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Industry discussion: Margitte Verkruijsse-Reiner

SnapShot GmbH’s Vice President of Business Development, Margitte Verkruijsse-Reiner discussed her experiences within the realm of emerging technologies and digital hospitality. The former Sabre executive gave us some keen insight into what trends are driving the current shifts to digital and especially analytics driven hotel decision making.

The HSMAI Top 20 extraordinary minds within sales, marketing and technology in Europe’s travel and hospitality industry were named at the HSMAI Europe Awards last week. Among the 2015 Top 20 recipients judged by a panel of senior industry executives, were gurus from sales, marketing, and technology innovators leading the trends that power today’s hospitality industry.

Travel Daily News caught up with one of the winners, SnapShot GmbH’s Vice President of Business Development, Margitte Verkruijsse-Reiner to briefly discuss her experiences within the realm of emerging technologies and digital hospitality. The former Sabre executive gave us some keen insight into what trends are driving the current shifts to digital and especially analytics driven hotel decision making. SnapShot, for those unaware, is a well funded tech company based in Europe, that is creating analytics tools for hotels.
 
TDN: Margitte, what made you make the shift from a huge American hotel technology giant like Sabre, to a relatively new tech company?

Verkruijsse-Reiner: Well, my experience at Sabre was in selling hotel technology centered around central reservation systems and other services. SnapShot represented new, exciting, and potentially “game changing” with regard to the technological possibility. The combination of this, and the team behind SnapShot, made my decision fairly easy.

TDN: Given your background in technology, can you discuss how you overcome the intimidation hospitality industry people have concerning analytics technology? This seems to be one of the central issues where adaptation is concerned.

Verkruijsse-Reiner: Yes, of course. Well, it’s obviously crucial for hoteliers to understand that they are already working with big and small data already. They have the information at hand, so many times our job is to simply make them aware that they have it, and to ascertain the different systems in place that produce various reports they are currently looking at. Often times we find hoteliers have a subscription to system X, Y, and Z, but they simply do don't really do anything with the data. Then too, the person who purchased the license may no longer be there, and a proper transfer of procedure may not have been made, etc. In this way, the data capability is lost until we can make data understandable for hoteliers. Another major hurdle in this area is making this data useful and insightful. In this way, we are not always so focused on innovating the hotel into our new products, but we’re focused on helping them derive value. Essentially, we are making it easier for them to access existing data, without providing additional layers to navigate.
 
TDN: Do you think hoteliers don't totally understand the data they're already working with every day? Is there data they could access, but do not have the knowhow to?

Verkruijsse-Reiner: Absolutely. This is exactly the point. What we’re seeing in our industry right now, is that whereas before there were a lot of separate departments such as; had sales, marketing, and revenue, even though they are still there, commercial teams have started to work more closely together. Since hoteliers are starting to see that there is an effect for such things as, for instance a bad reputation on a Trip Advisor, the reality is bookings can be affected for a certain month.
 
So, I think that the overall idea that departments being to work better together also means that management needs to work outside the comfort zone in order to  learn what’s happening with Google Analytics, or what sales is doing, and so forth. In other words, the organization makes it easier to get a very high-level insight, a snapshot of what those KPIs for other departments.

TDN: So, how do you see Snapshot developing in the near future,  at least from a sales side or growth? Can you tell us what you are excited about, where do you want to see it go?

Verkruijsse-Reiner: I think it's very exciting how we are positioning Snapshot Analytics as a tool that makes data more comprehensible, quicker and quicker to access. It excites me a bit, that we’ve created our business model around it the idealogy of actually giving something back that makes life easy for the industry as such. I find it valuable and unique, that we are moving away from the typical hotel industry technology offering of having a startup fee and monthly reoccurring fees. So, what we are really offering is a technology where hoteliers themselves can build out their products at the pace that they wish, depending upon their needs, and not having to buy a product with all the bells and whistles and then only using a very limited number of functionality. And I think that's something you see in your private lives, but you don't see it really yet in our space.

Snapshot GmbH is an Austrian startup founder by industry notables Michael Heinze and David Turnbull. The startup has thus far received just over $30 million in funding from various sources, according to Crunchbase. SnapShot has no direct competitors, but data industry players like SAS and revenue strategy solutions startup Duetto are striving in the space. In the world of disjointed data silos that hoteliers currently squeeze business intelligence from, it seems to me the first player to create an integration tool that is suitable for all, will be the new Expedia of hotel tech. In this regard it’s hard to imagine so few innovators striving to do so. As we can see from the former Sabre executive’s part, SnapShot seems to have gotten a big head start.
 

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Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.

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