Building Sustainable Hospitality with Marc Laros (The Usual Hotels)

Jessica
Marc, thank you very much for joining me for a pillow talk conversation. I'm looking forward to speaking with you today and having this discussion. But before we get into the discussion, can you give me a little bit of a background and for our audience's sake, about The Usual Hotels, because I know you're a relatively new brand on the scene.

Marc
Yeah, thank you for having me, Jessica. I'm, like, very much looking forward to it. Yeah, we're The Usual Hotels. We're a relatively new hotel chain in Europe. We currently have two hotels open in Brussels and Rotterdam. We have a third one coming in Florence, Italy. It's born out of hoteliers that have a lot of experience in opening and renovating hotels for the last 12, 13 years already. And we wanted to do something that is focused on sustainability. So I think that's also one of the topics we're going to discuss. But we really think sustainability is the. Having a sustainable hotel that is focused on giving the guests the best experience in the most sustainable way is very important. Our aim is to be the most sustainable hotel brand in Europe.

Jessica
Absolutely. And we will get into that and how you do that and the concept of that later on in the discussion. But before we also get further in, can you tell our audience a little bit about you, Marc, and your background? So how does a technologist become, you know, get into hospitality? How was that sort of journey that you had to then become the CTO of The Usual Hotels?

Marc
Yeah, I don't have a background in hospitality. I have a background in software engineering. That's how I was trained. I've had a. I had a software company for about 14 years, and I kind of rolled into hospitality because of a business partner who started a franchise, and I kind of rolled into making systems for them, even started building a PMS at some point, even though I didn't even know what a PMS was. And then we opened 10, 11 hotels in about 10 years that got sold and then we started The Usual. Yeah, not a hotelier, but a lot of hospitality background already.

Jessica
Yeah, that's. That's great. So it is interesting, isn't it? You can come from software and into hospitality and the same principles kind of apply. But what you're dealing with is something very different, isn't it? You're dealing with something that is very analog, actually, in experience, because people stay, you know, physically are staying in a physical place, having a mostly physical experience as well. So what was. Would be the main lessons that you think you learned coming into hospitality that perhaps you didn't have before in your.

Marc
Software background I learned so much because I mean I wasn't really used to thinking about the user or the guest as much as I am thinking about it right now. Also, let me just say the industry is amazing. I have a lot of background in working with financial organizations. Well, it's completely different but yeah, having the guest experience be central to the tech because the guest experience directly reflect basically the value of the business is much more important here. So everything we do with regarding to technology is we focus on the guest centric experience. Guest experience comes first and everything needs to be built around this. This is not about technological gadgets or cool stuff. No, it is about how can we make it as easy as possible for the guests to stay here, have their technology just working without them thinking about it.

And how can we free up our staff so that they can also focus on hospitality? Because that is the main thing. The connection with the people here in the hotel, between the guests and the staff is the most important thing.

Jessica
Marc, as a technologist you talked about the customer journey and guest experience. Where do you see that for a technologist and for your input into it? Where do you see the sort of the beginning of that guest experience journey and then the end? Like do you see it sort of typically before the actual check in? Is that where you might come in? Come in and the technology that you have or is it just from the check in bit? And I suppose what I'm asking here is like how big and deep is the guest experience journey from a technologist's perspective?

Marc
Yeah, definitely before the check in, way before the check in. So of course we have good marketeers who make sure that the right people come with us. But we think it's very important that we do as much as possible beforehand. There's nothing worse than coming into a hotel and basically being asked two questions. What's your. Give me your passport and your credit card. Basically can you afford to stay here and who are you? We should already know this. So we invest heavily in communication upfront. I do our pre check in, get as much information as possible at a time that's convenient for the guests. So when that when they are in the hotel they can very quickly go through the check in without many questions, retrieve their key and go up to their room. And we do that through various things.

We have WhatsApp communication and we reach out to guests. Hey, please give us your information. And we have specialized kiosks that are custom made house a kind of takeaway. It's not a Traditional kiosk, it's more like a key pickup point so that people who don't want to interact with anyone just want to go up to the room. That's possible. But if people do want to interact, our staff is free to give them recommendations about where to eat, where to go, et cetera.

