Streamlining Hospitality Systems with Otelier’s Lexton Raleigh

In this episode of Evolving the Enterprise, SnapLogic CMO Dayle Hall talks with Lexton Raleigh, Distinguished Architect at Otelier, about the surprisingly complex world of hospitality data—and how to make it work for guests, managers, and owners alike.

Lexton breaks down why hotels juggle dozens of systems across brands, owners, and management companies, and how legacy tech (yes, even green-screen F-keys) meets cloud, automation, and AI. He shares repeatable use cases—from daily revenue reconciliation to digital audit packs—that replace back-office wrangling with real business outcomes.

We also look ahead: machine learning that reconciles OTA commissions, BI that tells you the three things you should know today in plain English, and why “perishable inventory” demands low-friction change management. If you care about guest experience, margins, and modern data foundations, you’ll want this playbook.

Transcript

Streamlining Hospitality Systems with Otelier’s Lexton Raleigh

Dayle Hall:
Hi, and welcome to our latest episode of the podcast. This is our podcast where we dive deep into the strategies and technologies that we're seeing across the industry, driving major transformation across multiple enterprises. I'm your host, Dayle Hall, the CMO at SnapLogic.

We have a very special guest today. Lexton Raleigh is a distinguished architect at Otelier. Deep expertise in hospitality technology, so he's doing things like helping hotels modernize operations, bridging legacy systems with cloud-based platforms, automation tools, and I'm sure a little bit of AI is coming into the work that he's doing.

He's very passionate about simplifying all the complex systems out there. When you go to one of these hotels or the hospitality teams, they can really focus on delivering exceptional guest experiences. Let's face it, how many times have we been to one of these outlets and feel like we just weren't treated right? I mean, is it the person, or is it really the technology?

Lexton, welcome to the show.

Lexton Raleigh:
Thank you so much for having me, Dayle. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah, it's great. We haven't actually had anyone from this industry specifically, so I'm really excited to talk to you today.

Lexton Raleigh:
Okay. Well, I'm excited to chat with you as well. To me, it was a bit eye-opening getting into this industry, but having been here, I understand it in a lot better way than I did 8, 10 years ago when I started, and it's super fascinating. Hopefully, it's a little bit educational for you and your audience as well.

Dayle Hall:
I'm sure it will be. Let's start with that. Before we get into Otelier and the company, I want to start with you. Distinguished architect, it's a very grand title. How did you get to that point? What are the things that you've done in your career, and how did you get to that point in your journey?

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah. Geez, where to begin? I'll start by saying, distinguished architect, it always strikes me as a little bit odd. I think they gave me that title because they didn't quite know what else to call me. But ultimately, my background is largely in technology and data management, but it's also in application development. It's also in business process functions. It spans the gap a little bit between business, technology, process, et cetera.

Basically, having been in technology for 20+ years, having written systems, having guided BI platforms, my role at Otelier today is mostly around setting a vision for our future-state architecture and also helping the team take where we are today and migrate to that, as well as understanding where the industry needs to go and putting that all together into sort of an operational plan to help us get where we're going.

Dayle Hall:
And so tell me a little bit about Otelier as a company, because, again, it feels as you talk about that, you're obviously very technical. It feels like you also are able to understand the actual business that it's in. So tell me a little bit about that.

Lexton Raleigh:
This is, to me, one of the most fascinating things about this. What Otelier does is connect data systems to make operational and business intelligence applications available for hotels. That's relatively easy to say, but I want to walk you through a little bit of the complexity of why is this actually a challenge that's a little bit different from other industries.

Dayle Hall:
Love to hear it.

Lexton Raleigh:
Most people- you go to a hotel, you're used to that experience and it feels more or less contained. But really, the technology and organizational ecosystem is what's so complicated. At this hotel, there might be 6to 10 to 20 or more systems that they use to run it. But the management and ownership structure is what makes that interesting. So when you have companies that manage hotels, they tend to manage multiple hotels, and those have different brands. And the brands dictate some degree of the operational software, but not all of it. So they may say the property management system is dictated by the brand, but you can have your own point-of-sale system or your own accounting system or your own time and attendance system, et cetera.

Dayle Hall:
Sounds complex.

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah. And the actual complicated piece gets in with your management company running multiple hotels, they need to stitch their data together to say, how am I doing as a company? They want to optimize their portfolio performance. But what gets even more complicated is the ownership group doesn't often manage their own hotels. So you have owners which might own one or two or hundreds of hotels, in the case of real estate investment trusts, they own lots of hotels and they have multiple management companies. So the management companies run multiple brands. The ownership companies have multiple management companies, and it's this ecosystem that sort of comes together that you have to pull your data together and then slice it back out based on who you're dealing with at the time. And then also it's a high transactional environment. Hotels are bought and sold on two-, three-, five-year cycles, and the management contracts don't always align to that.

