Name: 2025 Product Keynote
Uploaded: 2025-11-12T17:30:09.147Z
Duration: 1 h 8 min 16 s
Description: 2025 Product Keynote

Transcript for "2025 Product Keynote": What a wonderful way to kick this off. Welcome to Passport. I'm Adam Harris, CEO of Cloudbets, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our third annual user conference. Let's get started. Today is all about you. From Mexico City to Bangkok to Miami, we spend our days focused on your ambition. And whether it's growing your business, reimagining front desk, leading thriving teams, we're here to help you build something that lasts. But ambition is never a straight line. It gets slowed down by noise, and we know there's a lot out there right now. And that noise stands between you and your goals. Our mission is simple, to free your ambition, to remove that noise so you can act on the signals that matter. So what do we mean by signals? Well, they're the insights that help you raise rates at the right time, know who your top guests are, staff smarter for peak days, and give the kind of hospitality that wins loyalty year after year. Now last year, we introduced Cloudbeds Intelligence, and it has grown and evolved. Today, it stands on its own as signals.ai, the first foundation model built for hospitality. We have huge plans for it, and you're gonna see throughout this keynote how it powers forecasting and pricing, guest experience, and marketing, and how we're strengthening the backbone of our platform to deliver fundamentals you can trust. You may also notice we're looking a little different these days, and no. It's not that I've lost my hair. We've embraced a brand new brand that matches the scale of your business and the boldness of your ambitions. So as we open Passport this year, I want you to think about one thing. What is your ambition, and what would it mean if nothing stood in the way? Over the next hour, we'll show you just how Cloudbiz is helping turn those answers into reality. So thanks for being here, and let's get this started. I'm joined here today by Amit Poppet, head of machine learning at Cloudbeds. Amit, thanks for being here and sitting down to talk about maybe my favorite topic and a topic that every hotelier in the world thinks about daily, revenue. But since you're the head of machine learning and I got you here, I was hoping we might talk a little bit more than just revenue. Do you think we can dive in and talk about what intelligence is? Yeah. I would love to. Cool. So talk to me first about what makes signals technical and different in the industry and and and and maybe dumb it down a little bit for this for the audience. Signals is Cloudbed's foundation AI model for hospitality. So since the launch of ChatGPT, we've seen a boom of foundation models, and these essentially are models that are trained on vast datasets with the aim of becoming very useful in many diverse situations. So, Adam, I'm gonna borrow a statistic that you've often shared, and, this is these general models, they're trained on just 0.004% of hospitality data. And I think this captures it really well. They just don't understand your markets, your property, or your customers. So this has led us on a journey to amass one of the largest collections of hospitality data out there. I'm talking about over 40 different signals such as hotels' forward looking booking data. We've got, booking searches. We've got competitor prices, quick events. This is just to name a few. In fact, we're processing over 4,000,000,000 hospitality data points per hour. Okay. So I'm gonna interject here. Everything you listed, we we we already have. We can deliver. And and that puts us in this, like, middle of everything for the hotel, from bookings to those interactions, staff check-in, distribution strategy, and we have reporting on all of that. That's a really, really unique spot to build smarter AI that actually works for a hotel. And so why is that so different? So and and and what is really happening out there across all these hotels? Well, yeah. You're totally spot on. It's such a unique position we're in. And what's more, once we have all this data, we then train individual models per property. And Wait. So it's an individual model per hotel? Exactly that. So we've used this vast dataset, and then we train an individual model just for your property. Okay. So this is what's allowing us to separate the noise from the real signals that drive your property's performance. And the incredible thing is we're seeing the results. We're achieving up to 95% forecast accuracy over the three month window. And and now for those who tuned in last year, you would have heard us talking about our vision to put this in every part of our platform. So before we hold ourselves accountable for what we promised last year, I've also heard that that we are seeing so much success and accuracy. And if I sort of I'm a betting man. That's 24 to one odds if we're at 95%. Have we beaten that in some cases? We are pushing all the time, and, yes, we have for some properties. We've even reached up to 97. Wow. That's accurate. Okay. So year over year, lots of hard work. How are we doing? Did we deliver what we said we would? We sure did. And, myself and our colleagues, we're going to be showing this off throughout the keynote. Signals, it's now in every part of the CloudVest platform from guest marketing to guest experience to operations. And I think what makes me so proud is the innovations we've achieved in modeling techniques and infrastructure, which, by the way, has also been recognized by heavyweights such as Snowflake, where we've only just set the foundation. We're bidding beginning to now accelerate even further into the future. Well, you and I both stare at data every single day. Like, everyone probably listening. I I run a company. I know how mission critical it is to have the right data at your fingertips. And more importantly, when I think about the right forecast or the right decision, it always comes back to context. And in our industry, data is human. Right? And and so we we really want people to win big when it comes to this really important dataset. Amit, what has your team done to take that data and and turn it into not just intelligence, which is helpful, but really an organizational asset? So if if it's all possible, can we start at the very