Reinventing Hotel Standards with Adam Tuttle (Yipy)

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome back to Bill Talk Sessions with your host, Jessica Gilliam. Today Jessica's joined by Adam Tuttle, co-founder and CEO at Yippie, to explore how hospitality standards are evolving from dusty binders into real-time data-driven operating systems. They'll discuss Adam's journey from luxury hotel operations to tech founder, how Yippie's transforming compliance and culture across hotels and vacation rentals, and why AI-powered standards could redefine team performance and guest experience in the years ahead.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

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 from a hospitality background?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

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 you. But yeah, my background, I think, is is interesting as far as being a tech founder because I'm a hotelier. True and through in blue, actually, I should say red, scarlet, and gray. Went to UNLV. That's that's what I was. I studied hotel management there 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 um, and so I did, and 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 um 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 back at 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 a Las Vegas and Washington, DC. I opened the Four Seasons at Disney World, then back to Las Vegas, and then um then I left the operation and started consulting and worked with hotels, not just with 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 uh the spectrum. And my goal was working with hotels to better our service, better our uh quality. What do we, 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 my background truly is in 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 that's been my uh that's been my background my whole life.

SPEAKER_02 3:15

Adam, you've sort of answered something for me because I always am very curious about why young people go into hotel school or or apply and go to hotel school. So it sounds like it was like 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.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

I'm not even kidding. When I was 10 years old, I remember sitting with my parents and 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, I could do that for work. I I could do this amazing thing and interact with all these people and see people coming in and out of all over the world. And um, I wrote a letter at 11 years old to the dean, 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 Nevada, and so it was a state school. So, but they, you know, 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 almost called to us and saying, you know, this is what we wanted to do for a long time. So it's been a joy of my life to be in this industry, honestly.

SPEAKER_02 4:35

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.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

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 at and I saw for the first time that 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, you know, 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 that's what fascinates me about hospitality.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

Yeah, brilliant. And now, Adam, you're 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 Yippie.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Well, if we're gonna talk about Yippie, we need to talk about the sexiest thing in hospitality, which is standards and compliance. Not really, right? Many people just think, oh gosh, like this is just the worst topic that we could talk about. And I think that standards have very often been um a necessary evil or something that people want to avoid or deal with, right? Um, that's what they have to do, is they have to deal with. And so at Yippie, uh, 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 Yippee, right? We want to, 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? Uh define or 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, 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. No, 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 as into my consulting world, I realized this whole industry is a mess. This whole, this whole um, you know, 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 an 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 Yippee 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's 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 as 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 Yippee, making it fun.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

And it 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're 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 all those things. So seeing it much more as fundamental to how a hotel is run rather than being just, you know, the thing that you just pull out when you need to. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 9:25

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. This is 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. We're this is not a new conversation. This is not a new subject, but yet we have handled this problem the same way, which is hmm, 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 and we were doing some training on Yippie, 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 the truth of the matter is, 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 you know 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 Yippie, that 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.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

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 makes them really useful.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yes, most standards, believe it or not, exist through what we call tribal knowledge or oral history, which is hey, go ahead and spend time. Adam, you spend time with Jessica. She's gonna 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 gotta go, you know, spend time with Rob. And Rob shows you, well, Jessica does it this way, but I like to do it this way. And 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 success just through telling, right? Through showing and doing. And there's there's very difficult times for us to actually check that. That's why I I give so much value to those offer, right? That come through the industry and we get that price check or that 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 in in real feedback versus a definitive standard, right? What is the actual expectation?

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Just a quick pause in today's conversation. This episode of Pillow Talk Sessions is brought to you by Abode Worldwide, the strategic communications and public relations agency partnering with ambitious hospitality tech brands to build brand authority and create category leaders. From thought leadership to global media relations, Abode helps the companies transforming how we stay, operate, and experience hospitality to tell their story with impact. If you're a tech company shaping the next era of hospitality, learn more at abodeworldwide.com. All right, let's get back to the conversation.

SPEAKER_02 13:40

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

SPEAKER_00 14:09

You know, you've 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 that's great. Most organizations do. Now, some don't actually. It would it would be quite surprising, I think, to many listeners, that how many hotels don't actually have standards written down. But the majority of our industry, especially with you know franchised 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 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 Yippie 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 in the 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 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.

