In this week’s episode of the Hotel Moment podcast, John Burns, President of Hospitality Technology Consulting, joins Karen Stephens, Revinate CMO, to offer a solution to the age-old problem of, quite simply, knowing who your guests are. More specifically, John emphasizes the need to move from “anonymous to appreciated” when it comes to recognizing your repeat guests and providing them with the value that a loyal guest would expect and deserve. John explains how hoteliers can solve the guest anonymity problem with data-driven insights from AI that allow for unique personalization at every interaction.
Tune in and find out how to build a tech stack that includes AI to ensure no guest goes unrecognized, so that you can build a database full of loyal bookers.
Meet your host
As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.
Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.
Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com
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Transcript
Intro – 00:00:04: Welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.
Karen Stephens – 00:00:36: Hello, and welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast. I am your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate. And today, I’m thrilled to have John Burns, the President of Hospitality Technology Consulting, joining me. With decades of experience in the hospitality industry, John has been a key figure in helping hotels and a number of hotel groups navigate the increasingly complex world of technology and electronic distribution. He’s worked with countless hotels and travel companies, guiding them in selecting the right technology solutions to improve operations and enhance guest experiences. We’re excited to hear his insights on personalization, technology adoption, and the future of hospitality technology. So the minute that I saw John for this interview, I knew that we recognized each other. I’ve been in hospitality for many years, and so has John. So I’m sure many of our listeners out there have come across John certainly in distribution conferences, and he’s really a stalwart of our industry. So we had a great conversation today, really talking about the age-old problem of recognizing a repeat guest when they show up at the front desk, and how hoteliers should think about technology and the importance of staying ahead of the curve, not being late to the party, and really embracing technology adoption. So here you go. I give you John Burns.
Hi, John. Welcome to the podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
John Burns – 00:01:55: Karen, it’s my pleasure indeed.
Karen Stephens – 00:01:58: So, John, we’ve both been in the industry for decades. Let’s face it, you know, it’s been a while here. So let me ask you, a big part of your career has been focused on technology. How did you first get involved in the intersection of hospitality and technology? And what has kept you passionate about it?
John Burns – 00:02:15: Well, let’s see. It was accidental. I started out in hotel operations, and that moved into hotel sales. And at one point, someone came along and said, “We’re starting a new reservation program. We’re going to build a computer system and attempt to use it around the world to take reservations.” They replaced Telex. Fair enough. “Would you be interested in being part of that program?” And I said, yes. And it just went from there. So I moved from one company to another running reservation programs and then went out on my own as a consultant to hotel brands around the world, helping them optimize their reservation program. Called it reservation, then became electronic distribution. And now it’s really a promotion vehicle. The world shops electronically, buys electronically. We need to be part of that. So I helped them optimize the program.
Karen Stephens – 00:03:13: Great. Okay. So I think when you’re talking about digital distribution now, personalization is what we’re talking about all the time, I feel like in this day and age. So it’s become a key focus for many hoteliers. Do you think the industry is overcomplicating it, or do you think hoteliers are struggling to get it right? What’s your take about that?
John Burns – 00:03:31: Personalization is essential. Okay. In this e-commerce world, people want to feel first recognized and then appreciated. And that includes in their shopping, and their booking, and their interaction with hotels. So is it overcomplicated? I’m not sure it is. It’s complex to achieve. And that’s because we’re still struggling to pull all the pieces together for it. But it’s inherently complex. It’s inherently important. The reality is some organizations can put together their programs, and all their platform themselves. In other cases, they need to use trusted partners. But somehow we have to move from anonymity, from the point where a guest walks up to the front desk, and our first question to them is, “Have you ever stayed with us before?” to, “Welcome back. Good to see you again. Glad you’re a guest with us, and with our brand.” That transition from anonymous to appreciated is vital.
Karen Stephens – 00:04:36: Yeah. Isn’t it funny that no matter how long we’ve been operating in this industry, solving that problem, moving from have you ever been here before to it’s great to see you again is still the holy grail. I mean, that’s like level one of personalization. Just recognize I’ve already been here. Right.
John Burns – 00:04:54: And it’s still an area where we fall short in the hotel business. We’ve got more and more tools. We’ve got our Customer Data Platforms coming together. These are the successors to databases. We’ve got better tools to tap into the platform to try to mine what’s there. We’ve got better opportunities in PMS, and CRS, and the accompanying technology to show whoever is using that technology information about the guest, and how and why we should recognize them. But we’re still struggling to pull all the parts together. So we can get the right information to the right place at the right time.
