Partner companies Tafer Hotels & Resorts and the Villa Group, representing two collections of luxury hotels and resorts in Mexico, have just introduced Alice to all 14 of their distinct vacation properties. Overseeing these high-end collections to ensure that the millions of unique moving parts flow together seamlessly is Carlos Aquino, VP of sales and business development, who was searching for better ways to connect his hotel departments and staff, and integrate the resorts with one another.
“We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to make improvements to our services and create more opportunities to wow our guests,” Aquino said in a statement. “As independent companies, we have not always had an efficient ability to integrate all the systems and the myriad of platforms to complement our own custom development.”
The properties’ management team and staff considered the hospitality software they were using to be very limited in what it could do and lacking any features for guests.
“Our customers are very mobile driven—the way they interact with us nowadays is more on mobile devices,” Aquino said. “We need technology that is one step ahead of that, such as the possibility of integrating chatbots. We’re always looking to meet the customer where they are, not forcing them to be where we are. Capturing data is the most important benefit, and once it’s captured then we can analyze it.”
The data’s usefulness expands well beyond benefiting just each hotel individually. By using Alice, Aquino said the goals are centralizing data from all its properties, being able to analyze and compare the properties and creating a new set of benchmarks within the hotel service standards.
With 14 properties, the two resort groups relied on a rudimentary system of radios for communication before signing on with Alice. “The biggest challenge in more complex properties like ours has been the mobility of our associates,” Aquino said. “We have not been able to always identify where the staff are around property. Hundreds of radios. We couldn’t find a solution before that provided the mobility required. People at a resort are moving all over the place.”
Alice addressed this by working through mobile phones that everyone has access to and takes advantage of the internet coverage that wasn’t being fully utilized.