Corporate Apartment Group

The Corporate Apartment Group (CAG) was established in 2014 with the view to delivering a fresh outlook on providing a turnkey solution for corporate and leisure travellers seeking short stays or longer-term accommodation in Johannesburg, South Africa.

We spoke with CEO Nick Cooke about how they are using tech and data in all the right ways.

Old-School Frustrations

"We used to have a rudimentary PMS and did all our Revenue Management through it. But in 2017 we decided to switch to the Mews PMS because of all the integrations and the Marketplace in particular. That same year we became one of the first users of FLYR for Hospitality.

"I'm not originally from the hotel industry and when I started using Mews they realised I was data hungry when it came to running the business. I was an industry outsider and I found FLYR for Hospitality via the Mews Marketplace – it spoke to me about how to look at the business through the prism of data.

"The system is also very intuitive, which is a major draw. Several people internally are now able to regularly use the platform as, frankly, it's easy as chips to use. Furthermore, I think it took half an hour to onboard our first property and then within two weeks of that, the rest were all done."

Instant Results

"The system has worked great for us and we have seen excellent ROI. Ironically, back when we switched pricing automation on at our first property it was pretty nerve-wrecking. For example, normally we would sell one bed units for ZAR 950-1000 but FLYR for Hospitality was recommending ZAR 1250 or up to 30% more! We were really worried…until we realised they were all selling!

"In one month our ADR shot up 20% after switching on automation, which is funny because I had actually been worried about the risk of dropping through the floor beforehand!"

"More recently we have been even selling those same units for ZAR 1750 – that's almost double what we used to do."

Commercial Intelligence

"My default analytics product is always FLYR for Hospitality and not Mews. We use a lot of the forecasting functionality for setting our targets. What is my budget going to be next month? We always use their KPIs and the forecasting is very close.

"To cut a long story short, we trust them absolutely and I'm constantly circling back to the system to get data. In my opinion, many hoteliers are still looking at the wrong data…"