Jessica
Like true hospitality, it sounds like, you know, you're providing exactly what we talk about, you know, that we talk about a lot on this podcast. But I also wrote a book called Tech Enabled Hospitality and this is a lot of what we talked about, which is, you know, you provide the environment by technology so that you'll get your teams can actually provide the true hospitality to your guests as well. Whether that's, you know, where the guests are like, what they want, you know, whether it is more connection, you know, where to go, what to see, that sort of thing. I want to sort of wheel back on something there that you mentioned and I guess it's all, it's around those kiosks actually that you've designed your own kiosks.

Tell me a little bit about those and what kind of process you did to make sure that you got those right. And before we get into that, I'm going to tell you something that happened to me last week. I was at ITB last week. I'm not sure if you were also there, but went to ITB last week, stayed at a hotel, checked into a hotel. Third time I've stayed at this hotel. The check in process was horrendous. Like they didn't have the payment proof. They needed all these things. It took 15 minutes to ask me for my passport, all of these things. And it was just like, oh my goodness, this is, you know, this is tragically bad for a first impression when you come somewhere.

So as much as we have really forward thinking operators like you guys, like you on the podcast and within hospitality, the vast majority is still very clunky and very full of friction. But let's go back to your kiosks actually. So you designed these, you thought about what was needed. Tell us a little bit about that process.

Marc
Yeah, of course. So we have a lot of experiences with kiosks. We built kiosks for EasyHotel as well, which we did before this. And one of the things we noticed that people actually spend a lot of time on the kiosks trying to pick out the best room. There's a lot of friction in the beginning where they search for the reservation and maybe they don't have the Rice reservation number because they Booked through an ota. That whole process is very time consuming tuning and it can be very frustrating. Immediate frustration for the guest. If you go to a kiosk and you put in your reservation number or you think what is your reservation number? And it doesn't come up, then you have to wait for a host to become available. Very frustrating. So we wanted to achieve two things with our kiosk.

We didn't think there was something that fitted in our design very well. So we had this, the hardware custom made. And on the guest journey we make no compromises. So we buy what we can, of course, but on the guest journey part we make no compromises. So we collect all the data upfront. People get a QR code that they can scan at the kiosk. They scan this QR code, it immediately pops up with your reservation, says, okay, if there's an open balance you can pay it right away. And then you get your, you make your own key and you go off to your room. And we didn't see that at the, when we made them. That wasn't there yet in the market or not. Not well done, at least on average. I think a check in our case takes about 30 seconds.

So yeah, getting the data up front really helps us.

Jessica
So getting the data up front, that's through the booking process. So, so if they, how does that work when they've booked through an.

Marc
Yeah, good point. Yes, we have a booking engine, but then we also have an online check in progress process. So after the booking you get an email or WhatsApp or whatever. We can reach you at that. We need a little bit more information and it depends on the location, what kind of information that is. Then people go through that process, get a QR code. That QR code is. You're reminded of that qr code via WhatsApp right before check in. So people don't have to search for it's right there. And then they can just go through the kiosk and be off on their way.

Jessica
Just out of interest, what if it's a guest that doesn't use WhatsApp? Like I know sometimes our American friends maybe don't use WhatsApp so much. So, so what would you do then if they did? Yeah, we tried channel as a communication channel.

Marc
Yeah, we tried different channels per campaign. We can, we can say an online check in reminder. We first try to do through WhatsApp, then through SMS and then through email or even WeChat or whatever a channel is available for us. So we tried to reach them in as many ways as possible.

Jessica
And then with the guest journey and the guest experience, from your perspective as the CTO and as a technologist, what other major pain points are there, friction points that you spend your time really thinking about or you have spent your time really thinking about solving?

Marc
When it comes to the guest journey, you mean?

Jessica
Yeah, when it comes to the guest.

Marc
Journey, yeah, it's part of the guest journey. Because the time, the part that we really spend a lot of time in is optimizing internal processes, which frees up our staff. So, yes, it's not directly related to the guest journey. Of course. We make our own booking engine and we try to optimize that as much as possible and our online check in and our kiosk. But freeing up the staff to do as much with the guests as possible, that's our main focus. So we do a lot of automations, payment automations, we do automated folio splitting. Anything that we can automate, that takes away the administrative burden of the staff. That's what we try to do. And that indirectly very much contributes to the guest journey.

