Reinventing Hotel Standards with Adam Tuttle (Yipy)

Jessica
Adam, thank you so much for joining me for a Pillow Talk conversation. I'm really looking forward to the topic that we're going to be talking about and to just getting a little bit deeper into the area that is your expertise. But before we get into that, could you tell our audience a little bit first about your background and where you kind of come from, a hospitality background?

Adam
Yes, I'd love to. And first of all, Jessica, thank you so much for having me on. This is just so great and wonderful to join. Yeah, my background, I think is interesting as far as, you know, being a tech founder because I'm a hotelier. True and through and blue, actually I should say red, scarlet and gray. Went to UNLV. That's what I studied hotel management in at UNLV and that has been, or was, I should say, my whole life's goal. When I was 10 years old, I like to say I went through a midlife crisis of what do I want to do when I grow up? And then somehow found hotels and found this passion for hospitality. And so I did. And I really enjoyed what this industry offered. So I attended UNLV. From there, during school, I actually worked at a La Quinta. I opened a La Quinta there by the airport in Las Vegas, Nevada. And that's what I did working through college, and I loved it. I then did an internship at the Four Seasons on the HR learning and development side. And that ended up then leading to a job offer while I was still in school. And so I love the dichotomy that my career offers, that on a Wednesday I was working at a La Quinta and then on a Thursday I was working at a Four Seasons. And so really got to see both ends of the spectrum. I actually did the majority of my career with Four Seasons.

I did Las Vegas and Washington D.C. I opened the Four Seasons at Disney World, then back to Las Vegas and then I left the operation and started consulting and worked with hotels not just within Four Seasons, right, but was able to expand and really again focus primarily on the luxury market. Casino market is really where my niche was, but working with hotels all across the spectrum. And my goal was working with hotels to better our service, better our quality. What were we hoping to deliver to our guests to make sure that as guests walked in and out of our doors that they just felt that the service was impeccable, that it was genuine, authentic. And I loved doing that. And so my background truly is deep in operations. I've done everything that you can think of, from F and B to housekeeping to front desk, guest services, VIP, the whole bit, you name it. That's been my background my whole life.

Jessica
Adam, you've sort of answered something for me because I always am very curious about why young people go into hotel school or apply and go to hotel school. So it sounds like it something you wanted to do from age 10. You know, the rest of us want to be actors, actresses, lawyers, journalists, whatever it might be. But you wanted to go to hotel school.

Adam
I'm not even kidding. When I was 10 years old, I remember sitting with my parents and genuinely going through this, I don't know what I want to do. I don't know what I want to be. And we had recently stayed at a hotel and I instantly fell in love. I thought, oh my gosh, I could do that for work. I could do that for work. I could do this amazing thing and interact with all these people and see people coming in and out from all over the world. And I wrote a letter at 11 years old to the then Dean at UNLV and was like, I am planning to come to UNLV. Let me know what I need to do so that I can be accepted to the school. Luckily I was a Nevadan, so it was a state school. But they talked about getting good grades and things that I could study. And it has been a lifelong passion of mine. And I've also found that many hoteliers that I've interacted with over my life have all had that deep passion that hotels have of almost called to us and saying, you know, this is what we've wanted to do for a long time. So it's been a joy of my life to be in this industry, honestly.

Jessica
Love it. I love it. And the experience that you must have had at that family stay in the hotel must have been an extraordinarily good guest experience that you had.

Adam
You know, funny enough, I love that you bring that up, because I don't think it was actually the experience itself was remarkable in like a standout experience. But it wasn't bad, right? I think it was an awakening moment where I looked and I saw for the first time that, oh my gosh, this is a person, this is their job, this is their career, and there's options here. And I remember interacting with so many different people in that hotel and thinking, oh my gosh, there's everything here. You could go in restaurants, I could go at the front desk, I could go work outside and drive cars. You know, not knowing all of the actual fluidity of this industry. But I remember having this moment saying, there is an entire industry within this one building and there's so much. And I think that's what fascinates me about hospitality.

Jessica
Yeah, brilliant. And now, Adam, you've done something quite remarkable now, or you're doing something quite remarkable, which is making compliance and standards sexy. So I'd love you to tell our audience a little bit about what you're doing now and about Yipy.

