Staypineapple's President on Creating Brand Evangelists with Tech
We did an exhaustive RFP process. It took us almost a year. We had been on a legacy system from the beginning of our formation as a company. It was very scary.
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:Today, we speak with Dina Villan, the president of StayPineapple currently has 10 boutique hotels in its portfolio, but is poised to grow in the next few years. Throughout our conversation, you'll get a sense for how technology is not going to replace hotel employees, but instead how it can help hoteliers like you to deliver more personal and thoughtful experiences for your guests. I like to start these conversations by getting a sense for your background. If you could please walk me through how you got your start in the industry, all the steps you've taken along the way, and then what you're currently doing now at State Pineapple.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. So I, like many hotel people, have had a very circuitous route. I started out in design and architecture in general, fell into hotel design and architecture. Then I eventually transitioned into construction because I enjoyed that more, the physicality of building hotels. Spent a good bit of time in the brands, cut my teeth and learned a lot at Marriott and Wyndham.
Speaker 1:Eventually, I joined a construction firm and became a general contractor and did that for 6 years. And that was very fun. I very much enjoyed the opportunity to we mostly focused on renovating hotels. And this was the time period in my career that I started really learning about sustainable development and learning about sustainability in green buildings. So, we really focused on that as a contractor, which was really interesting to me.
Speaker 1:And then I shot off in that direction for a number of years around sustainability and really cut my teeth. And that's how I ended up in Seattle. I was working for a sustainable consulting firm, which I loved. I've learned so much. But consulting is a layer away from actual accomplishing things.
Speaker 1:And so I really missed working for the owner, which is where I had kind of been in that space for most of my career in kind of asset management or construction. So I joined State Pineapple as really the asset manager for the, this is a family office. So family owns the whole kit and caboodle. We own brand and manage the hotels. So that was an opportunity to really join an organization that was smaller.
Speaker 1:That was new to me because I had been really in much larger kind of fortune 500 company and make an impact. One of the things I've really been able to do here at Stay Pineapple is find ways to use my skillset to further develop our company. So I eventually, maneuvered into operations, which was I had been on the fringe of operations, worked in engineering at a hotel, but never worked at the front desk. Didn't come up through, you know, general manager, typical kind of operations trajectory. So taking over the leadership of the operations team was really exciting and fun here.
Speaker 1:It was unfortunately in the middle of COVID, but I am inherently as a person, a change agent. It's what gives me energy. And so I took the opportunity during COVID to really focus on our efficiency and take some of the concepts and ideas from sustainability, which is really finding the best way to accomplish something using the fewest resources available or making the least impact way, to really help our operations team function much more effectively. And so we came out of COVID really ready to hit the ground. We never closed any of our hotels.
Speaker 1:We kept them all open, which was a genius move, a scary one, but a smart one because we were in urban all urban markets, city center, worst hit areas, really, during the pandemic. But when guests started coming back, we were ready and staffed and were able to capture a really large percentage of the market segment that we sat in. So that was very successful for us. Eventually, was promoted to chief operating officer for the company. This was all working for Todd Boysen, who was our CEO at the time, who I had worked for from the very beginning of my joining the organization.
Speaker 1:And when he decided that he wanted to retire, I was, tapped to lead the organization. So last October 2023, I became president and haven't looked back. It's been really exciting. We're in a growth mode. So we're really expanding.
Speaker 1:We're focused on expanding our brand through an asset light model with third party owners. And that's really exciting. So we're out at conferences and talking to a lot of people and a lot of networking. It's the downside of living in Seattle because I'm doing a lot of flying and everywhere is far away, But we are based in Seattle. Our corporate office is in Bellevue across the lake from Seattle.
Speaker 1:So we really love it here, and I get questions a lot around why Pineapple and you're in Seattle. So I'll give you the story of State Pineapple. I mentioned we're a family office. Our owner and founder, Michelle, is the daughter. Her parents owned the company originally and her dad called her his little pineapple when she was a little girl.
Speaker 1:And so we named the company Stay Pineapple. So it's very personal. Most of the things inside of our company are very personal. We have a little dog that is our mascot. There's a stuffed version of him that sits on every bed in our hotels to greet you when you come in, and snuggle with if you so choose.
Speaker 1:Or we have people that take him on bike rides and all kinds of fun things. He's a very Instagram friendly, Dash is. And Dash is actually a dog. He is Michelle's dog. He runs around the office.
Speaker 1:So one brown eye, one blue eye. He's a husky, which also happens to be the mascot of the UW.
Speaker 3:How long have you been at State Pineapple now? Almost 8 years. Well, thank you for walking me through your background. You mentioned working as a GC. You got interested in sustainability and then ended up working in the sustainability industry for a bit.