beginning of a hotel's experience? And and we we all know it's really challenging out there right now. What is happening in the future? And I guess that's forecasting. Why is it so painful right now? Well, yeah, you've you've captured it brilliantly. So as part of both of our roles, we're speaking to countless hoteliers. And, of course, forecasting remains as critical as ever. But the old approaches, they just don't cut it anymore. And I think this past year in particular, there's been such a shift in market dynamics that everyone listening will know this really well. You're seeing things like shorter booking windows. So customers are booking much closer to the arrival date, which makes it so much harder to plan for. And then we're seeing a lot more market uncertainty. And this is where those traditional models such as using same point in time, they just totally collapse because the demand is so volatile. And then there's more long standing issues such as overstretched teams. We're speaking to countless general managers and revenue managers. They're spending so much time firefighting handling the day to day that they don't have time for that high level strategic outlook. And and this is a a long standing common issue as well. There still remains many siloed departments. So your revenue teams, your marketing teams, guest experience, operations, they're all using different systems, different data points, working towards different goals. So with all these problems combined, I think the best forecasting models out there, they're achieving maybe 80 to 85% forecast accuracy. And it's because they're just using a snapshot of your data. They're not looking at the full context. Every hotel in this audience has felt the pain of less resources than they would like. And let's be honest, 85% is not good enough. So when when you look at that number and and wonder, what's the context behind that, You you really have to sort of think about, where do I even go to find that? Right? And and if you look at the tech stack of hotels, there's lots of systems, so it can get lost in all those systems as well. And and I think the first time you and I spoke, you had this amazing analogy for the difference of what we're doing with signals in in sort of the older generation of forecasting. It's a movie. It's a a photo. There's a difference. Maybe you can tell a little bit about that. Sure. So, yeah, I'd say traditional forecasting, it's it's like a snapshot. K. So a single frame of how things might end up, perhaps using things like last year's numbers or yesterday's occupancy as a guide towards a single data point. But a snapshot, it doesn't tell you the whole story. But what modern forecasting does and what signals is built to do from the ground up is take that snapshot and convert it into a movie, but not just any movie, a streaming movie that updates with every single new data point. And with every frame, it adds context, color, clarity. It brings real depth and meaning to that forecast. So to put it into perspective, let's say there's been a a real shift in market demand. Maybe your competitors have increased their prices or a big event got announced. You'll see this impact directly into your forecast, and you'll see the reason why. And and this is what really sets signals apart. It's dynamic. It's predictive up to 95% forecast accuracy, and it learns with every data point as well as giving you that full transparency and explainability behind every number. So in short, it gives you that full movie. I'm really trying to hold back a smile here, because, look, I I sit in a really unique seat inside this industry. I I see what comes. I see what goes. I have meetings in behind closed doors. And and and I think one of the most proud aspects of Cloudbeds in our story is we have a seat at every table, essentially. And when you see very powerful figures get moved, almost jaw dropping reactions from what signals combined, I think it's really important that you help connect some of the dots here. Go so how does that translate into revenue and talent? Alright. Cool. I got a forecast. I understand that. But what does that look like in action? Got you. So, yes, revenue intelligence is the first product that taps into that signals AI. So it's bringing those forecasting capabilities into the world of analytics and pricing recommendations. So, Adam, would it be okay if I showed a walk through on the screen? Yeah. Let's let's pull it up. Perfect. So imagine starting your day as a hotelier with complete clarity. That's exactly what we set out to deliver when building this solution. So right here from this first screen that you're seeing, the opportunities view, general managers and revenue managers get an instant snapshot of their hotel performance. So all in one place, you'll see every KPI across every revenue outlook, and you see what really matters to you, immediate results and actionable recommendations waiting for you. And then when it comes to pricing, we go even deeper. The platform provides recommendations down to the room type level with our signals explainability engine, showing you the reason why every suggestion has been made. And if you need more context, it's all there. Real time competitor pricing, pickup, segmentation trends, even local events that drive demand. Everything you need to make confident pricing decisions. And if you need to dive even further, the performance analytics opens up even more from base and pickup to competitor rates and KPIs across one or even multiple properties. It's all on one screen ready to explore, track, and compare. And then finally, of course, there is that forecasting. We go all the way down to market segment level, but it doesn't stop there. Those forecasts can become marketing actions. So what do I mean by that? Well, with signals, tailored email recommendations can flow straight into your marketing strategy. So in minutes, you can deploy campaigns that target meet periods and boost your hotel's demand. So we are seamlessly aligning revenue and marketing like never before. So, Adam, later our colleagues, Christy and Ben, will be showing how it all comes together and can power a full commercial strategy. Yeah. I I love seeing the full picture, And it it goes back to this concept of that sort of organizational asset. And in forecasting, a 100% isn't just