Adam
Well, if we're going to talk about Yipy, we need to talk about the sexiest thing in hospitality, which is standards and compliance. Not really, right? Many people just think, oh gosh, this is just the worst topic that we could talk about. And I think that standards have very often been a necessary evil or something that people want to avoid or deal with. Right? That's what they have to do, is they have to deal with. And so at Yipy, you've said it exactly right. We're trying to turn something that is just mundane, overlooked and unsexy, sexy and fun. Thus the name Yipy, right? We are the industry's first hospitality standards management system. We are the first company to really tackle the problem of how do we take standards, distribute them through our organization, right? Define what those standards are, distribute them through our organization. How do we get our teams to do the thing, right, actually do the standards on a regular basis, building that consistency, and then, you know, beyond that, how do we get to diagnose? Where do we actually need to improve? How do we need to grow and get better? And then, of course, develop ourselves, our property, our team members into the next level, right?

When I was working as a hotelier, I felt this pain every day. And that's not just me from a business saying, like, oh, I felt the pain, like, genuinely, what are my standards? What do I need to do? What does my team need to do to be successful? And then as I grew into my consulting world, I realized this whole industry is a mess. This whole hotel business has kind of lost track of where the standards are. How do we do this? Compliance felt like the thing that we chased when an inspector and inspection was imminent or an inspector was due or we got a particular bad guest review. It's all, we better go look at this. But really, what we're doing at Yipy is we're taking that away from a singular event and we're turning it into a habit. We're turning it into an actual system that a hotel can plug in, can follow, build consistency, build competency, build confidence with the team and with the guest so that team members can know and understand what's expected of me, what are the things that I need to do to be successful and build amazing guest experiences, what is it that our product needs to do in order to remain in good condition, in good shape and be delivered appropriately so that we, as an entire property and a brand, a management company, whatever it may be, can feel like we are unified in expectations and can be unified in the delivery of those as well. So I think in a nutshell, that's what we're doing here at Yipy, making it fun.

Jessica
And it's, yes, I'm sure you absolutely are. But one of the kind of fundamental things, I guess, is that what you've identified is that at the moment, perhaps with hoteliers, they might have something on the wall or something in a staff handbook or somewhere deeply down in the hard drive of something on how you do XYZ, but what you are doing is making standards the operating system of which the hotel operates on, or the framework, so bringing it more front and center rather than the thing you pull out when there's an issue or there's a crisis or those things. So seeing it much more as fundamental to how a hotel is running, rather than being just, you know, the thing that you just pull out when you need to. Is that correct?

Adam
That is so correct. And I'll say this, if your standards are not accessed on a daily basis, they're dead, period. They're dead. Because what ends up happening is our industry has collected these standards. Hospitality is an ancient industry. It really is. I mean, this spans every civilization that has ever come. And quite honestly, when it comes down to standards, they've existed along the entire way. This is not a new conversation, this is not a new subject, but yet we have handled this problem the same way, which is, this is how we should do this. Let's write this down, or let's define it and let's stuff it in a book somewhere and let's put that book on a shelf.

I was just at a hotel, I kid you not, and we were working, we were doing some training on Yipy, and the hotel leader pointed to me and said, that's our standards Bible. And it literally read Standards Bible on it. And it was an old book, a binder stuffed really up high where it would be really difficult to get down. And the truth of the matter is that our standards have just been holed away. Most organizations, I mean, when I was working in the industry, if you wanted to find the standards, you had to go into a SharePoint and look through, okay, where is this? And just hope and beg that A, there was something there and B, that it was updated and it wasn't from 1976 of how it was done back then.

And so what's interesting is that our industry really wants to have this compliance. We want to have the standards defined of what excellence looks like, sounds like, feels like. We want to have these experiences defined, and we do, but we make them inaccessible. And so at Yipy, I think our number one goal is to make standards accessible, to bring them to the forefront, to put them in the hands of not only leaders, but of line staff and every person that needs to access standards. And they need to be accessible on your phone, they need to be accessible easily on your desktop. Within two to three clicks, you should be able to find things to make sure, okay, what is that? How should that be? So that we can all be aligned on what does excellence look like and how do we deliver it in our own authentic and genuine way?

Jessica
So it's not that standards don't exist, it's just that they're not discoverable and they're not being used in the way that makes them really useful.

