Best Western Stoke on Trent Moat House
Best Western Stoke on Trent Moat House
The four-star Best Western Stoke-on-Trent Moat House Hotel, is home to 147 bedrooms. It is a leading Staffordshire conference and events venue with a dedicated 11-room meeting and events centre and a large conference suite that can hold up to 650 delegates in theatre-style or 350 in cabaret-style. With its four bars and a restaurant, it is ideally suited for corporate events, tribute evenings and weddings.
The on-site leisure facilities include an indoor heated pool, sauna, spa pool and air conditioned gym.
Challenges:
- Their old system had limited capabilities and was very restrictive – plus, the supplier had no plans to innovate or develop the software further.
- The hotel needed more in-depth reporting and analysis from their property management system.
- The hotel wanted to integrate with a revenue management system and there were no interfaces with their old system.
Solutions:
- Rezlynx PMS
- Advanced Conference and Banqueting Manager
- IDeaS revenue management interface
- Two-way Best Western interface
- Channel Manager
- EPoS
The demonstration from Guestline addressed all their needs and provided a range of solutions that would enable them to achieve their business goals.
The hotel’s General Manager was reassured that the systems could fulfil their requirements from both an individual site and a group perspective.
Benefits:
Sophisticated rate management:
With the IDeaS interface to Rezlynx PMS, the hotel can effectively manage rates to boost ADR and occupancy. The system automatically applies the rules that have been set up, so there is less manual uploading.
Increased direct bookings:
As it is easier to manage room availability and rates, this has freed up their time to dedicate and enhance other areas of the business, namely marketing, which has resulted in a 4% increase in direct bookings and lower OTA commissions.
Effective event management:
In 2017, the hotel’s event business accounted for 45% of all sales with 70 weddings, 9500 Christmas covers and numerous tribute nights and conferences.
The Advanced Conference and Banqueting Manager streamlines all processes with confirmation emails, pre-orders and deposits and enables the team to provide a first class service to their guests. The Chef pulls off the food orders himself with live information and the system allows the hotel to link bedroom reservations to events.
Secure payments:
With the online secure payment facility, the hotel can now swiftly and securely process pre-payments, which are between 30-40 per day. Previously the hotel were taking pre-paid deposits manually on one terminal, which was both time-consuming and open to error.
Payments are watertight, there is no room for error and there are no missed payments.
Logical system:
The system is simple to use and all the information easily accessible – the hotel have set up hot keys personalised for the hotels’ needs so information is accessed swiftly. The reports are easy to put together and pull off the system.
Increased ancillary spend:
Pre-stay emails are circulated to guests to promote dinner reservations, which has resulted in an increase in ancillary food and drink spend.
Two-way interface:
Essential for a Best Western hotel, the Guestline interface facilitates bookings (that account for 35% of the hotel’s total room sales) from the Best Western portal in real-time.
EPoS:
The integration of the hotels EPoS system with their PMS simplifies and speeds up processes, essential for invoicing purposes at check-out. The EPoS also allows the hotel to carry out stock takes where they can pull off reports from the tills.
Improved marketing:
The team can extract contacts from the databases to target them (via email) with special offers and packages to drive direct bookings. The system gives them the freedom to control all the marketing themselves. As the hotel host numerous events throughout the year, they are able to cross-sell the different types of events they host to new markets.
Cloud-hosted:
The system is accessible anywhere around the large site as well as off-site.
Improved connectivity:
They were terminal server based previously and connectively was poor especially at the hotels that didn’t have fibre broadband. They are experiencing improved connectivity with the Guestline systems as they are all cloud hosted.
Automated channel management:
Bookings from OTAs were manually uploaded to the system previously. This has now been eradicated with their new Channel Manager. The hotel can manage and close out channels in real time.
"The Guestline systems are not only multi-functional and regularly updated, they are proving the most cost effective solution compared to other leading (more costlier) suppliers.
As a leading events venue, it was paramount the system helped us facilitate and manage our multitude of events and Guestline’s Conference and Banqueting module streamlines our operations and enables us to provide a more professional service to our clients.
The Guestline systems are highly automated, which provides us with more time to review and plan our activity and be more strategic and pro-active in our operations."