Haus Morjan – Dieter Eberle

With its central location and stunning views of the Rhine, Hotel Morjan offers guests the best of Koblenz and ensures a relaxing and enjoyable stay.

“People forget a year, but remember a moment”. True to this motto, the Morjan family and team are now already spoiling their guests in Koblenz in the 3rd generation.

Interview with Dieter Eberle (Marketing & Sales)

Please introduce yourself briefly and tell us what makes your hotel or hosting role special.
My name is Dieter Eberle and I am responsible for Marketing & Sales at Hotel Morjan. Our hotel is now already managed by the Morjan family in the 3rd generation. We offer our guests 40 rooms, over half of which have a fantastic view of the Rhine and Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. Our guests are always delighted with the central panoramic location and the Koblenz sights within walking distance. What can I say about our hospitality? We give everything to make our guests feel comfortable. We like doing our job and our guests notice that too. Furthermore, we are often praised for our friendliness. On the one hand, this makes us happy, but on the other hand, it surprises us. After all, friendliness should be the basis for dealing with guests.

Did you or how did you do revenue management before you switched to happyhotel?
We didn’t really do revenue management seriously before “happyhotel”. I regularly checked the price floor of our rooms and calculated ADR and REVPAR. The room rates were not really dynamic. There were seasonal rates and special rates for events.

What were the decision criteria for happyhotel?
The average occupancy rate of our hotel has always been very decent, there wasn’t much room for improvement. My idea was to increase the average rates of the rooms. And that was not possible without sensible revenue management. Anyone who has ever handled all those Excel lists and created forecast and event lists on foot knows what I’m talking about. So we had to find a software, and of course it had to have an integration to our PMS. We chose “happyhotel” because of the compatibility and the good price-performance ratio. And because I had a good feeling with “happyhotel” from the first contact. That was very important for us, since we are working together on a very sensitive topic, pricing, and the chemistry simply has to be right.

How does happyhotel make your everyday life easier?
The autopilot is a fine thing. After checking it daily at the beginning to understand how it works, I now only check the autopilot sporadically and entrust it with the pricing. That’s already a huge time saver. I do check the numbers every day, but it takes me no more than 30 minutes because the lists that happyhotel provides are almost perfect.

Which features of happyhotel do you not want to miss anymore?
The autopilot for pricing.

What does the dynamic pricing process look like NOW for you guys?
We are guided by events, utilization and I check the prices of relevant colleagues from time to time. Since the data, excluding competitive prices, is used by AI for pricing, I leave it alone. I now only intervene in pricing when unforeseen situations require it. I am sure that humane, emotional intelligence is superior to artificial intelligence in certain situations.

How has your average workday changed since integrating happyhotel?
More time for guests and more joy through positive development of our KPIs 🙂

What is the best thing about happyhotel? Which feature do you feel saves you the most time?
The autopilot and the evaluations.

Have you already made a recognizable additional turnover and if so, by what percentage have you been able to increase your turnover through happyhotel? (Estimate)
We were able to increase the revenue figures once again because we were able to increase our occupancy rate. However, I wouldn’t attribute that to the use of happyhotel, maybe indirectly. But where it’s really enjoyable is the ADR. We were able to increase this by about 20% in one year and that is pretty much the merit of happyhotel alone.

What are your personal tips for future happyhotel users?
Intensive study of how the AI works. Until you have a good feeling.
1. The good feeling is very important when you leave the pricing to others.
2. Always remain in readiness to intervene again if necessary. Keyword: Emotional intelligence vs. AI

Digitization in the hotel industry – what should a hotelier start with?
With an alarm clock 🙂 can be also gladly still analog, main thing he rings and makes awake. Of course, this does not apply to all hoteliers. But many have not yet heard the bang.

I sometimes can’t believe it: There are still, especially at smaller to medium-sized family-run hotels, websites without a booking tool. That won’t last much longer. The death of hotels in the economy class is just beginning. If you want to survive as a hotel today, you should deal with what I consider to be 5 topics that are essential for survival.

1. Know your guests better. What does the guest really want when he has booked with us? What are the motives behind it? Only those who know their guests and their needs can respond to them in the best possible way.

2. The basics of digitalization come next. A hotelier should therefore start with an online presence that also works on cell phones and that includes a booking tool. The homepage should ideally be the strongest sales channel.

3. Hoteliers should develop their own pricing strategy. Copying prices from competitors is not a solution either.

4. Pay attention to the sensible mix of sales channels. Here, too, the basis is a homepage with a booking tool and which is technically up-to-date. Hotels should not make themselves dependent on just one booking platform, such as booking.com or Expedia. There are many exciting sales channels, e.g. metasearch engines such as Trivago or Google with its HotelAds.

And the last recommendation I can give:

5. We would all do well to learn from the digital natives. This is the population group that has grown into the digital age. From them, we can learn a lot about digitization. Digitalization has long since reached the hotel industry. We have been working for a long time with self-check-in/check-out and digital guest folder

What do you wish for the future of happyhotel?
Stay innovative and surprise customers with cool tools

What is your most important tool?
Our PMS. This is the digital bridge to our guests

Name three things you would give to other hoteliers.
1. Take care of the basics. Those were the 5 points I just mentioned.
2. Hoteliers must pay much more attention to their target groups. The structure of guests’ needs is changing faster and faster. Only those who really know their needs can put together targeted packages.
3. Deal intensively with digitalization. There are many smart helpers that relieve employees, protect the environment and thus also save costs.

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