Interview with Edurne Vázquez, COO of Hotelatelier

During Fitur, we had the opportunity to interview Edurne Vázquez, Chief Operating Officer of Hotelatelier, to understand the challenges the organization has overcome in the past year and analyze the various trends that are shaping the direction of the tourism sector in the complex post-COVID recovery scenario.

Edurne Vázquez, current COO of Hotelatelier, has dedicated her professional career to the Petit Palace Hotels chain, where she has acquired a holistic knowledge of hotel management through her experience in various key departments. Her deep understanding of hotel operations is complemented by responsibilities in revenue management, commercial area, and participation in the management committee, which has allowed her to significantly contribute to the three strategic master plans implemented between 2015 and 2023. Edurne has played a crucial role in leading the Customer Centricity area, focusing on the transformation and repositioning of Petit Palace Hotels and Icon Hotels, demonstrating her ability to define, plan, coordinate, and implement key strategies that drive success and innovation in the hotel sector.

In this interview, she reveals the achievements, challenges, and strategies that have marked the direction of the organization during 2023, a period defined by intensity and results in the tourism sector. In addition to sharing her proactive and adaptive vision in the face of a constantly evolving sector, setting a precedent in the pursuit of excellence, innovation, and social responsibility in the hotel industry.

Xavier López, CEO of EISI SOFT and Edurne Vázquez, COO of Hotelatelier

This 2023 has been a year of challenges for the sector. How has 2023 been for you and what are the most important milestones you are most proud of having achieved at Hotelatelier? 

It has been an intense and beautiful year, but it has been rewarding. For the sector in general, it has been a great year. In our case, we can say the same; it has been an intense year, complex in some challenges, but with many results, and in the end, all the effort invested ends up tying the year together nicely. 

We did not expect the recovery in demand to be at that level, which has allowed us to work on different challenges that were no longer about capturing demand but optimizing it and building our management model to be able to commercially generate an optimal distribution mix, which is key for us. Our environment consists of a maximum of 100 rooms, and we have four distribution channels. For us, the big challenge this year has been to achieve great results in direct channel share, trying to find an optimal distribution mix, and in this case, the defined strategy, focus, and strategic revenue capabilities have been fantastic. We have achieved almost 40% in the direct channel, a great challenge achieved, and the team has done a fantastic job. I think everyone focused on the need to find their piece of the pie. There are hotels that have reached up to 60%, which has been spectacular for us. 

Another great challenge we had was the Great Place To Work certification; it is the fifth year we have achieved the certification, and the company's purpose is "people who take care of people." We are in a very competitive service sector, but you have to take great care of the internal customer so that the final customer perceives it, and we believe in this strongly. And the Great Place To Work certification made us very excited. We have worked constantly since January, we had a fantastic group of ambassadors who supported us, especially in the company's commitment to listening to the teams and working at a high level, and it was fantastic, with a 92% Trust Index and a 97% participation rate, which was spectacular. 

The two major challenges we had commercially and team-wise have yielded great results, and demand has obviously contributed greatly to all of this. When demand does not work, it is true that you can lose focus because it is business. 

You have given us the background that you are a special product. I always like to say that I think it is very different from what we can find in the sector. How do we prepare these establishments to offer unique experiences, and above all, what are the key processes in the customer experience? 

I think we have a competitive advantage there because our product is a boutique product, and we do not have more than one hotel with over a hundred rooms. That is, we operate in environments of hotels with less than a hundred rooms, and that is a key point because, in the end, having that number of customers and rooms allows you to generate much more direct contact with the customer, more interactive, more natural, because the customer flow in the hotel is much more manageable. That is a fundamental part: when we talk about personalized experiences, we are very fortunate to operate in that environment. We believe it is essential to generate the ability to anticipate experiences; it is no longer about solving them on the spot and personalizing in the moment what you need but being able to provide it without you having even asked for it. Here, the challenge is to adapt, obviously based on technology, to be able to anticipate. When you truly personalize and take a step further, you are almost thinking about the customer's need that they have not yet expressed. This would be the must. 

There is technology working on predictive aspects, and I believe that is the direction to go. Therefore, it is important to prepare the entire technological framework with a customer knowledge approach while having all that behavioral part; it is vital. The CRM, in the end, is very complex. We have been working on it for many years, and it is very complicated today, technologically, with all the tools, systems, constellations, and information, but that must be our objective; it should not change. We have to look for alternatives, technology, and where the real possibility of having that data is. Technology at the customer level is a great challenge. It is easy to say that I anticipate customer information, but it is very complicated for all the systems to really give you that behavior, that pattern related to the customer in all their processes. There lies the key challenge of being able to anticipate.

From there, when you talk about key processes, obviously technology, such as EISI HOTEL, at the process level, such as reputation management or all the elements that generate the Big Data that we are not generating at the company level right now, is key and essential to be able to move forward. The first challenge of consolidating that data and having reliable data is fundamental. 

