How Streamlining Hotel Technology Will Help Business Travelers
Skift Take
Instead of selling their platform to hotels, Conichi is now relying on corporate partners to help push through their technology from the other end. This can only be good news for business travelers as more efficient check-in processes and simpler expensing move into the mainstream.
The hotel experience for business travelers has long been a headache.
Conichi, which was one of the first companies to experiment with beacon technology at hotel properties, has in recent years focused on the more knotty issues that add complexity to corporate travel. While the company now has more than 400 partner hotels using its system to enable keyless hotel room entry and express check-in and check-out services.
Now, according to Conichi CEO Max Waldmann, the company is working to push deeper into corporate travel by fixing some of the backend technological inefficiencies that stymie travel managers and their travelers alike.
"The entire technological set up within corporate travel is still in the early stages," said Waldmann. "It's a bit like back in the AOL days. Everything is still disconnected. It takes a lot of time, it's complex, and only some people use it. It's not where it should be and it's definitely not at a B2C stage yet. But it will absolutely grow."
Skift spoke to Waldmann about ways that fixing the hotel check-in process will help make life easier for global business travelers.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Skift: When Conichi started out, you focused on deploying beacon technology and other things. Now, you're pushing deeper into expenses and other back-of-the-house stuff. Why the shift?
Max Waldmann: To give you the bigger picture, when we started off the core focus was always to come up with a solution to streamline the entire corporate stays process. And we always had more or less two balls in the game, one in the leisure side and one in the corporate side, with the intention of, again, streamlining the entire stay process. In the course of the last year, especially since 2017, we put a core emphasis on corporate travel. Reason being, leisure travel is really, really complex to manage. You don't know where travelers are going. You don't know how often they'll travel. They're really, really expensive to access.
Obviously, [leisure hotels'] willingness to innovate is high, but at the same time, the necessity to innovate and to disrupt is pretty low because their frequency of traveling is low compared to corporate travelers who travel a couple of times a week. The necessity to innovate for them is super high. So, we've been always been looking at h
