ÐßÐßÊÓƵ

Transcript

Introduction to Ett Hem hotel
 
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another Matt Talks. This week, I wanted to invite one of my personal favorite hotels, and I travel every week, and and I'm so used to staying in hotels. But this hotel, I felt, needed to be invited to Matt Talks so we can talk about what they're doing that is so special and so unique. Nicole, thank you for joining me.
 
Thank you, Matt. I'm so excited to be invited to this podcast.
 
And, yeah, I'm looking forward. You work in hospitality, and then you get invited for the podcast.
 
Yeah. It's almost a punishment. Like, I hope it's not a punishment, actually.
 
No, it's so nice. Thank you.
 
Can you tell us the story of Ett Hem?
 
Yeah.
 
Ett Hem opened in 2012 and by Jeanette Mix, who is the owner. And, she had a background in hospitality school, and she was really interested in hospitality. She met her husband, and her life took another direction. And one day, a friend called her and said, hey, there is a nice townhouse for sale in your neighborhood. You should buy it and make a hotel. And she has been traveling a lot and really wanted to create a hotel that she, yeah, she couldn't find anywhere else in the world. Then she created Ett Hem, which means a home.
 
So it's really more like staying at your best friend's house than staying in a hotel. And that should be the feeling. And, yeah, that's the story of where it started. And then now, twelve years later, we have expanded.
 
So we have gone from 12 rooms to 25. And, yeah, you never know where it's gonna end.
 
I love it. You build a whole neighborhood.
 
Yes. We hope so.
 
I think a lot of aspiring hoteliers have this dream of building this really homey hotel, but then a lot of hotels aren't. Like, what do you think Ett Hem does really distinctly different from what most hotels do?
 
Yeah. I've been thinking about it a lot since we have an intern now who comes from a hotel school. And I think that still when it comes to how you think about a hotel, it's always about the back of house and the front of house and the front desk. And the main thing with Ett Hem is that we have a blurry front and back.
 
We don't really have any back office areas. Our staff is always around the guests, and even, like, the office people are also seated around, you know, or the kitchen with someone who the guest can ask. When the guest arrives to attend, there is no, you know, you have to sit down by this front desk, and we're gonna make a check-in. It's more like, you know, you're invited to somebody's home, and we treat you like that.

Chapter
What it takes to create a homey atmosphere at a hotel
 
So, yeah, I think that's the big difference.
 
And I felt that. Like, one, I felt it from the design. As I walked in, immediately being asked to take a seat on the sofa, and then she ran to the kitchen to get me some lunch because I was hungry. But it just also felt like there was a different culture in the team.
 
Yeah. I think it's a different culture in the team. It's more like the focus is really, really around the guest, 24/7. And that's also why we try to avoid too much administration.
 
The staff should always, you know, focus on the guest.

Chapter
How to hire the best people
 
How do you hire for that? Is it do you hire specific people who are very guest-focused, or do you train hoteliers to become that guest-focused, kind of personnel?
 
Most of our staff do not really have a hotel background, and most of them are from the F&B side. And I think service comes from the inside. It comes from your heart. So yeah.
 
To walk the extra mile, you need to be interested. Because what does, so today, you have a number of arrivals, I'm imagining, what does the pre-arrival work look like for the team? Like, how are they investigating how to make those arrivals for the day the most perfect arrivals?
 
Yeah. That's actually something that we are working on at the moment to get a smooth arrival. We have just stopped working with a system that we have, and we are focusing more to, you know, work together with ÐßÐßÊÓƵ. So we send out a pre-letter two weeks ahead.
 
Our mission is to get to know what the guest plans are, and that is really the focus for everybody in the team. We want know, are they going to dine with us? Do they need any other help? So the pre-letter goes out two weeks prior, and then our goal is now to be able to send them, a WhatsApp message to get them to check-in, but we are not really there yet.
 
I know that a lot of other hotels does that, but it's a big, like, operational change that has to be done to do that.
 
Because how do you ensure with the focus on this really personal guest experience that technology doesn't get in the way?
 
No. That's a thin line, I think, to be, you know, personal, and it should not feel that it's, you know, something that's automatically sent out.
 