Because there's nothing worse than coming into a hotel and seeing people busy on a laptop or a PC and not having the time to help the guests. So that's really our focus.

Jessica
Do you think you've reduced the number of people that you need to operate the hotel as well through automation, or are you keeping those numbers the same or is it.

Marc
That's not the. Yeah, that's not the goal. Yeah, the goal. The goal is to freedom up for more important work. Not to reduce staff to a minimum, barebone minimum. So that. Yeah, to save money.

Jessica
Do you think also about the experience for the team members, for your staff? So. So when you're designing your systems and processes, are you thinking about what the experience is for them as well, or is it very much just focused on the guest experience?

Marc
No, of course, no. I mean, these people go into hospitality for a reason. They don't go into hospitality because they love being behind a laptop. They want to talk to guests, they want to share their knowledge about the area, about the hotel, about fun things to do. So I think freeing them up benefits both the guests and the staff very much.

Jessica
So I guess it gives more purpose, doesn't it? It gives way more.

Marc
Absolutely. And we are 100% purpose driven company people want to work with us for a reason. They see that we are a purpose led company that tries to do something or something good in the world. And the worst thing you can do is then clog them up with administrative stuff.

Jessica
Yeah, it feels really refreshing to be so purpose driven and I guess reflect on two things. Hospitality is struggling with talent, attracting talent and retaining talent. And I guess there's a very much a sort of strategic, apart from being purpose driven, but kind of a strategic play of that. Purpose driven is about getting the staff who want to come and work with you and then making sure that they're empowered in what they're doing and all of those things just. And I know there are three or I believe there are like three core principles behind The Usual Hotels. So you've got the sustainability as being that being very much a kind of a foundational pillar also you're very much design led, I believe, but then also community as well. And I would like touch on those two as well.

But first, can we talk a little bit about the sustainability now? It feels almost brave to, maybe less so in Europe, but to be, you know, sustainability led. Because in today's day and age it's very, it feels very much not top of the agenda anymore. You go to a conference, there's barely anything about ESG and sustainability, whereas two years ago, even a year ago, it was very much at the top of every agenda, no matter what kind of conference you went to. But you guys have very. That's very much at the forefront of what you're doing in your positioning as well. And do you use technology to sort of to implement that and to measure that or is it still very much something that's kind of more human led? I guess?

Marc
No, we do use technology, but the technology side of it is more on the reporting stuff. I think part of being sustainable is being very transparent about what you're doing. The greenwashing is a real thing and we 100% try to avoid that by being very open and transparent about this is what we're doing, this is how we're measuring it, this is what our goals are. We're not there yet on these fronts and we're there on these fronts. So that's, that is how technology supports that area of sustainability. There's a whole new set of rules that is coming up for bigger corporations that they need to adhere to when it comes to sustainability reporting. We're already doing that because we just want to be as transparent as possible. This is who we are and I think in the long run that will definitely benefit us.

And what you're saying about sustainability not no longer being on the top of the agenda at those conferences Yes, I see that as well. But sustainability is a trend that's not going away, in my opinion. Maybe it's a bit less at the moment, but there's a whole generation who's growing up that is for which is very important that this is a topic. If you look at the world around us, I think a lot of people would benefit a lot from traveling a bit more and seeing more of the world of other cultures. But there at the same time, we realize that travel has an impact on the world and not sometimes it's very negative.

Not just the footprint that you as a guest put out there, but also big hotel chase that go into a neighborhood with their own fmb and everything becomes centered around this hub that's basically standalone of the community. And we think that we want to be different than in that part. We want to make travel a force for good. Yes, you can still travel, you can still see places, you can still see other cultures. But if you stay with The Usual sustainability part is taken care of.

Jessica
Excellent. And then how does the community pillar that you have fit into that as well?

Marc
Yeah, so we work a lot with local initiatives like local parties. We want The Usual to be a local hub where also locals come. I think a lot of hotels try to do this, but every community struggles with their own issues or has their own causes that they want to support. So for example, in Rotterdam we support something called the Futzulthein, which is a garden project where they grow their own vegetables and use it in the city. Here we work with local suppliers. Same in Brussels. We have other initiatives. So we try to really incorporate into the local life here and be also socially sustainable in that way.