about revenue. It's really the sort of cornerstone of operations more broadly. And and and so can we can we talk about that? Yeah. Absolutely. I think when forecasting reaches this level of accuracy and relevance, it becomes truly empowering for the whole business. And exactly like you say, it really becomes that organizational wide asset. And our vision, as you well know, Adam, it's, to touch not just revenue, but staffing, maintenance, insurance. The sky's the limit, and it really moves forecasting from being that revenue only tool to something that can impact every department in the hotel, that true commercial strategy. Yeah. Like we said at the beginning, this is happening now. We have real properties all around the world, seeing real world results in a really challenging market right now. I'm sure you could share some of those successes. Yeah. We definitely can. I'll highlight one in particular, which is Macure London Paddington, and they were using long standing RMS solutions. But within three to four months of using revenue intelligence, they saw greater forecast accuracy than those systems combined. Actually, why not? Let's hear from them right now. I'm the group director of revenue for London Towne Group of Companies. We have seven hotels that we manage, and I've been doing it for nearly two decades. Before revenue intelligence, we were extracting data from our PMS, pasting it into Excel. It was very much a finger in the air approach to how many rooms we'll pick up just based on the trends that we were seeing. Revenue intelligence now fully automates the forecasting, and that's made us much more effective at managing the hotels because now we know what the forecast is gonna be. We can make the right decisions in terms of the business strategy. And, with that time saved, I can put that time into more, strategic decisions or, looking at more hotel dates and rates and competitive prices and just makes me much more effective. So there was a day in June that we identified as high demand early in a far in advance because we saw some pickup coming in on revenue intelligence. We saw that our competitor rates were higher than normal, and we saw that there was an event, in in the city, which revenue intelligence can also tell you. So quite far out, that gave us the confidence with this data to price higher than we typically would on that day. And we monitored our pickup and our competitive prices throughout in the run up to that day, ended up with a very strong, average rate and a full hotel. I mean, I would recommend CloudEdge revenue intelligence to any property that wants to be more effective and reactive and to drive greater profits. Wow. Amazing. Well, Amit, you know I'm a vision guy. Can you let everyone in on where we're going with all of this? Because it's really exciting. Well, I think everyone needs to keep watching the keynote to find out more. But jokes aside, we're really passionate about giving hoteliers that same intelligent edge across revenue, marketing, guest experience, and operations. And what's great is if you're using Cloudbeds, signals is there. Our team has worked tirelessly to unlock more revenue opportunities with less effort than ever before. And what's more, it's ready to empower all areas of your property today. Ahmed, thanks for pulling back the curtains. And to everyone listening, you heard it straight from our head of machine learning. Folks, this technology is live, it's proven, and it's ready for your property today. If you wanna see how it can transform how you think about your forecasting and pricing, your overall commercial strategy, just go ahead and connect with the team for a demo. Now we're gonna turn it over to Christy Espat, one of our resident marketing leaders, who also happens to be a hotelier just like you. And she'll be speaking with Ben Lloyd, our digital marketing director. They're gonna show you how to turn these insights into demand and how to fill that demand profitably. Hi, everyone. I'm Christy. As Adam mentioned, I'm senior customer marketing manager here at Cloudbeds. But I'm also a hotelier. Just like you, alongside my family, I run four boutique hotels in Munich, Peru, Spain, and most recently, Belize. So I haven't just been in your shoes. I've been sprinting in them. Now Amit and Adam just showed you how revenue intelligence gives you powerful forecasting. But as every hotelier knows, demand is only half the battle. The real challenge is filling that demand profitably with direct bookings, of course. And when it comes to turning insights into actual revenue, there's a lot on your plate. Collecting guest emails, uploading them onto platform, building the right segments, writing copy, finding images, and then asking yourself, did all of that even work? Are the emails even performing? What's a good success rate? And how much revenue did that campaign really generate? On the Cloudbeds marketing side, I've been totally spoiled. I use automation tools that make all of this seamless. But at my hotel, historically, it's always been a different story. That's why I'm so excited about what we're gonna show you today. Imagine transforming all that complexity into simple, high converting guest campaigns. Well, that's exactly what we're gonna show you. And to do that, I'm gonna sit down with our digital marketing director, Ben Lloyd. Ben, welcome. Thanks, Christy. I'm excited to dive into this. So your focus at Cloudbeds is helping customers get more direct bookings. You take the guesswork out of guest marketing. So tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah. It all starts with the foundation, Christy. So we built our own CRM and enhanced the main Cloudbeds platform to make marketing to your guest database seamless. And at this point in time, everyone has seen what I've seen. So we've seen guest profiles are now live. Why does that matter? Yeah. This is a huge deal. So those newly launched guest profiles are all standard in the Cloudbeds PMS now. And And the reason this is important is because before, when, you had guest information, it was all just sort of locked up in one reservation. Now all that guest data, including their personal information, past reservations, their ancillary spend, it's captured in one guest profile. So whether you have one property with Cloudbeds or a 100, those profiles are