Hotels have been called out for years as being slow to embrace new technology. Yet signs last year pointed to a shift, and the buzz has been growing even louder this year.
Oracle has been one of the beneficiaries of that trend. In the last fiscal year, the company saw the number of properties using its Opera Cloud hospitality platform – which has been around since 2016 – double to more than 9,000.
Among the brands selecting or extending their use of Oracle’s services were Choice Hotels, EOS Hospitality, ONYX Hospitality Group, Scandic Hotels Group, Thon Hotels and VAI Resort.
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“With travel levels increasingly on the rise, hotel brands are looking to technology to stay efficient, profitable and capture the hearts and minds of guests to increase loyalty,” said Laura Calin, senior vice president Oracle Hospitality. “Our comprehensive platform enables hoteliers of all sizes to add the capabilities they need to meet their unique business objectives while elevating guest satisfaction.”
Calin, who was promoted to SVP this month, has been with Oracle since its 2014 acquisition of Micros, where she had worked since the 1990s – starting as a lead developer on the original Opera system. To discuss the shifting landscape in hospitality, PhocusWire caught up with Calin at this week’s HITEC conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
A lot of the talk we’re hearing at the conference is about how technology is opening opportunities to pursue new advancements that might have seemed out of reach not long ago. What’s your view on that?
If there was something that the pandemic proved to the world and to the industry, it’s that things that people believed before to be too hard, too long, too difficult to do — it can be done. Somehow, some people figured it out and they got it done. So with that comes pressure on the entire industry. … Now, all of a sudden, there are ways to do these things we [once] thought was so hard. We thought it’s going to take 10 years, and it’s going to take thousands of people and this big budget. Now we’ve proved we can get some things out.
So speed to market is what absolutely everybody is after. You cannot do it with legacy technology. If you’re trying to put Band-Aid solutions and whatnot, it’s a loss. So that’s probably what has precipitated the [more rapid] adoption of cloud.
Tell us what you’re seeing.
We are really overwhelmed. We’re trying to keep up with the amount of demand that we have. We have now 9,000 hotels on the platform, and we have about 8,000 committed, so we have had to challenge ourselves to scale even faster. In the fourth quarter, we had 1,500 installations. And we have to go even faster. Our goal for next year is 2,000 per quarter. Just because we have the demand. That’s what we’re trying to get to.
How do you get faster?
It’s been a lot of investments in automation around data migration and around how do we get a hundred hotels live every night. We do things in what we call pods or waves. So we group hotels together. We’ve done that a lot. Thon Hotels, for example, they had 95 properties, and they decided [they wanted] all the hotels in one night [to] go live at the same time.
What could go wrong?
[Laughs] We were like, “Are you sure?” And it went so well. What they did, they invested initially in getting people excited about the project. It was really important that they had buy-in from the hotels, from operations, from all the departments.
They actually went live not just with the property management, they also went live with what we call our central component of our platform … It’s more like brand enterprise-level functions versus what they’re utilizing in their hotels. But it’s still a single unified technology that runs everything. So they went live with all that in one night. They created T-shirts, they had Opera Cloud cookies.
What did the T-shirts say?
They had “I’m an Opera Cloud expert. Come ask me questions.” Everyone wanted the T-shirt! So they took the time to learn the system. And so it went so well.
As you can imagine, there is an approach, how we approach training, how we approach configuration, how we approach the go live and so forth. But now we have all that, and we can go as fast or as slow as people want us to be.
It doesn’t seem long ago that we were hearing how reluctant so many hotels were to make the transition to the cloud. Is that narrative changing?
I definitely think that. We still see some reluctance here and there. For the most part, hotels are like, “When can you get me there?” It’s not a question of if; it’s how fast can you go?
How do you keep up?
We have a big re-seller partner network. We have about 80 partners around the globe that help us with the implementation, even [in] China, that we have engaged to help us with the scale.
Can you elaborate on some of the innovations that make this possible?