Speaker 3:How do you feel technology can help hotels be more sustainable?
Speaker 1:It's massive. I mean, it's a 100% integrated. My best example is this. 15 years ago, I was working in a large convention hotel in Orlando, and I was the director of sustainability. And we had a new chief engineer start in the organization, and we had fully automated systems.
Speaker 1:I could, from my phone at home 15 years ago, change the temperature setting on your guest room in your room. I could adjust anything. I had, full capacity to change lighting in common spaces or in breakout rooms. And he suggested to me that I go around in the evening and turn lights off. And, like, excuse me?
Speaker 1:That is the essence of wrong thinking when it comes to sustainability. That is way more effort than you're gonna get value. The cost benefit analysis for that is terrible. What technology does for us from a sustainability perspective is create economic viability on many of the things that we want to accomplish when we're trying to make a building more efficient, whether it's mechanical systems, lighting systems, processes, the ability for the front desk to preset the temperature that you prefer as a guest in your room an hour before you check-in. But prior to that, I've had it set in a cooling mode at 78 degrees or in a heating mode at 63.
Speaker 1:So that I'm not heating and cooling a space that's not occupied. So I can provide a great guest experience and energy efficiency for me as an operator. That is all technology. You can't manually accomplish that efficiently.
Speaker 3:Stepping back just a bit, I would love for you to give a quick overview of State Pineapple. You mentioned it is a family office. It's a small company, but you're growing. So what is the unique value proposition of State Pineapple? What makes your company different?
Speaker 1:We're about almost 15 years old, and the company started as a hotel owner, grew into a management company, and eventually became a brand as well. We currently have 10 hotels across the country in 7 markets in 6 states, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, Boston, New York, and Chicago, all city center, urban locations, all under 150 rooms. Our smallest hotel is 56 and our largest is 144. So boutique hotels unique, the brand itself is known for being unique and quirky and different. Our design aesthetic is a mix of elegance and whimsy, and we can dial up and down the elegance and whimsy depending on the unique hotel.
Speaker 1:We strongly believe in the brand being the wind beneath the hotel's wings to use the song and really provide an opportunity to lift the hotel without coming in over top of it and over branding the uniqueness of a boutique hotel. We talk about how we actually operate 10 unique boutique hotels, and we're a collection of boutique hotels versus a traditional brand. We're gonna grow, again, I mentioned through 3rd party owned assets. So we're talking to owners that align to that kind of methodology and are interested in really elevating their independent hotel. And we're able to give them a lot of what a brand does.
Speaker 1:So distribution, hotel positioning, a better sales channel, almost 50% of our bookings come direct from our website or our central reservations group. So really some of the benefits of a brand without having the economic burden of a large brand and or all of the rules and regulations of a large brand. So a little bit of the best of both worlds, and that's really our biggest value proposition. Also, boutique hotels, one of the challenges with them is there's a lot of overhead from a staffing perspective that any hotel needs, HR, IT, accounting, sales team, you know, kind of all the central services. So we have centralized all of those in our main office in Bellevue, Washington.
Speaker 1:So even our hotel in New York, in Manhattan, the only people that are at the hotel are operators or hoteliers. They are giving guest experience. They're providing guest experience. That's their job. Everybody else is back in Bellevue supporting them.
Speaker 1:So their accountant is in Bellevue, their HR person is in Bellevue. And that allows us to share a single accountant across 3 or 4 hotels instead of having an accountant at every hotel. So that's a significant cost savings in that small hotel space.
Speaker 3:That's really interesting that in your hotels, you have the operator as well. The corporate team sits in one central location. Can you talk to me about how technology makes that possible?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cloud based technology is essential to our entire process and footprint. We're currently in the process of moving to a new PMS and CRM, sort of. The CRM is a bit of a hybrid. We've been on Salesforce for our CRM.
Speaker 1:We're adding Think Cloud over top of Salesforce as our, our platform that we're using, for all of our guests' data. We really look at Think Cloud as the heartbeat of our company because the guests are the center of everything we do. And so really their information and the information that we have about them is critical to everybody in the organization, whether it's our sales team that's localized here or it's the front desk agent in New York. They have the same information and have access to the same information. Kind of attached to that then CRM is Muse, our new PMS system.
Speaker 1:Also cloud based, also very forward thinking. All of the choices we have made in the last, you know, year and in this transition have been based around finding technology companies that are aligned to our mission. I know that sounds really soft and fluffy when you're talking tech, but of course we did a, you know, check, check, check, check, check. It can do the things we want it to do. But after that, really the decisions were made around, are we going to be working with a technology company that is innovative and cutting edge and moving forward and always being adaptive and easily adjustable because that's who we are as a brand.