Adam
Yes, most standards, believe it or not, exist through what we call tribal knowledge oral history, which is, hey, go ahead and spend time. Adam, you spend time with Jessica. She's going to show you everything you need to know. And that's my training, right? Follow this person around. And we hope that you see everything that you're supposed to, and maybe there's one or two things that get missed or, okay, I'm gonna spend time with Jessica. That's great. And then I got to go spend time with Rob. And Rob shows me, well, Jessica does it this way, but I like to do it this way. And here's this difference. And most of our standards, if they even are written down, aren't really accessed from a written standpoint. Most of it's accessed just through telling, right, through showing and doing. And there's very difficult times for us to actually check that.

That's why I give so much value to those, right, that come through the industry and we get that price check or that check, so to speak. And what ends up happening though is that feedback loop is so slow and small. I mean, it's a huge feedback loop, right? Like we're talking three months by the time you actually get your data back from a secret shop, that it's really hard to then fix that alignment and say, oh yeah, and then we can kind of almost excuse away why we didn't do certain things and what that scenario must have been versus live and real feedback versus a definitive standard, right? What is the actual expectation?

Jessica
So what is the big problem then that you solve for? Like, we've obviously talked a lot kind of around it, but the actual problems, if the standards aren't being used as effectively as they could be, what is it that the hoteliers or the hotels, or maybe it is the guest experience, lacks by a lack of using standards in a really good efficient way and making sure that it is part of that operating system?

Adam
You know, you've said it right there in the last word. It's a system. Hotels don't have a system. It's not that they don't have standards. That's great. Most organizations do now. Some don't, actually. It would be quite surprising, I think, to many listeners how many hotels don't actually have standards written down. But the majority of our industry, especially with franchise hospitality, as I call it, we have standards in this industry, but we don't have a system. We don't have the process, the tools that not only help us define those standards, right, what are they, distribute them through our team, help us to understand what to do, right?

And then the next part really is understanding, okay, what do we do with this? It's great if we have the standards, they are defined, but the system needs to take us beyond that, right? The system needs to make sure that we take those standards, put them into action, that we can diagnose, and then we can continue to develop, right? And so what Yipy is bringing to this industry is a system both in terms of an actual software, a tool that says, hey, we're actually going to help you do this, but also in the other sense of the word, a system that truly allows you to do all of these steps to really make standards a focal point and something, and I should say it makes it not only a focal point, but a strong and firm foundation on which all other experience conversations, budget conversations, any type of conversation that needs to be happened at a hotel can be based on, right? And so that's what our industry is lacking, is a system that results in reliable data and reliable information and distribution methods.

Jessica
And it's really a core part of this digitalization of hospitality, isn't it? It's like bringing hotels up to the age of the modern age.

Adam
I hate to interrupt. I'm so sorry. Because hotels have modernized in every way. We have done it, right? We have tap to your phone, you just walk in and you can tap it and enter the door. We have robots delivering towels. We have chat agents. We have AI in our industry abundantly. And we have standards in binders. And why everything in hospitality has evolved except the very thing that defines our core.

Jessica
Yeah, when you put it like that, it's interesting because I guess it's the thing that feels like the least win or the least benefit that you'll get for it. But it's forgetting that actually it's that stuff that's so important. Adam, you mentioned data and about decisions, and you talked about budgetary decisions and other kinds of decisions. How does this, how does looking at standards in this way and making this forefront in terms of operations, how does it help hoteliers make decisions? And how does the data work with other parts of data? Like what are you bringing here that we haven't seen before?

Adam
You know what, this is one of my favorite questions, because data is the new gold. And I think we all understand that when we have data, you are just been given a new gold mine or at least a new chute that you can go and explore and find the gold. And that's what Yipy is going to do. We are going to open a gold mine for every single hotel that engages with Yipy and they are going to start discovering that there is so much gold down this chute. I'm from Nevada, so mining is a big thing there, right? And we are going to help hotels find that gold.

And what do I mean by that? This data is going to give to you as a hotelier a new perspective at how you get to see your hotel. Because not only are we going to give you, okay, here's the instant, incredibly reliably fast, instantaneous feedback on an interaction, what needs to change, what needs to do that, but also aggregated data over time that will allow us to look at not only individuals over time, teams over time, properties over time, departments over time, and the ability for us to then start comparing that. When we have some great properties that say, okay, we need to have a capex conversation about our room quality and what we need to spend money on. Well, how are you going to have that conversation if you don't have data telling you how every single shower head in your hotel is in comparison to the compliance of expectation? Or how is every single room when it comes to the caulking or the toiletries or whatever it may be, the condition of anything, without this data, we are relying on spotty guest feedback or occasional things.

