Hospitality management platform Cloudbeds has acquired guest engagement solution Whistle. Together, the companies will integrate their technologies to remove friction points in the guest journey through a single platform, they announced at HITEC.
“The term contactless is becoming far too synonymous with hospitality,” said Richard Castle, COO and co-founder of Cloudbeds. “We want more contact between lodging businesses and their guests to create purposeful touchpoints, answer questions and provide guidance through the entire guest journey. Research shows that engaged guests spend more, leave better reviews and the majority prefer to communicate via digital channels—Whistle makes it all possible. Whether it’s a booking engine chat or front desk text request, Whistle positions Cloudbeds customers to be a part of the guest journey from discovery to post-stay, removing barriers that might hinder a booking or positive review.”
Whistle offers unified communication tools, digitized arrival experiences and more. Current customers include major hospitality brands and hoteliers around the world, including Choice Hotels International, Accor, IHG Hotels & Resorts and Four Sisters Inn, among others. Founded in 2015, the company has been rated the No. 1 guest messaging software by Hotel Tech Report for five consecutive years.
Whistle will play an important role in the company’s vision for creating a fully frictionless solution that enables guests to engage with lodging businesses on their own terms. Simultaneously, it will give lodging businesses a unified platform to more efficiently manage points of contact throughout the entire guest journey.
“Our goal has always been to give lodging businesses a unique, easy-to-use solution that simplifies and streamlines the way they communicate,” said Christopher Hovanessian, CEO and co-founder of Whistle. “Cloudbeds has a clear vision for building a better, more frictionless hospitality experience via a unified platform. Together, we can make a greater impact on the industry that benefits not only the guest, but also the property staff and the lodging business itself.”
Following its Series D funding announcement in November, Cloudbeds has doubled down on its commitment to “more reservations, happier guests” with three acquisitions and the introduction of several new product offerings to address major pain points for both operators and guests. The company has nearly tripled in size over the past year, with more solutions set to roll out in Q3 designed to help hoteliers grow their businesses.
myDigitalOffice Deal
Also at HITEC, myDigitalOffice, a hotel performance management platform, announced the acquisition of Datavision Technologies, an industry leader in hotel data analytics and business intelligence for luxury resorts.
Datavision's hospitality BI platform provides a 360-degree view into any hotel operation, enabling customers to create bespoke reports and dashboards that contain insights that elevate operations and customer service levels. Datavision's tools, now combined with MDO's growing data lake, positions customers to have access to a state-of-the-art data and reporting platform.
"We're thrilled to welcome Datavision into the MDO family and couldn't be more excited for our amazing customers, like Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, and for our industry as a whole," shared Ali Moloo, MDO founder and CEO.
Datavision and myDigitalOffice customers will now benefit from the combined experience and strength of a globally dispersed team of more than 250 people providing 24x7x365 support and offering more than 250 hotel system integrations.
Datavision co-founder and CEO Sudharshan Chary added, "For over two decades, Datavision has been a pioneer and a passionate advocate for business intelligence in the hospitality industry. Our guiding principles have always been to deliver class-leading insights coupled with the very best white glove service to our customers, who are distributed across the globe. Datavision and myDigitalOffice share the same customer-first philosophies, and we cannot think of a better time to join forces with the team at MDO to accelerate the evolution of the next generation of data analytics."
Leveraging the alignment of myDigitalOffice and Datavision Technologies will enable hoteliers to automate and enhance reporting, benefit from real-time BI insights, and focus more sharply on hotel guests to suit their ever-evolving needs.