Strawberry's SVP of Tech on Building a Culture of Innovation in Hotels
And then maybe they leave or they shift roles, and there are new people to train and train and train. It's an analyst job. So what they've done is that they've built, on top of Gemini Flash from Google, they built our own generative AI bot.
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're joined by Carrie Anna Fisbick, senior vice president of technology at Strawberry, one of Europe's largest hotel companies. In this conversation, we dive into Strawberry's digital transformation journey, the state of cybersecurity in hotels, and some fascinating real world applications of generative AI. Carrieanna also brings some really compelling contrarian insights to the conversation, Like why hotels need to focus on staff before guests and when it's actually beneficial to make decisions based on feeling intuition even in a data driven world.
Speaker 3:Carrieanna, thanks so much for coming on the show today.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Jordan. Nice to be here.
Speaker 3:I'd love to start by talking about maybe just give us a quick background on you, your background in the hotel industry and the technology space, kind of how those things came together for you.
Speaker 1:Alright. My background is actually mostly from art, so it's not from my neither hospitality or technology. So it was kind of an accident that I stumbled into technology. Basically, recognizing that there was a huge potential in making anything really more efficient or more innovative, working with new developments by working with technology. So my interest sort of came from there, some curiosity in how to make things back.
Speaker 1:And then around four and a half years ago, I shifted from fashion, retail that I've been doing for about 10 years, and over to hospitality. Timing was pretty terrible because it was passed to March 2020. I came from the safe spot of fashion retail world straight into the corona of, the hospitality industry. Quite rough. Had sort of, you know, start with just stopping everything that we were doing and revisiting everything and what could we actually do in the time of, complete, well, lockdown.
Speaker 1:Having said that, it's been very useful when you look at how you very, very quickly figure out what is actually important and what's not. So rough but efficient start in hospitality around four and a half years ago.
Speaker 3:And I know we already had Spen on the show. Would you remind our audience the breadth and depth of the strawberry portfolio, the composition, the hotel property types and locations?
Speaker 1:Definitely. We are one of the largest hotel or hospitality providers in the Nordics. And part of our strategy is actually to move out of just being a hospitality provider to an experienced provider. Today, we have around 250 hotels across Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and a couple of other places as well. We have some hotels.
Speaker 1:So we operate in the Nordics with a variety of high brands and a new one coming in May next year. And then we also have around 50 independent hotels. They're more like spa resort hotels that sort of have their own brand in themselves. So we do multi branding. That's part of our strategy that we want to be ourselves to be independent and offer different experiences for both corporate travelers and leisure travelers so that you can basically, you should be able to find anything that you want today with us, whether it's, you know, a cheap budget hotel for young travelers or if you wanna go to a luxury spa resort hotel with a lovely little restaurant and get a facial treatment as well.
Speaker 3:And when you came into the business in 2020, how would you describe what you came into from in terms of the maturity of digital transformation at Strawberry, and how has that digital transformation journey evolved to today?
Speaker 1:Great. It's an interesting question, Joan, because it it was a strange mix. Of being a bit surprised that it's something that I thought would be more digital mature and at the same time, really impressed at some of the things that Strawberry had done as a rebel in the industry for the digital guest journey. So I think on a very general basis, I think that the hospitality industry has, for years, maybe been a bit behind on digitalization in general. And I think there are quite logical reasons for that because you work in a very physical environment.
Speaker 1:We deal with people every day. You have people in your house, your or everything that is sort of it's not as easily transferred to ecommerce, like retail, which is very easily transferred. And also retail has a very, you know, strict value chain with logistics and production and all of that. So I think that strawberries surprised me by a lot of the cool, you know, like, mobile keys that we have and different solutions for app and web that they built that was really cool on the digital journey, really bold me. And at the same time, there was a lot of things that we needed to work with on more ground level to get, you know, data flow and integrations and master data quality and tracking of your purchase orders and stuff like that that I would do see from retail, and retail have come far along with that no one in the hotel industry was staying.
Speaker 1:So I think, on my part, I very quickly find that a lot of the sort of hotel technology conferences didn't really give me a lot because they were basically focused on a lot of things that I knew about already. So what's important, I think, for us was to them sort of, you know, look a bit broader out in the market to other industries and what we could learn from them.
