City Lodge, South Africa: Ensuring a consistent guest experience

City Lodge has 40 properties scattered across South Africa. Until this year, each hotel ran its own Property Management System (PMS). The decentralised set-up made it difficult for City Lodge to share guest data across the chain and ensure a consistent guest experience.

“Our business is summed up by a very simple strap line: People Caring for People,” began Stuart Mattinson, City Lodge IT Manager. “We want our guests to feel cared for. They come to City Lodge hotels, and they come back again and again, because they know we give them a personal and caring experience.”

Every hotelier knows that information is power, and that guest data can help them anticipate requests and give every guest a truly personal experience. For City Lodge, however, a fragmented PMS meant it was difficult to put this information to work across the chain. “Each one of our hotels maintained its own guest database on its own hardware.”

As well as creating a barrier to delivering a consistent guest experience across the chain, having guest data locked in silos on different IT systems hindered City Lodge from supplying corporate customers with centralised reports. Opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling were limited.

For Stuart Mattinson, the system also meant IT management headaches. “Installing an upgrade meant getting on the road and visiting each of the 40 properties. It could take months.”

Working against the clock

In 2005, City Lodge decided to harmonise its guest data on a single management platform and chose the multiproperty version of Amadeus Hotel Front Office (Hogatex) as its preferred solution. “The tool was important but more critical for us was finding a partner who would understand the operational pressures we faced.”

The existing system was unstable and City Lodge needed to act fast. “It was vital to have a partner who could be flexible. The old system was on its last legs – at one stage parts of it even fell over. Amadeus and its local partner HISA came through with emergency installations, to make sure we stayed up and running. It was great having a partner we could rely on. The support from Amadeus and HISA was phenomenal, to put it mildly.”

With its strong local presence, the Amadeus team was able to work on site and hand in hand with Stuart Mattinson to deploy the unified guest data platform.

After twelve months - one and a half months ahead of schedule - the rollout for the 40 hotels in the two, three and four star segments was completed in mid May 2006.

A unified view

With the system in place, City Lodge personnel have a single countrywide view on guest data for individuals and for corporate customers across 4,360 rooms. Centralisation makes it easy to control rates and much simpler to cross-sell. “Our people have targets for the number of bookings they make in other City Lodge hotels. Thanks to centralisation, all the information they need to service the guest is at their fingertips.”

Up-selling is another area where centralisation makes a difference. Previously City Lodge’s different hotel brands used different PMS software, with each having its own screen display. With today’s simple and unified display it is easy for hotel staff to offer recommendations for everything from a two-star Road Lodge to a four-star Courtyard City Lodge property.

With the multiproperty version of Amadeus Hotel Front Office life is easier from the IT management perspective too. Upgrades can be quickly completed on a server and a single point of management enables Stuart Mattinson to ensure security of the network.

Gearing up to welcome the world

“We want to improve our performance even more,” said Stuart Mattinson. Integrating Point of Sale into the platform is one enhancement his team is looking at. Another is optimising existing features such as multicurrency functions. Today, with 90% of City Lodge guests coming from South Africa, the vast bulk of the chain’s business is transacted in rands. With South Africa hosting the historic 2010 FIFA World Cup, the country is getting ready to welcome millions of visitors. “It never hurts to be prepared!”