Yeah. Yeah.
 
It has to be the at hand move.
 
Right?
 
Yeah. It's really, really hard work. And I think that a lot of hotels do it very, very well. So we have to find out what is their attempt, way of doing this.
 
And what's your food and beverage concept? Like, is it like your typical hotel with the buffet restaurants where you go and grab as much food as she wants in the morning with, like, a like, what is it? What I am thinking, like, a typical branded hotel with their club sandwich in the lobby. Is that the freedom beverage concept or is it different?
 
No. Like, we don't have any menus and we don't have any buffets. We have like,we don't say restaurant, we call it kitchen.
 
So in each of our houses, since we have two townhouses, we have one kitchen in each house. So our staying guests, they can choose wherever they would like to eat. And then we also welcome external guests for dinners and lunches in one of the houses. But if you come as a guest, you say that, oh, I just want to have, like, a pasta and a glass of red wine, and you can get into, like, our original house, and you sit there and just enjoy a nice meal.
 
And in the other house is a set menu. And I think also maybe that's the part that has made, attempt, like, well known because, you know, you don't have to make any decisions. The food that comes, that is the food that you're going to eat. Then, of course, we care about allergies and food restrictions, but you don't have to, like, choose anything.
 
You just go with the flow of the house.
 
I love that. And I love the communal tables that you have where you get to mingle. Like, very rarely in a hotel do you interact with other guests. Like, do you have your own table when you separate yourself? But, actually, through the living room and the communal tables, I felt like it was encouraged that people should actually interact if they want to.
 
Yeah, absolutely. And there have, I mean, there has been a lot of great friendships at many of those tables and actually a lot of guests that have, you know, been repeating guests because they got to know somebody at the time. And but also when it comes to breakfast, you know, it's not a breakfast buffet. It's also you cannot decide what you would like to have. It's more like, first come the yogurt serving with a nice homemade yogurt and the homemade granola and the berries, and then comes the bread and the homemade butter and cheese and ham that are also bought from, like, local farmers. And then, of course, you can choose what kind of egg you wanna have or if you want pancakes and so on, but it's not a buffet.
 
And it's also. But I love like, and you say the homemade bread and the homemade yogurts, but that doesn't happen in most hotels.

Chapter
About the focus on quality and local sourcing
 
And I love that there's so much effort goes into the details of the experience. And, yes, it's not a giant buffet, but, actually, everything that you get is so high quality and it's homemade and real thought has gone into it. And I think that's what's so unique about it.
 
Yeah. And I think also a lot of other hotels talk about, you know, working with a local. But at the time, we really, really do that. I mean, the plates are made from a woman who has her studio down in the, in the harbor, and, the glasses are from a factory up in Ã…re, which is a small village up in the northern part of Sweden.
 
And, I mean, we also work with, like, the ham is made from pigs that we have, you know, it's Ett Hem pigs that we have bought from a farm in the southern part of Sweden. And the chefs are really, really interested in what you can do, you know, season wise. I know that a lot of people talk about, yeah, it's seasonal, but, you know, we don't have, for example, like, you mentioned that when you were there that if you want avocado, no. We don't have avocado because it's not grown in Sweden.
 
Or we don't have orange juice because we don't have oranges in Sweden. We have apples.
 
Yeah. So and I love it. Like, sure. I love avocado, but it makes sense. And when you explain it in a nice way and, like, it's the way that it's explained that made me feel like, yeah.
 
This makes sense. Like, I'll have a lovely apple juice instead. And I think it's that interactive, and it's almost a way to start a conversation rather than saying we don't have avocado. And this happened to me last week in Prague where I actually asked for avocado with my breakfast, and he said, we don't have avocado.
 
And I was like, okay. Do you have anything else?
 
And he said, no. Like, your omelette comes with garnish. I was like, okay. I'll have a garnish then. And it was such an uncomfortable conversation, and that was the opposite of what I had at that time where it became a conversation starter. And they explained what the local philosophy of the hotel was. And I thought, like, that was so powerful.
 
