The Watermill Hotel, managed is a 71-room hotel built with views of the River Bulbourne located in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. Just 20 minutes by train from London, the hotel is frequented by business travelers and holidaying families alike and is also idea for large coach tours and wedding parties.
The Watermill Hotel was quick to adopt a PMS system but when their previous supplier raised its prices, manager Sandeep Chawla set out to find a more affordable and flexible solution to suit their specific needs. Senior management was determined to find a cost effective yet reliable alternative which would offer easy integration, automation and meaningful analytics.
With 50-60% of bookings coming from third party websites, the right technology was vital for the hotel to ensure optimised occupancy rates and revenues. The small six-member team also needed to have the best guest service management tool at its fingertips to support the smooth running of the establishment at all times.
Management took advantage of mycloud’s free trial offer covering PMS, POS and social listening solutions in August 2016 and as soon as they were confident that they found what they were looking for they signed up for the Premium plan to ensure a good occupancy rate, and improve and optimise room rates to get the best possible revenue.
Summing up some of the advantages of their new system, hotel manager Sandeep Chawla says “mycloud PMS is a supremely efficient tool which is proving itself invaluable for our small team of six. The feature we love most is the seamless integration with TripAdvisor. Immediately after a guest checks out, TripAdvisor automatically generates an email inviting them to leave a review. This means that our team can focus on giving guests the best possible service rather than sending individual follow up emails.
The hotel had anticipated that there would be some issues transitioning from the old system but had been reassured by the mycloud support team. Their product knowledge and responsiveness in answering our initial queries, ensured that the transition process ran quickly and efficiently.”
The future
Although it is still early days, the Watermill Hotel is very happy with the mycloud hospitality solution, which the team relies on every day as it is allowing them to make “undoubtedly better-informed business decisions”. The hotel manager continues, “We recognise mycloud as an excellent partner and as a result of our robust cooperation, we have since recommended them to additional New World Hospitality managed hotels in Hythe, Hemel Hempstead, Epping, Stevenage, Eastbourne and St Helens.”
