By Christian Palomino, Rocío Pérez
After spending a few years in a global pandemic, travelers have never been hungrier to see the world and have a great hotel experience wherever they go. One of the best ways for hoteliers to ensure guests are having incredible, personalized experiences is to keep teams engaged by utilizing technology to deliver the latest and greatest in industry innovation.
That was what led Meliá Hotels International to adopt the Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud Property Management (PMS) which utilizes the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) to easily and seamlessly connect complementary applications. With these technologies, we are able to simplify and improve our operations to ensure employees and managers can spend more time focusing on guests.
A better PMS
Now, Oracle OPERA Cloud serves as the nerve center of our hotel management. It simplifies processes and provides a centralized view of our operation. It also makes teamwork easier, since Oracle helps free our staff from having to complete repetitive tasks. It optimizes their time at work and can be used anywhere which make us more efficient.
With OPERA Cloud, we have been able to digitize and simplify many of our services, including hotel booking and the check-in and check-out processes, as well as giving guests more control over their own stays than ever before. With access to real-time business insights and reporting from our primary dashboard, we can provide more personalized guest experiences based on what we know of our visitor’s preferences across our resorts. As such, we have been able to deliver amazing experiences that are unique for each customer, not only identifying what’s best for them based on the historical data from previous visits, but also by creating a frictionless experience when they arrive at our hotels.
Oracle’s technology has also given us the tools to upgrade our hotel app for our customers. For instance, they can now use the Meliá app as a digital key for access to their rooms, to contact hotel services like housekeeping or place an order for room service, and even make future reservations or check out from the hotel.
Better integration
Most important of all for us in our day-to-day operations is the adoption of OHIP, Oracle’s next-generation integration solution. It has helped us to centralize, consolidate, and streamline our business through a comprehensive library of interface capabilities and related processes through the single, unified PMS platform.
With OHIP, we have a centralized PMS that can integrate seamlessly across all of our property locations. For our guest loyalty program, this means that visitors can start our loyalty program at any of our locations, and then accumulate and take advantage of Meliá points across our entire footprint. We have also been able to innovate our back-of-the-house billing process, automating manual-intensive processes by linking to other processes or technologies. It is amazing how this has enhanced our ability to innovate.
OHIP also enables us to integrate our PMS with everything else in our tech ecosystem, so guests can start with our loyalty program and use their Meliá points everywhere. We have also been able to automate parts of our back-of-the-house billing process with OHIP, transforming tedious tasks into something performed by the PMS in seconds. For instance, when needing to correct any invoice, our staff had to redo it line by line, and that takes a long time in the case of a meeting and event, Now they just push a button, get all the information of the original bill from the PMS, edit just what they need to change, and the old invoice is automatically canceled and the new one created.
So, the main benefits we have found in using the Oracle Hospitality ecosystem are not only how efficient and cost-effective their solution is, but also how it has transformed the way our business operates. OHIP in particular brings agility and the ability to innovate our hotel operations and elevate the guest experience.
The last key benefit OPERA Cloud provides is giving us access to our data, enabling at the same time our data governance processes. Combining more traditional data extractions with OHIP, we ensure data quality and management, providing us with everything we need to compare and aggregate information gathering, relevant insight for our business teams, and, implement real-time algorithms to trigger events, personalization, and optimization.
At the end of the day, OPERA Cloud provides efficiency, security, automation, integrations and data availability, and the ability to innovate making it a key pillar of the digitalization of operations in our hotels.
