Tag: hospitality

These days, the sense of community has become all more important. Small businesses, often seen as the backbone of local economies, have been hit especially hard. Founded in 2011, Fivestars if here to help that exact segment, offering a payment and loyalty platform that takes the heavy lifting off the plate of those managing these businesses.

Boston-based Toast is a cloud-technology platform that was “purpose-built for the restaurant industry,” says Aman Narang, President and Co-founder of Toast. We recently sat down with Narang to chat about restaurant industry trends, why they picked Boston to headquarter in, what challenges they’re facing, and what’s on the roadmap ahead.

In 2006, Mike Ford and Mike Rogers were working together at a health tech startup digitizing paper-based claims sent from hospitals to medical funds. At the time, Ford had an investment in a local hostel through which he gained unique insight into how the Internet was disrupting hospitality management. He experienced the struggles of hoteliers who couldn’t connect their systems with online booking sites to centrally manage their rates and availability, and drew a striking resemblance to the conversion problems that he and Rogers were solving between hospitals and medical funds. Ford quickly worked with Rogers to build what would become their flagship product. From that, SiteMinder was born.

My friend Manfred Osthues and I developed the concept behind protel, including an early version of its GUI. When we showed our work to potential customers, every single hotel that saw our prototype wanted to know when the full PMS would be available. Since then, protel has maintained a steady set of core principles. But staying true to our vision has meant overhauling our software—sometimes radically—as the hospitality industry and its approach to technology have changed.

ALICE, a platform for hotel staff to deliver exceptional hospitality to their guests, acquired a large competitor, GoConcierge with a global customer base of over 1k hotels. ALICE needed to migrate GoConcierge’s customers so they could benefit from the new platform. Here’s how they used AWS Glue to do it.

For Stephen Chung, Co-founder and CEO of Breakup Tours, travel is the best medicine for heartbreak. The Hong Kong-based travel activity app recommends travel itineraries for customers based on the emotions they experience after a breakup, whether it’s anger, sadness, or something else. As the app gathers customer data, it becomes more intelligent with its recommendations. Chung shares what inspired him to found the company, why its technology is relevant, and what his vision is for its future.

Volara – led by David Berger as its CEO and Founder – is building voice interfaces for leading hotel technologies, while providing hotels the software to manage conversations with their guests at scale.

Red Dot Payment is a Singaporean startup that offers a platform for companies looking to accept digital payments. CTO Gian Carlo Val Ebao sat down to tell us more.

Whether it’s a day trip snorkeling in Palawan or a visit to an elephant sanctuary in Phuket, it’s tough for activity operators to make sure that travelers around the world can snag a spot for their activity. Dawid Makowski, CTO of BeMyGuest, is changing that.

The way travelers book their lodging has changed dramatically as Internet commerce has become more secure and Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) have grown in popularity. Customers benefit from speedy price comparisons and easy-to-read rating systems. Hotels, however, can’t always keep pace with the rapidly evolving virtual world and miss out on direct bookings while struggling to partner with third-party sites. Enter Fornova, which addresses this gap in the hospitality space with technology that scans, extracts, and analyzes millions of pieces of data from the online marketplace.