While innovation in hospitality is constant, Jess Conroy saw a gap in the innovation spectrum. “Over the years that I’ve worked inside and around this industry I began to realize that most of the innovations were focused on top of funnel activities, driving up valuable top line revenue,” she recalled. “This work is vital, of course, but every new contract signed means more people and more hours of human capital supporting that growth. This kind of growth is inefficient, and that was where I saw the opportunity for ROH.”
Conroy saw how much the guest experience could be impacted by something as simple as payments. “As it turns out, payments are much more than the moment of transaction—they truly touch every part of a customer’s journey with a hotel and nearly every department within the hotel’s operations,” she continued. “So as hoteliers seek to open up the top of their funnel, they need infrastructure to support that business growth in an efficient way.”
When ROH launched in February 2023, the company started with invoicing and transactions. “We built the platform to ensure payment flexibility on the end customer side to preserve satisfaction and ease of tracking, reminders, reconciliation and more on the hotel side,” Conroy said. “So much of the customer journey flows from the schedules and plans set out in a contract that we quickly built a product that automatically ingests contracts and automates the creation of schedules.”
Overnight, hotels using ROH “saw late payments all but disappear.” The hotels were able to leverage a single dashboard to understand all completed, upcoming and at-risk payments, and sales and finance team members gained confidence in their data and performance. “With ROH we now provide the end-to-end system that informs that clarity in an on-demand, real-time way every minute of the day for our users,” Conroy continued. “It’s incredibly valuable and allows them to get back to revenue-generating activities.”
“We knew the market was seeking a much more in-depth and integrated platform. We built ROH specifically tailored for the complex ways in which hotels operate today and in service to the varied stakeholders such as brands, operators, owners, etc. that make up the $4 trillion in payments volume flowing across hospitality each year.”
New Developments
One of ROH’s key focus areas right now is around integrations. “The hotel industry has long been serviced by a myriad of point solutions and we can supercharge both our acquisition and the stickiness of our product within each hotel by ensuring that the content and data in those platforms can easily enter ROH and vice versa. Every day we see our hotel partners using ROH to manage more of their revenue streams and by ensuring we connect into the platforms that they’re already using we can accelerate that process,” Conroy noted.
Earlier this year, ROH closed funding for the company and its rapidly expanding partnership with Highgate, both on the investment and commercial side. The goal is to continue providing the absolute best, most reliable platform for hotel payments, Conroy said. “One of the greatest demands we’re hearing is that we need to expand geographically to serve hotels worldwide,” she said. “We are working quickly to ensure that we can meet that need and maintain the trusted, compliant nature of our platform.”
Clicking with Clients
When a hotel owner or operator adopts ROH, the company can have the system up and running in a day. The way hotels are operated though has become increasingly complex in the last decade and often, Conroy said, ROH finds four to five different organizations are involved in a single property between the asset owners, operators, brands and others.
“Typically ROH is brought in by one champion in one organization and if that champion operates say 100 hotels, we quickly get to work educating the teams at those discrete hotels, often in sales or finance roles, about the ease of ROH and the immediacy of our impact,” Conroy said. “Inside of a given hotel portfolio, we may find 20 percent are early adopters. Once we have more than 20 champions in each portfolio, we can push for adoption portfolio wide.
“It’s a bit different than a normal software sales cycle because so many operators and owners maintain such significant portfolios, and so by starting at that level we see adoption much faster than one might think.”
Hoteliers see immediate impact to their bottom line after implementation. “When I say day one impact, it’s no exaggeration,” Conroy continued. “Because of the way in which we built our platform, we’re seeing incredible overnight results. Invoices sent through our platform are paid early or on time more than 90 percent of the time. Those end customers are paying in the ways most aligned to their financial situation and on the devices they are most comfortable with.”
This article was originally published in the July/August edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.