Dayle Hall:
I never knew it was that complex.

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah, exactly. And that, to me, was one of the most interesting things that got me excited about it from the very early days to say, wow, okay, I get the business reason why you need to put all these things together. It's hard enough to operate one hotel, but operating a portfolio of hotels and having them come in and out with different ownership reporting requirements and even brand changes like the operational complexity of this ecosystem, is huge. It's a big deal, right? So it's super interesting to see how this all works and then help evolve that and be part of the supporting infrastructure.

Dayle Hall:
Given that kind of structure and management groups and ownership groups and different brands, what does a typical structure look like, and who are you working with within those organizations? The technology challenges we'll get into, but who are you talking to on a daily basis?

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah, exactly right. Again, the consulting answer is it varies. There's as many different structures as you can picture with all of this, but to boil it down, our primary audience is a hotel management group. It's typically someone who is responsible for the operation of some portfolio of hotels. Now, having said that, we have owner-operators of single entities. Our software works for them. We also have operators of literally hundreds of hotels.

One of the interesting things, too, is we have hotels where we have the brand as a customer of us. We have the management group as a customer of us, and we have the ownership group as a customer of us. What makes that interesting is the ownership of the data is not universal. The management group owns their data, which the brand would like to see, but they're not authorized to see that. So you basically have to bring some of this data together, allow sharing where it's allowed, but keep it separate where it's separate.

But back to your question, the management group is our primary audience. Now we go up to ownership groups. We have brand relationships, but really have to boil it down. The management group sort of feels the pain of this problem the most because they're responsible for the operations of the hotel and most of the reporting requirements. They have the most acute pain in this relationship, which is, again, why we're there to help them.

Dayle Hall:
As you deal with these different groups, who in those groups are you actually talking to? Because as I've done these podcasting, if I talk to one of our customers, for example, generally, it's an enterprise organization. They have business units, and then they have IT supporting it. But this sounds a little bit more complex. Do the groups have IT broad support? Is it treated like a business unit because it's a management group? How does that look?

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah, exactly. You're asking all the right questions because, again, the answer is it depends. We absolutely have multiple constituencies, even within a management group. A couple of the big players are, one, revenue management. It's a big deal. In the hotel system, what they're talking about is how do you make sure that you're priced appropriately? You don't want to be too high that you don't have occupancy. You don't want to be too low that you full up. So the business of revenue management at a hotel is its own thing. And there are people who need our software to be able to integrate all the different channels and data feeds where this data comes into to optimize your revenue mix.

There's another group around, say, sales and catering. This is more internal of actually delivering the business that you're booking. Then there's operational, to make sure that you have the right number of room attendants staffed and your scheduling is appropriate. Then there's guest satisfaction, to look at guest dynamics and saying, hey, how do I manage my repeat business? How do I make sure that the personalization services is there?

And then there's, of course, the fiduciary responsibility of making sure you're operating to a P&L and a budget plan. So when we get engaged with a management company, we could be engaged with the CFO. We could be engaged with the CMO. We could be with a regional director of sales. It could be anyone from the operations team. So it really depends on who hears of us and who starts that conversation, but we're really attuned to tell me about your overall operations so we can say, hey, you've got this, but what about this and this? Oh, you don't need that? How about this?

That's one of the things that we strive to do is have a full stack of hospitality or hotel management software for back-office optimization. But if I had to boil it down, sorry, there's a lot of me talking here, but to boil it down, it's usually an accounting persona or a sales persona or an operations persona. Those are the three big ones that come up routinely.

Dayle Hall:
That sounds a little bit like what I would refer to as almost like, in an enterprise, it's the business unit or it's the business buyer. That's because they're looking for that kind of data. Do you engage much in a central IT to get access to data? How is that all managed? Because I would imagine, you mentioned it yourself, which is certain people would like access to it, but they can't get access to that data. How does governance work in that regard?

Lexton Raleigh:
It tends to be disjointed. What I'd say across the board is the management companies on the mid to small scale almost exclusively have no IT support from a central perspective. And if you can think about how a management company goes to business, again, this varies widely, but you may have 2 to 5 to 10 or 20 people in the corporate office, and then maybe 20 or 30 or 50 people at each hotel. So it wouldn't be unusual for a management company to have, I don't know, a portfolio of dozens or more hotels with 3,000+ employees of which a hundred of them are in the corporate and everyone else is distributed.

