Germain Hôtels

Charles Bureau

Guest Experience Architect

Gonzalo Esquitino is a finance and payments executive with extensive experience in FP&A, capital markets, and data-driven strategy across Latin America. Currently serving as Business Performance & Data Science Director at Kushki, he leads the integration of analytics, finance, and technology to strengthen profitability, and strategic decision-making within the payments ecosystem.

Germain Hotels seamlessly transitions 19 properties to innovative OPERA cloud Property Management System overnight.

Guest experience is the heart of the hospitality industry, and guest data is essential and invaluable for creating a personalized and high-quality visit every time. An exceptional and continuous digital and in-person experience was the guiding force when Germain Hotels transitioned from its on-premise property management system (PMS) to a new cloud-based system.

The 2023 CIO Awards Canada winning project involved training 800 users and maintaining uninterrupted operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 19 hotels across Canada transitioning simultaneously. The new Opera Cloud PMS offered the same functionalities and integrations as their current system while retaining various integrations, including key systems, internet integration, payment systems, room charging, phone systems, and more.

“The scale and complexity of our project required meticulous planning and coordination to ensure a seamless transition without any disruption to our services,” explains Sandy Bélanger, Germain Hôtels IT Project Manager.

Why a new PMS?

Although the Germain Hôtels’ former PMS had been adequately maintained over the years, team members agreed that the system had reached its end of life. Furthermore, the current system's strong dependence on outdated technologies severely limited the Group's capacity for innovation and integration with modern technologies.

"In order to provide our customers with a top-quality digital experience, it was necessary to replace this system. In addition, we wanted to offer them innovative features such as mobile check-in, online personal profile management, an expedited check-in process, and improved visibility of stay histories and preferences," says Charles Bureau, Vice-President of IT.

He continues, "This applies not only to our customers but also to our team members. Providing modern, efficient, mobile, and intuitive tools for their work is part of our employee retention and satisfaction."

Small IT Team, Big Innovation

To kick things off, an IT project manager was hired to lead the initiative, ensuring internal control over the project rather than relying on an external provider. The Opera Cloud implementation, data transfer, and all other required technological tasks (infrastructure, security, permissions, etc.), along with change management, made it the largest technological project in Germain Hotels' history.

“We are a Canadian hotelier competing against major international chains, much like David against Goliath,” explains Mr. Bureau. “Germain Hotels' IT team is small, but they have accomplished great things.”

The Team at Oracle and Germain had collaborated on a variety of implementation methods for the solution given the complexity.  In the end, Germain Hôtels elected to handle the data transfer on their own. “Changing the central system for all our operations presented an opportunity to clean, harmonize, and structure our data,” explains Mr. Bureau. “Our guest data is essential for providing a personalized and high-quality experience.”  An ETL system was implemented to clean all the data for transfer, and certain APIs provided by Oracle were used to modify the recently imported data, enabling subsequent integrations with third-party vendors and avoiding the creation of thousands of duplicates.

‘Germain Hotels seamlessly transitions 19 properties to innovative OPERA cloud Property Management System overnight.’

An innovative approach minimizes the transition downtime through highly automated data transfer processes. This automation enabled the migration of all 19 hotels in less than 10 hours, averaging approximately 30 minutes per hotel.

The team declined Oracle's on-site Go-live support resources and implemented a centralized remote support model. This approach maximized resource utilization, and the support provided to one site was automatically accessible to all hotels simultaneously, consistently reducing the volume of assistance requests.

The 800 system users were trained by in-house trainers, coached by Oracle. As a result, trainers customized the training to reflect the "Germain Hotels" approach. By doing so, user training on platform usage was not merely about mastering a new technological tool but became an opportunity to convey the company's values and add personalization to the guest welcoming process.

The revenue importation for the 9 restaurants was independent of Opera Cloud. Prior to the migration, daily restaurant revenues were partially imported into Opera V5, while the remaining portion was manually entered into the accounting system. To make the revenue importation independent of Opera Cloud, we set up an ETL system (Apache NiFi) that retrieves the "RAW DATA" of all restaurant point-of-sale transactions. It then calculates the total revenues for each category. These files are ingested daily by the accounting system, completely eliminating the reliance on Opera Cloud. This automation significantly reduced the implementation time of Opera Cloud by eliminating the restoration step. It also served as a risk mitigation tactic in case of any issues during Go Live, ensuring that the restaurants would not be affected.

"A good plan does not lead to urgency. Your preparation for this crucial day produces the results you deserve. Congratulations to the entire team."

- Jean-Yves Germain, Co-President, Germain Hotels

Noteworthy results

“Technology projects like these often have a poor reputation. They are considered expensive, delayed, and of poor quality, among other issues. At Germain Hotels, the migration to OPERA Cloud is unilaterally recognized by all employees and management as a major success,” says Mr. Bureau.

By the time the project came to an end, the implementation only cost 40% of what was initially estimated by Oracle, while accomplishing more than the initial scope by cleaning the data, removing duplicated and provide personalized training to team members.

By automating the restaurant revenue import and making it independent of the PMS migration, the team also saved more than 10 hours a week of manual tasks for the accounting team. “A significant gain in efficiency,” Mr. Bureau explains.

Making the impossible possible

The new Opera Cloud platform, with its OHIP infrastructure (Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform), finally opens the door to previously impossible integrations and automations. The team created PowerBI dashboards connected to Opera Cloud's APIs, allowing automatic visualization of daily updated data. These data come from multiple hotels and sources, with an added analytical layer. The insights gathered are strategic and enable us to identify trends within seconds, facilitating occupancy and pricing forecasting. Previously, the same exercise took nearly 5 hours of work per day and was accessible to only a few team members. Access to strategic data has been democratized.

What’s more, the use of high-performing tools, wellmanaged and accompanied by quality training materials, greatly facilitates staff recruitment and retention. In a labor shortage context, this generates significant value for the company. Happy employees are productive employees! Although this benefit is difficult to quantify, the feedback from our team members has been overwhelmingly positive.