Speaker 3:So you guys have thousands of employees, hundreds of hotels. How do you guys prioritize and say, okay. This is our list of things that have to be digitized or moved into a technological process that is manual today. Is that coming from the hotels reporting up to you? How does the organizational hierarchy sit so that you can bubble up those ideas and then prioritize them as a team?
Speaker 1:What is quite unique with Strawberry is that we wanna be like a rebel in the industry. So a lot of other organizations have very strict processes for how they deal with the innovation and then prioritize, while we have a more unstructured process for that. We have, like we work a bit with OKRs, basically, that we wanna have these goals and solidarity for Grace. We have we wanna have these many hotels. We wanna have these many members.
Speaker 1:And then there are different business units working on the business goals and how to get there. And then we try from tech to support them as best we can. Sometimes the idea will come from a business unit. Sometimes it will come from 1 employee in the hotel. Sometimes the tech department will come with something.
Speaker 1:And then we try, obviously, like all other industries, to find the best business cases to work with the most. But I think on the tech part, we prioritized lately a lot of the good old cloud shift to getting rid of old on prem technology that basically gives where the database structure are so so old that you can't really use them for anything new and fun. And so we prioritized that a lot over the last 18 months, and I think that is giving us a lot of the results that we're now seeing in form of pricing strategies, how to work with the with revenue and new revenue items and dynamic yielding and everything that we do towards guests and also are able to connect all the new partners that we wanna work with. We try to identify when you go traveling, either at the corporate or a lesser guest, what are the most important things for you when you go there? What partners can we offer you good deals on?
Speaker 1:And I think, basically, that those are sort of we try to prioritize by finding good business areas, but we also like, you know, to try and fail. So sometimes it's not maybe the main thought through idea, but something that everyone has a lot of energy around. And then, you know, if people have a lot of energy around something, that usually means it might get you very, very much further than a business case that no one really wants to work with. So we try to do a middle of that as well so that we let people in the company be a part of the innovation and follow gut feeling as well as numbers.
Speaker 3:Are there any specific projects that the team is really excited about right now?
Speaker 1:Definitely. On the commercial side, we're launching a new partnership with a Norwegian air company. So we are together building a company that we own based on us to join all our member points in one program. So, basically, the new company called Spem, they will consolidate the points that you earn as a member in Strawberry or in Norwegian Air. So you have, like, a digital currency that you can spend, and that's why we call it Spem because that means spend, across our different hotels and airline companies.
Speaker 1:And we're gonna onboard more partners for that as well, and they're launching on the 19th November. So not very far away. So when the, you know, the sort of, you know, thrilling loss, the test stages where everything's probably seems impossible, but you solve it anyway. We're very excited about that. So a lot of the teams are working on that based on loyalty strategy, partner offerings, building technology, analyzing data, training our hotel staff in the new loyalty program.
Speaker 1:Lot a lot of excitement around that one. And then we're still excited about, you know I know you have Ben on the podcast earlier, and he spoke about all these systems that we had rolled out. We're still very excited about that, actually. So we're tweaking all the, you know, how can we do this a bit differently? How we can we connect this data a bit more?
Speaker 1:What can we learn in how we wanna do men's geoengineering out of the restaurants? Can we tweak that a bit more there? Reception role, how can that be smarter? Still a lot of work around that. It's great to see that the things that you've implemented actually have an impact.
Speaker 1:And then we have another team that has been working sort of in the background, and everyone else has been rolling out all these new systems with building our own generative AI bots, and we built it initially for our employees. You know, we have around 20,000 employees currently in the company, and we have a turnover out of the in hospitality, and you probably know this. The turnover out on the hotels is quite high, anything from 30 to 50% sometimes. We have a lot of people that need to be onboarded and a lot of people to be off boarded or retrained or moving around departments and everything. And that's just obviously a huge logistical operation to train them and get them to understand your business or hotel.
