So a lot of that abnormal behavior or malicious behavior kind of detection anomaly detection is a based in the cyberspace. Any associate productivity i mentioned the three big partners of microsoft you know the i would copilot box has their assistant and zoom has their assistant so they're all rolling out you know i keep abilities and functionality. The fifth area was the guest experience, and the guest experience is a wide range of things that we're piloting at SAGE. So that's robots, kind of robots are one piece of AI. You know, AI is this wide, right? It has robots, it has facial recognition, it has voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. It has the large language models like chat GPT, it has machine learning and kind of graph Machine learning we're trying to connect the dots on different activities so there's lots of components. There's voice recognition and things like that so we're trying to pilot in lots of different areas the guest experience so we have robots we have. Delivery robots and cleaning robots we actually have some AI in noise detection in some of our hotels that are maybe new construction zone. or other things we're monitoring noise levels we also get recognition programs were trying to recognize gas for facial recognition when i come into a hotel that. Instead of you walking to the front desk and saying you know what's the name on the reservation it's like oh welcome back miss for this hotel so it's like i don't know who you are and that you've already been there before.

SPEAKER_02:
I love how similar technology can be used in so many uses. Employee productivity, guest experience, cybersecurity, so versatile.

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And like I said, AI, I think is one of those where it's very high in the hype cycle right now. This is one where i think the hype is real it's gonna be here for a long time there's so much money. Going into this space from an investment perspective and all the major players. You know it's microsoft google facebook etc are all investing very heavily in the space so i think we're gonna be talking about a i for a long time to come.

SPEAKER_02:
I'd like to dig into the guest experience piece a bit more. Curious to learn what tech you're using on property. I'm sure it varies quite a bit based on brand or if it's independent, but curious what's in the guest rooms, what does the check-in experience look like, how you're using tech on site.

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, so actually how we got connected through Jordan was through stay in touch. So I'll start there. Our CEO has spoken publicly in the past how he views the front desk, the people working at the front desk, should really be what he calls the best Airbnb host. You know, the person who knows the neighborhood, who can tell you about the best independent coffee shop, tell you about the best place to get a cocktail, tell you the best walking tour, tell you what are the sights and attractions You know that you really wanna go see and so if you say that that's the role of the front desk then what what that's not is the transactional aspect. And so we've been piloting a variety of kiosks. stay-in-touch kiosk at our stay-in-touch hotels, a kiosk for a company called Verde at our Upper Cloud hotels, and really that's meant to be to get the transaction and the self-service with the guest so that the front desk is still there, but when you're talking to the desk associate, it's less about ID verification, credit card, room key, and more about, hey, welcome to downtown Denver as far as what can I do to optimize your stay? What is it you've been to denver before and like i said is it independent coffee shop is it the cocktail is it dinner is it. The walking tour is it the sights and attractions what can i do to make you make your stay the best experience possible. So our vision statement for sage is to become america's favorite lifestyle hospitality company that's our long term vision. We do that through our day-to-day mission is to enrich lives one experience at a time. So we're all about experiential hospitality. You know, we're not just a bed and a shower and a TV and great Wi-Fi. It's like, how do we make your whole experience really good? And a lot of that experience is what we call placemaking. And that, you know, our studio team would tell you that we create places and spaces that people want to go to and not through.

SPEAKER_02:
Are you using stay in touch?

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. All the independent hotels are either on Stay In Touch, Opera Cloud, or we have one hotel on Infor HMS. And we have the kiosks deployed for Stay In Touch and Opera Cloud.

SPEAKER_02:
And are you finding guests are receptive of the kiosks?

SPEAKER_01:
Yes. Particularly for Stay In Touch, we've gotten really big pickup. In some hotels, north of 90% pickup.

SPEAKER_02:
And does that mean they can bypass the front desk completely? Or do they use the kiosk and then go to the front desk for something?

SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, we view it as an and, not an or. So yes, there are guests who can check in, ID verification, credit card, room key, and bypass through the front desk. They can do that. That's not the experience we're going for. We really want them to engage with someone once again to have that experiential, you know, how do we maximize their experience? The kiosk is really the transaction and the person, the person to person experience and interaction is really less about the transaction and more about building that relationship and saying like, You know hey i'm here to enrich your life one experience at a time how do i do that for you what can i do to maximize your stay. It's similar to the view of AI you know the goal of the kiosk is not to replace the front desk is to augment the front desk and change the role. And i think a is very similar i guess of the five focus areas in my opinion of the same weather with or without a it's really a is there to enhance. or augment those things like cyber security existed before AI. AI is just a way to enhance, you know, CRM existed. It's just a way to enhance the CRM capabilities or the cyber capabilities or the business intelligence capabilities. Right. And, you know, I always joke, I don't think AI is going to, you know, in a lot of our, you know, I think of the front desk, I don't think AI is going to replace the front desk. It's just going to enhance that experience. AI won't replace your job. It's like people who know AI will replace your job. So it's not that a kiosk is going to replace your job. It's like a front desk with a kiosk. Well, that'll become the game changer.

SPEAKER_02:
Thinking ahead, are there any vendors or any tech that are on your wish list? Something that seems really cool and innovative, but you haven't implemented it yet?