Humans are so fallible, and I'm so guilty of this. I remember going to my hotel manager as a housekeeping manager and saying, we need new linens. All of our linen is bad. It's all terrible. Well, no, in reality, it was probably about 50 to 60% of our linen needed to be replaced. The other half was good. And so when my leader would go look at the thing, oh, this linen looks fine. And I wasn't able to take a number and say, you know, 67% of our shower heads are below our compliant expectations. We need to put this in here.

And I think that's been really great for a lot of our team members. But what also is really great for a lot of our clients that have implemented Yipy is how Yipy is going to rise to the surface. What are the consistency issues and what is that consistency issue across our hotel from a service perspective or from a team or anything like that? And now we can look at onboarding differently, we can look at training differently, we can look at guest recovery differently. When we have our data that is going to immediately tell the teams, okay, this is where we need to spend our energy and effort, which is going to then, of course, make dollars and cents, right? It's going to help in cost savings on training and onboarding and all of those other things, but it's also going to tell us where we can lean in and drive, right, where we can really focus.

And so everything that Yipy points to, all of the data that we are going to give, truly becomes a gold mine for hotels to harvest. So yeah, it's been really great to show the value of that data for these properties.

Jessica
And I guess it's about making better decisions. And Adam, in the UK, which is where I am right now today, we have a television show, I don't think you have your own one in the US, but it's called Traitors. And part of the premise of it is that human judgment is incredibly flawed. So when humans think that they can go on gut instinct or that they can go on just judgment or just by looking at something to understand it, that nine times out of ten they're actually wrong, like badly wrong. So what you're sort of saying here also is that kind of judgment, oh, we need to redo the bathrooms or we need to redo the linens or whatever it is, those kind of judgments a hotelier makes without using the actual facts and data, just using instinct. Yes, of course, maybe it'll work out. But actually you can make much more efficient decisions and cost effective decisions and longer term decisions based on the data that you have that can really tell you the real picture of something.

Adam
Yes. First of all, I need to go watch this show. Second of all, yes, our instinct is wrong. When we think about our capacity to store information and really understand things, it is so finite. Some of us are better than others. But when you're a hotelier and you're worried and thinking about, okay, I need to make these decisions, you're also dealing with the guest that's in 203 that's really upset, that had a bad breakfast. All of these other things are in your head. And so while you're trying to make decisions, if we don't have a system, if we don't have data, we are going to be clouded by current events and the current minutiae of life that's currently in front of us that's blocking our ability to look at a greater picture.

We call in Yipy, we call these things Yipy moments, which is when people kind of have that aha moment or they wake up. And I remember my first Yipy moment when one of our clients showed me, they called me and they said it was so great, it was one of our early adopters, and they said, I just did an employee review. And it was the first time I've done an employee review based truly on yearly performance. Normally I do my employee evaluations for the year based off the last two weeks of performance because that's what's in my head. But when I looked at Yipy and I had an entire year of employee performance, I could actually see where this team member excelled, where they needed to improve and what the areas were. And we also get these little trend reports, right, that we know that, hey, you were really good in July, but in September, maybe something happened and you weren't so great, right? And we could watch this performance trend, and that can be done singularly with a person or an entire hotel.

But my first Yipy moment was realizing, yeah, our brains can't hold this amount of data, and we are losing out on the ability to make these decisions because we can't even see the whole picture. We're too close in hospitality. We are too close to the day and the actual operation that it's hard to pull back and actually look at that big picture, right? Because we're getting through today. We got rooms to turn.

Jessica
Yeah. And firefighting. There's always so much firefighting, isn't there?

Adam
Isn't there?

Jessica
Let's talk about culture a little bit and how that fits in. So you talked there about performance reviews and how that process can be hugely benefited. But what about team members? Is it that they see these as guardrails that are really useful, or do they feel like, oh, I've got to tick that box there and feel very constrained? What is it that you're kind of feedback you're getting back about that, about teams?

Adam
Yes, Jessica, this is my favorite question. It really is, because we are named Yipy. This is not, you know, audit yourself or be compliant. That's not the name of this. This is called Yipy for a reason. And why we have two really big jobs to do in this industry. One, get every hotel into Yipy. That goal, number one. Number two, assimilate into cultures. And Yipy is about building culture and adapting to cultures and understanding what this can be.