accessible across your entire Cloudbeds experience. Those profiles can then automatically sync to our guest marketing CRM. And what's cool is that we've incorporated signals AI to make building smarter, effective campaigns to those guests totally effortless. That's really cool. So let's bring this back down to earth. Let's look at the campaign builder and show us how we can build a campaign on there. Yeah. Sure. So using that AI powered campaign builder, you can literally build campaigns in seconds. So in this example, we're gonna pick an image and AI is gonna generate the copy for it and that campaign's just ready to go. But the real power is actually in our dynamic audience segments. So what does that mean? Well, with those guest profiles, those are all populated with data from the PMS. And that means that you'll be able to build dynamic segments based on any of that data. So we've built our segment. Right? What what's a good example of a campaign that we can run? Right. So you can make segments that, maybe you wanna target high value guests. So people that have stayed with you a lot, or spend a lot of money on your property or maybe several of your properties. You could target those high value guests with exclusive offers. Or maybe you've got OTA bookers that you wanna win back later with, direct bookings. You can incentivize them with a campaign. Maybe you've got, you wanna run campaigns against anniversaries or birthdays or other seasonal patterns that impact your property. This means that you're not just limited to holidays like a Christmas campaign or a Valentine's Day campaign. You can create create automated campaigns based on dates like, check-in or checkout dates or even birthdays or other special occasions like that. That's fantastic. We actually use the date. So we use the check out date. And at our hotel in Belize, we run a six month post stay reminder. So timing is key. We don't do it on the anniversary date because that's not when they're planning their next trip. We hit them when they're planning. Right. Exactly. So what you've done is basically build a post day follow-up campaign that's, optimized for a specific behavior. So that six month window that's important to you, guest marketing can just do that for you. We've also got, action based triggers. So you can send campaigns for, like, abandoned bookings, or upsell offers during a guest stay, a loyalty reengagement campaign. It's all automated and intelligent. So speaking of all that automation, I'm really excited about the events calendar. So it should be out relatively soon to everybody. Can you show us a little bit of how powerful that is? Yeah. That events calendar, it's a real crowd pleaser. So, in our event calendar view, most properties are gonna get seasonal or, like, one off events that are tied to campaign suggestions. What happens is that AI will surface the events that are most likely to convert for your property and, like, your guest types. So you're not gonna see just a list of all possible events in the area. You're gonna get those that might matter to your revenue. And in there, you'll just click on an event, and it will build a suggested campaign with seasonal and action based triggers for you. So that turns your reactive marketing into a proactive, revenue generation. So talking about revenue generation, the how do we measure the success of these things? This has historically been a very black box for our customers. How do we know that it's really working? Yeah. It is pretty hard to to pull all those things together, but we've worked really hard to make that easier. So, sure, you're gonna get email campaign metrics with, like, open rates and click through rates, but we've got our revenue dashboard that lets you attribute revenue from email campaigns to specific reservations. So you can even track indirect attribution, meaning, let's say you send out a email around, Christmas promotion. Somebody sees that email, but then they end up booking a stay later, maybe on Easter or something. Now you'll finally be able to attribute that revenue, and you'll have a full picture of your marketing ROI, not just email marketing metrics. That's fantastic. So this is what we're calling revenue marketing. Right? We heard I mean, Adam talk about revenue intelligence and how it connects to guest marketing. Can you tell us a little bit more about why that's important? Yeah. So revenue intelligence is gonna give you opportunities. And when you click on those opportunities, it's not just going to give you a pricing recommendation, it's also gonna give you email campaign suggestions. So for example, instead of, you know, you're running into a soft period and it says to drop your rate by $20, we might say something more like drop your rate by $10 and run an email campaign targeted at a at a specific customer segment that's likely to convert. Then you can click on those recommendations and it will automatically generate the rate plan and set up the campaign and the builder for you. So this is a holistic approach to optimizing your commercial strategy and it's not just revenue and marketing in silos. Yeah. We have customers who are benefiting from all of this right now. Let's hear from them. I'm Stephanie Calvel, and I'm the group revenue and distribution director at Bespoke Hotels. We help independent hotels with hotel operational management, revenue management, sales and marketing, finance. Bespoke Hotels is currently 55 properties, all with different levels of ownership and management contracts. When we first saw Calcutt's Revenue Intelligence, it was like Christmas all come at once and it actually was Christmas Eve. So we came down to London, we met our Met, we looked at the product and went this is gonna change our lives. So we use Cloudbridge Intelligence to assist us with the day to day revenue management for a hotel, but we're also using it to help us with our marketing campaigns. And that all ties back in with the PMS and the fact that it's live data, and it's allowing us to make decisions much quicker and much more simply and easier than previously. One particular case where we've used the marketing to our benefit is for Dumbleton Hall. And historically, when they took when we took it over, they were very reliant on flash sale companies, whether it was Travelzoo, Welch. They'd continually gone