SPEAKER_01:
The one area there I would say is mobile key. There's some vendors I saw at Hitech this past year that are starting to introduce what I'll call appless mobile key. So if you think about an independent hotel, someone's probably not going to download an app for one hotel, five hotels, ten hotels. So If I really want to give them that mobile key experience and remove the hard plastic from the equation, which is both an environmental kind of ESG goal, as well as a cost goal to remove the plastic. I need to find that person, give that person a way to open their door, but I don't want to require them to have to download an app. And so there are some technologies that are coming out now that allow for that appless, you know, integration with the door locks. And so that's something I'm really excited about because I'd love to find a way to remove door keys, but not require an app. The keys are just one of those areas where it's just, it's just a friction point. And it's like, Hey, we should be able to get past that. I think about like at our house, you know, we don't have keys. I have like a touch pad that my kids use. And so we've never had a door key and it's not an app. So it is possible to find ways to do these things. The other one that I would say I'm really excited about, and I don't know a ton, but I'm just really excited, is Apple. Apple is releasing the Vision Pro in 2024. And if you're not familiar with the Vision Pro, if you go to Apple, they have like a five or 10 minute video that explains it. But it's basically, you know, we've had this vision of what virtual reality could be. You know, you think of like the Oculus, you know, that you wear and you play games and that kind of stuff. Apple has been working on this for like a decade. The Vision Pro, I think, is going to be the first true virtual reality that I'm not going to be able to tell that I'm not, you know, that we're not like talking, you know, in person, right? Because it's 4K in each eye. So like right now we're on 720p and then you have 1080 and it's like you're not even in 4K, right? So now you're going to get 4K in each eye. I think it's going to become really immersive. And you think about what that means for hospitality. You know, as I'm thinking about which hotel to stay in, particularly if there's a view, okay, well, what's the view from this hotel? What's the view from each individual room? What's the view from the balcony? What's the view from where I'm planning an event? You know, I had my group activity or my, or, you know, my corporate group or my wedding, and I want to know what's it going to be like. And now I can put on something with like 4k quality detail and understand what is that experience going to be like. And so I just think. We think we know a lot about virtual reality. I think that finally the tool is going to be here. That's going to really open up like, wow, you know, and we've been talking about it for a while, but I think finally the technology has caught up. So I'm super excited about that. And I think as a sales tool, as our group sales and catering group, I think it's going to be massive. I think from a training tool, as you're training folks, I think from an IT support perspective, just offering remote support. Let me put on my headset you put on your headset walk me into the server room what's diagnosed together okay unplug this cable what troubleshoot what's going on. I think you know that's gonna open up all kinds of possibilities and then also you know i said when you watch the video it actually is immersive in the applications. She'll be able to create a word document or a powerpoint document with your hands in the air like you see in the movies. kind of a combination of minority report and, you know, Iron Man when he's kind of like pull up a schematic and like, you know, edit this in the air. And so I just think it's from an associate once again back to associate productivity. Then you add the guest experience aspect of it. It kind of just that one technology kind of hits across the five things we've talked about, right? So there's also gonna be a cyber security aspect, but it's also a guest experience. If guests bring those devices to the hotel, they're gonna expect an even higher level of bandwidth. and Wi-Fi performance.

SPEAKER_02:
Switching gears a little bit, given your time in the industry, I'm sure you've worked with all different types of people. Curious to hear if there are one or two skills that you feel a hotelier should have in order to be successful, particularly in the tech side of the hospitality space.

SPEAKER_01:
So I think the first is communication. My advice to people getting in, you know, whether it's on the IT side or is in the hospitality, you know, I say from a communication perspective, Emailing with someone is good, having a call, phone call or video call is better, but in person is best. And so you think about from an IT support perspective, like if I can be there in person and really helping you troubleshoot and hands on keyboard and things like that, look you in the eye, see what's going on, that's the best. And then kind of working down from there. But you have to be a good communicator and effective communicator regardless of the medium. So you still have to be just as effective on text, chat and email, as well as on the phone and video. And then when you're in person. kind of honing your communication skills on all three levels, I think, is really kind of number one. And then number two skill set I tell people is the continuous learning. You know, IT evolves faster than any other discipline. Faster than accounting faster than human resources faster than payroll faster than marketing faster than it's just. There's constant every day there's new vendors that come out that's constantly the standards are constantly changing expectations are constantly changing and you have to carve out hours in your day to. Devote to continuous learning in order to stay relevant right to stay on top of these things so you're not saying you have to be the smartest person in the room or the most technical person in the room but you have to understand how all these things work together. That's kind of the expectation of IT going forward is like how do all these things play together.

SPEAKER_02:
Are there any other final thoughts or any other topics you want to bring up that we didn't talk about?

SPEAKER_01:
One thing we didn't talk about and maybe it's in the NatAssociate pretty guest experience perspective at the kiosk. We're not there yet but maybe it goes back to the question you were asking what I'm excited about what's coming. I talked about the vision pro and things like that one is the biometrics so if you think about when you go to the airport you know you have clear and it's all kind of visual. I'm excited and and we're in some conversations about like how can we can't just use clear to check into the hotel. And that solves the ID verification aspect right off the bat right and so the biometric piece once again we talk about fingerprints on your computer we talk about using facial recognition but. There are established companies that already have figured this out. How do we find a way to take some of those established companies and bring them into hospitality? So I think biometrics is another one you'll see in a few years. It'll find its way in.

SPEAKER_02:
Well, thanks for sharing. Super interesting. I'm excited to see Sage continue to grow and innovate.

SPEAKER_01:
Well, thank you very much for your time.

SPEAKER_02:
Thanks, Matt.

SPEAKER_00:
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 comp set 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. Do you 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.