I say that because you sort of have to have this big enough scale where there is the economy to have a central IT department that orchestrates all this versus allowing it to be decentralized and having hotels operate more or less independently across the country and manage it that way. So across the board, we tend not to see IT departments until you get to the bigger scales. And even when you do, they also differ from, am I just here to keep the email working, or am I a big enough hotel management company that I have my own data warehouse and I'm using API calls and I have my own analytics platform and they're looking for data integrations that we can provide that they don't have natively? So there really is this gamut from basic operations to enterprise stuff at a large scale that you would expect from more mature fintech industries or things like that.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. As you go to those big organizations that maybe have their own cloud data warehouse, data lakes that they're pulling from, if it's centralized like that because it's a bigger scale, is that easier almost to work with because they could be a little bit more advanced, or does it not make much difference?

Lexton Raleigh:
It tends to be easier in the net, because again, they have a background of what we're trying to achieve from enterprise data systems. But when you get to that scale, you sort of, I think, have more difficult challenges at the last-mile integration to the hotel.

This is another key thing to understand about the hotel ecosystem, is the legacy data systems that are engaged. And there's this whole sort of side thing that I may take you down or may not. I'll maybe spare you that rabbit hole, but there are hotels today that have data systems that are green screen using F12 keys, F keys. And I've been around long enough, I'm not sure-

Dayle Hall:
No, I'm old enough to remember that, too.

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah. If you don't remember those screens, you don't really appreciate how old that tech is. It's interesting because those operational systems, they still work, they're still in use with the hotel, but there is no API connection. There are data systems that we need to integrate with who can't produce or email a report. There's no API. The best they can do is dump a text file to a local disk.

If you have a hotel, like you buy a hotel and it happens to have that kind of data system, what are you going to do? A centralized IT department, what can they do? Ultimately, are they going to be in the business of figuring out how to solve that? No, that's part of what we do. That's not all we do, but we do have clients that can go sit on that machine, get that data and send it to us. We have clients that can install a virtual printer in your environment. So you can print a document that comes into our cloud, and now you can integrate it with. So there's a lot of what we do.

To tie this back together, if you're a management company that's big enough to have a central IT department, you very likely have 50 to 500 hotels, each of those has 10-or-so data systems, I guarantee you're dealing with an ecosystem of 200 to 300 systems. Are you, as central IT, going to be able to integrate with all of those to the lowest common denominator?

That's what Otelier does, is we do have 350+ integrations. We can integrate data all kinds of different ways, even from these green screen systems. We normalize it in our data warehouse. We make it available to folks. The top-level consumers are more able to consume it, but they don't necessarily appreciate how difficult it is to get it. And some of the restrictions that we have at the lower level to say, listen, I understand what you're asking for, we just can't have that. This is what you get because that's what's available.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. That sounds like a pretty complex scenario, particularly with those old F12 keys. I remember those pretty well.

Then we move into something like, you mentioned it yourself, the whole point of doing this is to try and provide better customer experiences. Ultimately, in hospitality, they want customers. They want many customers, repeat customers, people coming back, great experiences. Anyone that's ever stayed in a hotel, there's a small thing that could go wrong and they just completely ruined your experience. In general, have customer expectations evolved so much over recent years that it's now harder to provide a better service? Some of the systems that you work on or the data architecture or the infrastructure, how are those set up to really help provide a better customer experience?

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah, these are excellent questions. And that's where, again, you get a little bit of a mixed bag because some of these legacy systems are very difficult to move out, either the brand mandated or just the change management of changing that it's difficult. And yet customers are expecting near real-time feedback. They want mobile check-in. They want contactless service. You want personalized experience. The demand for services is increasing, but it's difficult to retrofit those back to your green screen or your other applications. And so you end up with ecosystems of silos.

In the hotel, you have a dozen data systems more or less, and very likely none of them talk to each other. And so that's okay. But imagine the general manager going around trying to understand what's actually happening. Like you gotta log in here. You gotta check over there. You gotta do all this. You gotta do this. And that's really the core of where Otelier's software suites come in, which is allowing the integration of this and the servicing of this so that the hotel operators are not spending all of their time chasing down data to ultimately service the guest.

Part of our thought process is let me make your back-office work easier, so you can go out and be in front of the customer and be there with a smiling face and be there to respond to their issues and not in the back office, trying to crunch some numbers and integrate data with Vlookups and Excel because you have a report due that week to your management group or your ownership group.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. It's similar with- when we talk about SnapLogic, obviously, it's integration and automation. Now we're all talking about agents. Part of the underlying goal of doing that is to quickly automate some of this very manual, whether you're using spreadsheets and Vlookups, automate it so you can actually focus on more of the meaningful business value fulfilling work. But again, in the hotel industry, actually, the meaningful work is providing a better experience. That is your ultimate goal. And I can understand being able to set that up is critical for those hotels. It feels like the technology has come a long way in terms of now we've got devices on our phones that we can check in ahead of time.