Speaker 1:How do you do this? How is this routine working? What do I say when this gets asked about that? Everything from where is the parking to how do I do a refund if someone has paid me the wrong card, or how do I actually help someone that wants to find a hairdresser? It could be anything.
Speaker 1:Right? And you want your employees to be on top of that, everything that the customer is asking them for help about, which means that basically over years, you've been building, you know, manuals to be out of your house, training them, training them, training them. And then maybe they leave or they shift roles, and there are new people to train and train and train. It's an analyst job. You know?
Speaker 1:So what they've done is that they've built, on top of Gemini Flash from Google, they built our own generative AI bot that has been secretly learning in the background for a year now. They collected the lang chain on top of several of our systems, basically. We picked those that we thought would be the most useful, obviously, our Google Workspace and everything that is in there. And then some of the specific systems, 1 by 1, connect to them to that, all very secure. We we're not releasing any information that we don't want to, but we also connect to the bot to the the general worldwide Internet so that basically now our employees can ask our little bot, which is called Scout, a little helper, about pretty much anything that from how's the better going to be tomorrow to how do I change the booking in the small system, what kind of menu will our restaurants have tomorrow, Where is nearest neighbors?
Speaker 1:Anything that they need to know, they can ask, and it's just so much more efficient way to to share information. We're super, super excited about that.
Speaker 3:How did that process work as you guys are rolling out the LLM Bot Scout? Is there, like, a digital master manual to everything at the company, or where does that data and content sit today?
Speaker 1:It's a variety of things. I mean, we have an LMS, obviously, with trainings so that we release to be a 1,000 headquarter employees. And we have Google Workspace, so there are a lot of Google sites with information. Then there are all the colleagues out there that they ask every day about how to do things. Then we have digital trainings.
Speaker 1:We have, weekly webinars. We've had a lot of classroom trainings before we changed the tech stack. We actually had to go out there and do classroom training, which is also a huge cost, you know, travel wise and time consuming. So I think there's not, like, one answer to how we did that, but I think that across all the departments that are working on getting information out to themselves, there's so many hours and so much documentation that is built but never read, never understood because nobody likes to read a manual. We all hate that.
Speaker 1:Nobody even reads the IKEA manual. You know? That's why they made it all into pictures because, hopefully, someone will at least wanna look at it and maybe understand. So by introducing a Scout now and this technology that combines all these various types and system and information, And instead of sitting there reading the manual, or even for the guests, because we're also connecting this to the website and for our guests, you can just ask about the exact thing that you're wondering about and not navigate for ages to find information. And I think it's really, really going to revolutionize how our employees are trained, what information they have, how they can help our guests, and also how our guests are able to interact with us.
Speaker 1:And then we connect all that data, you know, and then when we see what are the guests actually asking about, what are we training the employees around, what are we offering them, what do we see the guests wanna buy or find, what partnership should we have. It's like an ocean of information that we haven't had access to before. So I think it's one of the coolest data and insight projects that we are actually in the midst of.
Speaker 3:So the hotel employees, they access this through, like, a web portal that has, like, a chat gpt vibe. Well, obviously, it's on Google, so the Gemini version. But there's, like, an interface where they can query all these different disparate datasets and pieces of content?
Speaker 1:Actually, what we've done, and I think that is also part of that what the success is built into Google Workspace. So it's like, you know, where you can chat with all your colleagues when you're in Google Workspace. Like, I can send a chat to Jordan or I can send a chat to Sun. Scout is one of the chatbots in there, so you can chat with Scout. So you can just pin it in your your mail where you are on your phone or in your computer or in your pad.
Speaker 1:Wherever you go, basically, you have your Gmail accounts available. So that means you can use it anywhere on the bus on the way to work or in the reception. We're also building it into the employee portal, of course, so that we have it extra available for prompts and back office staff that are dealing with questions from the guests every day. And we don't want them, you know, standing on their mobile and looking weird when the guests arrive. We want it to be easily accessible for them.
Speaker 1:So we're doing a bit of base, but, the fact that it's always winchy means that it's kinda like any other very more commercial chatbot there when you need it wherever you are.
Speaker 3:And how do the guests interact with it? Because, presumably, they're not in the Google Workspace like Google Cloud.
