Hotel owners will all have some common challenges. HOFTEL aims to help hotel owners work together as Simon Allison explains in this video.

Hotel owners unite

Well we are a hotel owner's alliance, so - why? Essentially because if you look at the structure of the industry, I mean most people know, a lot of the hotel real estate is managed by third parties, by other people, and if it isn't managed by third parties it's branded by third parties. And most of those are bigger and more global and certainly more experienced at negotiating contracts than the owners. So, ten years ago, I decided with a group of other owning companies to get together and form an alliance, almost like a hotel owner's trade union. And our objective is to leverage the combined power of owning companies around the world.  

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One campaign we're working on is supporting a new company in the States called OpenKey, and what OpenKey is doing is it's trying to create a universal app for the new mobile door key entry. So now, you know, you're going to be able to use your mobile phone to open the door. A couple of issues with that - one is that if the brands control that - and initially they do - they're creating a different proprietary app for every brand, working with the different lock companies. Firstly, for procurement, you end up having to put entry across your portfolio by ten different systems, that don't talk to each other. And if you then want to change a brand, obviously you have to redo all your door locks, so this system will negate that issue. Perhaps more importantly, it means that this company will be controlled by hotel owners and it means that any data you can gather - an anonymised data - belongs to the hotel owners. If it belongs to the brands, and they share it with the OTAs, that’s another area of the business the hotel owners will have lost control of. If we can keep it, the hotel owners themselves will be able to pull the useful data about travel patterns and, you know, what people spend when they're in the hotel and so on, 'cause in the end I think your phone will become like an oyster card or something, you'll use it to buy food in the outlets, and obviously open your door and so on. And you can track it around, so you can tell what people's travel patterns are and so on. And to have, finally, a bit of, sort of, cutting edge data, controlled by the owners, would actually be a very interesting thing, so we're supporting that initiative.

I think a lot of it is just an entirely new approach aimed at the millennial’s, which is lets make it fun, lets make it communal, you know the old style hotel, with the elderly concierge in his slightly battered jacket, whose a little bit hard to approach, and a bog standard room that, you know, has one bit of standard art in it. I think all of these things are going away now. People do want, perhaps a bit more buzz in the public areas, a bit more genuine comfort, in the bedroom areas, you know, it was Barry Sternlicht who started this with a "heavenly bed" and a "heavenly shower". And suddenly people are realising, you know "what do the guests actually want?" you know, they want, good mattresses, good pillows, good duvets, good showers, ok, but then when they come down, they want a bit of life and I think most of the modern brands are creating this kind of community feel, which is much more kind of modern and with it.