Stefan Karapanchev and Anita Velinova, founders of Anstea Synergy Exely, discuss the pioneering approach to providing hotel software and expert support in the interview for Best Hotel’s Blog.
What is Exely Anstea Synergy exactly?
Exely Anstea Synergy is a hospitality software company with a human-to-human approach. We always say, “We are hoteliers helping other hoteliers”. And it is true — Stefan used to be a general manager for about 10 successful years in different types of hotel complexes.
For this reason, we know exactly what daily issues and challenges hoteliers face and offer the right software and individual proactive perspective to solve them:
- Booking Engine and Hotel Website for direct sales
- Connection with metasearch engines & payment service providers
- Channel Manager for online distribution
- PMS for hotel operations
- Reputation Manager for online image
- Price Monitor & Price Assist for revenue management
More than 500 hotels, both small, city, spa, boutique, seaside hotels, resorts, and guest houses, in Bulgaria have entrusted us with hospitality software in the past seven years.
In your opinion, what issues stop Bulgarian hoteliers from earning more?
Firstly, hotels overload their very limited human resources with e-commerce and reputation management. As a result, the staff is overworked. Busy employees can hardly put any additional effort into promotions, revenue management, or sales optimization. Therefore, hotel revenue does not grow.
Secondly, it is the “Do not teach me how to do my job” approach. The unwillingness to change one’s ways can really hold your business back.
Thirdly, hotels are very dependent on global booking platforms. The commissions that these platforms charge can reach up to 15-30% of the booking amount. By relying solely on Online Travel Agencies, hotels lose a big chunk of revenue.
Hotels have been relying on Online Travel Agencies for years. Why change something?
This convenience comes at a cost! OTAs provide visibility but interfere with the hotel’s ability to control its own pricing, brand image, and guest relationships. Here are a few more arguments that might change hoteliers’ minds:
- OTA bookings statistically have lower average checks. If guests book on OTAs, they may not even learn about hotels’ extra services. On the other hand, booking engines for hotel websites upsell all kinds of services and even suggest room upgrades.
- OTA guests are not loyal to a hotel, they are loyal to their favorite booking platform. To be ranked higher on search results, hotels create discount offers that OTAs represent as their loyalty benefits. And, of course, hoteliers cannot use OTA guest details to run their own promotional campaigns as OTAs do not disclose any contact details.
What does Exely Anstea Synergy have to offer to hotels that decide to reduce their dependency on OTA?
- Free start, setup, training, support, and maintenance: Hoteliers do not lose anything by trying our solutions.
- 41 language versions and 53 currencies: This let’s hotels attract more international travelers and makes it so much easier for them to complete a booking.
- Tools that increase the conversion rate in Booking Engine: These are booking motivators: mobile discounts, country deals, smart widgets, and many more. Our customers say they could not imagine how powerful these tools are for online sales.
- Website analytics: all the data on website traffic are collected and stored in one place.
- Metasearch engine connection: this is the future of direct booking tools in the next 5 years.
- 11+ payment methods: They provide hotels with the absolute freedom for guaranteed bookings.
- Loyalty Program: Exely Booking Engine has a built-in automatic Loyalty Program that calculates loyalty levels and displays loyalty discounts on the hotel website.
- Features for maximizing revenue: Exely supports dynamic rate management so that hotels can monetize on any seasonal changes.
- Features for occupancy optimization: We offer such things as an automatic waitlist and RoomMix feature. The waitlist suggests visitors leave their contact details when rooms they want are booked and sends them automatic notifications if these rooms are available for their dates again. RoomMix allows hotels to maximize occupancy by suggesting guests move rooms mid-stay if there are no rooms available for the entire selected period.
- Qualified customer support: Our support managers help hoteliers with any settings and questions. Customer Support also makes all the initial settings in a Customer account with hoteliers to make it as easy as possible. And the results are impressive — our customers who used to have few direct bookings per week claim to have hundreds a week immediately after initial settings.
What are the results that your customers can achieve?
There is no better way to showcase our efficiency than a success story. There is a Hotel Complex located in Winter Resort in Bulgaria that contacted us at the end of October 2023. The property did not have a website or any active reservations and was looking for a software supplier that could provide a fast set-up and proactive support.
The Exely Anstea Synergy team came up with a plan: to provide the property with Exely Hotel Website Builder and Booking Engine and launch promotional activities to drive direct bookings.
Here are the results that the Hotel Complex has managed to achieve during the first three months of working with us:
- It took three business days to complete all the initial settings in Exely Extranet and launch marketing activities.
- During the first month of our collaboration, the Hotel Complex got 200 direct bookings for over 150 000 BGN, saving BGN 27 000 on OTA commissions.
- Hotel Reservation Team has saved themselves 120 working hours by automating the booking management process with Exely Booking Engine.
Get in touch with Stefan and Anita at [welcome@exely.bg] or call [+359887313159], exely.bg,
Exely Anstea Synergy has been a gold sponsor of the TOP 100 Best Hotels in Bulgaria Awards Ceremony in January 2024.
