Latest / The Modern Hotelier / #291: Making Revenue Management Accessible to All Sizes of Hotels | with Anthony Vita
Transcript
- The Modern Hotelier #291: Making Revenue Management Accessible to All Sizes of Hotels | with Anthony Vita === David Millili: Welcome to a special, HITEC Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Make sure to subscribe, like, follow, and let us know in the comments what you think about today's episode. Steve, who do we have on the program? Steve Carran: Yeah, David, today we have on Anthony Vita, the VP of Global Partnerships. It's okay. Thanks for sitting down with us, Anthony. How you doing? Anthony Vita: I'm doing well. It's really nice to meet you. Thanks for having me on. Steve Carran: Absolutely. So we were chatting a little bit before this. Yes. And what I found really interesting was you're pretty new to hospitality, and you come from the e-com. You have more of an e-commerce background. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you got to Revenue Analytics? Anthony Vita: Absolutely. I'll try to make a longer story short, but for years, for about seven, eight years now, I worked in direct-to-consumer e-commerce. Started my career in Manhattan and moved around in the COVID time of being remote in both Ohio and Virginia. At that time, when I was in New York, I was actually working for this company called 1stDibs. We specialized in luxury interiors and art. It was a really cool job. I would say it was a bit tangentially related to hospitality as well because we were working with a lot of private clients and homes, but there were periods where I was helping to outfit small bed and breakfasts and people that wanted to make really unique properties. At that time, I had a client there, and that client and I became good friends. It turns out we both had a passion for road bikes and cycling. That ended up taking me to his house in France, where, after a five-year period of continuing to go on these absolutely sort of like otherworldly, incredible trips where we're riding parts of the Tour de France every year together, we end up basically becoming good friends, and one thing leads to another. Doors opened for him at Revenue Analytics, where I now am, and as we continue to try to scale in a couple of different ways, he actually asked me to join the company and start working with him now. So it's pretty neat because while direct-to-consumer e-commerce, I would argue, is completely different in every way from hospitality, what I was doing in that industry was specializing in data feed management. So what's neat about that and revenue management is how parallel those two operations are for the different industries. Steve Carran: So Revenue Analytics just brought Climber to North, North America for independent operators. Listening, what's the gap you're setting to close, and why is now the moment? Anthony Vita: I would say that first I'll start with the gap. What's cool about this is that there's a lot of RMSs in the space. There's no denying that. I think that all of us do a really good job in our own way of supporting the largest enterprise companies out there, but revenue management at that level's always a privilege, and what we're doing is we're trying to make that privilege really accessible to even the smallest mom-and-pop boutique so they now have the ability to focus on a guest experience, property enhancements, and just bringing those tools down a level without sacrificing any of the nuances of them so they now have the same access as someone that's running 300 different properties on a global level. Steve Carran: So most independent hotels still set their rates by hand. Anthony Vita: Yes. Steve Carran: Why has revenue management stayed out of market for so long? Anthony Vita: For the smaller boutiques, I would say it's absolutely cost at the end of the day. These tools are not cheap. They're thousands to ten thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in some cases, and because of that, I think there's been this, a bit of a stereotype around them that there's no way for them to ever access them Climber itself was founded as a Portugal and Brazilian based company, so it's been pressure tested in this global market now for many years. And we have this kind of unique period of time right now where with everything that we've been able to prove with our N2 pricing, which is our enterprise and mid-market product, with all the success that we've had there and all the success that Climber's had in this other market, merging those two together now on a global level where we're gonna start in North America, I'm excited about it because it's not gonna be expensive. It's gonna be a couple hundred bucks a month. So even the smallest shops that are running these really unique experiences in different corners of the country, we're gonna be able to help them, even in a trial period in the beginning, to just understand that they don't have to do this by spreadsheet and gut instinct anymore. David Millili: Partnerships are your world. So you've got the property management system, central reservation system, the whole tech stack. So how do those relationships shape what is actually possible for an operator, and where do you see the ecosystem heading? Anthony Vita: I wouldn't be sitting here without partnerships. It is fundamentally behind everything we do, no matter the industry. I have the job because I knew a guy who was able to open a door into an industry that I was craving getting