As those new technologies come online, which are great experiences, how hard is it then to build that piece of the technology or that experience into some of those older systems? Sometimes if someone approaches you with new technology for a hotel, is it like, how do we make this work with everything else?

Lexton Raleigh:
That's definitely it. And I guess this is a little bit of that rabbit hole that I mentioned earlier. One of the other nuances about hospitality is it has what we call a perishable inventory. What we mean by that is the hotel metric is really a bed night. It's a room sold for this day. And if you don't sell that room today, you can't sell it tomorrow. The room you sell tomorrow is tomorrow's room. You can't stockpile these, right? You either do it now or you don't do it.

So every day, you get a brand-new set of rooms to sell. And every day, you can no longer sell yesterday's rooms. It's a perishable inventory. That's relevant because that really gates what kind of downtime you can expect. The hotel is not going to close operations for a month to replace a data system. You can't do that. So when you have these new systems come up, there isn't really a choice of saying, hey, let's plan for this cutover. You've got to run in parallel. You've got to plug it into the outside. You have to keep things going or there isn't this natural downtime. Now, obviously, there's seasonality and some hotels have the ability to say close rooms or close floors at a time. But for a data system, it's either all on or not. So you can't partially implement a time and attendance system. You’re either in or you’re out.

That goes into why there is a change management curve in hotels, which also affects their ability to adopt technology. But the counter push to that is customer satisfaction and guest experience. So there’s always a long lookout for, what are my competitors doing? If my competitors have implemented contactless service and they're winning business because of it, then I have to do this now, even if it's going to cost me and my perishable inventory. So there's this pressure on all directions. You make sure the hotel meets the customer expectation, but it's very difficult to justify getting in front of it because you're losing your perishable inventory whenever you get too aggressive.

That's where the secret sauce of the management company comes in, where they can make these decisions and figure out who their ecosystem partners are that enable them to meet the guests where they need to be without that sort of massive churn and change management issue.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. Interested to, let's say you get a new client, hotel chain or a management group, and you go in there. We talk about from our side of the equation, what we're looking for is what data do they have, what infrastructure do they have? Is it some legacy that you have to integrate with? Is it on-prem? What are the new technologies? There gets to be like a baseline of systems and infrastructure, and even governance that they need in place.

How does that work for you? Is it different if it's a new hotel chain and there's- I don't know if those exist. They're actually starting from scratch and you can guide them. But what are some of the baseline things that you advise your clients, the chains, the brands, or whatever? Where do you advise them to start if they just come to you like, okay, this is what we're trying to do? Where do they start?

Lexton Raleigh:
It has a lot to do with who is the person engaging. As mentioned, if you're the CFO, they may have daily revenue reporting issues. Because we're on a day cycle- that's one of the things that trips up some folks,too, is this is a day reporting cycle. It's not month. It's not quarter. It's not year. It's a day-by-day basis where the owner wants to get up in the morning and see, did I win yesterday? What he means by that is looking at their occupancy, looking at your revenue numbers, did I win? That data has to get into the accounting systems. You're talking about daily reconciliation of revenues, et cetera.

So if that person's coming to us, they've got an idea of what this means versus someone who's looking to guest sat, who's looking to somewhere else. And so basically, as you said, there is a difference between a legacy operator with legacy systems versus a new operator who's installing new systems from scratch. But either one of those is a far more solvable problem than the management group who has them both, because then they have the overarching responsibility to stitch them both together.

So when we go to these engagements, we almost always start with, what are you interested in, right? I've got this whole bag of tricks I can sell you, right? I've got lots of things to solve, but what do you actually care about? Is it guest analytics? Is it revenue? Is it planning? Is it analytics? Is it this? Is it that? Is it automation? What actually moves the needle for you?

One of the other things that's also so interesting about this role in this industry is that you can have a consultative approach to all of these things. We deal with literally hundreds, probably thousands of customers, and thousands or tens of thousands of hotels. So when you think about what we've seen across the industry, it's quite a bit different. But you come into some conversations, and not going to throw anybody under the bus, but you have conversations that say like, this is the metric that matters, and I can't believe you never heard this before, how can you run your hotel without it? I don't know what to tell you. This is the first time I've heard of this metric. That doesn't happen a lot anymore, but a hundred percent, you'd get these sort of niches of expertise to say, this is how we do things. And sometimes it aligns, sometimes it doesn't.

So that consultative conversation comes in, and our ability to react to what they want is very important, right? That's among the reasons why we're partners with SnapLogic, we're partners with companies who can help us move that forward faster and be reactive and be expansive.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. As I'm talking on these podcasts, frankly, it doesn't matter what type of company, what industry, one of the things that I hear consistently is focus on, don't say, hey, there's an AI solution, we should be doing more AI. Look for a problem. Solve, figure out how to solve the problem, whether it's AI based or it's just pure integration or automation challenge, and focus on those, get the wins, and then expand from there.

