Case Study Loughview Leisure Group
Loughview Leisure Group
Group Overview:
- Ten Square Hotel - 131 luxury bedrooms in the heart of Belfast that combines boutique-style accommodation and state of the art conference and banqueting facilities.
- Loughshore Hotel - 68 luxurious bedrooms, the hotel is ideally situated for exploring Northern Ireland, the Causeway Coastal Route and Belfast City.
- Chimney Corner Hotel - 62 recently refurbishment rooms in Greater Belfast, offering excellent facilities and comfortable rooms.
Challenges:
As the group expanded to 3 hotels and undertook a refurbishment and expansion programme, they required a more sophisticated and robust system with more functionality to better serve their additional needs.
They required centralised functionality to process operations on behalf of all three properties.
With limitations to their old system, the group needed a more efficient and fast system to automate processes, save them time and improve the guest experience.
Solutions:
Loughview Leisure Group selected the comprehensive suite of Guestline hospitality solutions to better suit the needs of the group. This included:
Benefits:
Smooth migration of systems:
The team were impressed by Guestline’s professional project management that fully prepared the hotel for the job at hand. The team collectively uploaded thousands of live bookings successfully and the data was migrated with minimal disruption.
Timely installation:
The training covered off everything the hotel required, and they were closely supported by the Guestline team who were quick to respond to any queries.
As such the project went live on time and the various teams (including Accounts, Events and Reception) felt confident using the new systems from the start.
Two hours saved per day:
All OTA bookings, regardless of their source, now flow directly into the PMS without the need for time consuming manual data entry and allocation. This saves the reservation team up to 2 hours every day as they were previously manually uploading up to 100 bookings per day – on a painstakingly slow system.
They also had to manually check and prioritise late bookings.
Centralised operations:
The central reservation team handle reservations on behalf of all three hotels from one place, quickly and easily accessing availability and rates and confirming bookings.
Event management:
With the Advanced Conference & Banqueting module, the events team can check availability, process bookings, monitor revenue generated, schedule delegates and restaurant sittings and raise invoices. This has proved far more effective and time saving than when they previously logged and managed all processes on Excel spreadsheets.
Enhanced customer experience:
Check in and check out processes are quicker on the new system which enables the hotel front desk to turnaround more guests at any one time - invaluable when they have large coach bookings arrive.
Quick reporting:
The accounts team can run a range of reports in a matter of seconds - from actual and forecast reports to month end and weekend revenue reports. The night audit report is emailed to all the Executive team every morning at 5am so the team can review the revenue generated for the 3 hotels from the day before.
Improved accessibility:
As the systems are cloud based they can be accessed off-site, from any device, which is proving beneficial for operational staff and for housekeeping teams who update the system on their tablets as and when they complete tasks.
Effective rate management:
The hotel find rate building easy and simple and can now flex and manage their rates more efficiently across the channels (almost daily) – all from one place.
No more overselling:
With live availability all room rates and availability are automatically updated across all channels and their own website to prevent the hotels from overselling the rooms.
"Our old system was extremely slow and was holding us back with limited functionality - we needed a more complex, quicker system that would save us time and money and enable us to operate more efficiently across our three sites. Guestline’s system fulfilled all our requirements.
Denis, Jo and Clio [from Guestline] did a brilliant job in preparing us for the new system and implementing exactly what we required to improve business processes and enhance the guest journey.
We are now saving hours per day and can analyse and forecast figures far more effectively with the range of reports available to us."