Jessica
And then do you also look at space in a community way as well? So maybe I think. Do you have co, like co working as well? And then how do you sort of monetize that?

Marc
Yes, we have co working in Rotterdam, not in Brussels. We love co working in Florence as well. There's not a business model here. We don't monetize it. People are welcome to stay here and work. It's about getting the locals in. If this becomes a spot where people want to be, where they want to socialize, everyone benefits. So yeah, this is not a subscription based co working or anything.

Jessica
So it's more about that culture that you're creating in the brand as well.

Marc
Yep, correct.

Jessica
Marc, can we go back to the tech topic that were talking about and also about your staff and how you're building things for your, you know, making sure that your Staff are, you know, very much part of the DNA of that guest journey. Where does agentic AI now fit within that? So, so agentic AI is like warp speed, what's kind of happening there? At least what's happening when we talk about what's happening there. But what's your view on it and position on it and then how do you see it sort of deploying in The Usual and sort of how will you kind of work that into the DNA that you have around being purposeful.

Marc
So agentic AI is definitely going to. Or it's already changing the hospitality industry. More people should be very much aware of this because it's not only going to change the way people look and find your hotel, it's also going to change the way the hotel interacts with guests. So if you look at the guest side actually being purpose driven hotel and being a little bit niche is very much a benefit with us because if people are looking for this, agentic AI is more likely to recommend you based on the strength of your brand than if you're a generic brand without any unique selling points. So this is where we very much benefit from it.

But on this, on the hotel side, agentic AI has so much potential of being supporting the staff not only by taking away administrative processes, think about checking commission invoices or splitting folios or checking reservations, all the comments on a task list for the guests, but also it can reach out proactively to the guests. An example that I have used in the past is an agent that scans, for example, flight arrival times, can see a guest is arriving late and act based upon that. So not just reactive like oh, a guest contacts us and says my flight is delayed. No. How cool would it be if an agent could say, hey, I see that your flight is delayed, let me change the checkout time, let me upsell complimentary spa package. We don't have a spa, but you get the point.

And be proactive in providing this hospitality, the service to guests. And I think that's coming very soon. We're experimenting with it. That's first there in a few months, I think. Also on the guest communication side, we're already using this a lot. So when guests Contact us via WhatsApp, for example, it's not just a knowledge base that the AI takes from and says, yes, our check on time is at 10 or at 3pm or yes, our breakfast at this time. No, it can actually check reservations. It can say, oh, you don't have breakfast yet. Would you like To, Would you like me to add it to your reservation? There's so many possibilities. If you give an AI agent these tools to connect to your various systems that you have, the possibilities are endless.

And, and yeah, this is coming, this is already there, but it's going faster than people are realizing.

Jessica
And then for you at The Usual, if you were to think about your AI workforce as opposed to your human workforce, how many agent, different types of agents will you be deploying, do you think within. Have you got that far like thinking about where and which ones?

Marc
We're very much experimenting. I mean reservation like a guest relations part is obviously there, but I'm mostly thinking about the different departments that are doing administrative work for our hotels. So think about the finance department who would have an agentic age, an agent that would support them in doing certain financial tasks. And then we'd have an agent basically who during the night already makes a task list for our front, front desk staff so they can do their work more efficiently. I don't have an exact headcount basically, but we're looking at where we can put it in as much as possible not to replace people again, but to support people.

Jessica
Yeah. And to augment. And I wonder if, because you're a new hotel brand, whether it's easier for you guys because you're still kind of at the beginning of your journey to be able to implement this and change so much. Because it is really a seismic change, isn't it?

Marc
Yeah. Well, we do have a benefit. I think hotels that have an outdated tech stack who are working with legacy systems or even on premise systems like a PM in the basement on the server, they're going to struggle with this because agentic AI is all about talking to different connected systems. When we set out to build The Usual, we invested heavily in a, basically a technological middleware layer that connects all our systems. So we have our PMS and our point of sale and whatever we have. And then we, on top of that we have an application layer with standardized interfaces like with APIs. I don't know if this is too technical, but basically the agentic AI system can talk to The Usual middleware layer and have access to all of our systems.