Karen Stephens – 00:05:34: I think you hit that right on the head because we hoteliers need to leverage the technology. But what role do you think training and support? So you can have the technology running in the background, but once the guest arrives on property, now you’ve got the staff that needs to be able to leverage that technology. So how do you see training and support play a role? And what advice do you have for hoteliers to be able to leverage the technology at the human level, at the staff level?
John Burns – 00:06:00: The training and support is one of the last cars in the train. We’ve got a lot of cars in advance in terms of putting together the infrastructure, putting together the program, deciding for our specific hotel what personalization is, what we mean by it in terms of greeting the guests when they call, if they happen to, when they arrive at the front desk, when they arrive at the food and beverage outlet. Towards the end, once we have our structure in place, then we have to help our staff to use the cues, the props that we give them. In an electronic world, most of our staff are very comfortable looking at a screen of some size. They need to be reminded why this is important. The personalization is part of a relationship that we’re building and maintaining. So we need to remind our staff that the gesture of saying, “Welcome back”, or “Good morning, glad to see you”, or whatever it is, or, “Can I refill your coffee, or would you like a coffee to go?” So many little things that come together to make a person feel appreciated, that these are all essential ingredients in a personalization campaign. So a training? Yep. I don’t think it requires a lot of training, but it’s training less than the mechanic in the reason why. That this is important to our guests, to their satisfaction, and to our success.
Karen Stephens – 00:07:28: Wow, that’s really interesting. I think let’s talk a little bit about staffing. I know we’ve been dealing with an ongoing labor shortage, I think, within hospitality for a few years now. But I think you hit on something really important there. The generations coming up are very familiar with screens, and technology is not a barrier for them to use technology. And hopefully, I mean, one thing we strive at Revinate, at least, is that our UI is very clean, easy to use, obvious. But I think you hit on something there. It’s how do you train hospitality itself, training somebody how to be hospitable? How do you think about hotels making sure that their staff is understanding how to leverage that technology and do the part about the human touch, which really makes the biggest difference to the guest?
John Burns – 00:08:12: I don’t know the answer to that, but I’ll say I’m hopeful. The pandemic was incredibly stressful for the industry and for the society. But I think it reminded, hotel operators of the value, of the importance of their staff. And I’d like to think that we now have a better appreciation of the people who work at the front desk, who work in the kitchen, who work making the beds. We have a higher value, higher respect, and better communication in a lot of cases with them than we had in the past. They’re not expendable. They’re essential. There are times when I don’t care about the general manager, but I care about the housekeeper. I’d like to be able to get in my room. So we’ve had something of an enlightenment, a forced enlightenment. And I’m encouraged that our staff are now seen as more important and their training and satisfaction and retention is essential. So we’ve always got a ways to go. We ask people to do hard jobs. We keep changing management and changing directions and so on. But I do believe that overall. Drift is in a positive direction.
Karen Stephens – 00:09:25: So you mentioned a moment ago that the training of the staff — if you’re looking at a train, a literal train, that’s the caboose. That’s at the back of the line after you do all the other things. And I mentioned in the introduction, you run a consulting company. You’ve done that for many, many years. So when it comes to selecting and integrating the right technology, if we think about the beginning of the train, what are the most important factors for the hoteliers to consider? Where’s the start of this process?
John Burns – 00:09:52: Really good question. There are some things that will determine where the starting point is. Am I an independent property or am I affiliated with a chain? If I’m a chain, they’re going to have certain practices and processes in place. If I’m independent, I have a totally different workflow in terms of trying to decide what I want to do and who my partners are. The next one is, “If I had the opportunity to do anything, what would I do in terms of personalization of my property? Is it the front desk greeting? Is it emails? Is it any number of things that I could be doing to say, hello, welcome back. We appreciate you. We’re glad you’re here.” Okay, so putting together what I’d like and then saying, “Okay, if I had all these resources, here’s what I’d do. What resources do I have? What access to database? What ability to put a message in front of a desk clerk or a server in a restaurant or at a bar? What do I have that I can use, I can leverage to accomplish personalization?” And once I understand what I’d like to do in the toolkit, then I can say, “Are there other tools I can add, such as Revinate and the data and process available there to accomplish this?” All right, I assemble my program, the structure. Now I can talk to my staff and say, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s why we’re going to do it. Here’s where you fit.”
Karen Stephens – 00:11:17: Got it. And in your opinion, which tools or technologies have proven to be the most effective in driving guest loyalty and improving overall satisfaction? So there’s a lot of options for technology out there. Is there anything that stands out as kind of the key to driving that loyalty or it might be a combination of things?
