Keikyu EX Inn Co., Ltd.
Keikyu EX Inn Hamamatsucho – Daimon Station Manager Kentaro Nakajima
Keikyu EX INN Shinagawa – Shimbamba Station North Manager and in charge of New Branch Opening, Head Office Chain Business Department Hideaki Yamamoto
Head Office Chain Business Department Public Relations Momoka Gomi
Q: What changes have you seen in your working environment since you started using our service?
It hasn’t been long since we introduced the service, so we haven’t seen any changes in terms of numbers, but since it supports Chinese and Korean, we are expecting an increase in the number of bookings from overseas customers that we have been missing out on. With the OTA reservation system we’ve used so far, we couldn’t be flexible with the plans, so we really like the fact that we can set our own plans. The other thing is the price setting. More and more hotels are claiming to offer the best price or the lowest price guarantee, but we have never been able to do so. This will become possible with tripla Hotel Booking, and if customers can see the difference in price between the OTAs and us, we expect to see an increase in our own bookings. Also, in terms of smartphones, the fact that you can make a reservation from a chatbot is different from the way you used to make it before, and you can make a reservation easily as if you are writing a reply on LINE. We think this will lower the hurdle of the booking process a little bit, and we hope that we will get more reservations from young people.
Q: What were the problems with the reservation system you have been using?
With our existing reservation system, we can see information such as who has made a reservation, but we cannot analyze it. We would like to do email marketing in the future, so customer analysis is important. In addition, if we could extract the list of reservations in CSV format, we could easily check them by setting up an Excel macro, but we were also troubled by the fact that CSV output was not available.
tripla is constantly improving the management interface, so we would appreciate it if we can do more and more in the future.
Q: What are your expectations for tripla?
By communicating with you this time, we had a good opportunity to think about what kind of engine we should build to get more bookings from customers. It is a fact that we have been bound by the current reservation system and have not given much thought to the convenience of our customers, so we hope that we can continue to work together to create a system through trial and error. What we like most about working with your company is the development speed and revision. Once you make a correction, you have to do a lot of work, and there is often a lot of fuss, but I think the speed with which you do this makes for a good service. For the booking engine, one of the first features we would like to have is the ability to post photos and other information that is easier to read.
One more thing is for the chatbot. As for the hotel access that we get a lot of inquiries about, it is difficult to convey the information well when talking on the phone, so we think it would be useful to be able to provide information in an easy-to-understand manner using maps and GPS.
Thank you for your cooperation in this interview.