DEVELOPMENT
“ BUILDING CONFIDENCE IN PEOPLE SO THEY FEEL SAFE STAYING AT HOTELS AND TRAVELING WILL BE SOMETHING THE WHOLE TRAVEL INDUSTRY WILL NEED TO WORK ON .”
– JOHN FLOOD
Secondly will be the expected COVID waves , which will also impact hotels and destinations in general – opening and closing all the time until things really settle down . Hopefully , things settle down by mid-next year . We ’ ve been fortunate enough to get almost all our corporate office and hotel staff vaccinated .
Building confidence in people so they feel safe staying at hotels and traveling will be something the whole travel industry will need to work on .
The biggest opportunities will firstly be at home in the large numbers of hotels , which will be bought and looking to rebrand , as well as the many hotels that will be looking to get connected to an established online distribution system like ours .
Secondly will be the overseas projects as we look to pick up and expand our footprint across the globe .
H : Explain the longer-term strategy of the company ?
JF : For Archipelago , we ’ ll continue to look for HMAs while also constructing our own hotels – our third hotel is currently under development . We will also continue to look to expand overseas , especially around Southeast Asia .
We also just started offering a ‘ one-stop-shop ’ for hotel connectivity and online distribution called ‘ Powered by Archipelago .’
When business returns following COVID-19 , the hotel industry will see an acceleration of online business . Many independent hotels lack the staff , tools , systems and expertise to take advantage of this – and even more are falling behind their competitors . Without proper systems in place , this will continue to get worse , while opportunities are missed .
To fill this gap , we ’ re offering the first all-inclusive plug-and-play solution to these problems . So , instead of shopping around for a booking engine , channel manager , rate shopping tool , rate parity checker , metasearch integrator and so forth , we arrange all these and set them up for hotels .
On the tech side we ’ re also developing our own PMS , which is quite far along , and we ’ ll add this to other tools we ’ ve developed such as our payroll system and inventory system .
Our team of 20 developers and our AI people are flat out at the moment – very exciting times .
34 hotelsmag . com September / October 2021