D-EDGE steps up its game for 2022

2021 was rich in innovation: we helped hoteliers capture demand and position themselves in the world of e-commerce with MediaGenius, the first multi-digital management platform to centralise, simplify, organise and optimise the management of their digital marketing campaigns and with Fusion, the first website offering a fully integrated and seamless booking process. We added the offline string to our bow with our Central Reservation Office (CRO), allowing hotels to efficiently manage booking requests coming by email, phone, etc, increasing the conversion rate from offline demand. And we started to deliver our Guest Centric vision with the integration of our Central Data Management (CDM) and Central Reservation System (CRS): work that we will continue in 2022 as described below.

And the momentum will increase further in 2022. We will double again our level of investment in our R&D: in 2021 we hired 80 new product experts & engineers, and we plan to welcome 90 more in 2022 to surpass the threshold of 300 developers working to change hoteliers’ lives in the R&D department.
Why? Because the hotel business transformation is accelerating: staff shortage pushes for more product simplification and a quick learning curve, digitalisation of the economy urges for more personalisation and differentiation, and globalisation leads to more hotel consolidation and rationalisation needs.

It is consequently a natural progression for us to build our Roadmap around 4 core priorities:

1. To significantly improve UX for better user adoption and greater operational efficiency 
2. To enable you to navigate the ocean of data, through a “Guest Centric” approach 
3. To develop the depth of our functionalities to serve more specific needs such as those of hotel chains 
4. To pursue our unique strategy of developing direct connectivity with the hospitality ecosystem, to provide hoteliers the freedom to pick the PMS, Distributors, RMS, etc. that suit them best.

Hotel distribution is a complex process. D-EDGE’s solutions are built to make operations as easy and fast as possible. Our Central Reservation System (CRS) – including our Channel Manager to name just one – is already recognised as one of the most user-friendly on the market.
We’ve put a lot of effort into functional alignment to further integrate our solutions into a single, seamless platform. But technical integration is just the first step towards an even more hotelier-friendly platform.

“Our products must be easier and easier to use. We want new users to be able to learn very quickly how to master the D-EDGE Solutions with no heavy training. We want the new features to be self-explanatory. We think that in the context of staff shortage and with a need for flexibility, it is crucial for hoteliers to be able to onboard new users very quickly.”, said Antoine Buhl, CTO of D-EDGE during the internal presentation of our 2022 roadmap.

We have therefore considerably strengthened our UX team: a recognised expert in the world of Product Design and User Experience (UX) has joined us and will be supported by a large, dedicated team of UX specialists. To deliver this vision, we put the user at the center of our product design process. We work closely with many of our hotel clients to define how we could make their lives easier and be more efficient in their day-to-day work.
In the short term, we will be working on the ergonomics of our Central Inventory, the platform for managing your distribution, and in particular, the planning.
And we are not stopping at our users’ experience: we also work on the guest experience, and especially the booking process.

Empowering hotels through a guest-centric reservation system

The challenge for most hoteliers is to gather the data collected from many channels (online and offline) and tools (PMS, Website, …) and to ensure this data is always up-to-date and accessible anytime by the staff while complying with regulations such as GDPR. Only from there, they can offer personalised experiences and increase the return rate.

That’s why we launched our Central Data Management solution, a hotel-dedicated CDP (Customer Data Platform) providing you a unique Central Guest Profile. 800 hotels are using this solution with clear effects on direct bookings, retention, and satisfaction ratings. And because our CDM is connected to our CRS, there are many additional values for your hotel…and for your guests. For example, thanks to this integration, your Loyalty program is connected to your Booking Engine, enabling your guests to benefit from their Member special rates when booking on your website and to receive a booking confirmation with an update of their membership status. Simple. Seamless. Efficient.   

In 2022, we will go further and strengthen the CRS-CDM synergy. 

Our vision is that you should be able to pilot all your distribution from the Central Guest Profile and we will continue working on integrating all our CRS bricks with our CDM. At D-EDGE we are building the first real guest-centric CRS! One of the upcoming releases is the CROxCDM integration. This means that your Call-Center Staff – or your receptionist – will be able to immediately identify a returning customer and apply the right price and provide a room according to the guest’s preferences. In the case of a first-time customer, your staff will be able to immediately create a new profile and generate the booking from there. 

Market data to make rational, optimal decisions

In parallel, our team is also focusing on improving our market intelligence solutions to help you better monitor your competitiveness. In 2022 we will finalise the 12-month revamping program of our Data Intelligence solutions portfolio, which includes 3 streams: to scale up our data collection process, to improve our solutions UI to enable an expert usage of the tool to multitask hotel staff, and to provide a new and state-of-the-art Event Management tool.   

D-EDGE solutions have helped many hotel owners to grow their businesses and think bigger. As our customers’ businesses grew, we were able to develop increasingly sophisticated solutions for larger and larger hotels. Today, D-EDGE technology powers 17,000 hotels, including domestic, regional and international chain hotels.

More specifically for these chain hotels, we have developed a new layer of functionality to facilitate and streamline their work and offer them greater operational efficiency. These features include template creation and duplication, mass creation and update of hotel rooms and rates, advanced user rights management, and a PMS interface, retrieving information from the PMS and importing it into the D-EDGE CRS, giving hotel chains the ability to control 100% of their booking information in the CRS.

By building the only platform in the world that integrates CRS and CDM as described above, D-EDGE offers hotel chains the unique ability to drive their distribution strategy from the customer profile regardless of their PMS(s).

What we are building is the next-generation, easy-to-use, Guest Centric CRS for hotel chains, because we’ve learned that the more complicated the environment, the stronger the need for simplicity. 

Our platform is open, and adapts to the hoteliers’ environment – not the other way around! Over the last 12 months, we have connected 49 new hospitality players (channels, tech providers, etc) who will make 2022 and beyond.

Today, our 17,000 hotel customers benefit from the best connectivity in the world. Not only because it offers one of the largest ecosystems with more than 550 third-party solutions (PMS, RMS, …) and distributors (OTAs, GDS …) connected to the D-EDGE CRS. But also, because D-EDGE is the only player in its category to develop direct connectivity with each of its partners.

And, from the hotel perspective, this makes a huge difference in the processing speed and in real-time information, meaning your inventory and rates are always up-to-date, with no delay.

Speaking of choice, we want to thank the 17,000 hotels that have chosen D-EDGE as their preferred partner. Whether on the technology side, the customer service side or the administration side, our entire team is committed to going the extra mile for our customers. Because, just like you, we want to deliver the best experience to our customers.