Speaker 1:That was really, really important to us. And both Think and Muse met that. And I should also mention Opti, which is our housekeeping tool that plugs into Muse, which has been the most easily adopted technology I have ever seen in my career. It's been phenomenal. You can imagine housekeeping departments are not generally super excited about change and technology, and it was the one I was the most concerned about.
Speaker 1:And we've converted half of the hotels currently to our new tech stack, So we're half and half right now. We're half pregnant. And so Opti was the tool that I had the most concern about our teams adopting and really being comfortable with. We were already using a Google phone. All of our teams are on Google phones for their communication and management, both engineering and housekeeping.
Speaker 1:It plugged right into that. It was super easy. Everybody is excited about it. It's been absolutely amazing. So thus far, halfway through, we feel like we made really great choices on our new tech stack and ones that, to your point, are absolutely imperative for us to be able to deliver what our core benefit is.
Speaker 1:So we're testing all this out on our own portfolio. And then as we grow and we add third party owners, it'll be super easy for us to plug in a new owner into the tech stack and fairly inexpensive too, because these are all cloud based applications and we have learned how to bring a hotel onto the platform ourselves. So we had helped through the first five hotels on the process. Actually, the first four, the 5th one we just did, which went swimmingly, we did ourselves. So that was our goal all along was to get us into a position so that we could go when we onboard a new hotel, we could send our team, our task force teams not have a lot of loaded expense on a new owner to switch to Estate Pineapple and implement a new technology Because we're going to require owners to be on our tech stack.
Speaker 1:We're not going to be in a position of having 7 different PMS systems because it won't work well with the efficiency model and the centralized services that we provide. Get efficiency is by using the same technology across the platform.
Speaker 3:I am curious if you have any advice for hoteliers who may be interested in switching off of a legacy system. But as you've done it, it's a big undertaking to migrate a system that's as crucial to operations as your PMS. So have you had any learnings along the way or any advice you could offer a hotelier who's considering taking a similar path of migrating to a new system?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I'll tell you how we did it. We did an an exhaustive RFP process. It took us almost a year. We had been on a legacy system from the beginning of our formation as a company.
Speaker 1:It was very scary to change. We were very worried about it. However, just through the process of getting everybody on board and making sure, I think the key element was making sure that every constituency inside of our organization bought in and agreed on the choice that we made. And the last and final voice that had the final say so was not me as president. It was the end user.
Speaker 1:I said through the process all along, constantly, the end user guys, the end user, it's great that it's better for us here at corporate and we can get this information or we can get that information and I want all of that stuff. But if the tool that we choose doesn't help the front desk, the housekeeping team, and the engineering team at the hotels every day do their job better, then we're not choosing it. So our hotel operations team had a very loud voice in the process. And we had made the mistake in previous years. We had tried to implement a couple of tools over the years and not done that process, and they failed.
Speaker 1:It just didn't not go as great as we would like. Like literally ended up having to pull the technology out because it failed because we didn't have buy in. And so that is the number one thing I think I can recommend to people. The other is integration. Obviously, we're changing out a portion of our tech stack.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of other technology that we use that we didn't want to change. And so ensuring that we had very good integration and partners that were willing to have open API and communicate with all of the other technology that we use so that all of the information can be shared across those different tools was the other, I think, most important factor in the box checking, right? Like those were the 2 boxes that were non negotiable. And then as I mentioned, you know, I think don't underestimate the mission that the organization has. Like ours is innovation and creativity and, you know, always moving forward.
Speaker 1:Other organizations could be totally different. Right? Make sure that the entities that you're gonna be working with because you're getting married. You're not gonna go change your PMS every year. So you're getting married to these people and you wanna make sure that that is a relationship that is gonna be long term.
Speaker 3:To your point about you're not switching your PMS every year. At some point, a hotelier may decide that whatever system it is is not working. You know, you decided at some point that your legacy PMS was no longer the right system for your organization. How do you think about those technology decisions? At what point do you make that determination that it's time to move to something else?
Speaker 3:Is it something that you evaluate on a regular basis? Have you gathered input from your staff? Just curious how you think about building and maintaining that ideal tech stack.
Speaker 1:I think in general, end users have a tendency to like the system they're in because they're used to it, right? So we don't typically get a lot of negative feedback. I mean, we'll get some, you know, frustration about this, that, or the other, but it's not usually I want to change the technology. I wanna go to something else. Even with all the buy in we got, I was just in our New York property that just switched to Muse.
