Esther Hertzfeld:
Hello, I'm Esther Hertzfeld, senior editor of Hotel Management Magazine, and I'm here with Richard Valtr, founder of Muse and Innovative Hospitality Management Cloud. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Valtr:
Hi.

Esther Hertzfeld:
Yes, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.

Richard Valtr:  
I like to say that I'm a recovering hotelier. So I started Muse 12 years ago now. It was a project that I was doing on the side of actually building a hotel that my sister was then going to run. And that's kind of my family background. We've been developers and operators of smallish hotels in Central Europe, which is where I'm from, despite my very English accent.
I kind of collected all of my memories of the things that I hated about hotel systems from working as a night receptionist most of the time during my summer holidays. And I thought about how hotel systems could actually work for the benefit of those people who actually worked in hotels and would really streamline a lot of their work so that they could focus on the guest experience and on running a great profitable business rather than just on the processes that we've been forced into.
And yeah, started it 12 years ago and managed to scale it so that we're now in 85 different countries. We have almost 1300 Muses working for us. More than just about half of those are actually still in tech and we're growing super, super fast, but we're very, very excited, especially here in the US that I moved to about five years ago to have it as our fastest-growing region. So it's very, very exciting at the current moment in Muse.

Esther Hertzfeld:
That is very exciting. And perfect gateway to my first question is, what is that driving force behind your growth in North America here?

Richard Valtr:
I don't know if it's the same everywhere, but I do feel that hotels on hotel software has traditionally been built by people who are outside of the industry. And I think that both myself and my business partner Matt, are both hoteliers. Me from more the kind of the S&B side of life. And he started his career at Hilton. And I think that we can always put ourselves in the shoes of a front desk operator or as somebody who's working in the central part. And so from that perspective, I think that we understand the problems, we can empathize with what that person is going through, and I think that that's why we make better products, I think. So that's the way that I d I think hoteliers do see that empathy in the product. And for that reason, I think they find it very easy to use, very easy to interact with, and I think that partially explains our incredible growth.

Esther Hertzfeld:    
So how do you envision the future of the hotel and what role do you see Muse playing in that?

Richard Valtr:  
I think that we always think about what are things basically that a human can do that is uniquely human because we think of hospitality is as the most human industry, and we think about how can we accentuate all of those things that really are the core of hospitality. So welcoming somebody in, making them feel at ease, recommending other great places. That feels like it's the heart and soul of hospitality, performing a check-in by writing down somebody's name, giving them a key card. Those feel like things that technology can actually replace really, really well. So we talk about automation, we talk about the idea of how can we streamline these businesses to make sure that we accentuate the human part and automate all of those things which end up causing friction in that guest experience.
And I think that that's what we try and do both for the front office but also for the back office as well, so that you can run your reports, you can think about things like reconciliation and to think about that in the smoothest possible way so that you don't need to employ an entire army of bookkeepers who then try and actually make sense of all of these guest bills and all of these credit card receipts that are flying around everywhere.

Esther Hertzfeld:  
So going a little further on that, what role do you think artificial intelligence and automation will play on the guest experience side over the next decade?