We often look at standards in our industry as such compliance metrics. And that word can feel so regulatory. It can feel so constrained. And when you put in a system like Yipy, what can end up happening is you can feel like, or people can feel and think, oh, we're putting in Big Brother. Here they come watching our every move. Are we compliant? What will be fixed? Who's getting fired? Where? Our philosophy is maybe taking that term, flipping on its head and saying, instead, Yipy is your big brother a little bit different than Big Brother, right? It's your big brother.

Let me show you the ropes. Let me show you these safeguards and what's really great. And I want to answer your question very directly and specifically. The greatest feedback that we get in Yipy is as we've introduced Yipy, people say, oh my gosh. I feel like I know my standards for the first time. I feel like I understand what's expected of me. And I feel that because I have the competence of knowledge and understanding, I am given the confidence to deliver in an authentic, genuine, hospitable way. That feels very authentic to me as an individual.

The greatest feedback that we consistently hear, and I'm not making this up, is because our standards are now defined and we look at them every single day. Not only is it more enjoyable, but the conversations are much better. And we're seeing this want and desire to understand, deliver, and adapt. No one gets a job to say, I want to be terrible at this. We get our jobs so that we can excel, so that we can be great. And that's what Yipy enables. It enables us to understand and define what does success look like, sound like, feel like. And our hotels that have adopted it, and when we help onboarding, again, we're not just onboarding a system. We're onboarding into a culture. We're building this idea of this is good. Let's find our success. Oftentimes when we talk about this, our brain instantly goes to let's find the red, let's find the bad, let's find what we're missing. No, no, no. Let's find what you're also succeeding at. Where are we crushing? How do we celebrate this so that we can emulate that in those other areas?

So if I know that I'm doing really well in this particular, this team is doing great, or our property is really excelling in these standards, and maybe we're falling behind in these others. Well, why are we excelling in these standards? What are the practices and behaviors that are enabling this standard to flourish? Let's try to pull those same behaviors into these other attributes, right, into these other requirements, and let's see how we can do that to be successful. And when we look at Yipy in this light and when hotels adopt it in this measure, we have nothing but excitement.

We had a leader reach out to us, and he sent us a screenshot, and they got their highest evaluation scores ever in their property in the history of it. And he forwarded that to his entire leadership team, and he sent this to me as well, and he said, I only said one word, Yipy. And I think that covers why we do what we do and what we do, right, and that integration into the teams.

Jessica
Excellent. I have another kind of thing to bring to you, which is, so the work that I do is in the hotel space, but it's also in the short term rental space. So I've done a lot of work in vacation rentals, short term rentals. It's an area, it's a segment of hospitality I know very well. And one of the things that perhaps over the years has been, I guess, thrown at the vacation rental world is that it's not like hotels. It doesn't have the standards that we know of hotels. You know what a three star is, you know what a five star is, you know pretty much what you'll expect if you go and stay at a Marriott or whatever kind of brands.

But in vacation rentals there are no standards. What vacation rentals then would say back is, but we have the uniqueness. Every property's different, everything's unique. You get a really unique hospitality experience. What do you think of that when you bring that lens of standards and compliance to that sort of positioning?

Adam
I guess I think first of all, I love the vacation rental industry. I think it's really interesting and I'm interested to see where things go as the market has truly adopted and accepted this. And really what is. I've been really digesting this a lot actually. So this is a great conversation. But I'll always say this really, when it comes down to it, uniqueness, individuality, these are things that every property has to accept. I stayed at a, gosh, what was it, like a DoubleTree in Washington D.C. somewhere. And they had their own identity. Even though they're a very branded and a very suburban type hotel, there was its own culture and you could feel it.

When we're looking at the vacation rental industry where the uniqueness, the charm, the individuality is the appeal, right, but the question then becomes, what makes you unique? What defines this property and why should someone come and stay there? It's so fun when you go and you start reading reviews of these properties and properties sometimes get reviews about the host being nice or this or that. And if these properties that are vacation rentals would adopt standards of this is our quality expectation, those reviews would start being consistent in what the guest is reporting on of how the room was cleaned or the linen quality or the amenities that were offered, the way that the host interacted or just everything that is done.

