Zoottle Helps Hotels Build Meaningful Engagements

Nektarios Sylligardakis, Chief Product Officer of Zoottle, helps establish meaningful and profitable engagements with Hotel CMO, CRO and Guest Relationship Managers.

How many of you reading this post have experienced poor internet quality even at the finest of hotels? This was exactly what inspired the team at Zoottle to build up an app which would help provide a solution.

So we asked Nektarios a few questions about how exactly they build their startup from the ground, up.

What inspired you to create this startup? 

I was at a hotel and in order to connect to the WiFi network, I had to go down to the front desk to ask for the WiFi credentials.  They provided me with a random username and password.  This guest experience was poor, and the hotel gained nothing in the process. I immediately realized that we could do something better, not only from an authentication process, but from a guest engagement perspective as well.  We have since been able to use our technology and workflow to solve some of the biggest problems that hotels face today:

1. Hotels have less than 10% of their guest e-mails
2. Negative reviews on TripAdvisor, lower hotel profits
3. Hotels have an inability to up-sell services during their guest’s stay
4. OTA Fees cost hotels 10%+ of revenue

What makes your startup different from other similar startups out there?

Almost all competing solutions in our periphery are at the mercy of guest contact information coming from the hotels.  As an example, dozens of solutions target guest satisfaction, however, they reach less than 10% of guests whose contact information the property had and was able to share with the vendor. Our solution captures contact information from more than 90% of guests.

How did you get your startup off the ground and gaining traction?

Our initial office was opened in Athens, Greece.  Greece has some amazing advantages including a workforce with high skills and availability, a national mentality embracing hospitality and tourism (18% of GDP, 10,000 hotels), and concentrated market/management clusters.  With our proven results, we were able to win over some of the largest and best known national hotel brands early on, thus reference selling became our primary sales tool.  Many of our latter-stage sales came from international hotel chains which we leveraged to expand into twelve countries, and have now opened offices in the US and UK.

How is your startup changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

Not only are we capturing information from more than 90% of guests, we are capturing it while the guests are still on premises.  This allows us to use the data (including real-time NPS guest satisfaction results) to improve guest satisfaction, prior to check-out, resulting in less negative reviews, more positive reviews….and happier guests, more likely to come back.

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

If you have the right team, building a product is easy.  Getting your product in the hands of (paying) customers is what is difficult. For those with products targeting B2B (as opposed to B2C), these difficulties are astronomically higher.  Some companies find success selling direct. Others find resellers/partners the way to go. Both have pros and cons and the only way to find which works best is to try both. However, be sure to quickly pivot and/or focus once you can measure and compare results.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. You can connect with Nektarios and Zoottle on Travel Massive.