A new website that tells the FastBooking story well
It’s all happening at FastBooking .com these days. A new website launched last week; a new generation booking engine, Attraction, launched; a new managing director for Asia Pierre-Charles Grob who moved to Singapore couple of months ago, a regional conference in Singapore just wrapped up late last week …
It’s almost as though the Paris-based company is making up for lost time and perhaps it is.
Founded in 2000 and inventor of the hospitality industry’s first independent Internet booking engine, the company had been seen to be too European-centric and not fast (despite its name) enough to adapt to changing times and markets. With European business declining and Asia rising – the region now accounts for almost 40% of revenues – it was time not only for a rethink of the future but also the company culture and business model.
And the man driving the change – Jean-Gerard Galvez (below) who was appointed chairman January 2013 and then asked to take over as CEO last September by FastBooking’s investor. Meet him and you know this is a man who thrives on change and loves it best when things are happening fast.
Jean-Gerard Galvez: Driving change at all levels with a new focus on Asia
A seasoned entrepreneur – I lost count of the number of times he’s sold companies from an Internet security company to a coffee chain; an early Silicon Valley success story who made investors in Singapore very happy (more of that later); an angel investor and board member, you can tell that Galvez is at the stage of his career where he’s no longer doing it for the money but for the passion of growing and turning around businesses. “It’s like riding a bicycle, you never forget how to,” he said.
“One of the first things I’ve tried to do is change the culture of the company so that we work as one family. There were geographical barriers as well as operational barriers. I’ve tried to get people to work together, to say, it’s fine to talk to each other, make mistakes – although not too often – and it’s fine to listen not only to each other but to customers.
“We have opened our way of doing business – openness from a technology standpoint where we will help integrate platforms and openness from a business model – whatever model the customer wants from commissions to fixed fees to fee per transaction.
“We want to become an easier company to work with.”
These changes came as a result of listening to customers. “They were saying, we had good technology, good foundation, but that we needed to listen more, be more transparent in the business model and where we are going. There was frustration of over-committing and under-delivering and our pricing model was seen to be rigid and expensive.”
He’s putting resources into Asia and said the company would be investing several million dollars in growing the region. It’s added offices in India, China, Korea, Taiwan, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. Key executives from Paris including the head of revenue optimization services and head of web design services have moved to Singapore, to be able to service clients in the region.
“We are excited by the markets. My intention is to move here too,” he laughed.
He is no stranger to Singapore. He visited the city 20 years ago, in 1994, when he started an Internet security company called ActiveCard. His first investor was from Vertex Venture Holdings, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings, which gave him $3m. In 2000, he took the company public and raised $2b, obviously making his investors very happy.
“There’s a little bit of my heart in Singapore,” he said. “That’s why we want to make it our hub for Asia. The business infrastructure is well thought out by a government that is clearly visionary.”
His vision for FastBooking is “to be the e-commerce expert for the high end hospitality industry”.
“There is big demand for the market to have competitive direct booking capability. OTAs have a lot of power and yes, hotels need OTAs but they need to re-balance their P&L. There is huge potential for growth in delivering direct booking solutions for the industry.”
And FastBooking, he said, is the only company that offers a one-stop solution to hoteliers.
“One, our platform is pure cloud-based. Richard (Kefs) had the vision 15 years ago to build a total distributed architecture around the world that’s 99.9% fault-free and very scalable.
“Two, we have account management and revenue optimization experts around the world who can work with hoteliers on how to deal with meta-search, GDS chnnels. When a hotel signs up with us, we can grow direct bookings from 3% to 30% – we have a lot of examples in Asia.
“Three, we have marketing services associated with e-commerce such as Direct Link, SEM services where we invest money on behalf of the customer to buy traffic, a website builder, calendar intelligence where we monitor events held around the hotel, retargeting …”
He said that these days, a platform has become a commodity. “You need to have more than a platform to compete and I see huge potential in the e-commerce marketing piece. Out of our 8,000 customers, more than half are buying more than just the booking engine.”
With his background in computing, technology excites him. In 2006, he sold a 3D software company he started to Adobe at 12x revenues.
And to him, technology is now redefining hospitality. With the acquisitions and investments coming into the hotel technology space from new investors, “the name of the game is critical mass and visibility and that’s all good for the direct booking market”.
New thinking coming into the industry will also bring innovation. “Fastbooking has always been an innovative company and will continue to be,” he said.
And part of being innovative comes from not being afraid to make mistakes. He said he’d made many mistakes in his career. “It’s so easy to take the wrong strategy. All mistakes are made when you think something is easy – nothing is. When I got into coffee – Columbus Café – I thought it’d be an easy business but it’s complicated.
“Never under-estimate the competition and never under-estimate how hard it is to understand a business.”
And so he will apply these principles to FastBooking. “What’s the most difficult thing is to get the whole organisation aligned from research and development to sales to marketing and customer support. It’s very hard to get people understand the same thing and to fundamentally define what you want to be for whom.”
Having defined that for FastBooking – “to be the ecommerce expert for the high end hospitality industry” – it’s now time for to get a move on, fast, said Galvez, as he left to catch his late night flight to Paris after our interview.