SPEAKER_02 15:56

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

SPEAKER_00 16:06

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

SPEAKER_02 16:40

Yeah, when you put it like that, it's interesting because I guess it's the thing that feels like the least win-win or the least benefit that you'll get from it, but but it's forgetting that actually it's the it's that stuff that's so important. Adam you mentioned data and about decisions and all kinds, and you talked about budgetary decisions and and and other kinds of decisions. How does this, how does looking at standards in this way and making making this forefront um 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 that we haven't seen before?

SPEAKER_00 17:23

You know what? This is one of my favorite questions because data is the new gold. And I think we all understand that. 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 Yippie is going to do. We are going to open a gold mine for every single hotel that engages with Yippie. 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 gonna find, 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, like the 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 capital, 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 what if whatever it may be, the condition of anything without this data, we're relying on spotty guest feedback or occasional thing that says, you know, humans were 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. Or, and I think that 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 noticed that have implemented Yippee is how Yippee is going to rise to the surface, right? What is 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 Yippy points to, all of the data that we are going that we give truly becomes a gold mine for hotels to harvest. So yeah, it's it's been really great to show the value of that data for for these properties.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

And I guess it's it's about making better decisions. And Adam, we in the UK, which is where I am right now today, we have a television show. I don't know if I don't think you have your own one in the US, but it's called Traitors. And I don't know if you've heard of it, but I've never heard of it. Anyone who's listening to this in the UK will have heard of traitors. It's it's it's like a huge show. And it's a reality TV show. 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 you know, nine times out of ten they're actually wrong, like badly wrong. So what you're sort of saying here also is is that kind of judgment, oh, we need to updo the bathrooms, or we need to, you know, re redo the linens, or whatever it is that are those kind of a judgment that a hotelier made without using the actual facts and data, just using um that. Yes, of course, maybe maybe it will 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 haven't actually. That you have that can really tell you the real picture of something.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yes. Man, I 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, you know, 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 minutia of life that's currently in front of us that's blocking our ability to look at a greater picture. We we call in Yippie, we call these things yippie moments, which is when people kind of have that aha moment where they wake up. And I remember my first Yippie moment when that a client of mine showed me. They called me and they said it was, it was so great. It was one of our early, 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 Yippee 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 give these little trend reports, right? That we know that, hey, you're really good in July, but in September, maybe something happened and we weren't so great, right? And we can watch this performance trend. And that can be done singularly with a person or an entire hotel. Great. But my first hippie 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.

SPEAKER_02 24:11

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

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Isn't there?

SPEAKER_02 24:17

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

SPEAKER_00 24:48

Yes. Uh Jessica, this is this is my favorite question. It really is, because we are named Yippie. This is not, you know, audit yourself or be compliant. That's this is not the name of this. This this is called Yippie for a reason. And why? We have two really big jobs to do in this industry. One, get every hotel into Yippie. That goal number one. Number two, assimilate into cultures. And Yippie is about building culture and adapting to cultures and understanding what this, you know, what it 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 Yippie, what can end up happening is you can feel like or people can feel and think, well, we're putting in big brother. Here they come, watching our every move. Are we compliant? What will we fix? Who's getting fired? Where our philosophy is maybe taking that term, flipping on its head and saying, instead, Yippie is your big brother. Um, a little bit different than big brother, right? It's your big brother.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

It's it's this idea of another reality TV show.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Yeah, exactly, right? Let me show you the ropes. Let me show you these safeguards and what's really great. I want to answer your question very directly and specifically. The greatest feedback that we get in Yippie is as we've introduced Yippie, 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, you know, 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 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 job so that we can excel, so that we can be great. And that's what Yippee enables. It enables us to understand and define what success look like, sound like, feel like, and our hotels are to adopt it. And and us 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, brain instantly goes to let's find the red, let's find the bad, let's find what we're missing. No, 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, you know, this particular 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 EIP in this in this light, and when hotels adopt it in this measure, we have nothing but excitement. We we had a uh a leader reach out to us and he said, he sent us a screenshot and they got their highest evaluation scores ever, ever in their property in the history of it. And he sent forwarded that to his entire leadership team and he sent this to me as well. And he said, I only said one word, yippee. And I think that that covers why we do what we do and what we do, right? And and that integration into the teams.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Excellent. I I have another kind of thing to bring to you, which is so, 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, very well. And one of the things that perhaps over the years has been um, 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, you know, a a Marriott or or or whatever kind of brands there might be, a wolf, can't remember the name of that one, but grey wolf. You sort of know what you're gonna get depending on which um where you stay. But in vacation rentals, there is no standards. But what vacation rentals then would say back is but we have the uniqueness. We 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 kind of positioning, I guess?

