Hi,
Wondering if anyone has any experience selling SaaS solutions to hotels?
I run a company that helps hotels generate additional income via pre-arrival automated upsell outreach.
The challenge I'm finding is that there's obviously a huge number of different tech providers (and other types of suppliers) fighting for the attention of hotels.
Wondering if anyone here has any experience of how to get in touch with the right person at hotels, and how to cut through the noise of what I'm sure is a huge amount of cold outreach from various businesses.
Thanks in advance!
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Hi Gary, I can answer this from both hotel management and SaaS vendor perspectives. Most high-end hotels will have something similar in place already. Several resorts I work with as a consultant will prefer to sell services and experiences at full price on-site instead of pre-selling it and forego some percent of their revenue. Other smaller hotels will want something like this for free, and pay a commission on the generated revenue. A real pain in the ass, to be honest. If you can offer a commission-based model where hotels won't need to give a discount but sell at full price, and it will be priced more reasonably compared to other solutions then it can be prospected successfully.
Hey Daniel - Thanks for taking the time to reply. Appreciate your thoughts.
My personal experience so far is that price hasn't been a blocker, and when I've managed to speak to hotels we've converted almost all - the bigger challenge I'm finding is getting that initial conversation - both in terms of figuring out the best cold outreach approach and also figuring out who I'm meant to be speaking to at each hotel.
This is a great question... and I don't really have an answer for you. I'm adjacent to hotel tech rather than buried in it. But channel to market and channel / tech partnerships are a huge issue for startups in this sector and in travel generally.
After the big 3 PMS/CRS providers (Oracel, Sabre, Amadeus) hotel tech totally fragments - it often feels like there's a PMS for every independent hotel out there. If you want a list of the hotel tech providers - broken down by type - it might be worth investing in a Skift Research subscription so that you can access their Hotel Tech Benchmark. The distribution / channel manager side is a bit less fragmented.
The other way to meet players in hotel tech is to go to events that hoteliers frequent. I'm thinking ITB and WTM. It won't be easy to partner though - the hotel tech companies are swamped with people looking to sell something to hotels or in hotels. (As are airline IT providers). And the people on the stands are sellers not buyers. And even if you get the "partnership" it's a photo opp, a round of golf and a press release - and most of the time that's all you get - the tech companies sales teams really only want to sell what they are paid to sell.
That leaves reaching hotels directly, which - as you've figured out - is really hard. Ideally you have a proposition that you can persuade a chain or brand is a guest experience advantage and that wins you a tranch of hotels in one go. Getting in the door is difficult. Working with property owners is hard - mostly because they aren't actually hoteliers. Working with individual hotel managers also very hard.
Caveat on all of this... I'm adjacent to hotels, not in the sector, and it's been 10 years since my last hotel project. So I'm hoping you get a few better answers.
Hey Mark - Thanks for your reply!
Great idea on the Skift research subscription. I'm definitely thinking that getting listed on some of the PMS marketplaces gives us a bit of credibility and opens the door to potential organic sales - but I'm guessing they're going to be few and far between, and ultimately I think there's probably going to continue to be a bit of a slog of trying to get in front of people and just playing the numbers game.
Agree that going after some chains/brands makes more sense in terms of better outcomes when we land one.
Most people are the noise. Focus on things that don't scale. Find a nice and be the best at the niche and then expand from there. Or partner with their technology providers and use that as a channel.