Royal Orchid: leveraging technology to improve efficiency


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Preface:

Royal Orchid Group, earlier known as Baljee Hotels, has been expanding aggressively across India in the last few years. However, the rapid growth and expansion posed new challenges for the group as it could not maximize its revenues as the group had manual bookings system in place, owing to which it was becoming increasingly difficult to optimally manage nearly sold out capacities. The case was more to do with offering rooms at right rates instead of serving on a first come first serve basis to maximize revenue. Also managing last minute cancellations and co-ordinations with property and the guests were becoming tedious and time consuming. Since the group has multiple properties, their objective was to offer alternate accommodation at other properties in case rooms were not available in the desired property.
Detailing the challenge:
Before the transition, Royal Orchid Group carried out central reservations manually with property-wise status of bookings and reservation requests being forwarded to individual properties of the Group through telephone/fax/e-mail. This besides being time consuming also proved to be a quite unreliable and importantly, a non-scaleable model. Sample some of the issues that the group had to contend with due to the manual process:
- As each property offered different facilities at differentiated tariffs, application of property-specific tariff was invariably complex resulting in tariff negotiation being a cumbersome procedure
- Tariff offered to travel agents varied depending of the market segment, business source, seasons, etc. and maintenance of a manual record of special, negotiated tariffs for thousands of CVGR Companies and Travel Agents for each property and applying the correct tariff for each reservation proved to be a herculean.

Business benefits:

Besides optimization of the reservation process, the solution implementation led to a whole new channel of bookings opening up anytime, anywhere. The user-friendly interface led to enhanced customer satisfaction. Above all, better room occupancy rates and minimal incorrect billing led to higher revenues and profitability, which allowed the groups’ management to expand their footprint rapidly without having to worry about existing properties’ efficiency and profitability.