When most hoteliers think about luxury, they conjure images of butlers, champagne and caviar, but when Hotel Esencia’s Sean Murphy thinks about luxury - hotel technology is top of mind. Yes, there are butlers and champagne in Sean’s vision of luxury too, since the property he manages, Hotel Esencia in Riviera Maya, is Mexico’s only independently owned Forbes 5-Star Hotel.
At the center of hotel technology lies the complex topic of payments. Bookings come from a multitude of channels and geographies. Different channels have different payment methods; for example, OTAs leverage virtual credit cards while corporate business is developed on invoices and wire transfers. Adding to that complexity, each region has different payment methods.
For these reasons, hotel payment processing has historically been a nightmare. At most properties today, on-property staff still manually key in bookings from third-party channels like OTAs into their property management systems with card information from a channel manager. Due to legacy tech stacks, many of these properties even have to duplicate those efforts by re-entering that same information into a payment processing terminal which is a tedious, risky and error-prone process.
When bookings come directly via a hotel’s website, similar inefficiencies exist for most hotels today, but with a fresh infusion of strategic capital from , Selfbook believes that its suite of products can solve the pains of hospitality payments.
Selfbook’s VP of Product Bryan Thompson raved to HotelTechReport about Hotel Esencia’s pioneering guest experience strategy centered around payments automation. We decided to sit down with the hotel’s Vice President and Managing Director Sean Murphy to uncover how he’s leveraged Selfbook to eliminate the pains of legacy payments processing and deliver better guest experiences at scale.
In this article, we’re going to show you behind the scenes of Selfbook’s newest product, Station, and then walk through how the prestigious Hotel Esencia is leveraging it to streamline its payments processes.
What is Selfbook Station
Station is the latest product in Selfbook’s arsenal that arms hotels with tools to deliver cutting-edge ecommerce experiences without the need to replace any of their pre-existing technology systems.
The single biggest barrier to new technology adoption for hotels is the risk, time and resources required to switch from their current system to a new one. Switching systems means new contracts, time-intensive trainings and monetary implementation expenses. It’s these barriers that have historically made it challenging for hotels to keep up with the latest innovations seen in industries like fintech or ecommerce.
Selfbook is flipping the hospitality innovation paradigm on its head with the promise that hotels don’t need to replace their pre-existing software solutions to deliver cutting-edge ecommerce experiences, but rather they can easily add Selfbook’s growing suite of products into their current tech stacks.
Selfbook’s first product, Selfbook Direct, delivers an unprecedented desktop and mobile booking experience to hotels with integrated digital wallet functionality (e.g.). Don’t believe us? Try it yourself on the Hotel Bel-Air website.
Station is a natural extension from Selfbook’s Direct product. When booking a room with a Selfbook hotel, guests are shown payment terms like they are on any other hotel website or booking engine. For example, many hotels offer payment terms like 50% deposit at booking and 50% payment 30 days prior to arrival. Shockingly, to this day, most hotels keep lists of credit cards with payment schedules and have reservations agents manually key in those payments 30 days prior to arrival.
Guest-facing Selfbook Direct simplifies payments for users, while Station automates the entire payment processing flow in the backend, providing a truly seamless solution from end to end.
The difference with Selfbook Station is that this entire process gets automated at the time of booking. Hoteliers can even get super creative with payment terms and offer different terms for varying stay dates, different payment schedules, etc. You could create a payment plan that schedules equal daily payments for specific bookings until the day of arrival with zero administrative work. The possibilities are truly limitless. Hotel reservations agents can also easily and securely execute a growing list of tasks from within Station like issuing refunds, generating payment links and more.
Payment links are a creative way to increase the uptake of ancillary services for properties like Hotel Esencia. Imagine you have a guest staying on their honeymoon and their friend calls to send a champagne and strawberry amenity to their room. HotelTechReport just did this for one of our engineers who was on his honeymoon in Colombia and the process took two weeks of back and forth emails and phone calls. With Station, any reservations agent can create a payment link in seconds that gets associated with the booking and email the link to anyone who is buying the service. If HotelTechReport’s engineer was staying at a Selfbook hotel for his honeymoon, this process would have been cut down to minutes instead of weeks.
The Station payments platform may seem like a utility on the surface and you’d be correct in thinking so because the software delivers major efficiencies compared to the old way of payments processing in hospitality - but the benefits of this exciting new payments platform go far beyond the sheer time (and money) savings and risk mitigation.
Hotel Esencia's Blueprint for a Next-Gen Guest Experience
For Sean Murphy and his team at Hotel Esencia, delivering a next-generation guest experience is simply making guests feel at home amongst friends. His team is typically staffed with 5 on-property associates and the ‘secret sauce’ to Esencia’s luxury guest experience is all centered around first impressions.
What happens when guests arrive at most hotels? They typically wait in a line at the front desk, then, once they reach the front of the line, an agent asks them to pull out their credit card to make an incidental deposit that essentially says “we don’t trust you” and “we only care about your money.” Hospitality is all about making people feel welcomed and at home. Most hotels begin their relationship with guests as an adversary. What do we mean by that?
Imagine arriving at a new friend’s home for a dinner party. You ring the doorbell. They crack open the door and ask you to wait outside for 10 minutes while they greet the guests who arrived before you. After 10 minutes they open the door and ask you to hand them your credit card in case you damage anything in their home.
For Murphy and his team, the traditional arrival experience is completely backwards and sets hotels and guests off at odds from the moment of arrival. That’s why at Hotel Esencia there are no front desks and nobody asks for your credit card when you arrive. Upon arrival, Hotel Esencia’s guests are greeted by a butler who takes them to their room immediately to help them get settled. For Murphy, this sets the entire guest journey up for success from the first impression.
Selfbook’s Station payments product lives in a modern, easy to understand interface that requires little to no training
For Hotel Esencia, delivering a world-class arrival experience used to mean lots of administrative work happening behind the scenes, conducted by both staff and guests prior to check-in to ensure that arrivals went smoothly. Murphy’s on-property team used to spend hours per day keying in payments and coordinating with soon-to-arrive guests so that these processes wouldn’t need to occur upon arrival. With a lean team, this often meant that his team members were being pulled away from guests to complete these administrative tasks in the background but with Station, all of these repetitive tasks have been eliminated according to Murphy:
Automating tasks and eliminating repetitive work is not just about time and money savings - it’s about empowering hotel teams to focus on the most rewarding and impactful aspects of the business.
The Beauty of Selfbook is That You Don’t Have to Switch Your PMS or CRS to Deliver World-Class eCommerce Experiences
Hotel Esencia leverages Oracle OPERA and Sabre’s SynXis Booking Engine - both of which Murphy and his team love working with. Before Selfbook, Hotel Esencia might have needed to switch to a new PMS or CRS in order to implement next-gen ecommerce and payments processes at Hotel Esencia, but with Selfbook, he and his team have been able to bring the impeccable guest experiences they deliver on property into their digital guest experience without replacing any systems or adding any net new cost.