back to that model because it gave them the volume and the leisure customer that they were looking for. What we had when we got Dumbleton was a huge database of all of those customer details and therefore sending that offer or that campaign straight to that database as opposed to using the flash sale company has saved Jumbleton thousands in commission. What it also allows is actually the revenue team can send their own individual things for their own properties without the need for marketing because the templates exist. They know how to build their rate plan. They embed it into the template that already has been created, and therefore they don't need marketing at that stage. It's just sending something straight out for their property. I would say that having Cloudways, we're a new management solution has allowed us probably to save somewhere between five and ten hours per property per week and therefore that time saved allows us to focus much more on the strategy rather than the development of the numbers. Therefore, it's being put to far more constructive use. I love it. And as a hotelier using Cloudbeds, I can say I totally agree. It really you really take all of that sort of AI power behind it. And that AI power is in our different products. Right? So this AI is the same that powers the digital marketing suite. Right? Right. Exactly. So that, AI powers the email campaign creator, but we're also using AI to optimize your hotel p max campaigns or even retargeting. And in our reputation product where we manage reviews, and I know you use that. Right? We're able to provide sentiment analysis, and that's all powered by AI. Yeah. And I I have to take a second here. I love sentiment analysis. My it's changed the way that we do things at the hotel. It shows us the positive stuff, which I love, but it also shows us the negative stuff and where we can improve very quickly. So it saves ton of time. Totally. Exactly. We've also made it super easy to answer reviews with the built in AI tools. It makes it all a breeze. Ben, before you go, what's the future of guest marketing? Yeah. The future of guest marketing, it's smarter, it's faster, and it's more connected than ever. So you're a hotelier. You understand, like, revenue and marketing can kinda feel like rivals. Right? So revenue is focused on numbers and forecast, whereas marketing is focused on, building relationships and generating demand. We're both using data, but those things aren't necessarily in sync. That can change now. Revenue and marketing teams can finally be in sync. They're using the same platform and speaking the same language. You can launch a campaign instantly when demand trends start to shift underneath you, and you're both using your trusted data as your own guide. Yeah. For sure. And there's a ton of tools that I love. So as a marketer, the creative side, we have the AI visualizer, And I was able to decorate the hotel in Christmas for Christmas in July so that I could run a campaign. It was really cool. Yeah. Those creative possibilities are endless. So whether it's decorating your hotel, for Christmas, but it's the month of July, or you need to maybe create a summer campaign in just a couple minutes. This is all easy with our AI visual tool. When you pair that with, personalized booking engine offers, guests can see tailored messages and promotions that are geared just for them. So the future is also seamless personalization and automation. There's less manual work involved, and you're able to generate more impact and more revenue just by engaging with returning guests. These guests are always less expensive than trying to acquire somebody new. Thanks, Ben. Absolutely. Thank you, Christy. That's it from us. We hope that if your campaigns feel scattered or even reactive, what you've seen from Ben today transforms guest marketing into powerful revenue driven guest relationships. Up next, you'll hear from Whitney Doyle, our leader in UX design, and our senior product manager, Christopher Hovanesian, about knowing your guests like never before. We've seen how revenue intelligence predicts demand, and guest marketing captures it with direct bookings. But the real test comes when a guest walks through your door. How do you deliver an experience worthy of the intelligence that brought them there? I'm Whitney Doyle, group manager of UX at Cloudbeds, and I'm joined by Christopher Hovanesian, one of our senior product managers, to talk about guest experience. For a single boutique hotel, remembering a guest's favorite breakfast is great hospitality. But across 200 properties, that takes a system, one that ensures every front desk, every night auditor delivers the same brand experience without missing a beat. Without the right technology, scaling personalization is nearly impossible. You get missed opportunities, inconsistent service, and staff burnout. Teams juggle emails, texts, OTA messages across platforms, returning guests feel like strangers, and staff spend more time in systems than with actual people. But what if every staff member from front desk all the way to marketing had the same complete view of every guest? What if PMS, guest profiles, and guest experience data worked seamlessly together? So personalized hospitality was just the baseline. That's what we're diving into today. And there's no one better to explore this with than Chris Hovanezian, who's dedicated his career to building guest experience tech that actually works for hotels. Chris, welcome. Thank you, Whitney. Excited to be here. Chris, let's dive right into it, and let's talk about the vision and how that's evolved over time. You've been building towards this since Whissel joined Cloudbeds in 2022. Tell us about that evolution. Yeah. Absolutely. So when we first joined Cloudbeds, we had the vision to provide a seamless guest experience. What we wanted to do was provide a solution that increased satisfaction and improved operational efficiency for hoteliers while driving revenue. Since then, we've had thousands join this vision. We're facilitating millions of messages every month, and we're automating countless tasks around the clock. So we've made constant improvements to the platform and the solution. Most recently, we've introduced our unified inbox directly into the PMS. So now your staff has a centralized workflow for messages, at