One of the biggest pain points in hospitality is fragmentation of data points, and hence too many data silos. One company that is trying to solve that problem, as well as solve the industry’s access to “a properly integrated data platform which would dramatically accelerate the hotel technology industry’s innovation possibilities” is SnapShot, which has launched its Marketplace product, opened an Asia Pacific office and appointed Stefan Wolf, formerly with Onyx Hospitality, as its key account director based in the region.
Stefan Wolf: “This helps hoteliers give answers at the time the questions occur.”
I caught up with Wolf about a month into his new role and he’s visibly excited about his new charge.
“Put it simply, Snapshot Marketplace integrates non-PMS and PMS data into one dashboard for hoteliers,” said Wolf, who’s worked in revenue management for nearly two decades, most of that time spent in Asia.
“As someone who’s worked in revenue management for years, one of the biggest headaches was that data was all over the place and you had to pull in data from everywhere and then put it together manually so that by the time you complete the analytics, the window of opportunity to make crucial pricing decisions is lost,” said Wolf.
“This helps hoteliers give answers at the time the questions occur.”
SnapShot has been able to integrate data from leading PMS vendors such as Oracle, Hotel Logix and Protel as well as local PMS providers. “I never knew there were so many PMS solutions globally. We currently have 40 integrations, and I am told that 40 is nothing considering the total amount of PMS providers ,” said Wolf.
The SnapShot Marketplace acts as a hub for developers who need to access and work with hotel data for applications and hotels who need secure and integrated applications.
Currently, Wolf said, 6,000 hotels are signed onto the freemium model, with 2,000 of these from Asia, and about 3,500 from Europe.
SnapShot was co-founded in Austria in 2013 by David Turnbull (CCO) who has worked with brands like Design Hotels and citizen M and Michael Heinze (CIO), a hotel technology entrepreneur since 1990 and who has built four companies in the hotel technology sector from PMS to Channel Managers.
Relating the beginnings, the website says, “In 2013, not satisfied with the current state of hotel data, technology, integrations and analytics David and Michael set out to do something about it. The first issue to solve was how hotels could manage their revenue forecasting, predictions and budgets without resorting to unwieldy Excel documents shared over email.”
This led to the first cloud based Demand Management Application, followed by SnapShot Analytics, an analytics dashboard for hotels – “incredibly there was no such dashboard – in an age when data is considered the solution for most businesses”.
With the dashboard built, the company, which moved its base to Berlin in 2015, felt it was time that “a properly integrated data platform for hotels would dramatically accelerate the hotel technology industry’s innovation possibilities”.
Hotels, it said, were clamoring for a better system to integrate with other applications and innovative application developers were using all their resources building integrations while they struggled to keep their applications up-to-date.
“A marketplace to get instant access to pre-integrated applications would offer hotels the possibility to easily upgrade to more advanced technology and it would give application developers access to thousands of hotels on a simple platform.”
Wolf, whose role is to expand its customer base in Asia, said, “I felt it was time to do something different in my career. While I love revenue management, it can be repetitive and I felt this solution absolutely meets the needs of hoteliers.”
See SnapShot blog on What Independents and Small to Mid-Sized Hotel Chains Must Understand Differently About Their Data
• Featured image credit: Tzido/iStock-Getty Images