HITEC is the largest annual hospitality technology event in Europe, which took place in Mallorca this month. It gathers over a thousand hospitality experts and hotel top management.
During the event, a competition called Entrepreneur20X (e20X) introduces the most innovative startups the hospitality technology industry has to offer.
This year, the winner was Hotelway that is headquartered in Finland.
Hotelway provides guest communication services to the hotels. The main service is the guest chat. An AI-based bot and the human agents will reply to the guest messages.
“Hotels don’t usually have time to answer to their guests fast enough. We will do that on their behalf,” says the CEO and founder of Hotelway, Hannu Vahokoski.
“In addition, all our Guest Care Specialists are hospitality experts, who have experience from studying or working in hotels. That is extremely important in the hotel industry, which known for the high brand images,” Vahokoski adds.
Hotelway can provide also other services for hotels such as mobile room service ordering.
”Hotelway was selected as the winner because they are genuinely solving a real problem in hotels. In addition, they concentrate on what is most important in hospitality: people. They are doing this with a smart technology utilization, which will help to scale this service to all Europe,” says Nick Price, one of the expert judges of the competition.
Price has a wide experience from the hospitality industry, and he has acted, for example, a global CIO of Mandarin Oriental hotel chain.