Speaker 1:No. They're not. No. They are interacting on it on our website for the moment. This is quite new.
Speaker 1:We only have 2 hotels up at the moment, but it's speeding up quite fast now rolling it out. But we just wanna, you know, make sure that we really understand it and how it works and get rid of all the bugs and the things that we thought would be great that show up that they aren't. So at the moment, it's more like an intelligent customer service agent at the website, and we're still training and learning. So that's how they interact at the moment. In the future, I don't really know.
Speaker 1:We might release it, obviously, for members in the app. Maybe we'll connect to the loyalty system in different ways. There's just an incredible amount of possibilities. And I also think, the subject that you've touched upon before on how do we innovate, how do we prioritize what to do, this actually gives us real time information about IDs from employees as well. So we can really innovate based on input from any 20,000 or any customer that is interacting with us.
Speaker 1:We can get that information instead of, you know, maybe someone tried to write an email and it didn't get through you, or you didn't have time to read it, or your boss wouldn't listen to your idea. It's obviously not gonna solve all the problems in the entire world, but it it really gives us a whole new perspective on how to act with information that is structured in another way than what it is in the page we're at, basically.
Speaker 3:Are there certain milestones on the guest side of the chatbot that you guys are looking for before you roll it out? Or how do you think about the staging? Because, like, I think about when we send an email to our audience of, like, 70,000, I'm about to press send on that email. It's already been written and edited, but I have to click send and take ownership. It's such a scary moment, and Mailchimp has that, like, sweaty monkey finger.
Speaker 3:I can't imagine rolling out a new tool to 20,000 employees, let alone got 100 of 1,000 or 1,000,000 of guests. What does that process look like from where you guys are today of piloting 2 hotels with the guest facing to all of your properties?
Speaker 1:As a company, we like to be a bit rebellious. We like to go in a different direction than a lot of others do. If we go big and we fail, at least, and we tried, we will probably learn from it. So we're not that scared. We haven't put up a lot of milestones, like we have to do this or that.
Speaker 1:We basically just wanna train it a bit more to make sure that the information that is scraped can answer as many questions as possible. But I think that what we're learning already from the pilot is that it's so easy for customers to understand and interact that there's really no risk in just deploying it in several cells. Obviously, we have to make sure that we can scale it and all of the techy stuff behind. But apart from that, I think that we're gonna first thing, now we're obviously going to release the employee books to charge 20,000 employees and make sure that we do that very well before Christmas, and then we'll probably do a couple of more hotels. I don't know if we'll do, like, up until 20 8, 30 exactly where we'll go with them versus another of scouts.
Speaker 1:That is not really called scouts externally. That's just internal that we call it scouts. The hotels will have to get it you know, name it their little box so it fits their brand and culture. But I think that within, you know, 4 to 6 months is probably gonna be rolled out everywhere that we want it to and all the channels that we want it to and maybe some that I haven't thought about today. And if I'm wrong, I'm struggling to figure out how to do it and then release it a bit later.
Speaker 3:And what other data architecture systems are enabling this LLM? I know you mentioned that you guys use Snowflake, and you have Salesforce from your guest side. Can you talk a little bit about how the LOM might interact with those tools, or is it not quite there yet? It's more interacting with, like, your general content about the hotel business and then plugging in the personalized data in the future?
Speaker 1:It's a bit of both. Obviously, we started with all the internal stuff that we need, that we could connect to, and and that we where we can, you know, control the information very well. And that is still at the core of the system. But we are planning to connect it, definitely to sales, first, for the corporate market to connect all that data into theirs because and there's several reasons for that. A lot of them are basically because all the hotels need information about the corporate deals when they are doing bookings directly to the hotels.
Speaker 1:I mean, not all bookings go through web or through the sales agents. A lot goes directly to the hotel. So we're gonna do that. We're obviously, like I said, we're in forms of booking systems. It's gonna try to connect it to the Vietnamese, me and me, TriBe, everything that goes around there.