I'm interested, with this type of business, dealing with things like hotels who have, as you mentioned, many different use cases, many different metrics, different departments looking at different things, have you seen specific repeatable use cases that have really helped to- I wouldn't say change the business. What are the things that, as you've seen, it could be on experience, it could be on managing revenue or operational efficiency, what are the things that you see? I know when these chains look at this, it generally has a big impact. What are the biggest use cases you've seen and the impact of those?

Lexton Raleigh:
I've got maybe three examples I’ll give you. I'll maybe even start with what I think is one of the biggest ones, and this is daily revenue reporting. The use case here is- there's two use cases here, but the one I'm going to talk about is when a hotel closes their day, there's actually what they call a closed process in the property management system where they say, this day is done and now we're rolling the day to the next day. That may happen at 2am or 1am, or there's some time where that day is closed.

What the hotel can and should do is then reconcile that day and actually report their revenue to enter how much money did I get on my cash machine, how much actually reconcile it. I'm getting to the point where our software helps them do that, and we have customers who haven't done that before. They basically wait until the end of the month and see what their month looked like, or they're trying to reconcile their bank account on this weekly basis. But we've had customers who come in and implement our software, and now they're seeing on a day-by-day basis what money they should be coming in and what money should be flowing to their system.

That was all backstory. To give you the punchline here is we had a customer implement and they called us and said, hey, we saw that we were getting X thousands of dollars a day, and it wasn't in our bank account. We thought someone was stealing from us. We called the hotel, what's going on? Turns out their credit card machine had become disconnected and was queuing up those transactions. So they hadn't gone through yet. Now, if they hadn't implemented our software, they wouldn't have known that until the end of the month. And then those authorizations may have expired. Then what are they going to do? Call those customers back and ask for the money again?

So there's an example of if you're not reconciling your day and recording these things on that really timely basis, you're operating at a serious risk today. That's why there's still companies that do that. And again, we're all on a maturity scale here, but there's one thing like, hey, listen, we have ways to automate that. It's not as painful as it sounds, and you get so much visibility into your business that's worth doing.

Two other use cases real quick. One is there's a legal compliance requirement in North America to have an audit pack for your day. You have to reconcile and say, room sold, who was there, what was going on. There's requirements there. If you don't do that digitally, you're missing out. We absolutely still go to hotels where they have a stack of paper, I'm not kidding you, a stack of paper for every day that they close for the last seven years. That fills up bankers’ boxes. They're paying for storage units to keep track of this because it's a requirement, right? That's an easy win today. Listen, we get that data automatically. We have signature flows. You can workflow approve it in our application. It's available for audits.

That was also a huge deal during the COVID years. That's a bit in our rear view now, but imagine when people couldn't go out to audit their hotels. They used to have people drive around, drive from hotel to look at these auto packs. Now you can do it in our application. There's other use cases, too, around pickup and revenue flow and booking things where it really comes down to more granularity in your data in a more timely manner. The better you can do that, the better you can respond, the better you react, the more you're having your folks not spend time data wrangling, instead spend time actually analyzing the business and looking forward to helping your guests.

Dayle Hall:
It's interesting because I think, again, in our line of work, there's a lot of things that we're looking at around things that can be automated. You just had a couple of examples there, which really take the manual piece out of it, which, to be fair, that's what we're trying to do. There's this concept that a lot of the AI work now is going to take people's jobs.

I think how you described it before, it's, no, if you can automate the painful stuff, then have them front of house, have them focused on the guests and not running reports and filling boxes of invoices and so on just to stall them. I think there's definitely still some worry out there, but to me, this industry itself is exactly what should be more focused on the people and what the guests expect and less on the backend, less on just having that running. So I think it's a really interesting industry to be focused on this.

How do you feel the industry as a whole is getting behind these capabilities, the technology capabilities? I don't know how much work you may be looking at AI and generative AI, but one of the other podcasts I did just recently, someone that talks across multiple industries, and she actually said that FSI was one of the most fourth innovative companies that they were working, all the FSI companies, because they recognize that they can really deliver a better experience. And sometimes if you ask a lot of people if we think FSI, it's got a lot of controls, regulatory compliance, personal identification, that must be hard. But no, she actually said that they really want to move it forward because they can really create differentiation.

So in hospitality, whether it's they're competing with hundreds of different chains and experiences, and there's new boutique hotels and operators popping up, as an industry, how advanced do you think it is as a whole? Are they starting to accelerate with these new capabilities? Do they want to talk to you now, not just about potentially legacy stuff, but, hey, we want to take this to the next step? How advanced is this industry now?

