Hotel Rival

The Rival is a privately owned luxury boutique hotel in the trendy Södermalm district of Stockholm. Beyond its 99 designer hotel rooms, it counts bars, a bistro and café, modern meeting facilities and a theatre amongst its offerings.

We spoke to Jesper Sandberg, Revenue and eCommerce Manager, about how they have upgraded their technology and are now well positioned for the travel recovery.

Old-School Frustrations

"We used to use a PMS called Suite8 – Opera's little brother – so we were always limited to what we could integrate with. Then we switched to Mews and we got access to a world of apps through their Marketplace, including Revenue Management solutions.

"I felt that the legacy RMS options were too old fashioned – we wanted technology that was future-proof and had a fresh look. They are also way too complex, and not to mention the huge setup costs that really ruled them out.

"We liked FLYR for Hospitality because their algorithm wasn't looking at what other people were pricing. Hotels often don't even have a revenue manager so they simply base their rates on what other people are charging – to follow them is like the blind leading the blind.

"Analytics was a real game changer and almost nobody else offers a native Business Intelligence solution like they do."

Rapid Implementation

"Onboarding was super fast and we were up and running in a day or two. Other systems wanted more historical data and I knew that getting historical data from our old PMS would not work.

"It's also less of a gamble when you have a PMS like Mews and you can just switch on FLYR for Hospitality immediately through their Marketplace and try it for free for a month."

Instant Results

"We switched on automated pricing and it's been a great decision. We increased our ADR over the last year and during the pandemic. We are actually charging more this April in comparison to previous Aprils.

"In the end, it's not about what we think the room is worth but what people are willing to pay for it. You can't base it on what you think – a super advanced algorithm that adapts to demand will always price way better than any human could."

Commercial Intelligence

"We've really benefited over the last year from using Analytics. We used to do forecasts every month but now we do them every week as the platform lets us see what's happening on a more granular level.

"I've built a bunch of my own reports and have been using Analytics to build custom visuals. I've got three reports arriving each day and then I have five dashboards that I've built that I receive each month.

"I used to spend 8 to 10 hours building just one monthly report but now it's all delivered immediately."

"Reports now automatically arrive everyday into my inbox as a PDF. I've also got another two daily reports being delivered to our CEO and operations managers. Our CEO even uses the Analytics tool everyday to look at the main dashboard and keep an eye on ADR, occupancy, forecasts and budgets."