their fingertips. And then an important change that's about to take place is that the Whistle name is going away, and the application and platform that you know and love is now going to be known as Cloudbed's guest experience. Now that integration that you just talked about, that's going to be so compelling. I want you to walk us through that. Tell us more about the unified inbox. Yeah. Absolutely. So the unified inbox combines all of your channels into one shared workspace. So this is SMS communication, email, OTA communication, and more. And we're constantly adding more channels as they become available to us. For example, we've recently added booking.com. We've added Expedia, Vrbo, Ctrip, Agoda, and more. And on the social side, we've introduced channels like WhatsApp, Instagram Messenger, and LINE. So we're helping facilitate all communications in one centralized workplace. And the benefit there is that your staff don't need to switch between two different platforms. It's right there in their workspace that they're familiar with already. I imagine that's gonna help digital check-in so much. What are you seeing in terms of adoption? Yeah. So we're seeing about, on average, hotels divert 60% of their arrivals into our digital check-in flow. So that means 60% of your arrivals no longer need to stop by the front desk, and that helps free up time and allows your staff to provide an elevated guest experience to those that they do interact with. We're also utilizing the check-in process to facilitate the collection of regulatory and compliance data. So all of that is taken care of before the guest ever arrives on property. And we've also made our check-in flow more robust than ever. So guests can update their contact information. They can add additional guests to the reservation. They're able to sign off on documentation, verify their identification. They can even purchase add ons and then add a payment method directly to their reservation as well. So everything you need to help facilitate a more streamlined check-in process is right there ready to go. And also, we in light of self-service, we've introduced two new feature sets to our guest portal this year. So the first is we are now allowing guests to view their outstanding balance and pay that balance on the day of their departure so they can check out themselves. And we're also allowing guests to cancel their reservation themselves without needing to interact with the desk. Wow. That's really exciting to hear. And we also have some very happy hoteliers who wanna share about their experience. Let's take a look. Hey there. I'm Brett. And I'm Casey. And we are the owners of the Opera Inn here in Killington, Vermont. The entire place really needed a full renovation from top to bottom. And as we started to dig into some of the rooms, we actually started documenting and making videos that we posted on our Instagram page, investors, and quickly took off, and we grew a following of about 300,000 people. With a lot of people watching, it became very important that we had all the right systems in place and made the guest experience seamless. After operating for a few months, we learned that our guests were coming arriving late to ski for the weekend. They were spending all day on the mountain. They didn't wanna have to wait at a desk late at night. So after months of doing our own research, talking to dozens of our colleagues here in town, it was very clear that Cloudbeds is gonna be the right fit for us. As Casey mentioned, a lot of our guests here are checking very late. They're driving up after work in a snowstorm, and we used to have to stay up till, like, midnight handing out physical keys. For us, Cloudbed's guest experience, like, becoming the real quarterback of everything we do here has been an absolute game changer. Now all of our guests automatically receive text messages, emails, and OTA messages that has their check-in instructions, room number, and custom codes that they can use to enter straight into their room with one of the apps links that's on the Cloudbeds marketplace. A couple of the other features that we really like is the unified inbox. So being able to be listed on Expedia, booking.com, Airbnb, all these different sites and have it come one place, all those messages right on our phone to answer has been huge. And for me, I love the guest portal because guests can head right in there. They can sign agreements. They can receive our desk book for recommendations, and they have everything they need in one spot. The craziest thing that Cloudbeds guest experience has done for us is really eliminate the need for us to have a twenty four seven guest. So I know for us, integrating Cloudbeds into our property would take an absolute game changer, not only for us and for our guests, and it's overall something we would highly recommend to any other owners that are out there in a similar situation. We couldn't say it any better. And now, Chris, I hear there's a kiosk mode. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah. Absolutely. So kiosk mode has been a game changer. We've just launched it, and it basically allows your property to turn a simple tablet into a powerful check-in or checkout station at the lobby. And hotels can deploy it one of two ways. They can either have tablets stationed around the lobby where guests can check-in and check out themselves, or you can have staff roaming the lobby with a tablet for a more personalized welcome. So it's not just about efficiency, it's about choice? Exactly. So you'll have guests who prefer their independence and want to check-in themselves, and you'll have those guests that prefer the traditional personal interaction. Either way, it's all about reducing the lines at the front desk and helping facilitate a faster check-in. And because the kiosk utilizes the guest portal to power it, it's the same familiar and consistent experience that you're already familiar with. I imagine that's huge during peak times, like when a group block, a wedding party, or a tour group is checking in and all at the same time. Yeah. Exactly. So it's all about distributing your arrivals and your departures across multiple touch points. For example, we can have hotels send out a message to guests on the day of their arrival or on the day of their departure, asking them to