into. My love for travel is why I'm here. It's why we're all here. In terms of what I was talking about around that accessibility, partnerships is the foundation of all of that. If we're going to serve a subset of customers in any corner of the globe, they're all using a different tech stack at the end of the day. Some of them might overlap, some of them might be similar. PMSes might be the same across the board for some. But if we're going into a new area of the world and we don't have relationships, which is fundamentally the most important part of this entire industry, we're not gonna make progress. If I want to approach a new client and say, "Hey, I think we have a great RMS, Climber, that would be able to help you, and you can now focus on your property and your guest experience and not sitting in front of your laptop for six hours a day guessing," if we're not connected to all of the systems they're already relying on, we're gonna fall flat on our face. So it's this right here, how you're connected in this industry, and you have a couple people that you might think you'd be able to help me speak with. That alone is what is gonna be the catalyst for our success in America, and allow us to go global with what we're trying to do. Steve Carran: So you have operators that are still using their gut and spreadsheets to set pricing. Anthony Vita: Yes. Steve Carran: What changes do they see once they have an automated system that's running 24/7? Anthony Vita: Literally everything. Literally everything. It's going from half of your day sitting in front guessing numbers to you now have an agentic brain effectively behind this operation that we don't tell you to completely ignore it, but if you were to compare the two, it's effectively allowing you to completely ignore this because this is a pressure-tested system that has been operating for over 20 years. And not only that, we're combining two of them that have operated in two different continents. So the intelligence that's built up over now decades lives in this little microcosm that if you were to run a bed and breakfast out of your house, you now have access to it, and it's the same access that a multi-billion dollar global hotel corporation has access to as well. Steve Carran: Is there anything that once they switch over they're surprised at the most? Anthony Vita: I think it's probably the amount of data signals they didn't think about before. A lot of times, people think about the proximity of where they are to certain things and the people that might be coming around holidays, but they're not thinking about weather. They're not thinking about concerts within a 50 mile radius. They're not thinking about sporting events that might be within a two-hour drive of them because I love staying... I've got loyalty status with a hotel. I love staying there when I can. But when I go to countries, frankly I went to Syria earlier this year, when you go to places like that, first of all, there's no loyalty status in these places. You're trying to find the coolest, most unique experience. And it's those little properties and giving them the tools to be able to now look and say, "Oh, you know what? There's this concert coming to town for Taylor Swift." Let's automate that. We would be taking care of it for them in this case. That's gonna be a huge change that they're gonna see with Climber coming to America now. David Millili: Sure. So Climber is one piece of a bigger revenue analytics story. Mm-hmm. How does it fit into where the company is headed, and what should the market expect over the next year or two? Anthony Vita: There's a lot that the market can expect from us, and in terms of where we're going right now, it goes back to the word that I keep beating into oblivion effectively. It's the accessibility side of this. We focused so heavily for so many years on the enterprise. You know, you try to win the big hotel chains of the world, and it's great when you do that as a business. But the reason why I wanted to get into hospitality was because of the unique experiences that all of these different small places or properties around the world offer. So in terms of what you can expect from us, expect our tools to be available to anyone, no matter the size of your property. We want everyone to be able to have access to revenue management. It might not be the sexiest thing in the world, but it's certainly one of the most helpful facets of an operator in this business, and being able to provide that is something we're fundamentally really excited about. David Millili: That's great. That's great to hear. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. Anthony, this is where you get to let people know how they can get in touch with you. Cool. How they can find out more about Revenue Analytics. Anthony Vita: Well, LinkedIn's always the easiest way to get in touch with me. Shoot me a DM. I've got the premium subscription, so I'll always get your messages. On there my email address as well is listed. It's avita@revenueanalytics.com. Very responsive on there, and if you ever shoot me an email, my cell phone is in the signature when I respond. I'm always happy to take a call. David Millili: That does it for this special HITEC Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. So whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you and hope to be with you again soon. Thank you. Thanks for joining. Anthony Vita: Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. David Millili: Thank you.