Company insight
ospitality is a timeless industry, but as our increasingly digital world evolves it must change in turn. Planet seeks to deliver a unified and connected technology platform that empowers hotels to deliver better service and improve the guest experience. It does this by supporting hotels with easy-to-use software, integrated systems that work effectively across channels and optimising payment structures.
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the PMS software at the front desk, which is fully integrated to the payment terminal, or by using their mobile phones. De Jong visualises this using the analogy of the London Underground, where guests are in full control to seamlessly navigate to their destination.
Originally a provider of tax-free solutions for retail merchants, Planet made the move into payments years ago. It made several acquisitions focused on hospitality software and tokenisation before the company sought to become, in its own words, a full stack payments partner. In the past two years, the company’s acquisition of Hoist and protel have helped to boost Planet’s network, TV infrastructure and property management systems (PMSs).
Of course, hospitality faces challenges as well as opportunities from the ongoing digital revolution. For hotels, the fragmentation of geographies within the ownership structure is a significant obstacle. Global chains will have to deal with local technology, whether they like it or not, because the hospitality sector is decentralised, with each hotel making its own decisions.
Planet aims to help hotels build a tech stack that works for individual properties or brands while also focusing on the guest experience. “I think those things go hand in hand,” says De Jong. “Innovation is about
“I can’t deal with friction in my life. If I see something where I think, ‘Oh, this could have been done smarter’, I get fire in my belly.”
The hotel technology landscape is a matter of collaboration, says Lennert De Jong, president of hospitality at Planet. He notes the main goal when providing integrated solutions in hospitality is to ensure they are going to improve the guest experience. For Planet, it’s imperative that its current and prospective customers understand the power of a partner that can operate across the hotel technology landscape.
Technology for tomorrow Looking to the future, Planet aims to transform its individual solutions into an agnostic hospitality cloud platform, which De Jong believes will revolutionise the guest experience. Guests can check-in either using
Hotel Management International /
www.hmi-online.com
using existing technologies to make the guest experience better.” A key part of this, however, is for hotels to look beyond the solutions that are currently in place and to really consider what technologies are best placed to help address specific problems. De Jong compares this to his experience working as chief commercial officer at citizenM. He cites the company’s transition from a traditional check-in service to self- check-in back in 2006, which was met with opposition by some parts of the industry. As De Jong argued at the time, the benefits of self-check-in was not in reducing the number of required staff, as its critics claimed, rather it was about giving guests the control over the process.
Planet is a leading provider of integrated payment solutions, hospitality and retail software and global VAT refunds that help to remove the friction from a customer’s payment journey. Lennert De Jong, president of hospitality at Planet, explains how using payment data and connected technology can help empower staff to deliver a better guest experience.
Today, Planet is focused on helping hotels connect their guests’ online and offline journeys, while also powering their upstream channels with payments and tokenisation. After that, hotels must adapt to payments becoming a global game. Many hotels are still reliant on local banks, which are not always capable to keep up with rapidly developing international and alternative payment methods. Finally, Planet seeks to address the challenge hotels face with the identification of guests when the majority of bookings come through third-party systems. Currently, the only way to recognise repeat guests is through a loyalty programme or, as a proxy, through email – however, this can only be so useful when many people possess multiple email addresses. Looking forward, Planet is developing a solution that triangulates email addresses with payments data at the point of booking to check-in, check-out and the point of consumption. It leverages this information operationally and removes the need to ask the question, ‘Have you been here before’. “My vision is to declare that question an enemy of our state,” De Jong confirms. Beyond connecting online to offline journeys and offering alternative payment methods, Planet aims to achieve this by implementing tokenisation across its payments stack. The acquisition of PCI Proxy several years ago did aid the company on the latter front, as it is used by a number of PMSs and payment providers. PCI Proxy transfers the ownership of its tokens to the hotel company or individual hotel, moving the vendor out of the PCI scope and ensuring hotels own and control their own tokens. “I can’t deal with friction in my life,” concludes De Jong. “If I see something where I think, ‘Oh, this could have been done smarter’, I get fire in my belly.” ●
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