Author: Jose Manuel R. Person

What’s Guestperience?
Guestperience is a new and fresh solution to help hoteliers to enter in the mobile era. We believe that motels must go beyond just selling beds, and engage more with their guests . Y-guests are interested in a lot more than booking a room such as for instance, Wifi across the property; which has become one of the most critical factors when searching for a hotel. We are focusing in the after- booking expereince: pre-arrival assistance, experience throughout the stay aiming at improving the property’s reputation when guests leave.
As a result , we built up a solution that consists of  a combination of a customized app and our Guest Management system which is fully integrated to hotel systems, Guestperience is drastically increasing the number of touch points during the stay, increasing revenues per guest and cutting costs anchored to printing.
 Tell us how you identified the necessity of offering this service?
As travellers or guests we have identified some anomalies in hotels when we are travelling. For example like queuing when check-in or check-out, order of services through traditional landline phones, low appealing directories and a feeling that when we are in a hotel, there are hundreds of things happening around that we are not noticing due to not using the best channels to communicate them.The changing context within hotels is an unstoppable trend. It is boosting in countries like UK or US, but mainly in luxury hotels. Spain is a large market of hospitality and we want to be pioneers making this «guest technology products» affordable for any kind of hotel. Hotels must embrace mobile era and take advantage of its wifi service. Nowadays, 25% of guest in US are considered digital savvy and 3 out of 4 bring their own smartphone when they are staying and are keen to explore new useful apps.
What’s your value proposition and differentiation from your competitors?
Guestperience is a solution that gathers  all what guests request in a mobile app. The design of our apps is strategically thought to offer a “win-win” deal among hotels and guests. 50% to open a new channel «hotel to guests» and 50% «guests to hotel».
Some propertes have noticed how guests are changing their way of enjoying a hotel experience and  have started building their own apps, but these are mainly the top chains like Marriot. The development of these types of «guest products” costs a lot of money, and also there is a huge risk of failure when a hotelier decides to build an app as it is not his core business. That is why only big players can afford it.
Then is when Guestperience adds  value as a solution that is flexible, affordable, modular, scalable and fully supported by our team.
Our main competitors are out of Spain, but we know most of them are interested to enter a market like Spain. Guestperience will face more local competitors very soon, but it is not worrying as we are developing a new category of product and they might help us to generate demand.
What kind of benefit your customers can obtain from guestperience?
Depending of the type of hotel, benefits are to increase the revenues per guest or cut printing costs. For instance, Imagine a hotel that starts to receive Chinese travellers and all the information of the property and services are in spanish and English. The cost of translating and re-printing the directory books are high in comparison to the multilingual functions that Guestperience app is offering.
What type of feedback you are getting from the industry?
Our first customers (La Moncloa de San Lazaro Hotel) are happy with the new benefits that they are delivering to their guest. Some others, see Guestperience as a great solution, but do not believe that now it the right moment for them to implement it. however, our business is a B2B2C, which means that Guestperience also cares  about the feedback of users (guests), making guests really excited to go to a hotel that has an app like Guestperience implemented.
How do you built and integrate your solution?
We initially work in a “look&feel” that our customers like, then analyse what kind of services are available in the property in order to explore if we can integrate with their PMS, CRM and CRS (systems used by hotels). Guestperience can integrate with hundreds of PMS and with this integration the experience for the guest is great as you can do your check-in and check-out in your own mobile and bring in your mobile the bill of your stay (hotel restaurants or bars, spa….) without having to wait for obtaining it at departure.
After that we configure an app for the customer and upload hotel and surroundings touristic content. From that point on, hotels can update info in real time.
What are your future plans for 2016?
Guestperience has a great challenge to face. The company has been supported by EMPRENDETUR for its business plan, so we are building a strong team to increase our chances of becoming a leader in this guest technology sector. If we beat our commercial goals during 2015, we are ready to make the first steps in international markets.
We are very interested in collaborating with IT hospitality experienced professionals, so if you are interested, please do not hesitate to contact us

About us:
Founders: Jose Manuel R. Person and Santiago Fernandez.
Founded: June 2012.
Headquarters: Madrid, Spain.
Team: Santiago Fernández, Jose Manuel R Person, Marco Uzcategui, Elena de la Torre
Contact: jmperson@guestperience.com