And I think that's what we need to do, you know, to keep, yeah, to make, yeah, our like, try to work with the environment and all the locals and also, yeah, get smaller companies to survive. If we buy pigs from this lady down in southern part of Skåne, then she can run her business still. And so I think our chefs are doing a great job with finding all those small suppliers.
 
That's amazing. So if we go back to technology, so I went into your website right. And I thought, wow. This is very different experience than what I would experience with a normal hotel. What was the idea around the website? What were you trying to create with that?
 
Yeah. And what's interesting with the website is that we didn't even have a website for one and a half years. It took such a long time to create this website. But what was interesting then was that we did not drop any bookings or anything. People were still booking even if there was just a page saying, you know, that page will come up later.
 
And then with the website, it's more like Jeanette, the owner of Ett Hem. She thinks that, you know, you should visit a hotel to have seen the hotel. You should not be able to do, like, a full guided tour and see everything before you get there. And I think that's one point because today, I think most hotels are, you know, you have a video of the suite. You have the video of the communal areas. You have the video of everything. So you have almost already been to the hotel before you have actually traveled there.
 
Yeah. But I liked in your gallery how you went from some images of the beautiful design, but at the same time, it was also, like, just looking out the window of the room right. And seeing the wind. And it was like a gift.
 
And I just thought the experience of the website was like, it really aligned with the experience I would get once I walked through the door. And it was just difference. And I think difference sometimes can be good if it's done in the right way. I've seen also bad examples of when people did something really different, and you could not figure out what to do with the website.
 
But you kept it extremely clean, but a high design with beautiful images, and I think that reflects the experience that you get once you walk in the door of the hotel. Yeah.
 
And I think it should be, you know, clean and easy.
 
It's the same with, like, the pricing, because sometimes, when you get into a hotel's website and you should book a room, you have like twenty four different rooms. And then all, all rooms have like twenty four different rates. And then in the end, you feel like, which rate shall I pick, you know, to make the best deal? We have kept that line even across into the rating or into them the rates because it's like one rate that you can book.

Chapter
Direct bookings vs. OTAs
 
And do you work with OTAs?
 
Or do you fully like, are all bookings coming direct to you?
 
Yeah. No. We do work with OTAs, and we started just, you know, just in autumn of 2019, which I think was just luck because then came COVID. And I see it more like a marketing place because, you know, I also go there when I go traveling. Like, I'm going to Amsterdam. What kind of hotels do I have there? So you need to get, like, a broader perspective, and then maybe you go to the hotel's website and make the reservation there.
 
Yeah.
 
It's a good marketing tool.
 
Like, for example, next month, they have one room left. And then it's like, okay. Who's going to look for Ett Hem? Probably, they will go to one of their OTAs, and then they see that there is one room left, and then they will book it.
 
And, hopefully, they'll book direct. They'll come to you later.
 
Yes. Exactly. I hope so.
 
Can you talk about the technology stack? Like, besides ÐßÐßÊÓƵ as the core property management system, what other applications do you use that you get a lot of value out of?
 
Yeah. Actually, you know, when we started with ÐßÐßÊÓƵ one and a half year ago approximately, it changed a lot for us, especially since it's guest-centric, which is also the way we want work. We don't want work, you know, out from the actual reservation. It's better for us to work with the guest and all the information that we can add to the profiles. And now we have also just signed with the concierge organizer, and, hopefully, we will also add another team for the financial department or another system for the financial department, which is Fort Knox. And then yeah. Now we are thinking about how you know, what would be the best way of sending our pre-letters because we have stopped working with the previous system.
 
So And for revenue management, what do you Yes.
 
Then, of course, we have Atomize. Yes.
 
There was a leading question because I knew you're going to say that. But I like, does it help you? Like, and how does it help you in your daily life?
 
Yes. Since we are a small hotel and we and, you know, everybody is doing a little bit of everything, I do then sales and I also do revenue, and I'm also in charge of the reservation department. It saved me a lot of time, and I think we signed up with Atomize, like, one year ago, approximately, a little bit more. And, I mean, it's crazy how much time it changes, or it saves for me and, no. It's perfect.
 