Speaker 1:And every time I go to any of the properties, I'm like, how's the migration going? You know, how are you feeling? Do you like it better? And everybody by and large was, it's better. I like it.
Speaker 1:It's easier. It's more intuitive, you know, blah blah blah, but it's different. I have to go find things in different places, right? The stuff that I was where I thought it was isn't there. And so generally human nature doesn't like those changes.
Speaker 1:So most of the time for us, a technology change bubbles up in our home office because we're trying to achieve things that we can't achieve with the technology that we have. So for example, we want to do a comprehensive add ons program. We wanted to do really curated programs for our guests. So as an example, not just, you know, we can buy you tickets for Seattle Center. That's boring, but really developing unique experiences that guests can have.
Speaker 1:Joe at the front desk, his uncle might be a fisherman and know all the best fishing spots. And so, we curate a fishing experience that, you know, you can only get if you stay with us. Those kind of things. Being able to communicate that to our guests, explain it well, identify the guests that would be interested in fishing. Because if you send me a fishing request, I'm gonna be like, no, thank you.
Speaker 1:Right? I'm not into fishing, but knowing the guests that like fishing, all of that kind of stuff is way more complicated. It it does sound simple, but from a technology perspective, it's much more difficult to achieve at scale. And so our current technology couldn't do any of that. It was literally hampering our ability to improve our guest experience.
Speaker 1:And I mentioned to you before, the guests are at the center of everything we do. We're constantly looking at the guest journey and how we can connect with guests better at any point in their journey and build a relationship. The boutique hotel space is very relationship oriented. It's not, I need a large number of consumers to buy my product. What I need is to get to know you and you to get to know me and there become a relationship because I have a 10 55 rooms across the entire country.
Speaker 1:I don't need a lot of people. I need people that really love us and we have a lot of those. We call them pineapple evangelists that just absolutely love our product, love what we do. I think they have a sense of belonging to Stay Pineapple that is as strong as our team members do. And that's what is fun for us.
Speaker 1:That is so fun to create that kind of connection with people. And our technology is the best way to support that. We have a program called Surprise and Delight. It is really a team member empowerment tool for any team member at the hotel. It doesn't matter what level you are, is 100% empowered to if you hear something that you can surprise and delight a guest around, go do it.
Speaker 1:Like, I hear you're sitting in the lobby with your husband, and you're talking about your new baby and you can't find the Pampers that you normally get. And I'm a front desk agent and I also have a new baby and those are my favorite Pampers too. And I know where I can get them. I can run to the store and on the company credit card, buy Pampers for you and leave them in your room and just say, we heard you were out of diapers. Surprisingly customized, totally unique to you.
Speaker 1:With our legacy system, we can only do that by hearing things in a physical state on property. What our objective is over time with our new tech stack is to build a model about Adrian in our CRM that says, we know that your daughter was born in 2024. And so we're gonna know for the rest of your life, like, how old she is, that kind of information. Or we know you have a dog and his name is Jack and he likes the soft chewies and not the hard ones. And so we always put the soft ones in Jack's room when Jack checks in.
Speaker 1:Because we look at Jack as much of a guest as we do the people guests. We're dog obsessed. We're, openly, animal crazy brand. We were named the number one hotel brand in the United States, for pet friendly. And that kind of level of personalized experience is critical to our business model And the way we can do that in a much bigger way is through technology and having that information at the fingertips of the barista, the coffee bar, the front desk agent, the bartender, the housekeeper, the general manager in the hotel, everybody having that available to them so that we can find those opportunities to surprise and delight our guests.
Speaker 3:I would love to learn more about how communication flows between State Pineapple and the guest, particularly if the guest is on-site and they have a question. Is there some sort of messaging tool that they can use? And then how do you solicit feedback from guests? If there's something you use to manage reviews, online reputation, that sort of social listening.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. We have all of those tools. We have online text opportunity on property. And we also have our own built chat bot, which is called ChatPineapple.
Speaker 1:And we've mostly focused Chopt Pineapple on team member tools, less direct guest facing, other than some very basic specific questions that it can answer because we're so relationship based. I think we look at technology as something behind our team members, not instead of our team members. What we really wanna do is take transaction off of the team members. So ultimately, someday, what I would love is to have no front desks and have everybody checked in by the time they come to the hotel. And the interaction that you have is a greeting, not a check-in.
