Automation leads to competitive advantage

Focus Hospitality is the exclusive distributor for Belgium and Luxembourg of the Property Management Systems (PMS) system Protel. In addition, the Wilrijk-based company also distributes Planet Payment's payment systems. These include payment terminals and the processing of the payments themselves. Furthermore, they are distributor of RevControl Revenue Management.

Mike Valcke, general manager Focus Hospitality: "And as if that were not enough, we are also working on a cash register system. We can already distribute this in Luxembourg, but in Belgium we are waiting for certification from the FPS Finance. All the above actually fits perfectly into our comprehensive support vision and personal approach. We can guide hotels full-option that way. Because it must be said, unlike other players on the market, we can be reached by phone. Every email is answered within 24 hours. It requires a bit of flexibility, but our customers are very satisfied with this."

"We notice in the industry the ever-increasing drive for administrative automation," Mike continues. "We can respond to this perfectly through our combination of the PMS system and Planet Payment. This way, we substantially reduce the error rate in the back office. Tracking pricing has also gained much more importance. We then have the combination of Protel and RevControl for that. RevControl does a full analysis of the market and how the competitors' pricing is. Using that data, the programme then makes proposals to rates. Those proposals can either be accepted fully automatically or after user intervention. As a hotel, you can obviously get a very big competitive advantage from that. That goes without saying."■