John Burns – 00:11:36: It’s several things. Certainly, we’ve got to have the data, and that means the databases or the Customer Data Platforms or what have you, where we can extract history in order to give us guidance in the future. But at the same time, some of the tools that we’re using are becoming easier to use. The current or latest generation of property management systems, and point of sale systems, and so on, require less intensive attention from the user, from the hotel staff member. So they are now able to have more of a conversation with the guest. And that’s good. If they have a conversation, they’re listening. And that’s a big part of personalization. They’re listening and they can respond. If we give them the right amount of detail, they’ll know what to say to that person once they’ve listened to them. In the past, when the guest was almost an interruption because it took all my time just to read the screen on the property management system to sort out what was required to flip from one screen to another, the guest was underserved. I’m hopeful that the emerging generation of technology, and new PMSs, and other related systems are allowing us to listen more and communicate more. And that is the foundation of personalization.
Karen Stephens – 00:12:56: I think that that is really a great observation. I’m curious to get your take because I think that things are changing so rapidly now, certainly with AI on the scene where you kind of hit on it there before. There’s so much data that somebody has to process themselves to get to, you know, to look up from the screen and say something to the guest. When you think about AI, how do you think about that application affecting the guest experience and also the staff experience as we get more and more robust data sets being able to process faster and faster?
John Burns – 00:13:27: A lot about AI scares me. We’re just in the infancy of its understanding and adoption. But I’m thinking that it has the opportunity to be a highly useful filter for us. When I say filter, I mean we have a mountain of data that we somehow have to analyze, and distill, and draw, from a microsecond in order to achieve this personalization. I’m hoping that AI will take this mountain and say, “Here is the one thing that matters. Tomorrow is this guest’s birthday.” Flash it on the screen, birthday tomorrow, and the person at the desk can say, whoever it is, “appy birthday. Hope you enjoy your birthday tomorrow. Glad you’re going to be here with us.” Or we can send a muffin or a cupcake with a candle in it or any number of things. I’m hoping that AI can help us through the jungle of data to find exactly what we’re looking for that’s going to be appropriate under the circumstances. Does that make sense?
Karen Stephens – 00:14:30: That absolutely makes sense. As you mentioned, the problem now isn’t how do I find all my data and get it in one place? The problem is now, “Wow, now I’ve got so much data, I have no idea what to do with it.” And the goal is still the same, right? The goal is still ultimately to be able to personalize guest communications and the guest experience. So I think you hit that on the head. I really do. So as we think about for hoteliers, I don’t think you’re alone in that AI can be, I don’t know if intimidating is the word, but there’s a lot to be concerned about if you don’t really understand how it goes in. So for those hoteliers out there who still might be hesitant to invest in new technology concerns about the learning curve or costs, what would you say to encourage them to start to dip their toes in that water? How do you get over that?
John Burns – 00:15:15: I think part of it is a recognition that the world is evolving and we don’t have a choice. We can’t say the good old days are where I’m going to stay. The marketplace, our guests are moving forward in their expectations and our competition is moving forward. We can’t lag. So the question is, we have to do something. How do we manage the risk? How do we learn? How do we say what is a safe course, but a progressive course, something that’s going to move us forward. So we’re strongly competitive in the marketplace and we can go to conferences. We can go to consultants. We can go to a brand in some cases and say, “What are you doing?” And we can go in some cases to suppliers like a Revinate and say, “What’s going on? If I want to have a moderate footprint, if I want to move forward at a moderate pace or a slower pace or an aggressive pace, what are my options?” So we can’t ignore it. And we have to be thinking about what’s wise, what is measured and how we do it in a safe way. But we have to do it quickly.
Karen Stephens – 00:16:30: And finally, one last question for you. Over your career, you’ve seen tremendous change in both hospitality and tech landscapes. What’s been one of the most rewarding moments and accomplishments for you personally? I know that’s a big question.
John Burns – 00:16:44: It’s an interesting one, and I’ve got an unusual answer to that. I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of companies, going in and doing assignments, doing research within the hotel organizations, and frequently putting together temporary teams of hotel staff. And we’ve come together as a team or as a committee, and I have pressured people to do research, to think about options, to think about how we do things differently. And in so many cases, I said, “I’m not sure this is right. I’m not the right person to be doing this.” And I would pressure them. “You’re the only person I’ve got. Let’s do this. Let’s make it happen.” And a few weeks later, people are saying, “I didn’t know I could do that.” They’ve got a new confidence. And that’s been one of the great pleasures of pulling people and saying, “You can do this. Give it a try. We’ll work through it.” And then seeing the pride at the end of it.
Karen Stephens – 00:17:43: That’s a great one. Well, thank you so much, John. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for being my guest.
John Burns – 00:17:49: It’s been my pleasure. I love talking about this stuff.
Outro – 00:17:57: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com forward/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.