Richard Valtr:    
It's quite an interesting thing because I think that most people, when you ask them what would be the use cases of AI, they think, okay, great, there's going to be a chatbot. There's going to be something that responds to requests. It might be another kind of chatbot or something like that from the other side. It might be a way for you to think about smart rotas. It can be a demand calendar for when you need housekeepers, how many you need. And I think those types of things ... I think for example, we're developing a lot of those types of systems to make sure that we can think about the automation or the use of AI in allowing the hotel to actually be smarter.
I think the more interesting thing that we then think about is, well, what happens when everyone has an AI agent and everyone is planning their trip with an AI agent and that AI agent is calling on their behalf? Because if you look at AI voice, it feels like there'll be almost no end to the amount of requests that somebody will actually have. And what we think that that might also cause is on the one side, it'll be ... if you're running a big hotel currently that might be one or two people who are very, very keen and very organized. If you're running a 100-bedroom hotel, that might be two or three people basically that are that organized that put the time in to actually make those types of requests. Or maybe it's 10 or 15 for a weekend.
But if you have AI agents actually planning these trips and making those types of requests, that might be a thousand of those requests. And you have to think about not only what's the AI agent on the other side, so you might end up with this weird paradoxical situation where you have two AI agents actually talking about the service that you'll receive. But then y only so many pillows. There's only so many might be hyper-allergic pillows, there might be X amount of cots, there might be X amount of bookings that you can actually physically do.
So it just ends up really exploding the amount of supply architecture that you'll need to bring to that hotel. And those are the types of questions that we ask ourselves is that not only what's the kind of the first use case of AI, which I think has been fairly well covered at this point and is fairly easy to think about, but more what's the kind of the future, which feels like a very near-term future at this point as well, with the rapid pace of change in that area of the world where you have to really rethink how you think about actually the supply issues that come with AI everywhere.
And then thinking about how does that actually change the fundamental delivery system of the hotel as well. And again, how can we make sure that within the human aspect, which is I think what most people are actually trying to look for when they come to a hotel, doesn't get lost and people don't get overwhelmed with all of these different requests and all of these different queries.

Esther Hertzfeld:    
So what do you think is the most underestimated challenge facing the hospitality industry today?

Richard Valtr:  
Definitely inflation and costs are a huge challenge. I think that, for example, for smaller hotels or even let's say mid-scale operators, definitely managing your cash flow and managing the way that you can think about ... how you think about your expenses and your kind of incomings and outgoings are definitely an area that I think is hugely challenging for finance teams, especially with the amount of inflation that there is. In general, I think financial pressures that a lot of hotel operators are feeling.
And with the fact that demand also seems to be fairly unpredictable, it's not as linear as it was. I feel that on the one side, we've definitely benefited from relaxed work-from-anywhere policies that feels like shoulder days are not what they used to used to be, but also then makes some of that demand a little bit unpredictable. And we can't completely trust the models basically that are embedded in some of the revenue management systems basically that we've seen. And so because of that, I think that that idea of actually kind of the financial planning around a hotel becomes really, really difficult. And I think that that's an area that doesn't actually get talked about that much today, but it seems to be one where hotels are really, really struggling and it seems to be basically an area that does need to have some attention.

Esther Hertzfeld:  
Yeah. So going along with that, what metrics do you think hoteliers should be thinking about in 2025 to ensure the successful growth of their business, but also provide exceptional guest experience?

Richard Valtr:    
So I think that this is why, and one of the main ways that you can kind of counteract the different pressures that you have is both by making sure that you are trying to automate as many of these different things as possible. I think it should be much in the same way as having a channel manager became a pretty standard thing, let's say five or 10 years ago. I think the same is true of, for example, revenue management. I think that having an automated revenue management system rather than trying to actually update your rates the entire time is at this point a necessity because there's just too many. The world is becoming too unpredictable. It's too difficult to actually try and rely on knowledge of what last year actually looked like. So you need to be much faster in the way that you respond.
I think also hotels need to be thinking about other forms of the ways that they can actually generate revenue. So the way that they think about ancillary revenue. I think we always like to call ourselves as the first system that thinks about property management rather than just room management because of the way that our unique architecture looks at all different types of spaces. So you can sell parking spaces, meeting spaces, all within Muse and really any kind of space. And you can sell that on a nightly basis, on a daily basis or an hourly basis as well. So really looking at all of the different ways and now with Muse that you can maximize what it's traditionally been seen as ancillary revenue, and then the ways that you can, for example, revenue-manage all of those different spaces, but also for example, all of those different products.
And I think that's to do with, for example, also the flexibility that most customers demand. I think most people find it very easy in especially some brands to just say, okay, I just need a late checkout and that should just be a one-click event for myself or for my family. And I feel like those are the types of things basically that hotels need to figure out a way of how to make sure that that doesn't need somebody to actually ring you up or actually come to the reception, but they can do that through an app or through some kind of guest portal that the guest would have access to.

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