Hospitality management company Charlestowne Hotels is investing in new technology solutions across its hotel portfolio.
Charlestowne’s latest tech investments provide the infrastructure necessary to manage all 50+ hotels from one central hub while strengthening the framework for a number of the company’s core disciplines, including marketing services, revenue management, strategic operations and food-and-beverage management, the company said. These cross-functional tech solutions help the Charlestowne team utilize real-time data integration and analytics to better forecast and guide strategy for each individual property and market.
Charestowne’s core technology objective is to streamline back-end operations for staff to ensure their time is spent on building guest relationships and developing personal touch points rather than managing protocols and processes.
“This past year, technical creative problem solving has been at the heart of our efforts and plays an essential role in our model for success,” said Maxwell Spangler, corporate technology and systems manager at Charlestowne Hotels. “While these efforts were in play well before the recent developments with the labor market, they’ve never been more valuable. It was our priority to identify efficiencies and new technologies that arm our hotel teams with a spectrum of platforms to help them work more efficiently.”
New Tech Developments
Finance: To support corporate and on-site operations teams, Charlestowne has introduced a new budget and forecasting tool. The interactive platform provides an enhanced performance module and features real-time labor insights from its payroll system and a strong analytics dashboard to provide greater visibility into hotel performance, resulting in deeper insights and control over the business.
Operations: The management company also recently integrated a new property inspection platform to perform a variety of operations-based audits, facilitating quality assurance inspections from property inspections to food presentation and quality of brand standards. The innovative platform allows the on-site teams to provide instant feedback to the Charlestowne corporate office, delivering a richer view of the facility and operations beyond its initial customer feedback.
Marketing: The in-house corporate marketing team has developed a customized enterprise project-management platform to streamline internal communication and provide frictionless campaign management. The platform provides teams with deep visibility on campaign analytics, the status of all marketing projects, overall complexity, and estimated turnaround time for completion. The use of this platform over the past two years has helped the marketing team increase collaboration and triple their output while elevating creative and brand standards.
Food and Beverage: The management company has implemented a new food-and-beverage customer relationship management system to integrate F&B data into hotel property-management system and CRM systems, allowing individual properties to pivot and change menu items as needed while still maintaining design and brand consistency.
To further support the development of a stronger, more collaborative F&B culture, the new knowledge base platform grants Charlestowne immediate access to key F&B resources and information.
“It's important to recognize that hotel technology has an incredible effect on the overall guest experience,” Spangler said. “By continuing to integrate new technological solutions at our properties, we’re keeping our customers at the center of everything we do. This includes implementation of our zero-trust security policy, in-house SMS notification platform to dispatch internal communications, as well as hotel-specific technologies that are standard in the world of COVID-19 – such as QR codes, cashless tipping applications, mobile-key or self-service kiosks.”
Looking ahead, Charlestowne Hotels has announced the planned development of a revenue management business intelligence product that will deliver information needed to make time-sensitive inventory-related pricing decisions.