Lexton Raleigh:
I think it's still a little bit of a mixed bag because you absolutely have small operators. That's really not on the radar at all. But you do have big players that that's clearly what they're looking at for differentiation. One thing about hospitality obviously is it's still a really physical industry. As far as you're talking about, forget the term, but heads and beds. You're talking about people, giving them a place to stay. It doesn't exist without a location. It doesn't exist without that sort of environment. So that's there.

But over the last, say, 10 years, the presence of Airbnb and VRBO and other stay-sharing applications, that has had a bit of a disruptive influence because now your supply is much more variable. When a big event comes to town, all of a sudden the supply of available rooms increases as people are renting out their extra space, and then it goes back down, as opposed to you could plan around that demand set. Hotels are reacting to that, but that also gets them into experiential things.

As an industry, travelers are interested more in the experience of traveling than they used to be. This isn't about, let me just find a place to stay. This is about, what am I going to do in town this weekend? What's an authentic natural experience when I'm in this environment? So you see a lot of hotels going toward that as well, in part to combat the Airbnb market, but in part, because that's just what the travelers demand these days, right? They want a local experience. And so this gets into differentiation and personalization, and how do you know about all of these things? Data systems bring it all together.

So there really is, I think this sort of, I can't quite say dichotomy, but maybe a pressure between the service area of it, where it's really about someone there to offer a smile to you, and then also the data integration piece to make sure you have enough information to actually know who you're talking to and what they're here for and how to actually provide the best experience for them. Overall, I can't say that hospitality is leading the tech charge, but a hundred percent they're interested in it. In some areas they're leading, but it's a lot about getting this sort of legacy and lagging things up to speed in what's a very complicated ecosystem.

Dayle Hall:
Any of the people you’ve taught, your customers, your clients, has there been anyone that surprised you with something that they want to be able to track or implement or a metric that's less common? I love what you said about it's the people, it's the faces, it's the smiles. Those really help the experience, but is that even anything they track? Is there a way that hotels are really looking at that part of the experience, the engagement, not just the, I love the expression, the heads and the beds?

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah. You definitely get that spectrum, and I guess come back to some more industry background, there's obviously different types of hotels from an extended stay, where that may be someone's in town, they book a room for a month or two or three, versus sort of mid-scale where you have some amenities, versus larger scale, versus resorts, versus luxury. So there's a whole ecosystem there.

But let me bring that up to say, when you get to the upper tier of that, yes, they're tracking that stuff. One of my favorite examples is, I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to use names or not, but one of our top-tier customers, you can check our website and find them, they have such personalized guest experience that when you check in as a new guest, they'll have a fruit basket there with apples and oranges and pears and bananas and a selection of fruit. They're actually keeping track of what you eat. So if one ate the oranges out of there, when you check in next time, you're going to get a basket of oranges and maybe a couple other things.

At the luxury end of the market, that matters. That moves the needle for the luxury customer to have that sort of personalized experience where it's almost transparent to them. No one asked you what fruit do you want, but they're keeping track of what you're doing at their organization such that they can give you that degree of personalized service. That doesn't happen at the lower end of the market, but different things happen at that end of the market, right?

Again, it's an ecosystem experience where our baseline customer may have 12 data points that are all they really need to run their business, whereas the other end of the spectrum is they may need 1,012 data points to actually run their business. That's one of the things, again, it's interesting to me as a computer scientist, as a technologist, as at heart a data manager, to actually understand the data warehouse enough such that we can support people where they are and actually serve that breadth of market that, yes, you want to get to that level of personalized service. Think about the complexity of keeping track of reservations and the charges you have against the bill when they're split out, which guests actually charge that. There's a whole bunch of complexity in actually getting that level of granularity, and we can support that, as well as just a top level. It's super fascinating. One of the reasons why I've been here as long as I have, it's a fascinating environment with lots of challenges.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. Again, the things you're saying make sense, but I don't think I've ever really thought of the complexity behind the systems when I'm just a consumer of these services. I'm not a planner and understand what goes into it

You have new customers that come to you. I'm sure most of them have multiple use cases. Like you said, it varies depending on who you're talking to, larger group, smaller group, different kinds of investments that they're looking at. Is there a baseline as they come to you and say, look, we have 10 use cases that we think we need help with. Where do you start with some of the baseline stuff that you really need to get your data out of these old systems, then we can really start to help? What's the typical guidance when they come to you with a dozen use cases? Where do you start with them?

