Hotel Beethoven

The four-star Hotel Beethoven is an elegant, five-floor boutique property built in 1902 in Neo-Renaissance style, lying nestled in the bohemian quarter of Vienna opposite the famous Naschmarkt. The hotel is family owned and operated.

We spoke to Julia Hellwagner about how they have upgraded their revenue management platform during the pandemic and are already seeing the benefits.

Old-School Frustrations

"Before we were using a really primitive RMS that was super slow in making price changes. It was so manual! You had to click around everywhere and update things all the time. In fact, it was so bad that the system didn't seem to recognise that there was a difference in demand compared to the previous year.

"We finally moved to a cloud-based PMS in 2019 when we switched to Mews, which opened up a world of possibilities for us in terms of Revenue Management. We immediately chose FLYR for Hospitality – it was an easy choice and we switched it on in March 2020.

"We fundamentally agreed with FLYR for Hospitality's preference for primary data. The most important thing to be looking at in RM is your own demand and not to blindly follow your competition.

"The ease of use was also a major factor. We've changed our operations set up a lot over the last year and we have needed an RMS that anyone – from the front desk to our GM – can use."

Rapid Implementation

"Onboarding was so easy. Our old rate manager took six months to get connected! But this time it took only a few days to get up and running with Mews and FLYR for Hospitality."

Instant Results

"We switched on automated pricing a couple of months after onboarding. Now I love how it is adjusting prices constantly throughout the day and how easy everything is.

"The amount of time it has saved me is crazy. I used to have to check all our pricing manually three times a day and then make all the changes. Now I have all that time back to do more important things like strategy and long term planning.

"We even ran a test comparing what FLYR for Hospitality pricing achieved during lockdown versus what our old RMS would have delivered – our RevPAR was €4 higher, which is amazing considering our average room rate was €120."

"Since we switched over, our RevPAR has been constantly rising along with our ADR. Our occupancy is recovering nicely and is back at over 70 percent."

Commercial Intelligence

"I love the analytics and it was a big reason for choosing FLYR for Hospitality as our RMS. In short, you can look at it and actually get something out of it.

"I used to spend days preparing just one report and now it takes me seconds to do the exact same thing. For example, I like to know what channels bookings are coming from, in what category and at what price. We were not able to get anything like that before but now it's generated immediately."