The Glow Hotel Group follows pioneer citizenM and selects hetras
Trendy design, kiosk check-in, stylish rooms and perfect cappuccinos. The newly formed hotel chain Glow, based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is a perfect example of a new generation chain and also the newest customer of hetras, the cloud-based hotel management product designed especially for this category.
The first property of the Glow Hotel Group, in the heart of Eindhoven, opened to great fanfare and a full house. The forty-room boutique hotel caters to both business and leisure travellers and continues to pleasantly surprise its guests with eye-catching art, bold design and attractive prices. Eindhoven is known as the friendliest city in Holland and many guests find that the hotel’s most lasting impression is its personal service. Ingmar Sloothaak, COO of Odyssey Hotels, which operates Glow, Marc O’City Apartments and several Marriott franchises, explains his decision for hetras: “I initially heard about hetras from citizenM. While our concept at Glow is a bit different, we still need a high degree of automation and only hetras is able to provide this today.”
With only five full-time staff members (housekeeping is outsourced), providing personal service can be a challenge. Yet Glow manages to do this with flying colors. Part of the formula for success is the best-in-class integration between hetras and other technology partners that accompany the guest journey. This frees up hotel staff from mundane tasks so that they can better interact with the guests. For example, the distribution through the hetras channel manager is self-optimizing and runs unattended. The credit card interface (Adyen) takes care and resolves almost all exception cases. The key card interface (Hotek) also runs fully automated. Glow continues to add technology to their high-tech rooms, including the in-room tablet solution from Suitepad. Despite all this technology, there are no servers on site. Everything is in the cloud.
What makes Glow different from other brands is that most of the staff does not have a hotel background. They come from a variety of industries and bring fresh ideas on how to run a hotel.
“Similar to Glow, here at hetras we also have a healthy mixture of hotel industry insiders and innovative thinkers from outside the industry” added Marc Fries, hetras’ Director of Operations. “This is why hetras looks and works like nothing the hotel industry has seen before. New generation hotel concepts like Glow – and any other traditional brand that plans to modernize – are perfect fits for hetras.”
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