Lexton Raleigh:
I guess we'll come back to plug us a little bit to say that we've really organized our package, our products, along basically three pillars. There's a business intelligence pillar that says, if you're primarily interested in analytics, reporting, predictive stuff, reactive stuff, if you're primarily interested in analytics, here's a pillar for you. If you're primarily interested in operations, this is around your night audit process, your daily revenue reconciliation, optimization of labor, if you're interested in an operational thing, then here's a pillar that we have. And then the financial planning or a FinOps, FP&A kind of function, we have that. So basically, if I had to break it down, that's where we start and say, which of these pillars really resonates with you the most?

Now behind the scenes, when your data comes to us, it's going to come to a centralized repository so that we can share all of our applications at the same fact base. But from a customer point of view, we really want to see where is it you're trying to focus on. Your operation’s solid, you want to get into a reporting so you can get that next level of analytics, okay, great, here we go. If you're not there yet, here's this. So those three pillars really start that conversation. And then depending on where they are and what resonates, we can get them into the ecosystem and help them along.

Dayle Hall:
I could probably talk to you for about two hours, but I know we don't have two hours. As we close, one of the things I'm really interested in, because obviously AI is everywhere, it's the most important thing since cloud computing and internet and all those kinds of things, and I've read all the reports as I'm sure you have. Just talked about three specific areas there, the operational, financial and the analytics piece. Within your business, or potentially from your customers, your clients, are there specific AI-driven applications or AI use cases that you're seeing growing either from the things that you're investing in your business or your clients now coming and say, hey, can we look at doing this? I'm sure there's a ton of things that have to happen behind the scenes to make sure that they can take advantage. But from an AI perspective, what are you focused on, and then what are your customers coming to you and saying, we think we can leverage some of this?

Lexton Raleigh:
There's, again, a gamut of this stuff, but I'll focus on two use cases. One's really around machine learning. And part of this is this reconciliation process. Again, this is a little bit more detailed, but I'll give you the pie level, which is when a hotel uses what we call a channel partner, if you book your hotel through a third-party website, again, I won't name any names, but I think folks know what I'm talking about, you go to a third party and book it, the hotel pays a commission to them for that room.

Truth be told, maybe folks know or they don't know, in most of the US, maybe broader worldwide, is there are price regulations to say you actually don't get a better deal here versus the other. Direct booking is okay, but the ability to compare multiple brands is some of what these online travel agencies, OTAs, offer. Regardless. If you book that way, the hotel owes a commission. The hotel gets statements every month to say, this is what you owe us. Guess what? Those don't always reconcile with what was actually booked. We have an application that compares the OTA invoice and bill to the property management system of what was actually happening. And we do the match to say, yes, this is valid, this is not. And we do the auto match.

We also have ML that will suggest things that we don't see enough to match it. This isn't the same number, but this looks like it's close enough. If the human goes through and accepts or rejects that as a match, that's informing our AI system to do better matching in the future. So there's that AI system where, again, that's just one application where it literally pays for itself, not overpaying or underpaying commissions, much less the time it would take some human to do that instead of our algorithm. So that's sort of 100% in that one.

Let me pivot dramatically over to the BI side. And I'll say, to my mind, the future of business intelligence is no charts and graphs at all. You're not going to come in and look at a data system or a dashboard and say, hey, what's going on? Instead, you're going to come in and an AI is, in natural language, going to tell you the three most important things you should know today. This happened. And more importantly, this happened, this is why this is what you should do about it. This happened, this is why this is what you should do about it.

If you need to get into more data, it'll be a natural language interface where you say, show me the revenue for this country, for this thing. And the AI will dynamically go get that query, go visualize that data, go analyze it and tell you what it sees on that report. This isn't me just thinking 20 years in advance. Our demos do that today. There are other customers who have already implemented that- not customers, other industries that have implemented that today. But that, to me, that's where we're headed, and that's what we're preparing for and have in motion right now to release soon to have this guided concierge experience to BI.

It's not going to be one or the other for the next 5or 10 years easily, but that's there today where the AI can analyze the data and dynamically think about these things and tell you stuff that you wouldn't know to ask, that we wouldn't know to have put this in a dashboard yet because it's an anomaly, it's a seasonal trend, it comes and goes. The AI will find that and help us understand that.

Dayle Hall:
And then instead of your team spending 80% of their time identifying that and 20% fixing it, because it has the recommendation already, they can spend 80% of their time actually going fixing what's being recommended.

Lexton Raleigh:
Exactly right. So you can think of this evolution that, today, if you're not doing these things, you're spending 80% of your time getting your data together and 20% of your time analyzing it. If you're using these things, we've already got your data together. So you're spending 80% of your time analyzing it and 20% of your time doing it. In the future, we'll have your data, have it analyzed, and you'll spend 80% of your time doing it and 20% of your time servicing your guests or something else, something else value-add. So it's this ecosystem of just wrangling data, to analyzing it, to understanding the predictive and prognostic things, to understand the root cause and causality, to then actually go do something to drive your business. That's all getting pushed left. That's an expression we use to say, obviously things are getting easier and earlier in the funnel, so the value-add out the other side is much higher.