A key process that, for me, is above all that is explaining to the teams why we do things, why we do the processes, what the objective is, giving them measurement, giving them data, and working on that data culture, because you can have a lot of technology, a small boutique hotel, have certain competitive differential factors, but if you are not prepared as a team to adapt to technology and understand how it can improve the customer experience, if we are not able to convey it to our teams in that way, it is very difficult because they will see it as a process, but a process has no value as such. So, above the strategy and technology above all, the most important thing is to communicate very well with the teams, coordinate very well, but above all, give them information, measure the follow-ups, which is the way to see how their work really has much more value than it has, but there is one more factor, which is stepping out of that task box, and that is made possible by technology, but it must be accompanied by a culture.

In 2018, you set us a great challenge, the implementation of EISI HOTEL. The project posed a great challenge for us because, indeed, you were looking for a partner to accompany you in your entire strategy. After three years, what role has EISI SOFT played in this strategy, and above all, what role is it playing now?

The truth is that we have been betting on technology for many years to generate that data culture that is important, even before working with technology, to work with that approach. The company started in 2001, and we really did not have a system or technology that supported us in operational knowledge, which in the end is everything that happens in the hotel. There comes a time when you realize you do not know what is happening in the hotel: I do not know the processes, I do not know the value of everything we do. For us, it was fundamental to work in that line and with a broader vision. Indeed, we did not make a mistake with our partner, and I can confirm today that the choice was totally correct. We have a series of criteria when choosing partners, and I think it is important to say so because we do not have technological collaborators; for us, they are strategic partners, and in this case, EISI SOFT has been part of that evolution, sharing vision, support, and that we see it has the potential to continue growing together. For me, it makes no sense to have technology or a system that does not accompany me in that development or gives me specific support but does not allow me to grow as a business, and sometimes it is very difficult to find partners who somehow support you.

It has also been tough for us, especially because the pandemic was very complicated, but it is true that it is the most complex technological project in general because it applies to almost 100% of all the operational processes of the company's hotels, and this is an implementation with a very challenging culture. It has helped us a lot to digitize the processes. We are having almost 100% digitalization, we have generated new KPIs with you... Understanding that it is not just the record but the quality of the data, the knowledge. You have allowed us not only to stay in two key departments, and that is ultimately part of the continuity and the work we see between a client and a strategic technological provider, understanding that there is more. 

In that sense, we have reached practically 100% of the organization. We have generated all the part of KPIs, internal processes, being able to analyze the data, being able to cross them now in a quality project linking reputation technology. For us, it is vital. If we do not consider EISI as a technological process platform, we would be falling short in vision, and for us, it is very important. It gives us a step to link it with more business areas, such as revenue, distribution, and reputation, and in the end, the whole set is what really gives you business quality. For us, it was fundamental that this gap existed between so much data that we had, an important gap for the customer experience, which is our ultimate goal. In the end, we sell experiences, we sell a service, we sell attention, and it was fundamental that in all the cases in which we have been working, the result has been exceptional, and we continue to find new opportunities.

You have mentioned some challenges that technological companies must face, such as prediction. From an organizational perspective at Hotelatelier, how do you see the challenges we must set for ourselves in the upcoming 2024-2025? We remember that in 2019, when Big Data was being talked about, you were already talking about data quality, and now it is the trend within the sector. Where do you think the sector is headed in the coming years?

It is true that in our DNA, there is that part of innovation, disruption, trying everything. We are not afraid of change. We believe that if there comes a time when we have covered all the milestones and have no further vision, we will make strategic technological rethinkings with significant or minor impacts. In improving technology, those constant checks must always be made, and all that evolution will make us rethink certain things that today you have in a constellation, improving, changing, integrating... We must continue to have that technological vision because it is stronger today.

On the other hand, they talk about AI. What we need to understand is how it will bring us value, although for us, it should aim, above all, at anticipating that friction just like today. In revenue, you can forecast, in different possibilities, you can have that vision a bit more forward-looking, and it allows us to understand customer behavior much better. We can anticipate those experiences that they are asking us for, which is ultimately our main objective, obviously supported by technology. We need to know it, not that we are afraid, but simply at what point it falls and how we are able to manage it. We need to understand how all this is distilled into big numbers and also into our business model and how it supports us, just as we adapted at the time. 

Additionally, the customer is increasingly demanding, looking for more authenticity, much more personalization, betting on leisure, and demanding a higher level of service and personalization from us. For this reason, it is necessary to rely on that knowledge. This trend will continue to increase, there are more offers, more destinations, products, and it is necessary to live up to that level of demand. 

And another important part, which we are also working on, is social awareness, not only environmental. As a company, I think we must be able to convey to our customers: what is our purpose there, what is the value we provide as a company. Today it is not an exclusive criterion, but the trend of well-being, the trend of knowing that we all have to collaborate, that awareness is already in people. Many companies already have a sustainability check. It does not have to be something marketing-oriented, but part of the DNA, a purpose, and you have to know how to play that role where you want to position yourself or where you can reach. Not all companies are born to be sustainable, and you need to know at what point the customer can somehow give you the benefit of trying you because you have a series of policies or a series of decisions within the organization that go in that direction and accompany them. Therefore, today, we should all have in mind what the overall impact is, and I do not only mean sustainability. I believe there is much to do, and as a company, we have the responsibility to make visible what we do.