When a strength becomes a weakness
Before switching to Cloudbeds four years ago, Thomas and his business partners used another system to manage their room inventory on OTAs. Unfortunately, that channel manager did not have a good API connection and that caused occasional overbookings.
Thomas and his team prioritize flexibility and customer satisfaction above all else, and he knew they needed a reliable, accessible and comprehensive property management solution to effectively manage their bookings, guest experience, and growth.
Searching for a partner who cared as much as they do
After seeing Cloudbeds as the number one search result for hotel management software on Google and an impactful conversation with a local, beloved Cloudbeds Market Manager, Thomas and team made the switch.
From the beginning, Thomas had an easy experience with Cloudbeds onboarding, sharing that he “had constant dialogue with some of the people from Cloudbeds and they were very, very helpful.” Since he’s added more resorts to Cloudbeds, he’s taken on completing the onboarding process himself because it’s so intuitive.
Also, overbookings have become a thing of the past with Cloudbeds. As Thomas puts it,
The reason why we're using Cloudbeds is because the most important thing for a channel manager is that it always works. We talk to our competitors and we know our competitors use a lot of other channel managers and they get overbookings.
An end to overbookings and the start of a direct-booking boom
In addition to eliminating overbookings, Thomas and team have seen massive growth in the volume of direct bookings over the past year. He attributes the increase to Himmapana’s strong presence on social media channels, like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, in conjunction with Cloudbeds’ booking engine and payment processing set up on their website, which allows them to take bookings 24/7. Thomas shares,
Instead of customers seeing us on social media and going on an OTA, they will now go directly to our website because they can see they can pay by credit card. So our volume of direct bookings has had a crazy growth the last year.
It’s also the simple functionalities that help streamline Himmpana Villas’ day-to-day operations that have kept Thomas a happy Cloudbeds customer over the last four years. Himmapanas impressively manages at least 2,000 bookings annually and many guests have special requests. He says, “It’s a simple thing, but if we didn’t have the calendar function, if we didn’t have the notes we could put in Cloudbeds, if we didn’t have monitoring of what they’re paying and so on, it would be very difficult to manage.”
Another win? Thomas and team can use Cloudbeds’ cloud-based platform remotely when they move around the property or even when traveling. “It’s very, very, very convenient that you can do it remotely because everybody here is not really sitting down that often,” relates Thomas.
Finally, Thomas praised Cloudbeds customer support for their timely and knowledgeable help, “I have not worked with a company that has such good customer service as Cloudbeds has. It’s miles ahead.”