SPEAKER_00 29:55

I think, first of all, I love the vacation rental industry. I think it's it's really interesting in it, and I'm interested to see where things go as the market has truly adopted and accepted this. And and really what is I've I've 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 every property has to accept. I stayed at a oh gosh, what was it, like a double tree in Washington, D.C. somewhere? And they had their own identity, even though they're a very branded and a very, you know, suburban type hotel, there was its own culture and you could feel it. When we're looking at this, you know, a 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, you know, this or that or this. And if these properties that are vacation rentals would adopt standards of this is our quality expectation, those reviews would start being consistent in that what the what the guest is reporting on, of how the room was clean, or the linen quality, or the amenities that were offered, the way that the host interacted, or you know, just everything that is 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, uh, when we travel internationally, we normally like to try to find a vacation rental home because we just love the, I don't know, 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 and we try, we've 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, you know, bed. And but it's 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 to that maybe aren't necessarily in the hospitality world to play in the hospitality world. And over time, those have been doing it for a long time start to develop standards, start to develop expectations. But it also probably feels like to them that 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.

SPEAKER_02 32:37

You actually described really, really clearly the maturity loop that professional managers in the vacation rental space, you know, go on. Quite often they're accidental hosts. They might have their own property, then they get a 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 is 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 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 that 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 a cultural dispersion, if you like, of standards. How do you get their their heads around doing it in a 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?

SPEAKER_00 34:04

That's a really great, great question as well, because Yippee, we we 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 and it's just crazy. And he thought, well, there's gotta be there for sure there's something on the market that can help you with that. And we 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. Let's, you know, we've got duct tape and wires, let's do it. And and we put put together a tool and hey, this, this worked, that worked. But really, what it came down to was once we finally got everything off the ground and and we realized, hey, there's something here, it was the independent hotels that validated Yippee first because 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, Yippee as a system, the first part is to define and it enables properties to either adopt, you know, some we 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 to start putting them down in place so that we can start measuring consistency and, you know, what is it that we really want to do across our property? And when you look at independence specifically, many are, of course, the the unique charm of what really makes this property great. And and it would be surprising that 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 Yippie 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 let's do that. And I'll go back to an earlier point that I made that competence builds confidence. When we know, and uh 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 room should be cared for, and all of those different things. When we know that and 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 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, the what I call the golden thread of that hotel present in every step, in every interaction, in in housekeeping, in room service, in food and beverage, at front desk with the doorman, everywhere that whole hotel's that hotel's identity should be present.

SPEAKER_02 37:24

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

SPEAKER_00 37:33

Let's do it.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

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

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Yippee, first of all, dream come true. That's amazing. Yippie, 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, in 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 Yippie, in 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 bench practice or benchmarking or best practices, and we can adopt standards and then we can customize them and tailor them to ourselves. But also, this is this is the great part is that as AI also now gets to be infused with this, is 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. Um, 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 out 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 EAP 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 where is Yippee and where the industry is. It's 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. We that's such a key buzzword for us of guests are going to start booking. You need your PMS and or your, you know, 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 get 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 offer. 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 is exciting. I think that as we look to evolve as an industry, if we leave standards behind where they are in binders and in and in old PDFs, we will never be able to tap into this wealth of gold, you know, this gold mine and this wealth of knowledge and data that our industry has to offer the future.

SPEAKER_02 41:41

You said something really, 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 pro get information and process information, that guests will be expecting a lot more information as they make a choice. Um, you know, they'll be expecting to get into the fine detail like what's the linen, you know, how often does XYZ happen in this property, like kinds of things that that let's say on a you know, 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.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

There is so much deep in there. We won't dive into it, but you can imagine a guest right now there. 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 and hotel A says one. Hotel B says we have three attendants that are sh, you know, that are required to shift out every, you know, 30 minutes or whatever that may be. Or you 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 can start looking, the game changes. And those that have defined standards will be miles ahead of those that don't.

SPEAKER_02 43:19

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.

SPEAKER_00 43:34

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

SPEAKER_01 43:41

Thank you. And that wraps it up for today's episode of Pillow Talk Sessions with Jessica Gillingham. Thanks so much for listening. And if you'd like to stay connected and never miss a conversation, head over to Pillotalksessions.com to subscribe. You can also follow us on LinkedIn for more insights and interviews with leaders shaping the future of hotels, short term rentals, and tech enabled hospitality. Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on Pillow Talk Sessions.