check-in or check out on their own device. Or, you know, the guests can go down to the lobby and check out on the kiosk. And as a last line of defense, you have the front desk for those guests who have not utilized those options. So your desk becomes the last line of defense and the last option rather than the primary. So we're helping properties work smarter, not just faster. Very, very cool. Now let's talk about what's coming next. We believe that every hotelier needs this feature that we're gonna share next, and that's an AI chatbot that gets directly to your guest questions, providing them with answers. Chris, tell us more about that. Yes. We just launched our new AI assistant, which we're referring to as our digital brain for the property. And it's powered by signals, so it actually learns about your hotel from your hotel material. So we're utilizing your website, your OTA listings, your handbooks, your SOPs, and even your training manuals. So what would you say makes this so special compared to other digital assistants that are out there? That's a great question. So most of these chatbots utilize generic responses or scripts. In this scenario, the bot is actually learning from your hotel and your training materials. And so no matter how simple or complex a question is, we can have the assistant respond in a timely manner in your hotel's tone of voice. So this isn't just AI for hotels. If I'm hearing this correctly, it's AI for your hotel. That's exactly right. And we're not stopping there. We're gonna be looking to add deeper guest insights, predictive personalization, and even natural responses so it sounds more like your team responding to the guest. That's incredible. If you'd like to join our pilot for signals integrated with guest experience, this AI powered chatbot that we just showed you, hit the link on the screen. Chris, this has been wonderful. Thanks again. Thank you, Wendy. Well, everyone, you've seen the full picture now. Revenue intelligence predicts demand, guest marketing captures it with direct bookings, and guest experience delivers the personalized service that turns first time visitors into lifelong guests. Now I'm gonna turn it back over to Adam Harris to go under the hood on the infrastructure that makes Cloudbeds work. In hospitality, data is human. Every data point represents a real guest, a real experience, a real moment that matters. And while AI is accelerating fast and it's exciting, here's the industry challenge. Most systems weren't built to handle the complexity of human behavior at scale. Now we saw this coming, and we got ahead of it. We rebuilt our entire data infrastructure to understand that hospitality is fundamentally about people, your guests, and your team. Now this foundation makes everything you're seeing today possible, including the financial management tools we're about to show you. Because we know when your accounting team can automate deposits and refunds, when payments reconcile seamlessly, when invoicing happens with a click, that's not just better technology. That's giving your people back their time to focus on what matters most. We believe the back office journey should be as smooth as the guest journey. So now I'm gonna hand it over to our director of product, Jeremy Peters. So, Jeremy, take it away. Thank you so much, Adam. So today, we've seen how Cloudbeds helps hoteliers win demand and delight guests, but none of that works unless your financial backbone is rock solid. And that's why I'm so excited to bring in the person who's been leading a complete rebuild of our financial foundation, our senior director of product, Chad Brubaker. Thanks, Jeremy. Yeah. I'm really excited to be here to talk through this. Over the last one to almost two years, our team has spent a ton of time completely rebuilding the transactional accounting ledger system that the PMS sits on top of and runs on. Now all of our transactions are fully traceable. There's no backdating. It's aligned with you, Sally, and generally accepted accounting practices. And this rebuild was not easy. I I kind of liken it to rebuilding a plane mid flight that we're all in. We did encounter some turbulence, but the result is now we have a foundation that we can have a ton of confidence in. Every transaction is accurate, consistent, and reportable down to the room or even the bed level. But I like to remind people it's not just about reporting accuracy. The real reason we've opted to do the full rebuild was so that we would have a techno technological foundation that we could spin off new features that we know are gonna make life easier for the people in your back office and your accounting team. In fact, one of those features I know you've been very busy working on is smart policies. Right? Yes. That's right, Chad. Smart policies. And, you know, before we get into smart policies itself, let's contextualize it a bit with a user story. Oh, perfect. Because you and I are product managers, and that means we love our user stories. Yeah. So let's talk about Cornelia. Mhmm. I think I might know her. Right? And so Cornelia is an accountant. She's a real live CloudBeds user, and she works at a midsize hotel powered by CloudVest. And one of her first headaches every day is having to deal with refunds and cancellations and deposits. Yeah. And until recently, she's been manually dealing with all of these things, having to know if a payment's due, if someone no showed or canceled, having to collect those balances, and having to collect deposits. Sometimes across hundreds of reservations per day Right. It's really something tedious and very time consuming. Right. Well, plus those hundreds of reservations are all coming from different sources that have different cancellation policies, different rate plans. Right? Mhmm. Exactly. And and with smart policies, now users can set deposit rules and cancellation rules per rate plan. So guests are seeing those terms clearly upfront. Mhmm. And then in the background, we have deposits, cancellations, refunds, all processing instantly. And then in addition, users can set a payment schedule. So if you want to collect payments at a certain time period before check-in or at the time of check-in, those can be set and, again, automated and processed instantly. So instead of Cornelia spending two more hours reconciling folios, now