Speaker 1:It's really exciting to try to connect it also to Flex, keeping that we are rolling out now as the new housekeeping system and connecting information there. Because, you know, you can do talk to your housekeeping personnel there, and you could actually gather up information. And if someone does, you know, rebook a room or wanted you to later check out, you can get all that information flowing through. The whole dish of warehouse that we are at the moment is still in space like Matillion. So, yeah, that would be, very useful and rich source of information, but we haven't quite decided yet what kind of information that we wanna pull from there.
Speaker 1:So we're still working on that one a bit. There's a lot of marketing information in Braze that we wanna connect, and there are also a lot of we're building up GDP systems now and everything. So there yeah. I I don't really see a limit to this. We just haven't made the full road map yet.
Speaker 1:To be honest, it's gone faster than I thought it would, and I'm quite an impatient person. So I usually push limits a lot, but, yeah, I've been taken by surprise here. We need to speed up the road map a bit. Yeah. It's not really my doing.
Speaker 1:It's just definitely the teams that have been working on it. They've been great, and they've been I think what's really cool is that they've been a combination of, people that came from hotels into the technology department with a very good view on how do you run a hotel, what are actually our challenges, with the engineers that can, you know, build solutions? And I think that is actually quite unique in our tech team that we have chosen to have a variety of people from hotel and engineer business in the tech team. We've also chosen very carefully to have some people that have, you know they've they've never gone to technical schools or engineering courses. They just train themselves, combine them with all the sort of, you know, structured engineers that have thought that this is the only way to think so that we can mix all these competencies and energies together.
Speaker 1:And I think that's what makes us able to move this fast is that we're not stuck on this mythology or this mythology or only that. We are seeing it across, and I yeah. Basically, I think that's where the magic happens.
Speaker 3:So I wanna pivot to cyber. I know it's a huge top of mind for hoteliers everywhere. The good news since COVID is that the industry has come a long way. And from a digital transformation perspective, hotels are operating more efficiently than ever. RevPARs are through their roof, so all good stuff.
Speaker 3:But with that comes a big loop for hackers. What are the biggest shifts been from what you've seen from when you started to now in terms of cybersecurity, cyber threats, the changing nature of those threats? What are your biggest learnings from a cybersecurity perspective in your last 4 or 5 years at the business?
Speaker 4:I think one of my main learnings is basically that it's impossible to protect yourself fully. So what you need to do is to prepare yourself for what will happen, not if, but when we get in fact. I think that's huge learning, and then we have to stop pretending that it won't happen to us and that we can protect ourselves. Obviously, with the introduction of Gen AI, it's written at a speed that is just, you know, kinda hard to understand, which means that the hackers have field days every day. They can write so much code, and even we can become, you know, mal hackers by writing code wrongly as well.
Speaker 4:So I think to train people on code and how to recognize irregularities has become very important. Monitoring irregularities has become very important. There's obviously all the basic stuff with the try to shield yourself and all the good old firewalls are still there, but monitoring a lot of data and and the regularities are bigger. Training yourself because scam is everywhere. Luckily I'm not gonna say luckily because it's not a good thing, but, I mean, everyone else is also doing that.
Speaker 4:The banks are training people because you get a lot of scam from banks and fake phone calls, and you get it from all over the place. So I think, basically, we have to work together as a a society and together with the governance involvement in different countries to figure out how to protect ourselves. So it's not a tech problem anymore, and it's not a business problem. It's a problem for all of us.
Speaker 3:What's next for strawberry? Where do you see the next 5, 7 years of digital transformation? Obviously, you're building a lot of gen AI capabilities on top of these systems. Are there any other areas of focus or some of those 2030 priorities where technology you think will play a key role that we haven't talked about yet?
Speaker 4:I think what will be most insightful apart from that is definitely how we work with insights. And and to me, AI is part of working with insights and making good decisions or making efficient decisions. But I think that all the insight that we will now gather and we can also, you know, put on top of the loyalty programs and the corporate deals that we have to continue to expand our universe so that we can add partners and services that will make us your sort of your chosen chosen friend for not only a hotel room or that spa, but a lot of other more like our chosen your chosen experience partner. I think that is where the technology will help us basically getting insights and then actually, you know, making it easy to connect to these different partners. And then I actually think there's a lot still to be done in supply chain in hospitality.
