Big Mama Hotels

With ten years under their belts already, Germany's Big Mama Hotels have big plans ahead. With legendary hybrid and hostel properties operating in Berlin and Leipzig, the German group is planning to open several new properties over the coming months.

We spoke to Chief Commercial Officer Tobias Koehler about how new technology has transformed how they run their business and how it is allowing them to scale up.

Old-School Frustrations

"We're scaling up and building a tech stack that can help us do just that…so not only do we need systems that are easily scalable but we also need ones that are easy to maintain.

"Our journey all started with switching to Mews as our PMS a few years back. It allowed us to start to adopt truly innovative platforms and a revenue management system (RMS) was first on the list.

"In my former job I worked with the two legacy RMS vendors – they were both big heavy machines where, at some point, I would always get lost in the complexity of it all. With FLYR for Hospitality, it's nice to finally have a platform that is straightforward and easy to work with and boosts our ADR automatically.

"The support team has really helped change my thinking towards revenue management. First, I've ditched focusing on compsets. FLYR for Hospitality's approach of not overly relying on compsets makes total sense and is a massive differentiator. Second, there should be only one rate to push to our PMS and FLYR for Hospitality does just that."

Instant Results

"RevPAR is the metric we look at most and, thanks to FLYR for Hospitality, our RevPAR is almost back to what it was in 2019 pre-Covid, with some months even outperforming.

"It's also been super helpful to have reliable forecasting through the platform. It has really helped us to plan financially in general – the system forecasting has been particularly crucial as the German government support scheme demands that we submit monthly forecasts.

"We've even been able to analyse how different room categories are performing and to see whether it is worthwhile keeping dorm rooms or switching to double rooms and private rooms. Being able to rapidly shift inventory based on demand is a big thing right now."

Commercial Intelligence

"I use the platform's analytics way more than our PMS analytics. It is faster to populate, much easier to use and you can dive really deep into the data. It's often just one click and you don't need to create complex pivot tables.

"For example, earlier I mentioned how we were able to analyse room vs dorm performance and that was only possible thanks to its analytics. Or trying to understand what kind of ADR an OTA is delivering and on what dates they deliver that.

"Before I arrived we had more of an occupancy strategy but now we have shifted to more of an ADR strategy and good business intelligence is increasingly crucial."