Xcentric Hotels

Xcentric Hotels is the master franchise holder of easyHotel in the Benelux and opened the first easyHotel in the Netherlands several years ago. They also have their Maxhotel value brand with establishments in Amsterdam, Zaandam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Brussels.

We spoke to Sonja Roos and the Revenue Management team about how they have gone about adapting their properties to stay ahead in the future.

Old-School Frustrations

"We switched our PMS to Apaleo for our Maxhotels back in 2019 mainly because of their open API, which in turn allowed us to plug into several great apps. Once we made the switch, we then started to look at all the revenue management systems. In the end, we looked at ten different systems and narrowed it down to a shortlist of one legacy system and two newcomers including FLYR for Hospitality. Ultimately, FLYR for Hospitality scored the highest.

"The legacy systems are always much the same. If you want to have something changed or adjusted you need to go through a painful process that takes a couple of months at least. The systems are just too big and complex. It's so rules-based with no science behind it.

"FLYR for Hospitality is more like Artificial Intelligence (AI). The system thinks for itself and sets the prices according to demand."

Rapid Implementation

"The onboarding was great – it's really quick and you get good support. To give you an idea – our first property was done in a couple of days. The second took no more than a week.

"On top of that, the training for FLYR for Hospitality is just an hour or two. With the legacy systems training takes days and afterwards you still don't understand how it all works."

Instant Results

"In the beginning, I was scared of all the 'automation.' The price recommendations were so high – sometimes €10 or €20 above what I was expecting! But then we did a test over one weekend to see if the higher pricing would sell and the results were great. We're fully booked and during lockdown we were also fully booked!

"One major thing I've learnt is that you don't need a compset. In the end, it's selling the rooms and demand that matters! So now my whole approach has changed."

"With FLYR for Hospitality my one-star hotel was being priced above a local three-star property sometimes! Using my old logic, that was not normal but then it sells! I used to check STR every week but now I do just once a month."

Commercial Intelligence

"FLYR for Hospitality has full analytics and native business intelligence so I was able to quickly start building my own reports. I can build any report I want in seconds. Pickup this year vs last year. ADR. RevPAR. A nice split of my channels. Or compare ADR per channel. Average length of stay. Lead time.

"I now have automated pickup reports being generated daily which all helps to save hours of time every week. We've got well over a dozen reports and dashboards that we've built and many of those are scheduled daily."