The pandemic of COVID-19 put an immediate and sudden halt to the hotel industry. But now, as the travel restrictions are being lifted, there has been a gradual boom in the industry. Considering the post-pandemic world, more and more people are relying on the internet to book their flights and hotels.
There still remain a set of challenges that come the way. And while not all of them are unique, but are certainly noteworthy.
“Every good success story begins with a simple idea.”
Featuring for The Enterprise World’s this issue of Most Trusted Hotel Booking Solution Provider Platform – 2022 is ehotel®, a one-stop-solution company for all your hotel booking needs.
The Company- ehotel®
ehotel® set out 22 years ago, as a hotel booking platform, to simplify business travel. First, it had to find the right hotel rooms at the best price quickly and efficiently from the most diverse offers and contingents. The complexity of the market meant that the workload for the employees and the costs to the companies were both extremely high.
Today, ehotel® enables customers to quickly find suitable and up-to-date offers from well over seven million hotel rooms that comply with all their corporate policies. The unique meta-search technology that enables these optimized processes was launched by CEO Fritz Zerweck.
The former finance manager, who has been with ehotel® since 2004, likes the company’s pioneering spirit.
“We work together closely as a team”
As a manager, he considers it his responsibility to motivate his staff to contribute their own ideas and to give them a lot of freedom to think.
“Ultimately, it’s my responsibility”, he explains. “The fact that there is the potential to make a mistake shouldn’t stop anyone from being creative”. What does ‘mistake’ mean in our field anyway? It’s not like we’re performing open-heart surgery”., he adds.
As someone who knows the huge pressures involved in the world of finance, a pleasant working environment, and a very good communication culture are important to him.
“If you’re happy and enjoying your work, you’re much more likely to want to take care of the needs of others”, says Fritz Zerweck. Ultimately, the aim of ehotel® is to make the day-to-day lives of business travelers, travel managers, buyers, and accountants easier.
What Sets Them Apart?
Whether they are small companies, medium-sized enterprises, or large international corporations, customers have come to appreciate the combination of technology with real service and the provision of solutions from booking to billing.
“The guiding principle of ehotel® is to focus on the customer and this is what forms the basis for the further development of the hotel booking platform.”
As a data-driven company, it uses comprehensive analysis to adapt its innovations, processes, services, and tools to the needs and wishes of its customers. In this way, ehotel® is one step ahead in shaping the future with new features. This has led to an extremely high level of customer satisfaction, which has been confirmed to ehotel® in numerous surveys and with various awards.
ehotel® reacts immediately to new trends. When carrying out their searches, customers can take equipment, comfort, and other standards (in addition to internal company specifications) into account and can use additional filters to consider contemporary issues such as sustainability and climate protection. Hotels with charging points for electric vehicles score highly in this regard. Hotels with official certificates proving they are environmentally friendly are also highly rated.
The other ehotel® tools are extremely user-friendly too. Travel managers can generate structured statistics using ehotel® Analytics and analyze travel volumes to identify savings opportunities. Twenty-nine reports are integrated into the dashboard to automatically sort all data by country, city, hotel, cost center, order number, contract rate, or payment type. Custom reports can also be generated. Employees can be located at any time – a feature that proved particularly useful during the pandemic – to make it easier for travel managers to fulfill their duty of care.
Their Suite of Products and Services-
ehotel® has developed the sourcing tool ehotel® Rate Manager to ensure that negotiated contract rates can easily be checked for availability, correctness, and completeness. Regardless of the booking channel, GDS or non-GDS, unwanted contract rates are excluded and data-based purchasing is supported through systematic audits. The payment processes and bookings are automated through ehotel® central billing.
The billing system ensures full cost control and can be individually configured. The various tools of ehotel® can of course be combined with each other or used as stand-alone solutions to optimize internal processes and save costs for customers in the best way possible. The extensive offer distinguishes ehotel® from its competitors, who often only operate exclusively as comparison portals.
It is also important for ehotel® to take the hotels’ interests into consideration. With its wide range of filter functions, the hotel booking portal provides hotels and chains with the opportunity to present what they have to offer, recommending themselves as a venue for hosting large meetings and conferences, for example. The hotel market in Europe is extremely fragmented.
“ehotel® offers a particularly wide range of hotel options relevant to business travel. By mapping hotel content from many different sources and providers, ehotel® offers a variety of accommodation options – from independent hotels to fully equipped apartments. And the best part: All offers are presented on a single booking channel – the ehotel® platform – enabling customers to find their “best-buy“”, explains Fritz Zerweck.
But just like food manufacturers have their products sold by supermarkets, ehotel® is there to serve hotels – a win-win situation:
“Coca-Cola doesn’t operate its own shops, selling its own product”, emphasizes the ehotel® CEO.
Building an Efficient Team-
Trust, fairness, and transparency are the pillars on which ehotel® is built. Employees, customers, and partners can rely on the hotel booking portal to deliver what it promises.
“Companies that only strive to maximize profits are becoming less and less relevant in society”, says Fritz Zerweck.
For Fritz Zerweck, the world isn’t a hamster wheel as many see it.
“If you feel like you’re always at the mercy of the same problems and challenges, you simply have to change your perspective”
He also knows this is not always easy. But he’s convinced that setting targets makes you advance: “Even a hamster decides on a daily basis whether or not it is going to get onto the wheel”.
The Advantage of Technology-
Technological progress, customer contacts, and data evaluations will continue to determine the actions of ehotel® in the coming years. That’s why the company will certainly continue to grow organically as it has done over the last 22 years.
Through its unrelenting ambition to perfect the digital cycle around business travel, ehotel® remains not only a trend-setter, but also a reliable entity for customers and partners. In addition, the company is striving to become climate neutral.
This decision is supported as a team and the employees implement the individual, resource-saving steps together – from using public transport to ordering bottled drinks.
“What we do today determines what the world will look like tomorrow”, says Fritz Zerweck, quoting the writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.
If her wisdom had been followed back in the 19th century, the world would certainly be in a healthier state today.
