"From the first meeting, always together!" This is the promise of Tecadra, a business hotel located in the northern area of Bucharest, close to the Zoo and the two airports. Tecadra offers 39 rooms, two conference halls (70 seats), a restaurant with international cuisine, and a German brewery.

 

The hotel is particularly sought after by companies for conducting training and professional development courses, with business clients representing about 70% of its activity.

 

Business Challenges

 

 

Before collaborating with Pynbooking, Hotel Tecadra's activity relied heavily on phone and email for corporate clients and booking.com for online reservations. All data were then manually recorded in an old management application, developed for the DOS environment, and locally installed on a PC.

 

This situation involved a large workload from the Reception staff, both for operating reservations in the system and for entering data into the cash register and issuing fiscal receipts.

 

Employees could only work on the PC where the application was installed, and due to many manual operations, errors were frequent.

Remote mobile work was out of the question.

 

 

Work was inefficient, and Tecadra's four reception employees spent significantly more time processing reservations and data than effectively communicating with clients.

 

This "cost" was considered too high by the hotel management, who began looking for a solution.

 

"It's hard to ask people, used to Apple and Google, to work with stone age technology. The lack of modern digital tools put a lot of pressure on the Reception, and obviously, we needed a radical change in the way we work. For us, this revolution was called Pynbooking.

We discovered the Pynbooking platform looking online for a solution to digitize hotels, and the purchase decision was also supported by receiving recommendations from other hotels that used it," says Andreea Anton, Reception Manager at Hotel Tecadra.

 

The Solution

 

 

Tecadra's motto "From the first meeting, always together!" was also reflected in the relationship with Pynbooking. After the first presentation, Tecadra's management quickly became convinced that the Pynbooking platform offers solutions for the problems in Reception and abandoned the old system.

 

Since then, Pynbooking has become an essential tool for managing the hotel.

 

 

After signing the contract, the first step was to customize the PMS Cloud Hotel to Tecadra's specifics, defining all available products and services (accommodation, meals, conferences). Through the Channel Manager, the hotel's presence was extended to more online booking platforms, not just booking.com as before.

 

To better manage online reservations, the option for dynamic pricing was also activated through the "Rate Optimization" functionality.

 

Also, the POS Restaurant module was activated for integrating the Hotel-Restaurant and the possibility of allocating meal services to rooms. Additionally, the  Cloud Management module was used to track raw material stocks.

Complementarily, the Pynbooking platform was integrated with the SAGA accounting management system and cash registers for the automatic export of billing data.

 

"The structure of the Pynbooking platform is very logical and allows exact customization of the hotel, at the level of rooms, facilities, and services. There are no applications to install, nor PCs or servers to administer. We managed the initial configuration ourselves without having IT specialists. 

We had some snags with integrating the cash registers, and even though it wasn't a platform issue, we received help, and everything was resolved quickly.
Support services are very prompt, and the people are friendly." Andreea Anton, Hotel Tecadra.

 

Results

 

Tecadra has been using Pynbooking for nearly five years, and the platform has become a standard tool for the proper management of the hotel.

 

Today, the Reception team cannot even imagine working differently or that there are hotels still manually processing reservations.

 

The results are seen on multiple levels and fully justify the investment in digitization.

 

"From the start, we increased the number of online platforms we are present on, as Pynbooking integrates with most Romanian and foreign booking sites. And because we automated data updates, no additional effort was needed from the team.

Thus, we eliminated the manual work of synchronizing prices and availability, as well as errors and the risk of overbooking. In a very short time, online reservations came to represent about 30% of the activity."  Andreea Anton, Reception Manager at Hotel Tecadra.

 

 

From Tecadra's team reports, other benefits emerged:

• Major time savings for Reception employees as it automates data updating, guest registration forms completion, and communication with guests.
• New employees become more quickly familiarized with the hotel and better understand the structure of rooms and services offered.

"Since we've been using Pynbooking, we no longer train new employees. People learn on their own to work with Pynbooking, as it is a very intuitive platform, as well as the hotel's structure." Andreea Anton

• New employees become more quickly familiarized with the hotel and better understand the structure of rooms and services offered.
• Elimination of errors in manual data processing, and the risk of overbooking.

• Long-term data retention in the system and reusing them in recurring contracts/reservations. Also, the hotel was able to create a blacklist based on which the platform automatically notifies the existence of potential problems in a client's history.
• Extended mobility and access from anywhere to all functionalities needed for Reception and Sales activities.
   

"Because we mainly have business clients, many discussions take place over the phone. With Pynbooking I have all the data at hand and can give clients an informed and relevant response on the spot, regardless of my location. Thus, we don't lose any opportunity, especially since competition is very high in this segment." Andreea Anton

 

• Facilities for differentiated invoicing by customer categories, recurring contracts, types of services, payment methods, and automatic export of billing data to SAGA
  
• Access to diverse reports about current or historical activity.
  

 

 

"The reports in Pynbooking are short and to the point, so you don't get lost in details. They are accessible from any device and create a correct image of the reality in the Hotel. I mainly use 'night audit' and 'meal plan,' which provide all the necessary information for organizing the next day's activity." Andreea Anton

 

For Hotel Tecadra, digitization brought more time allocated to communication with guests and a real understanding of their requirements, as well as an openness to the online environment for diversifying revenue sources and constant business development.

 

"Pynbooking was like a revolution for Tecadra's digitization. It eliminated much of the manual work of data processing and allows us to physically take care of the guests in the hotel to offer them a quality experience." Andreea Anton, Reception Manager at Hotel Tecadra.