And then all of a sudden you'll start seeing consistency in that and the ability to replicate success to those teams. Standards are needed in every industry. Standards are especially needed in the vacation rental world. I mean, it is so apparent. My wife and I, when we travel internationally, we normally like to try to find a vacation rental home because we just love the immersion that it offers, right, in its own way. But we often joke, let's play roulette and let's see what we're gonna get, right? And we play the roulette wheel a little bit differently of, okay, let's spend a little bit of extra more money here to make sure that we're not just sleeping in an IKEA frame bed.

But it's been a joke that we've had for a very long time about there's so much inconsistency in this market because nothing's defined and it's very difficult for people that maybe aren't necessarily in the hospitality world to play in the hospitality world. And over time, those who have been doing it for a long time, start to develop standards, start to develop expectations. But it also probably feels to them like they're inventing it from scratch every single time, that they are creating the wheel for the first time where it really shouldn't be that way.

Jessica
You actually described really clearly the maturity loop that professional managers in the vacation rental space go on quite often. They're accidental hosts. They might have their own property, then they get neighbors and things like that. And then they find that they do have to do certain things to bring them up to that professional. But it's also the whole industry is on that kind of professionalization maturing curve as well. And consistent standards and having documented standards is very much part of that.

Just a sort of a final one, and it probably is a very similar answer to the vacation rental one, but I do want to just ask you about independent hotels as well. And that sort of, I guess it's like maybe it's a cultural shift for them perhaps. And you know, I'm pretty sure most independent hotels will have their own set of standards, of course, and what they want to provide for guests. But what do you say to a hotelier that doesn't yet have them documented in a very rigid way? It is more a sort of a cultural dispersion, if you like, of standards. How do you get their heads around doing it in a very structured, systematic way that they haven't already? Is there resistance ever? Is there sort of pushback? Or do they really just get it and be like, yeah, we just needed the help to do it?

Adam
That's a really great question as well, because Yipy began out of this need when I was a consultant. My best friend is a software engineer, and I remember bemoaning to him, oh my gosh, there I am working with 10 different properties, and they all have different standard requirements and nobody knows anything. And they're all independent at the time. Every standard's different, and it's just crazy. And he thought, well, for sure there's something on the market that can help you with that. And he looked and looked, and nope, there wasn't. It did not exist, not in the way that we needed it to. And so he said, all right, well, let's cobble something together. We've got duct tape and wires. Let's do it. And we put together a tool and hey, this worked. That worked. But really what it came down to was once we finally got everything off the ground and we realized, hey, there's something here. It was the independent hotels that validated Yipy first.

Because A, so many didn't have standards, they just didn't. And they didn't have a way to really capture what they were doing. And so Yipy as a system, the first part is to define, and it enables properties to either adopt, you know, some we have a library that anyone can take and have for free of some core standards. But it also gives the place to write those standards and just start putting them down in place so that we can start measuring consistency and what is it that we really want to do across our property.

And when you look at independents specifically, many are of course the unique charm of what really makes this property great. And it would be surprising how many really don't have standards, or they think they do because they've written something down somewhere, but they're not ever used as a standard, they're never held as a standard. And so what Yipy brings to them is the opportunity for them to define and create a standard, right? And actually say, okay, these are the expectations. Let's do that. And I'll go back to an earlier point that I made that competence builds confidence. When we know, and a property can define, hey, this is what we should be doing, this is how guests should be treated at our properties, and this is how our product should be presented and how our rooms should be cared for and all of those different things. When we know that and it's ingrained in us and we feel competent in its delivery, now we can turn around with confidence and deliver that authentic part where it feels natural because we're reacting with confidence and competence, right?

And it's just this great feedback cycle of confidence builds competence, competence builds confidence. And so back to the question more directly is independent hotels, whether they have standards or not, benefit from establishing them and creating that sense of identity through definition. This is who we are. It's standing into the world and saying, this is who we are. This is what you can expect by staying with us. And let me prove it. Guest in, guest out, it doesn't matter who checks you in or checks you out. There should be that level of individuality, of course, but it should also have the identity, what I call the golden thread of that hotel present in every step, in every interaction, in housekeeping and room service and food and beverage, at front desk, with the doorman, everywhere. That hotel's identity should be present.

Jessica
I guess the golden thread, the essence, the personality, all those bits. Adam, I'd love you to just do a bit of futurizing with me right now.