Dayle Hall:
As we've talked about, what that means is as a consumer of these brands, of these chains, I'm probably going to get a better experience. So they're going to create differentiation for me. So I am going to become more loyal because there's people there to always help us because all the backend stuff has been done for them. That's what I want when I go to these experiences.

I have a totally random question. Based on the chains that you work with and the customers, if you know they're more advanced in their technology, do you pick that chain to stay at?

Lexton Raleigh:
Yes and no. What are you looking for in your experience? Certainly loyalty matters as they have their brand programs. The experience matters. If you're a keyless check-in kind of person, if you actually don't want to stop at the front desk to get your key, that's going to pivot you. Now that I'm in the industry, when I check in, I actually do like to go to the front desk because behind the front desk, almost always you'll see a plaque that says who the management company is, who the ownership group is. I just make a habit of saying, hey, what software are you running? I happen to know the hotels that run our software as customers. And so it's nice to go in there and say, hey, how do you like this software? Oh, by the way, I’m with the company that does that.

Dayle Hall:
That's awesome.

Lexton Raleigh:
I think it is, but your point is interesting, too, because there's some brand management awareness there, too. There's also management company. If you look at some of the big management companies, they manage their hotels consistently. So it wouldn't surprise me if at some point people end up with management company loyalty as much as brand loyalty. But certainly it's out there in the ecosystem, and with information availability, it'll be a deciding factor for some folks for sure.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. My last question, a little bit looking into the future, I love what you've just talked about in terms of using AI for the analytics piece and getting ahead of it. And even on the financial side, we've built actually on SnapLogic ourselves, we've built a revenue reconciliation agent that saved our finance team hours of work at month close, and you guys are doing daily closes. So I'm sure that's super useful.

But if you look out, I don't know, 12 months, 2years, whatever timeframe you like, in terms of the technology that you see coming down with AI, there's all this talk of agentic and what that means, and potentially these agents talking to agents, is there something that you look out across your expertise, the industry you're in, say, is there something you're really excited about that you think could actually have an even bigger impact than the things you're already putting in place or something, maybe it's even in your personal life, something that you're really excited around what's coming down with the technology that I think is going to really change the game.?
Lexton Raleigh:
That's such a tough question.Yes and no.

Dayle Hall:
That's why I asked.

Lexton Raleigh:
This isn't your first time doing this, is it?

Dayle Hall:
No, it's not my first.

Lexton Raleigh:
Yeah, I think so. One of the things to me that's interesting about AI is, on one hand, it's overhyped. On the other hand, it's underhyped. I think people don't quite yet understand exactly what it's going to do. One of the things that we've seen is with AI, and specifically large language models- AI is such a blanket term. We really shouldn't be talking about it that generically. Large language models and natural language processing and generation has been the things I'm more excited over these last few years and its ability to simulate rational thought.

And so think about what that can do, is it's an accelerator that we haven't seen before. Back to the idea of what are these phases of technology, and the personal computer was one, mobile was a second, this is the third. What LLMs will unlock? So it's hard to get away from the potential of that. And we've seen it already. Ultimately we're a software development company, so it's helped us with our software development life cycle. It's helped us with the products that we're building, how we build them. It's helped them in the features that we're releasing. It's a big deal, right?

But I'd also say it's been overhyped as people think it can do more than it has, but it's been underhyped in that no one, I don't think, has quite unlocked what the true power of this is going to be. And whether that's agentic cycles, putting some processes on a flywheel that we haven't seen before, a natural cycle of goodness that- as a quick example, which hopefully is a bit relatable to say, to use an LLM to enrich a dataset such that another LLM can generate deeper insights, such that another LLM can actually deliver those insights, such that it can create deeper insights and more data points, once you get an ecosystem like that together, where the ability to deliver and digest is so much faster than it's been before, I think you may be looking at a step change in what we're even thinking about as cutting edge these days, because it will unlock the velocity that we haven't seen before.

This has been going on for a long time. There's some folks around here who are part of the beginning of small language model generation that was doing very interesting things 15 years ago. Now we're seeing large language models doing it. It's really exciting to think about where we're going to be in six months, much less two to three to five years. It's just moving that fast.

Dayle Hall:
It is. It's amazing. Lexton, I really appreciate your time. One of my favorite podcasts, I can honestly say, that we've recorded. I love your energy and enthusiasm. Your knowledge is amazing, too. I'm sure Otelier is very lucky to have you as part of the team. So thanks for your time today.

Lexton Raleigh:
It's been a pleasure, Dayle. Thank you.

Dayle Hall:
Thanks, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you on the next episode of our podcast. Have a good day.