Speaker 4:Maybe that is my retail heart speaking, but I sort of really wanna get into that. And at that point, I think that what used to be sort of, you know, hypes around blockchain and everything that is sort of, you know, hasn't really gone anywhere. I think if we talk about logistics and actually chain between partners and ourselves, blockchain is very relevant. It might have been a high for all our customers. We had to go, you know, looking on blockchain and all of that.
Speaker 4:But when you talk about links of technology and then there's some partners who are operating together, I think that there's a lot still on everything that has to do with data architecture, blockchain, and different ways of connecting together through technology. I think that's going to be super exciting.
Speaker 3:And when you say supply chain, you mean purchasing of FF and E, like linens and soaps and things like that? Yeah.
Speaker 4:And food. Good god. I mean, we we have so much food and drinks. You know, all the supplies that come in and out of the hotels a day, I think to be more efficient on following that chain, it's also one of the areas that we work mostly to be more sustainable. And, you know, I mean, for a hospitality company, we wanna work with sustainability in our own business environment.
Speaker 4:Not I mean, it's great to plant trees, not against that, but where we can make a difference is our own supply chain and the buildings that we are actually hosting to make them energy efficient. And we are very involved in sustainability chains, and also we really wanna work with that, and I think that's to work then with technology and then tracking supply chain and everything that we buy and how we, you know, wash linens and how much food. We've done a lot about food waste. I think we're really industry pioneers in food waste, Everything that we do in our menus around sustainable sourcing and also presenting food, I think there's still a lot that we can do. But we're providing data, and we're linking them together now.
Speaker 4:You know, the big corporate clients are getting reports back on their sustainability rating within us. So together, we're pushing and pulling each other forward. So anything that we can connect to data change. And, also, I think that with all the regulations that are coming from EU, for us especially, then on being able to trace where everything comes from, how did you buy, technology is really the only way to do that.
Speaker 3:Are there specific technologies that are enabling some of that food waste analysis, like menu optimization? Is that mostly menu? I think your POS or are there other software?
Speaker 4:It's a lot of that extremely new, but, obviously, it's also the whole story, you know, the insights and the data warehouse and everything that we have in our data platforms then. And there will be a lot of information coming from the customer data platform that we are currently implementing as well. So I don't think there's, like, one answer to it. I think that we will have to combine data. And, again, I think them combining all of this transactional data and facts with the soft data that you get from the Aeroskout will maybe be a key to cross the insights and get real insights and sense check if what we're doing is making any sense and has an effect at all.
Speaker 3:There's one question I always ask at the end of these interviews. I love to know, is there something where you feel like the industry has it all wrong? Or is there anything that you kind of look right and you're like, how do people not realize this?
Speaker 4:Actually, I think a lot of companies are still too idealistically focused on customer journey. It's basically of course, it is one of them it might be the key thing in everything that we do. But I've seen this is not only hospitality press. It's also retail. We wanna get things personalized to a level that I think that, to me as a customer, really isn't interesting.
Speaker 4:Like, if you wanna customize your shower curtain or customize my door, customize my bed, I think that we're putting too much effort into customizing things that are not really what makes a difference when you do a booking or when you buy something instead of focusing on just removing pain points. So I think that's a general thing that has come with this conversation in ecommerce. And just because we can do something, we wanna do it, then we sometimes forget that this is not really what's important to the customer. It's just a lot of money to get very specialized into an area that will really make a difference, and then maybe we forget the basic things that mean something to me when I come to Deontal. And I think, for me, at least, I mean, there's nothing any technical system or solution could make up for it if the staff weren't warm and welcoming.
Speaker 4:So I think we forget sometimes to cater for our employees so that they can be our primary source of customer service, and that is human to human, basically. So for me, my mantra is is not to make the guest journey great with the digital tools, but the more I can make the people that work there great with digital tools, I think that is maybe the technology's most important contribution to the guest journey is that we secure the human interactions and that they are good.
Speaker 2:Well, Carry
Speaker 3:on it. This has been a great episode. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much, Jordan.
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 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.
