Case Study: Grupo Posadas

Below is a brief overview of the Grupo Posadas client case study. For more detail, please see the full case study here. Please check back for more case studies in the near future.

Overview

Grupos Posadas is one of the largest hotel companies in Latin America. It operates six proprietary hotel brands – including 91 hotels in beach resort destinations – in Mexico and several countries in South America and the United States.

Posadas has grown through ongoing development and the exploration of new hospitality concepts. The company continues its commitment to creating value through innovative strategies and new technology solutions. It has over 14,000 employees and annual revenues of US$400 million.

Challenges

Previous procedures lacked controls to verify whether the information was complete and/or correctly received. Reservations could have been lost in the process. Additional setbacks in the model included:

• Slow information flow between channels, which encouraged sales managers to black out dates/rates in an effort to prevent overbooking (black outs were often not set at the right booking level so hotels were not selling out)
• Sales managers were not focused on sales but instead on administrative activities and paperwork
• Fragmented information flow prevented the call centers from applying the same revenue rules to all reservations, resulting in a lack of price integrity
• Poor information led to different views of the sales statistics, which affected the decision making process
• Maintaining the extranets of merchant model operators like Hotels.com and Expedia required a great deal of manual work, including inputting of rates and inventory, faxing of reservation information, etc., all of which prevented the agents from focusing on selling new reservations
• Use of a variety of brands of property management systems across the company led to high set up and maintenance costs
• The CRS had a tremendous amount of information about Posadas’ customers, but full advantage of the information was not received because it could not be accessed in real time
• Redundant, legacy systems, interface
• Maintenance, and infrastructure investments resulted in a high TCO of technology

Strategy

To develop a sustainable competitive advantage that would enable the company to maintain its leadership in the industry, Posadas wanted a solution that would:

• Focus on increased revenue, optimize asset utilization and improve guests’ overall experience
• Determine optimal rate for every transaction (sell “last available room” in real-time to all distribution channels, while still applying revenue management rules)
• Tailor pricing and property experience based on individual guest needs and potential value
• Provide an online single image that could integrate all the distribution and sales points
• Centralized inventory and reservations
• Centralized and automated sales force
• Centralized payments to travel agencies
• Centralized repository of data available to guests, wholesalers, corporate clients, travel agencies, etc.
• Provide a new set of technology tools that improved operation performance and flexibility while decreasing costs
• Quickly integrate wide array of additional properties into system (either due to M&A or organic expansion)
• Reduce growth rate in the level of IT expenditure (both for chain and property owners) while improving efficiency
  • Share data between applications for “real-time” decisions / transactions
  • Efficiently collect and utilize customer information / feedback (CRM)
  • Improve labor productivity

Results

With AltiusPAR, Grupo Posadas now takes an integrated approach to its distribution, revenue management, and sales and catering business. Unlike existing solutions, AltiusPAR was able to provide Grupo Posadas with:

• On-line, real-time centralized inventory control
• Modular architecture
• Integrated state-of-the-art elements such as:
  • Revenue management (at a transaction level)
  • Channel management
  • Sales force automation (group sales and catering)
  • Acount management
  • Contract management
  • Business intelligence
  • Loyalty programs
• Solid technology built on standard platforms (e.g., Lintel and Oracle technology)
• Technology integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite
• Data integrity across processes