“If we started the company again today, we’d connect to Impala right away.”
UpsellGuru can now securely connect to thousands of new hotels running on multiple PMS using Impala
UpsellGuru is an upselling tool for hotels, providing guests with the opportunity to bid on room upgrades and purchase additional items, such as breakfast, before they arrive. This allows hotels to build relationships with their guests earlier, while increasing their revenues.
Founded in 2015, UpsellGuru is headquartered in Dortmund, Germany, and growing quickly. Impala spoke to Karl Schmidtner, Co-founder of UpsellGuru, to learn more about how they use Impala to securely connect to data from hotels running on multiple PMS.
The Challenge — securely connecting to hotel data
UpsellGuru needs access to reservation data stored in their customers’ PMS in order to automatically send out pre-arrival emails offering targeted and relevant deals to guests. However, the normal process of accessing this data is long and arduous, sometimes taking up to one year to connect to a single PMS provider.
With hotel customers on multiple continents, all using different PMS providers, UpsellGuru needs to balance demand for their product with their speed of development. To keep up with this demand, they wanted a solution that was capable of providing them with the security, functionality and speed that matched their growing customer base.
“There are a lot of PMS system, I believe over three thousand hotel PMS providers, and it’s impossible to connect with all of them,” says Karl. “Before Impala, when there was a customer we needed to collect hotel data from, we would contact the PMS provider and integrate directly with them, which is very time consuming. It depends on the PMS, but with legacy PMS it can take six to twelve months.”
The Solution — quick, easy, and secure
Karl met the Impala commercial team in London at a trade show and quickly decided to take advantage of the Impala API. “We were very enthusiastic because Impala is really solving one of our main problems — the integration with the PMS,” Karl says.
UpsellGuru can now connect to more hotels because of the number of integrations Impala has with PMS providers. This makes it quick, easy and secure for UpsellGuru to go live with a hotel using Impala.
Karl says, “That was the first use case, where a customer wanted to work with us, and we didn’t have the PMS integration so we went through Impala to get the hotel data.”
“Once we request a hotel on the Impala Management Portal, it takes between twenty-four and forty-eight hours before we get the hotel data. We can focus on selling our product, and Impala basically takes care of everything else. Once the integration is complete, we then get access to the data through their API.”
Piloting with Impala
UpsellGuru were one of the pilot customers for a PMS integration with Impala. Even being one of the first customers to use this new integration, the connection to hotel data was many months faster than an integration to the PMS, and the Impala team were there every step of the way.
Karl shares his experience of the pilot:
“In this case, the PMS was a legacy provider. We were in contact with them and they were charging quite a high integration fee to us and to the hotel. Through Impala we could offer the hotel a solution where they could save a lot of money in the integration fees. And for us, we saved a lot of time in development resources.”
“Impala always communicated very well with our customer. They explained how quick and easy the process would be — it made them feel very comfortable. Especially nowadays GDPR is a hot topic when it’s about customer data. Throughout the entire process, the hotel gave us very good feedback, and for us it was a very smooth process.”
The Results
By using Impala for connecting to multiple PMS providers, UpsellGuru are able to sell their product to thousands of new hotels. There’s no need for their team to worry about transforming or translating the data into any other format, as it’s ready for their technology to use right away.
“The sweet thing about the connection with Impala from our side is that we really just need one integration and Impala translates the data to and from various PMS providers,” says Karl. “We only had to build a one-time integration with Impala through their API, which was very easy and straightforward. Then, it doesn’t matter what PMS our customer is using for us to work together. For example, it doesn’t matter to us if the customer uses Infor HMS or Protel, because Impala translates the data from the PMS exactly how we need it.”
“We can start using the data right away so I think it’s a win-win-win situation. The hotel can start working with us right away, and in most cases for a reduced cost. We save a lot of development resources and time — it can take quite a while until the integration is completed with the PMS. With Impala we can start working with the hotel way sooner. And of course Impala gets a new customer.”
What’s Next?
For Karl, it’s all about providing the best experience for his customers. That means working with technologies that are fast to onboard, affordable and secure to use.
By using Impala to connect to hotels running on multiple PMS, UpsellGuru is able to scale faster. They are now going back to prospective hotel customers around the world — in Germany, Switzerland, Asia and Australia, to let them know they can begin working together.
“Impala ticked some boxes for us with PMS providers who we don’t have an integration with,” says Karl. “So right now we are informing all of those hotels that we can start working with them. I’m sure there will be more and more hotels coming on board with Impala.”
Some advice from Karl to other founders:
“When we started, there was no such company as Impala. If we started the company again today, we’d connect to Impala right away. It’s very fast, and lets your developers work on your own product rather than spending hours or weeks integrating with PMS providers. There are so many PMS out there, and it is nearly impossible to integrate with all of them.”
