Rob Paterson Chief Commercial Officer of Village Hotels UK interview about Smart Locks, Mobile Check-in, Kiosks and Online Fraud.

Village Hotels is a 29 location chain hotel in the UK that is currently undergoing a tech revolution, I caught up with Rob at The Booking Factory offices a few weeks ago and we a great chat about all the changes they went through.

They changed their PMS from Opera to Hetras to enable most of these tech advances as they were being held back with legacy software. It was an interesting discussion and Rob promised he would fill in some questions so you can all read about it also. Enjoy!

Hey Rob, some people are familiar with Village Hotels but could you give us a brief description of what kind of chain you are and what your main target demographics are?

The Hotels are multi-use complexes each with extensive Food & Beverage, Meetings and Events Space and fully functioning gyms serving over 100,000 members across the 29 hotels

What is your main role at village and what do you love about your job?

My role is Commercial Director and what i love about it is that no 2 days are the same. It can be working with our digital Marketing agency one day on a Amazon Alexa skill, planning a large scale campaign to designing a technical solution for a pain point with a developer the next. Primarily I am responsible for the commercial performance of the brand so driving top-line sales strategies is my core day to day focus.

We talked about smart locks, online check-in and kiosks. These 3 things sound different but they all fit together. Could you explain some of the works you have carried out lately?

At Village we’ve offered keyless entry to our bedrooms via the mobile phone for more than 2 years as well as kiosk check in. Most recently we have introduced keyless access to our meeting space in our newest hotel in Portsmouth. Guests can book their meeting room online and a QR code is issued on the confirmation. The QR code will allow access for the duration of the booked period. We think booking & accessing a meeting room should be just as simple and automated as buying our bedroooms.

It all sounds quite futuristic to expect people to check-in themselves by mobile or kiosk, did you see any complaints or pushback from guests?

Consumers moving at their own speed through life has almost become an expectation in many areas of life. I no longer line up at the shopping centre to purchase my groceries, I order a meal on my phone and the food is at my front door in 20–30 minutes, I check in for my flight & have my boarding pass 24 hours before I’m at the airport, I book my uber on my phone to get to the airport. It’s all so easy and Hotels shouldn’t be any different. At Village we cater to all preferred journeys however. If a guest wants to use their phone they can. If they prefer to use a kiosk, they can. If they prefer to have a host check them in on the kiosk, we can do that. The best Hosts can spot who is likely to need assistance before they even get to the kiosk. Of course we don’t always get it right but overall our check in & check out scores have overwhelmingly improved since moving to this customer journey.

Can you share any numbers in regards to money saved, review ratings or some other metric that has been impacted?

The commercial ROI we achieved on this project, by far outweighs any investment we made on physical bricks and mortar. In Village the cost savings are largely related to transactional admin tasks and support & license fees. This allowed us to free up what used to be the reception role to become a pure guest focused host role. It means we have more time for the guest and less admin tasks for the back office. We also saw considerable topline benefits from both automation better access to data for more informed decisions.

In terms of customer success we have seen improvement in Tripadvisor ranking across 100% of our hotels but most compelling is the check in and check out scores of our internal survey. We collect approximately 4,000 surveys per month and across 6 months our check in & check out scores have gone from being our lowest 2 performers to our top 2 performers. The customer has definitely appreciated the simpler and faster experience that gives them more time to enjoy the Village complex

We also talked a lot about fraud and how you were suffering from a lot of chargebacks, how bad was this, can you give some examples?

With innovation comes learning and we certainly learnt the hard way that there are people out there looking to take advantage of un-secure ecommerce platforms. Some major OTA have decided not to have any security on the point of sale and simply pass the burden onto their partners. There is usually a 2–3 month lag on this impact but essentially when a payment is taken unsecurely with a stolen card, the cardholder usually spots it after the fact and the bank then requires the vendor to prove it was a real transaction. We very rarely are able to recover these funds. This mounted up very quickly across 29 Hotels and cost us significantly.

How did you cure your problems with chargebacks?

We have since implemented an email process that triggers a secure payment request pre-arrival. If the guest doesn’t make the secure payment on our website we fail the automated check in and collect a chip and pin payment on arrival. It’s not a great customer experience and adds an administrational burden on our business. In parallel we are working with our kiosk provider to install PDQ devices to capture secure payments. Ultimately, for full automation to work, the OTA’s need to take secure payment at point of sale to fully close the loop and facilitate mobile check in. Their excuse is that it lowers conversion (it stops fraud so of course that will happen) but today not enough pressure is applied to OTA as only small chains have adopted this journey. Sadly I can only see this changing with some big chains joining the chorus or government legislation as the big players really don’t care for a 29 group Hotel chain and are happy to profit from fraud. We can’t even claim the commission back!

Do you have any future plans for Village in regards to technology?

Absolutely. We are piloting a number of new initiatives in Village Portsmouth around an automated meetings journey, mobile F&B ordering in our pubs, restaurants and Starbucks and Amazon Alexa in our Club Bedrooms for room service ordering, late check out, information & services.

Any advice to independent hotels that are thinking about smart door systems, online check-in and kiosk systems, should they wait or look to implement soon?

Don’t wait. The technology is ready, Commercials make sense & Customers love it. Be aware of unsecure payments via the OTA and have a plan to address even if only an automated email journey. Ultimately look for a PDQ enabled kiosk as that will save you a lot of money on chargebacks. Be mentally prepared to adapt your operation and learn dynamically. Not everything will work first time when you’re innovating