As hotels seek ways to engage their guests beyond the initial booking and the check-in, and boost ancillary earnings, startups offering hotel concierge service like Portier are gaining traction.
US-based Portier Technologies, founded in 2016, just announced its latest tie-up – a partnership with Vietnam’s VinaPhone to expand Portier’s reach in Vietnam.
“Our partnership with VinaPhone is based on our common belief that the luxury hotel sector can leverage mobile to increase customer satisfaction, while also increasing overall property revenue to a much greater degree than what stand-alone apps or in-room tablets are providing today,” said Deniz Tekerek, co-founder of Portier Technologies.
“However, operational scale and local sales experience has always been an issue for cross-border mobile technology adoption for startups. This partnership enables us to access well-established local channels and scale at speeds that reach far beyond the capabilities of typical earlier stage companies.”
Portier is also banking on Vietnam’s tourism growth to bolster its own. In the first four months of 2018, the country recorded a year-on-year increase of almost 30% in international arrivals; hotel occupancy rates in popular cities like Ho Chi Minh City are reportedly the strongest in five years.
Portier, a white-label product which provides its hotel clients customisation, says their devices “provide guests with access to the best and most useful cultural and local entertainment coverage, written and curated exclusively for the well-travelled guest and updated daily by local experts”.
Tekerek said unlike handy, which “is the same across all of Singapore for example”, “our solution would be very different at two separate hotels, but we could also support the look and feel of a uniform experience within one brand. It’s all about the hotel and its brand.”
Hotels control their own content using Portier’s technology as a “content management platform” so they can potentially publish content that is different at various times of the day.
Tekerek also explained that Portier is a software provider and that hardware and connectivity are provided by local partners in each market. That way, it hopes to be “more nimble, a lot more efficient”.
