Hotels are working harder than ever to attract customers. While AirBnB has been turning up the competitive heat on the hospitality industry, many hotels have also found they have become over reliant on commission-hungry intermediaries such as Expedia and Booking.com. When the Covid-19 crisis hit, decimating hotel revenues worldwide, the landscape became exponentially more challenging.
Simplotel’s mission is to help independent hotels of all sizes to grow their direct website bookings by providing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology that enables them to compete at a higher level, drive greater awareness and increase direct sales. With the help of its easy-to-use product suite, Simplotel’s customers often see their bookings double and revenue multiply within a matter of months.
The Challenge: Image and Video Management for the Fast-Paced Hotel Industry
Simplotel’s proprietary content management system (CMS) is completely customised to hotels. When a hotelier signs up with Simplotel, they can upload their content, choose a page template, input their room rates, and set up a payment gateway - all in a few hours.
The most crucial step in this process is uploading visual assets. “A picture is worth a thousand words, and video is worth a million,” explains Tarun Goyal, Founder & CEO at Simplotel. “We’ve found that when hotels use video really effectively to tell a story, customer engagement jumps by five or six percentage points.”
But while images and video have become crucial elements to selling hotels online, they also contribute extensively to a website’s load time. “You can have the best video ever, but if it doesn’t load properly or fast enough, or looks jittery when it plays, what’s the point? Your customer has already lost interest. This is where Cloudinary comes into play,” says Goyal.
The Cloudinary Solution: Reducing Lag and Improving User Experience for Image and Video Content, Globally
In order to keep page load lag to a minimum and ensure images and videos can be quickly and securely uploaded by customers using the Simplotel platform, Goyal and his engineering team turned to Cloudinary’s image and video management tools.
Cloudinary is integrated into Simplotel’s back end, meaning that only a handful of Simplotel’s developers work directly with Cloudinary. When a customer uploads images and video to Simplotel’s CMS, they’re automatically hosted on Cloudinary’s platform.
Cloudinary enables dynamic resolution and format adjustment, meaning that Simplotel customers’ images and video load fast and at high fidelity across all browsers and devices - crucial for a business operating in so many different markets.
The Results: Driving Hospitality’s Recovery through Engaging Customer Experiences
Today, Simplotel hoteliers regularly record lower bounce rates, longer dwell times and jumps in direct and third-party bookings thanks in part to improvements in customer experience delivered by Cloudinary’s pioneering technology.
Cloudinary has also brought tangible benefits to Simplotel’s busy engineering team. By enabling the engineering team to offload the complexity around image and video management and dedicate precious development time to other areas of the business, Cloudinary helps Simplotel to accelerate its time to market for new features and stay competitive.
“We rely extensively on Cloudinary to provide a fast and smooth experience for our hoteliers and their end customers. The fact that Cloudinary consistently invests in new features, such as dynamic video and picture resolutions and image shape settings, means that we can focus on other areas and innovate much quicker for our customers.”
-Tarun Goyal, Founder & CEO, Simplotel