I’ll give you two things to think about. One is this open system architecture. In general, cloud-native platforms claim this. For us, we took a step further. It’s a technological term, but it’s a good one. It called API first. So that means whatever people see in Opera Cloud is accessible by partners or customers to create new solutions on top.
So let’s say a customer, big or small, wants to create their own guest technology for checking in, for checking out, for stay services, whatever it is. If they wanted to offer a particular room to a guest, or if they wanted to do a room move in between, or do whatever fancy things, they never have to worry about “Do I have an API available for that from Oracle?” They can do whatever our system can do, so there are no limitations in what technology vendors or customers can do on their own.
We have more than 3,000 APIs [and] all these APIs are available in a self-service manner. So if you’re a partner or a customer, you can go to our development portal. All the APIs are there, we give you recipes, even that you put directly in your code. So we help you with accelerating the coding part and then even going live.
It’s like your own app store?
Exactly. You can get access to the APIs. You can also get access to our marketplace. We have over 500 partners in the marketplace right now, and we have a thousand more developing. We have seen an explosion of innovation because all this access is free of charge. We wanted to enable innovation. We wanted to bring in the startups. We wanted to bring in some partners that were afraid of the hospitality industry before because it’s so fragmented and it was so difficult to integrate. Now we have seen some partners that have come from other spaces into hospitality because it’s easy, because it doesn’t cost anything.
So we have opened the system. With that, now customers have choice. If they’re like, I want to try some new solution that I’ve seen here at HITEC, it’s very easy to turn it on. Like, tomorrow, you can turn it on. You can try it. You can fail fast or succeed fast. And then you can decide if you want to roll it out or not. And these types of projects used to take years. And now it’s a matter of weeks that people can do it. It’s extraordinary.
You mentioned two innovations. What’s the other?
The other thing that I believe is making a big shift is speed to market. I talked about this unified platform that that we have, which is for both for properties as well as the enterprise, the brand functions themselves.
So I’m just going to take Scandic Hotels, for example. Scandic has all their hotels on Opera Cloud as well as all their brand functions: their distribution to OTAs, to GDS, whatever, it’s still Opera Cloud.
Why is that important? … Say you have some big vision. That’s great, right? … But usually people think about maybe just the sell side. “I want to introduce a new business model. I want to sell my hotel by the hour; instead of just offering an early check-in late checkout, I’m going to sell you two hours extra or three hours.” So they come up with a big idea, and then they implement it on the sales channels, and it goes great.
But now they haven’t thought about operations. They haven’t thought about what hotels need to do, housekeeping, or what should the person at the front desk tell [guests] or anything. … Because they tried to push on operations, operations eventually pushes back with, ‘Who the heck thought this is possible?’ I’ve seen it too many times.
With a unified platform, then any sort of business model that we’re introducing, it’s end to end. So we’re thinking about the sales channels, from the dreaming to the selling, but then also the fulfillment, what happens at the front desk, what should housekeeping do? Now things that sometimes started and failed or took a long time because you had to bring people together are much faster.
As technology opens up new possibilities, what are you looking forward to being able to do next?
There are so many things. One thing we are doing, we always get excited about new segments. Opera Cloud has a lot of flexibility, so it’s not that hard to take it to the next segment. For example, we just took it to casinos. We’re looking at [cruise lines] because now they have Starlink [satellite internet network], so now the cloud has become available. There are many other segments that could open up, so we’re looking at what’s the incremental functionality that we need to do to go and revolutionize that segment.
That’s one thing. [Another thing is] definitely [artificial intelligence]. I know everybody’s talking about it. But this is where us being part of Oracle, I feel like it’s the differentiation because we have a mothership company that has thousands of AI specialists in many domains, from infrastructure to tools and services that are now being given to my development team. They are being given AI services that we are now infusing into our applications. And it’s going to come through in multiple ways.
So [for example], these five clicks I’ve noticed you take this path every single time, I’m going to make it easier for you by rearranging the screen for you so that it’s right there. … AI will get infused, and it’s going to get embedded into everything that we do. It’s going to mean operational efficiency, more revenue better guest experiences.
