The Scandinavian hotel operator CIC Hospitality (CIC) early on decided to partner with Atomize in order to make the practice of revenue management for their 20+ properties more effective and easy to manage.
This philosophy is all in line with CIC’s vision to build a fun, effective and profitable operation for their properties by focusing on best-in-class cost management and innovative technology to drive efficiency.
About CIC Hospitality
- Company: CIC Hospitality
- Location: Norway
- Property count: 20+
- Type of properties: A growing mix of hotel properties in Scandinavia, multiple properties within brands such as Thon Hotels and Best Western.
At the CIC Conference at the beginning of June in Copenhagen, I got the chance to sit down with Eric Bergsten, Senior Revenue Manager at CIC to learn more from his experience of using Atomize and how it has made it possible for him to increase his portfolio of properties from 5 to 14 properties, with the end goal to manage 20 properties per Revenue Manager through Atomize.
“With the use of Atomize multi-property dashboard I get a very clear picture of how each property, brand, and region is performing and it helps us to identify revenue opportunities and which properties need action first,” says Eric Bergsten.
Eric states that being a Revenue Manager today is very much different from how it was when he started 12 years ago as a Revenue Manager at Thon Hotels. Back then the price setting ate up most of their time since it was a manual, daily process to collect, analyze and adjust prices.
“What we spent most of our time on as Revenue Managers back then, we are spending much less time on today”.
Today, Eric and his team just need to draw the bigger lines in the system, such as inputting their different price hierarchies and seasonalities and then Atomize does the heavy lifting for them by optimizing and setting prices in real time for all their properties and room types, 730 days into the future.
“One of the things that I like the most about Atomize is that it’s not steered by feelings, it’s completely data-driven, and because of that it can optimize prices to its full potential without human assumptions or preferences around historic pricing which usually limits us as revenue managers.”
The use of Atomize has enabled Eric and his team to focus much more on the strategic part of revenue management for example identifying new base load contracts for their hotels, which means they find long-term contracts for example workers that have a need for accommodation during bigger construction projects nearby their hotels. This means Eric can secure a long-term base demand for his properties and the rest of the inventory will be adjusted to full dynamic pricing, managed by Atomize.
Eric also explains that since Atomize manage their pricing they can spend more time on forecasting and budgeting, to be able to plan their resources as effectively as possible for their properties.
“Atomize has generated fantastic results for us. All of our properties run on full-price automation which means we save vast amounts of time; a working day per week, in other words, 30+ hours per month,” Eric says.
Atomize has in addition managed to increase the RevPAR between 10-20% for their properties and has generated an average RevPAR increase of 13% for their portfolio.
Eric believes that hotels in general would benefit from thinking more about how to build an effective operation that can have a chance to be profitable in today’s market.
“Inflation makes costs increase but the guests are not always willing to pay more. There is always an upper limit on how much you can charge for a room, which means we need to drive and focus on efficiency and invest in solutions that help to improve the bottom line.”
Eric looked at multiple RMS vendors before choosing Atomize and the main reason for going for Atomize was the sophistication of the pricing engine combined with the ease of use, in particular that it is extremely easy for the employees at the hotels to use and understand the system.
“Atomize is a powerful solution combining artificial intelligence, pricing mechanisms, and real-time price optimization that has greatly benefited our hotels and supported our growth,” says Eric Bergsten.
In addition to the above, CIC prefers to work with Atomize as a small and agile team just like CIC to get high attention and grow together as partners.
“We highly appreciate Atomize responsiveness, every problem that has occurred has been handled very professionally and with an immediate response. Atomize is also open to doing modifications specifically according to our requests and that is the way we wish to work and grow with our partners!” Eric states.
About CIC Hospitality
CIC is a fast-growing hotel operator focusing on best-in-class cost management and innovative solutions that operates 20+ properties in Scandiavia with another 7 properties in the pipeline. In their portfolio, they operate multiple properties within well-known brands such as Thon Hotels and Best Western.
One of their success factors is enabling higher automation and customer centricity to drive improved satisfaction. The company’s vision is to care, inspire and create experiences.
CIC was started by four colleagues/friends with a hotel background who wanted to challenge the hotel industry with an innovative/technological hotel concept focused on the environment and, not least, to create workplaces where employees thrive and have fun. The owners of CIC decided early on to focus on a win/win approach in negotiations, cooperation, and cooperation with others.
“Basis is a fair sharing when entering into partnerships and the result of a mutual gain approach to negotiations in which the parties work together to meet each other’s interests and maximize value creation. In a win-win negotiation, the chances of long-term success are much higher when both sides are satisfied with the deal.”