Adam
Let's do it.

Jessica
Imagine we're in five years time, 2031, and every hotel has Yipy. Everyone has Yipy. What does hospitality look like then? And who are the sort of the biggest winners, if you like, what's the great outcome that we'll see in the world?

Adam
First of all, dream come true. That's amazing. Yipy, first and foremost, becomes the standard of standards. A funny way to say that. It means that now, right now, when we look at standards in the world, every standard is delivered in its own language and its own structure, style. So properties, when they're getting these have to dissect, first of all, how is this standard written, how is it organized, what applies to me, what doesn't. With every property on Yipy and the way that we have our standards marketplace put in place, which is where a property can establish standards and publish them to the world, and if you apply to those standards, you can subscribe and they go into your database and your library and you can start getting data and feedback, right?

And what happens is standards, if we look five years in the future, standards are now readily available for hotels and they can be accessible. You can find new standards, we can look at benchmarking or best practices and we can adopt standards and then we can customize them and tailor them to ourselves. But also this is the great part, is that as AI also now gets to be infused with this, saying, okay, now let's start taking this data and let's start having AI analyze it and helping you construct the right teams. It's going to help you start identifying areas of training or of focus, right? AI is going to start telling you, here's where your budget needs to be spent or here's where your payoff and rewards are. Here's the training plan for the front office, right? Here's Adam's training plan for the next year of things that need to be due here, the things that need to be looked at and at what time they need to be inspected.

Properties can know that, but also brands and management companies will have the ability to look across their entire portfolio, knowing what areas where they bring strength and consistency and where they need to focus. I mean, imagine if you are a property management company that has Yipy and you've had it for five years and you're trying to win a new property and you're able to bring to that new owner this data that shows every property that you get improves in compliance scores and drives revenue. There's no way you're not going to win that deal because you're able to showcase your culture, your effectiveness and all of that. So properties are going to be armed and companies are going to be armed with so much more insight and proof of their operational skills and abilities that they'll be able to do that.

The next part about this is looking forward in five years of where is Yipy and where the industry is now. Standards are no longer hidden in dusty binders, but they're up to date, they're relevant, they're ready for us. And think about agentic AI, that's such a key buzzword for us, of guests are going to start booking, you need your PMS and or your CRM for those type of things to define what your rates are and everything. But if a guest really wants to book with you and they really want to find the right hotel, they need access to know what those standards are at that hotel as well, because they want to know what type of linen do you have, what type of services do you and your standards are. What's going to define that? And so if that agentic AI is also going to be able to have access to some level inside your standards now, the guest is going to be able to find truly the property that they're looking for and be able to communicate and discover on a level that they've never had before.

And so I think the future is bright. I think it's exciting. I think that as we look to evolve as an industry, if we leave standards behind where they are in binders and in old PDFs, we will never be able to tap into this wealth of gold, this gold mine and this wealth of knowledge and data that our industry has to offer the future.

Jessica
You said lots there, Adam. But there was something that really jumped out to me and that was around guests being in the future, because of AI, because of the way things are changing with how we get information and process information, that guests will be expecting a lot more information as they make a choice. You know, they'll be expecting to get into the fine detail, like, what's the linen? How often does XYZ happen in this property? The kinds of things that, let's say on a booking.com profile page of a property that you don't see. But we're already able to get so much more information before we make purchases because of LLMs and because of AI. And so this is part of that. And that's a whole other topic we could go into, which I don't think we have time now. But it is very, you know, the expectation of information.

Adam
There is so much deep in there, we won't dive into it. But you can imagine a guest right now, they're, do you have a kids club? Okay, great, they have a kids club. But imagine that guest being able to say how many attendants are in the kids club every day. And Hotel A says 1. Hotel B says, we have three attendants that are required to shift out every 30 minutes or whatever that may be. Or do you have a pool? Yes, we have a pool, but we also have poolside service with amenities that are distributed every hour. When those standards are defined and properties can actually give them in a way to their guests who could start looking, the game changes. And those that have defined standards will be miles ahead of those that don't.

Jessica
Adam, perfect place for us to end this conversation. Thank you so much for being a guest on Pillow Talk. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and to hear your passion about this side of the industry as well. So thank you, Adam.

Adam
No, thank you, Jessica. This is so wonderful. I truly appreciate the opportunity to join you today and hopefully again in the future.

Jessica
Thank you.