So this is a huge benefit for us that we've purposely built this way. What we didn't want from the beginning is we wanted flexibility so we wanted to be able to swap certain systems out very easily. So not only one package, but we didn't want basically a monolith because of all the connected systems. So if you have 20 systems and they all talk to each other, then basically you've still got an all in one package, because if you change one package, you have to change all of them. So that's why we built this middleware layer. And yeah, it's really beneficial for us now that AI is up and coming.

Jessica
And did you know. Was that in the background for you that you knew that change was coming, do you think? Or was it more maybe that flexibility basically was what you were after?

Marc
Yeah, flexibility was what we asked for. We don't want to be. We want to be a little bit agile in this. We want to be able to adapt to changing markets. That was always the plan. The fact that we started with this before AI was already there. We got ChatGPT in 2022 and that's at that point we're already building. But yeah, no, the flexibility was the most important thing for us. Just having a system that allows us to adapt to changing changes, technological changes. And it happens to be that there was a huge technological change upcoming and we're benefiting from that. Absolutely.

Jessica
Do you sit on the buy build, continuing with your.

Marc
What do you mean?

Jessica
Well, what is it that you do? You build. You build because you. You build your own. You've talked about the kiosks, but then the sort of the buy. So use third parties.

Marc
Yeah. So we buy what we can. We. We look every time in the market. What is the best housekeeping solution? Does it integrate? Well, we select that we're not going to build a housekeeping system. But on the guest journey part, we make no compromises. We want the whole guest journey to be as seamless as possible in one environment. We don't want people to go booking engine URL to another and then download an external app to open their rooms. No, that needs to be one whole thing. So if it's not there, we build it. But it's not that we build stuff because we want. We like building. No, we want to buy it when it's. When it fits our purpose. And if it doesn't fit our purpose, we build it.

Jessica
And then if something came along that was then worth buying, would you switch or would it be the sunk cost thing that you've built it?

Marc
No, it's not a sunk cost. But if a really awesome booking engine came along that did everything we wanted to do at a reasonable price and more, then we need to switch. Yeah, absolutely.

Jessica
Just on that, I have a sort of something that I'm always a Little bit curious about is how. So say, let's say a housekeeping app that you have, how often do you switch when you see improvements maybe happening in another vendor or that you're. The vendor that you're using isn't kind of keeping up with what you need? Is it the kind of like, do you see switching as something that you have the power over or is it more like it's so difficult?

Marc
No, it's not that difficult that we need the power to switch this. We have regular evaluation moments like hey, what with staff, what is working, what is not working, what needs to be improved and if it doesn't work with a current vendor, then we need to switch. And we've done this many times already. As an example, we want our agents that are talking to guests and if a guest asks us for towels, we want to be able in a housekeeping system to let an agent give them these towels or put at least a request with housekeeping in for these towels. If that's not possible, we are going to switch. So it depends on the use case. But yeah, we're not locked in to any vendors at all. No, we're going to change.

Jessica
I've got a bit of a silly question for you now, which is, you know, are you going to give your agents names? Like will they be, you know, I've not thought about that or whatever.

Marc
That's a good question. I've not thought about that. That maybe I do believe in being transparent about the fact that you're using agents with guests. We will not have a BOB agent that pretends to be bob. It will be clear that the guests are talking to an AI and that there are also escalation paths so that people can have an actual human. So maybe internally. Yes, sounds like a good plan. Yeah, I'm writing this down.

Jessica
I think as consumers, like we're all consumers, right? As consumers and as users of AI LLMs in our own lives, there's the speed at which people will become completely comfortable with having an AI agent do X, Y, Z for them. Even as a guest at a hotel or as booking a hotel comes so quickly because. And I always think my mother is the weather vane. You know, my mother's like, to my mother in law, she's like, oh, you must download ChatGPT on your phone. Like if an 82 year old who's a complete luddite is saying that, you know, like obviously that's just a tiny bit of what's possible. But the sort of. The comfort with having AI, agentic AI in our lives as consumers is going to be very quick.

