We recently sat down to a chat with Mr. Bruce Prins, the Founder of Amplitude Solutions and a nationally renowned Hospitality Operations and Training Consultant. Mr. Prins provided industry relevant insights on a leading hospitality management tool on the market today; SlimTrader’s MoBiashara for Hotels (MFH). Mr. Prins has worked in various industries over his 25-year career, including that of telecommunications, retail, education, fashion and most noticeably hospitality. The latter of which he was with the Accor group for 15 years before being active over the last 3 years in the Nigerian hospitality industry.
Commending SlimTrader’s rapidly growing platform, Mr. Prins said, “SlimTrader has managed to develop a hotel inventory management and reconciliation platform called MoBiashara for Hotels (MFH) that provides important benefits to hotel owners or managers, from larger hotels to the very small bed and breakfast establishments, in and around Nigeria”.
He went on to say, “besides the fact that MFH is there to assist a hotel in getting more guests and it serves in a similar capacity to marketing platforms – with visibility to hotels through either a customized website for each hotel or through Online Travel Agents (OTAs) or advertising on various social media platforms – the platform also provides hotels with a Property Management System (PMS) for managing their room inventory and offers payment reconciliation ease with the integrated Personal Computer – Point of Sale (PC-POS) feature. All these comes from the premise that every hotel wants to have some sort of control system in place, which uses technology but does not require an IT qualification to manage it.
To expand this visibility further, SlimTrader through its MoBiashara for Hotels Platform has partnered with leading local and international Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). With OTAs such as TripAdvisor or Hotelnownow.com, MFH allows potential guests to locate a Nigerian hotel based on a location and or rate specification from virtually any country in the world. It then allows such a potential guest to book and pay online or when they arrive at that Nigerian hotel.
SlimTrader goes further by empowering the hotel to use MFH as it’s PMS or Property Management System. This basically means that the hotel automatically accepts on-line bookings made through OTAs and its own website – if it has rooms available, and at the same time allows the hotel staff to make bookings directly on MFH. These bookings may be those made at the hotel either via the hotel’s phone number, e-mail address or by guests that walk in.
In this way the hotels do not need to record bookings made on their websites or those made on other 3rd party websites and then manually enter it in a book or on their own in-house PMS. It also enables the hotel to manage room availability, process in-house room payments and generate reports to see how it is performing for the day, the month and the year.
It also enables the hotel to control each receptionist’s shift, as every payment done at the hotel is recorded directly on the system and the shift reports help the manager or owner reconcile the payments with the actual money received.
Then to add to the efficiency of the above, Slimtrader also provides a point-of-sale that can be used in the restaurant and bar in the hotel, which links directly with the front office system. This point-of-sale is made to be compatible with existing or new laptops or personal computers at the hotel. Any orders can be recorded under room numbers for guests and the payments taken at the front desk, either from the restaurant staff collecting the payments or when the guest checks out.
SlimTrader offers hotels a loyalty scheme so they can attract new guests, increase repeats and spend per booking and improve guest retention.
To add more opportunities for a hotel to get bookings, regardless of where the hotel is located, SlimTrader has agreements with many international OTAs that will permit customers to book on those websites, and in doing so, automatically book onto the hotel’s channel manager. This relieves the hotel of having to source or sign up with international OTAs, which can be a lengthy process itself and difficult, if not laborious. Some international OTAs may think the hotel too small to sign up in any event.
For those other local OTAs that do not have an agreement with SlimTrader but always contact the hotel directly, the hotel can still accept and enter those bookings received onto the Slimtrader PMS and thereby retain the relationships the hotel may have with local travel agencies or OTAs.
Worthy of note is SlimTrader, through its partnership with Interswitch, allows hotels to also link a credit card machine (POS) for on-site credit or debit card payments and also be a point of sale for either mobile or data airtime. This not only gives some revenue for the hotels but actually provides an extra service for the guests who otherwise would have to use paper vouchers or go outside the hotel to buy mobile and data airtime.
For peace of mind the owner or manager can access the platform from a phone browser or on his or her mobile phone or tablet. This permits him or her to view the hotel system live even when on the move to make or see bookings, review reports or monitor payments done. In this way, the owner or manager can have access to what is happening at the hotel, no matter where they are. All they would need is data airtime or Wi-Fi access to do so.
SlimTrader, via its MFH service is innovating for the hospitality technology industry at a fast pace, especially for the smaller players, and in doing so it is bringing the guest and the hotel closer together”.
He closed by commending the company for providing this entire suite of features on the MoBiashara for Hotels platform for only N6,000 per month.
