Testimonial Penally Abbey

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As you find it today, Penally Abbey is a true labour of love for the Boissevain family. Husband and wife team Lucas and Melanie Boissevain work closely with two of their three children, Saskia and Jacques to create this 12 bedrooms, boutique hotel and restaurant by the sea in Pembrokeshire.

When Lucas and Melanie took on the hotel back in 2014, they had little experience in the industry and within the first 6 months learnt more about the hospitality industry than they ever imagined. For the past 7 years, the hotel has undergone extensive refurbishments. The hotel is based around three fundamentals; warm, welcoming and friendly service, good food and wine and comfy bedrooms.

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Prior to partnering with Guestcentric, how did you feel about your previous Hotel Website and Booking Engine solutions?

When we took over Penally Abbey, we had a passive hotel website and had to rely on our previous provider to maintain the CMS. For this reason, we looked at various other players in the market. Some were too costly, and others too clunky, but most notably, none of the British offerings provided a holistic package such as Guestcentric’s integrated website and booking engine solution.

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What influenced your decision to partner with Guestcentric?

Our decision to partner with Guestcentric boiled down to the holisticness of the integrated website and booking engine package, and the emphasis on the guest experience. We initially opted for the Essentials package, which helped us relaunch our hotel website in an efficient and timely manner. We immediately learned that the platform gave us autonomy and control over our back office, which is essential for our business.

We briefly migrated away from Guestcentric and engaged another digital marketing agency to implement best practices on our website. Although they supported our marketing objectives, we ended up with two URLs, one for our website and the other for our booking engine. As we grew our digital presence and began focusing more on Google SEO, the two URLs soon became an issue from an analytics perspective.

We also began to feel that our website needed a revamp, and remembered that Guestcentric offers this bespoke service. This drove our decision to re-engage with Guestcentric to update and optimize our website. Guestcentric’s onboarding team worked closely with my son and daughter to develop and relaunch our website and ensure it fit the needs of our business and what we wanted to achieve digitally. From a cost perspective, the revamp was very reasonable in terms of value for money.

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We learned that the platform gave us autonomy & control over our back office, which is essential for our business.

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In your view, what are some of the benefits you have received or expect to receive from using Guestcentric's solutions?

We relaunched our revamped hotel website with Guestcentric in October 2019. By January 2020, we increased our direct sales via web and mobile by 114%. We have since come to realize that OTAs are a lazy sale for our business, and reduced our inventory and commission costs with them to focus on our direct channels. Needless to say, the gains have been huge, and continue to grow!

I feel you either go 100% with OTAs or next to nothing. Working with the Guestcentric team and technology, we found our way and the direct channel is the way to go.

How has Guestcentric’s Integrated Website & Booking Engine solution improved the sales and marketing for your hotel?

With the Guestcentric platform, not only is our hotel website and booking engine more polished and professional for online visitors, we also have the ability to proactively measure performance and adapt in real time.

We find Guestcentric’s benchmark dashboards to be extremely valuable to inform our business decisions. Every Monday, we consolidate and analyze the information, comparing guest behaviour to previous years in order to identify trends and respond accordingly. We also measure year-on.-year growth and what our best years are in terms of revenue.

Overall, it’s extremely easy to measure key KPIs on the platform, which in turn gives us confidence that we are moving in the right direction.

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We relaunched our revamped hotel website with Guestcentric in October 2019. By January 2020, we increased our direct sales via web and mobile by 114%.

The Guestcentric platform speaks for itself. While there may be other good products on the market, very few host the hotel website down to the back-office.

How has Guestcentric's Integrated Website & Booking Engine Solution improved the daily operations of your hotel?

The Guestcentric platform speaks for itself. While there may be other good products on the market, very few host the hotel website down to the back-office.

Just having a good EPOS system helps us seamlessly take care of everything. For example, whenever we have a checkout, just a few clicks is all it takes to log information in Guestcentric’s to create and send an invoice to the guest. Other features, including the Audit Trail, are also brilliant and really help us keep track of important information. Overall, the platform is both intuitive and easy to operate. It’s also easy to teach others how to use it.

Guestcentric’s pricing model is also very fair and affordable for small independent hotels such as ours. The value-add is well worth the cost. Once hotels get established, the results are well worth it.

How Likely are you to Recommend Guestcentric’s Customer Service and Product to your peers in the industry and why?

I would highly recommend Guestcentric’s technology and customer service to my peers in the industry. We strongly value Guestcentric’s continuous focus on innovation to support the growth of our business and make life easier for us from an operational perspective, often without us asking for it. When you partner with Guestcentric, this approach is guaranteed.

Overall, I am more than happy with the service and product, as both continue to give us fantastic results. To be frank, UK-based hotels are missing a trick if they are still not partnered with Guestcentric.

What is your favourite feature from Guestcentric’s Integrated Website & Booking Engine Solution?

Among my favourite features would have to be Guestcentric’s benchmark dashboards, which have been extremely helpful in measuring our KPIs and informing our business decisions.

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