So if you give advice to another hotelier who wants to create this really personal experience in their hotel, what's, like, one thing that you think that they should change from tomorrow? Like, a small thing that they could do to have quite a big impact on the service side?
 
No. But I think, like, I also said at the meeting, a few weeks in Amsterdam, it's really, like, don't build a barrier between the guest and the staff. Like, for example, the desk. You have the check-in desk where you have the client on or the guest on one side, and you have the staff on the other side. And also try, you know, to I know it might be complicated in hotels with more rooms, but try to avoid as much administration for the front of house staff so they can actually be with the guests engaged.
 
No one, nobody wants to talk about passports and credit cards for a long time. I'm not sure about the details of how to fill in the registration card. Yeah. If we can remove as much of that before they get there, then everything leads to a very personal experience.
 
Yeah. And I had, like, a dream of, you know, if we could have, like, 90 percent pre-checked in guest, that would have been, like, wonderful, you know, when you have the green line on ÐßÐßÊÓƵ. So that's our mission, and we have started to work with, like, a project how we are going to get there.
 
Because you activated, I saw in your settings. You activated the SMS product besides just emailing guests to do the check-in online. You know, also sent an SMS to customers and SMS. We send this SMS. So if we don't get response to the online check-in email app, creation of booking or two days before arrival, one day before arrival, we'll send an SMS. Yes.
 
We have a much higher likelihood of converting, and that hopefully gets more people into the funnel.
 
But I have yet to see a hotel that has a one hundred percent adoption. I'm with you on that mission.
 
Yes. That's great because, it would be so nice and we will fit in so great with the, like, the Ett Hem arrival, you know, to just arrive. We take you on the tour of the houses, and then you're just check in and done. Like you said, it's boring with the passport and the credit card, and it would be nice if everything was done before you arrive.
 
Yeah. What is like, this is my last question, but what's the one thing that will never be automated at Ett Hem?
 
Yeah. Check-out and check-in.
 
No. But no. Check-out would never be automated either. We would like, you know, to see the guests before they, and also, I think ordering from the room will not be automated. There is a lot of, like, small things that will not be automated, I think.
 
Yeah. And I think that is part of the concept, which is very, very personal, and you get to know the stuff. Like, whereas in a giant hotel for me, picking up the phone to order room service, I'm like, oh, that's like I don't really know who's on the other side of the line. But at that time, it's a family. Like, you know these people because you get to know them. And I think you're looking to have these really personal interactions, which just isn't for everyone. And that's okay.
 
Yes.
 
It's a very good experience to attend.
 
And I love it. So I booked immediately after I stayed with you, I went home to my house and I said, right. We've never talked about going to Stockholm, but actually, I found a reason. And that time is the reason why I want to go to Stockholm for personal time because it just felt, I just really enjoyed my experience, and it was just one night, but it changed the way that I experienced the hotel.
 
So you've almost become a destination property for me yeah. Where you're the reason why I go to a city instead of the city being the reason, and then I have to find a hotel. I start my search at Ett Hem or a hotel that I love spending time in for the weekend. And I honestly, like, big kudos to you and to the entire team for doing what you do.
 
Like, I have talked about you so much that people like, shut up, shut up. But I can say it's just really special.
 
But I think that's exactly what you describe now. That's what happens a lot at the time. You know, you might come for a business trip and then you come back with your family or your spouse. And, a lot of emails starting with, we have had friends that stay with you.

Chapter
How to build lasting relationships with guests
 
We would like to come and stay. Or, yeah, we read about you in a magazine. We would like to come and stay, and we heard friends that have stayed. So that's really the story of a lot of guests that are coming to stay with us.
 
Yeah. I get it. Thank you so much for sharing the story. I'm excited to come and see you in July.
 
Yay. Hopefully, it will be very sunny. Like, those that's, like, the only or two months of the the summer when it's really wonderful weather. But I'm hoping for, but you never know.
 
Yeah. We hope so.
 
But I'm very excited to see you yeah.
 
Then. Thank you so much, Matt. And, yeah. We're looking forward seeing you in July as well. And you have to do the pre-check even.
 
Don't you worry. I will be all over that. Thank you.
 
Thank you. Have a nice day.