Soraya Kefs

This is the opinion of Soraya Kefs who, with her husband Richard, co-founded Fast Booking, one of the pioneers in hotel booking engine technology back in 2000 and now evolved into a full CRS solution for independent hotels and regional groups.

“I don’t believe that men are better at some things than women and that women are better at some things. Men and women can both succeed the same way but it is a fact that women have to make more sacrifices to succeed,” she said.

Herself an engineer with a PHD in computer engineering, she said there was a lack of women not only in her field “but if you look at other domains, even cosmetics, there is a lack of women in top management positions.

“We need to change that but I don’t think it needs to come from women or men – we need to do it together. Women need to believe in it and invest the time. It is difficult, the time when you are building your career is between 30 and 40 and most women have kids at that age.

“I had kids too when I was 32, it’s not easy, but if you want it, you have to make the sacrifice.”

Working as part of a husband-and-wife team has its challenges as well – they’ve have been working together since 1995 – but “we know how to complement each other and work together. It’s always a team that makes companies successful, a complement of knowledge and skills”.

Meanwhile, Soraya and Richard will be spending more time in Asia as part of Fast Booking’s intentions to grow the business from one-third of revenues to 50% in the next two years. The duo have rented an apartment in Singapore and will commute between Paris and the Lion City.

“We’ve always had Asia in our sights. We were the first booking engine developed in 10 languages including Chinese and Japanese. We opened our office in Singapore 10 years ago. From day one, we wanted to be international,” she said.

With Asia now growing by double digit and a flat Europe, which accounts for the other two-thirds of business, the time has come to dig deeper into Asia. The US – it has an office in New York – has been a much more challenging market to penetrate. “It’s a much more chain-dominated market while our focus is independent hotels and regional groups.”

Fast Booking’s mission is to help hotels “achieve equilibrium between OTA and own brand”.

“Hotels want to fill rooms the easiest way, we want them to do it in a smart and optimized way,” she said. “Today if a group of hotels is doing 10% website direct business, it is doing a good job; we want to take it to 30% for all our hotels.” That’s 8,000 hotels worldwide with the company adding 1,000 new hotels a year.

The Fast Booking model has evolved over the years.  Said Kefs, “We are an online distribution provider, using the Internet and GDS. We build traffic, we offer consulting services. We are a one-stop shop to help hotels optimise margins, and help hoteliers with their brands.”

Next month, it will launch several new programmes on top of the 20 products it offers – loyalty programme marketing, social media marketing, GDS corporate programmes as well as revenue management consulting.

In the area of loyalty, it will launch a private label loyalty programme as well as Fast Booking iRewards where hotels, small and medium, can exchange rooms through the platform. The aggregated rewards programme will be launched April 25.

Working on a commission-based model, Kefs said “we are paid based on performance. You make money, we make money”.

While she acknowledges the rising costs of customer acquisition, she said Fast Booking had developed unique expertise. It built a distribution programme 12 years ago based on destination portals and provided direct links between these 50 portals and its hotels.

“All the traffic came to the hotels and we’ve built strong partnerships with companies like Google, TripAdvisor, HotelsCombined, Kayak. We know how to build traffic for our own portals.”

As part of its stronger focus on Asia, Kefs said Fast Booking would also be looking at building up a development team in the region. “Mobile and social are a lot more advanced here than in Europe. That’s why we want to be more present here and learn from the dynamism and creativity in Asia.”