Marc
Yeah, it's about 4%. There was a recent study that said 4% of people now would trust an AI to make booking completely independent from them. That's still low, but it's also expected to rise to about 30% by 2029. So that means that 30% of people will not even go to your website anymore, just rely on AI recommendations to book hotels for them. This huge shift is something we need to adapt to. But that's a whole different topic on how to adapt.

Jessica
Yeah, that is. And maybe that's one we can have next time. But to finish up, Marc, I want to ask you a question on if there. So if we're looking at hospitality and technology, is there an area that you still feel needs a lot of work and a lot of. We're still not there. In terms of solving whatever issue or clunkiness or friction there might be.

Marc
Well, there's always agentic AI that we've talked about. This is the big focus for us right now. But there's a lot of work to be done on making it even easier for guests to fill out the details. And I'm just kind of pondering right now because this is not something we've invested a lot of time in yet, but we have a lot of details from these guests already. We know often their bank account or their credit card number, but we need so much more information to actually make that room key for them. I think if we could consolidate more of that data to collect more data so that the guests have to fill out less and it becomes even easier. That's the main challenge for us. Why can't the guests open their hotel room with a credit card that they also used for.

For a booking, for example? This is long term, but were always thinking about how can we make it even easier to get into our hotel and stay with us.

Jessica
Yeah. And then just even like we're using our Apple Wallets is still not something that we can do for hotels.

Marc
We can do soon with us, you can.

Jessica
What's that?

Marc
Soon with us you can.

Jessica
Okay.

Marc
We're doing a pilot right now. The limitation was always that you need to give out these Apple Wallet keys using an app. We didn't want an app that is now possible to provision this over the air, as they call it. So you can basically receive an Apple Wallet key through email or a WhatsApp message. So that's something we're trialing. Right now and that's coming to us very soon. All our locks are ready, but the technology was not ready yet.

Jessica
And just another question about your guests as well. Do you think about ways of keeping them within a community? So whether that might be. Because if you say you haven't. Did you say you don't have a guest?

Marc
Apparently no, we don't. No.

Jessica
So, but are there other ways that you think about keeping them within the community or a community that are quite connected to your brand, like how you keep in touch with them when they're not staying with you or are there any benefits to them to be part of The Usual.

Marc
We don't have a defined loyalty program yet, although the term loyalty program is not really something I would use. And today's loyalty programs are more incentive. Right. You're rewarding people with points or. So we're looking into something that will actually be more loyalty based because we do want fans of our brand, but we're not there yet. So yeah, this is something we're working on.

Jessica
Yeah, I think it's really interesting that and where hospitality goes with that about really building that sort of brand fans, brand loyalty, not loyalty, but brand connection, I guess. And brand relationships, especially when hospitality brands like you are sort of providing much more than just a stack stay overnight, you know, that sort of sense of community that doing better for the world through sustainability. Like so much more than just an overnight stay.

Marc
Yeah. So we do highlight like the contributions people make when they're staying with us. So we highlight what kind of donations we do to. To. To causes like we donate water, we remove plastic from rivers, for example. So we do highlight that. And that already is an incentive for people to think like, oh, I'm doing something for the planet when I'm staying with The Usual.

Jessica
Yeah, I want to be part of that.

Marc
Yeah, exactly.

Jessica
So Marc, to wrap up, I'd love to hear about what you have in store for The Usual. And I know you mentioned right at the beginning that you are opening up a new hotel in Florence. So when is that opening, if you know and then any other plans that you have?

Marc
We have a lot of plans, but Florence should be opening somewhere in the beginning of next year. We just closed for renovation. It's going to be a very beautiful hotel close to the Duomo in Florence city center on the leather market. So that's going to be awesome. And we're looking at different properties around Europe to see if we can acquire those and add those to a portfolio. So we still want to grow to about 20 hotels in the next five years. So we're actively looking for new properties. Let's see what comes up.

Jessica
Excellent. I wonder if you'll get. Whether you'll get agents helping with that side of things as well.

Marc
Yeah, yeah. That's not my area of expertise, but I definitely think they could help with that. Scanning huge amount of data. Market analysis. Absolutely.

Jessica
Yeah. Great. So, Marc, thank you so much for being a guest on the pillow talk session.

Marc
Thank you. Jessica. Really enjoyed it.