Speaker 1:That's where we're going. So the team members in the lobby, which we call everything people, will literally just be there to greet you, guide you, help you, answer any questions, and hopefully give you some curated experiences, all that kind of stuff. We won't ever go to a kiosk for creating keys or checking in. Again, we're really passionate about that 1 on 1 personalized experience and we think that technology should be ubiquitous and only help create those guest experiences, not put a piece of tech between us and our guests. So we're really careful about that.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like sometimes we're anti tech, but we're not. We actually use an immense amount of technology that allows us to do that and advanced technology. So yeah, we have pre check-in, you know, all of the, I think, tools that are anybody hears about in the market right now. And then kind of on the tail end, once a guest has left or is wanting to leave a review, we use ReviewPro. We actually have internally in the company, the policy is that 95% of all guest reviews are responded to.
Speaker 1:Positive, negative, doesn't matter. Most of our hotels run 98, 99 percent of guest reviews are responded to, so virtually all. It's really important to us that if a guest takes the time to make a comment or give us a review, that we return that with respect and communicate back to them. It's also a great opportunity for us to recover if we've made a mistake because we do. All hotels make mistakes.
Speaker 1:And we never want a guest to leave feeling like we did something. Guests inherently, I don't know why this is, but they won't come and tell us in person when we do something wrong. And then I get it, you know? So when we hear that feedback, we want the opportunity to fix it. You know, however that is.
Speaker 1:So recovery is also a really big element for us. We track any negative sentiment, not necessarily a negative review. It could be a 5 star review, but there was some level of negative sentiment in the review. Then we keep track of all of that. Look for trends.
Speaker 1:We use a lot of tools that compare hotels to hotel, track our trend lines, see if we're starting to see something that something the matter with the hotels. You know, room two zero one has had 7 complaints about the air conditioning. Maybe this needs to be an engineering ticket. Right? So anything from that to we've had 3 complaints about rudeness at the front desk, which would be horrifying for us.
Speaker 1:And that would be, you know, an immediate task force. Everybody get to that hotel and figure out what's going on because that's the antithesis of what we are as a brand.
Speaker 3:So it's rare that I have a woman on the podcast here. So, first of all, love having a woman that I can speak to who is right at the forefront of hospitality tech. You also work for State Pineapple, which is owned by a woman. Curious if you're seeing any trends in technology as more and more women work up the ranks in hospitality. Anything exciting or innovative that you're seeing that you'd like to share?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it's a really interesting time right now, and I will make a direct correlation between the growth of women in tech and the growth of women in leadership in the hospitality with the growth of innovative technology being used in the hospitality industry, the dropping off of legacy systems. I mean, let's be honest, the hotel industry has historically been used a model around technology of, well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I believe that some of the change that we're seeing in the industry is coming from the thinking that women bring to leadership that is different than men. Either is good or bad.
Speaker 1:They're both good, but women just look at things a little bit differently. And I think some of the willingness to let go of what always has been and do something new and be a change agent and really move forward is coming from some significant change that's happening, both in technology and in hospitality. So I think it's a wonderful thing. I don't think you can see the clear correlation between the two and not find a connection there.
Speaker 3:So just wanted to open it up if there's anything else you're excited about that you'd like to talk about or any final thoughts before we wrap up.
Speaker 1:Well, I think AI is one of the things that everybody's talking about, but everybody's talking about it because it's a big thing. And I'm really interested to see where it's gonna go and what the changes it's gonna cause. At least in our organization, I have no fear of it replacing people. Like we're currently using it to we were talking about our guest reviews. We're using it in assisting those responses.
Speaker 1:By no means is anybody using it to automatically respond to a guest, but I'll give you an example. A guest comment with 3 or 4 different sentiments in it, often when being responded by a person, misses things. Elements of the review are ignored in the response. We see it a lot. You know, they pick up 2 of the items, but 2 things they don't mention.
Speaker 1:So we use our TapCnapple. Our teams are able to go in and have TapCnapple create a response, and then they can go edit it and make sure that it's in their voice. So a big part of our brand's ethos is that we want every employee to bring their whole self to work and be their authentic self. So we don't have manuals to tell you how to answer the phone or how to check-in a guest or how to greet somebody. We want you to do that the way that's natural for you as an individual.
Speaker 1:Now that makes it a little bit challenging to train, but it creates a lot of opportunity for people to find their own way to speak pineapple. But Chatpineapple will give them a starting point, a kind of launching pad. And also to make sure that they identify all the individual aspects of a guest's review. You know, we're human beings. We have a tendency, if we're responding to 10 reviews at the same time, you start sounding the same and not getting into all the details.
Speaker 1:So it's helping our teams be more efficient and effective that way. I mean, that's a tiny little thing that AI is doing currently. Honestly, I don't even imagine what it's gonna do. It's gonna be a really fun next decade to see where we go with that.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you so much for your time, Dina. It was great chatting with you.
Speaker 1:You as well.
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.