it all just operates in the background seamlessly. Yes. And that's live today? It is, Chad. It's so exciting. And, really, it is live today. It's built. And if you don't have access yet or you don't know where to start, please let us know by clicking the link below. We'd really love to get you activated and familiarized with this feature. Go smart policies. Smart. Well, you you're talking about all this automated automation of payments. I work really closely with the payments team as well, and we understand how important it is for you to be able to track the status of all those payments regardless of which reservation they're coming from. And so that's another feature that we've come out with recently is the payments portal. What we've done is centralize everything payments related into one place. So in your example about Cornelia, they need to know anything about pay payments happening. They're able to go to the payments portal, see what succeeded, what failed, and what got paid out. There's a full list of all the transactions that happened a lot like, juxtaposed with a payout schedule with a payout ID that maps every transaction from its reservation to the payout so that you can fully reconcile that to your bank statement. So the team knows exactly what's going on. But we also know that payments don't always go smoothly. Sometimes you run into chargebacks and disputes. In the past, Cornelia or her team would receive something in the mail from Visa or Mastercard about a dispute with an ID, and they'd have to scramble looking through the PMS to find the reservation, gather the information about the guest and the reservation when they checked in and checked out if they wanna submit a dis a dispute, contest that dispute. Pardon me. But now instead of having to do all of that, we automatically notify her team within the PMS. All she has to do is click on it and navigate to the dispute center within the payment portal. And, because we have the transaction tied to the reservation, we can automatically pull in all the relevant information about the guest, when they checked in and checked out, and any supplementary information prefilled so that all with a click of a button, they can respond to that dispute, decide which ones they want to accept, and track, you know, which ones have are in a pending status, which ones have they won, which ones have they lost. Not only is hour are hours of manual work gone, they actually start saving money because your win rate increases when you respond that efficiently to all those. I love hearing all the work that your team is doing that's going to really take huge steps towards making hotel finance teams really love cloud beds. I mean, with what you're talking about with payments and then what we have going on with smart policies, you're seeing accountants really spend less time in the tedium of accounting and have more time to do other things as these things just seamlessly happen in the background. So let's return to Cornelia and her journey. Sure. So in in addition to those payments and those policies we've already talked about, one other persistent headache for back office teams and for accountants has been around invoicing and around receivables, which I know you and your team know very well already. Yes. Can you tell me more about how you're working to address that? Of course. Yeah. We're really excited to talk about this because for years within Cloudbeds, our invoices were really just PDFs of the current status of your folio, and that's just not sophisticated enough for a growing property. So we've opted to completely retool our invoicing solution. Now invoices are live documents, and they stay open with a balance until they're paid. They have an aging to them, so you can track how out of date they are. And when you pay them down, we they can automatically generate receipts. The balance gets adjusted so that then they can fall off of the your AR or your aging report. Pardon me. There's actually an invoices section within the accounting area of the PMS where Cornelia and her team can navigate there and then filter through all the invoices by group or by company to understand how much does a specific partnership owe us and, you know, how much is outstanding and where they need to follow-up. And like I said, you can automatically request payment from this center or mark things paid so that they fall off of the agent report. Since we've been able to do a full rebuild of this solution, we've also been able to consider compliance from the very beginning. So for those markets like Spain or Portugal that actually require fiscalized invoices, We're adding QR codes, fiscal stamps, and VAT summaries right into the invoice, and they're integrated with those government reporting systems. We've been rolling this out to clients. We have several using it today. And if you're interested, please click on the link. We'd love to get in touch with you and help you take advantage of this new feature. I hope you do because I've seen what your teams have built, Chad, and it's really something fantastic to be able to take all those complex, multifaceted financial operations and really distill that into something centralized and automated, has been really a pleasure to see. But beyond that functionality, you're also providing professional branded invoices and receipts. Mhmm. And these just reinforce hotels' brands and their identity for every guest, every corporate account, and every group event, which is super exciting. Right. Yeah. So when Cornelia is sending that invoice out, she's elevating the brand and reminding people. And that's it reminds me of how at Cloudbeds, we talk about the guest journey. It's like kind of a thematic thing for us for years. I like to think of this as the back office journey. It's all connected, but it's just as important. And so from smart policies to payments to invoicing and more that we're gonna be building coming in the near future, we're dedicated to continue in continuing to improve that journey and unlock your ambition. And unlock the ambitions of account teams too. Mhmm. Because when your accounting team is as happy as your guests, that's when you know you've got an intelligent growth engine powering your hotel. But we do know that you don't just run on Cloudbeds alone, which is why I'm so excited to introduce Sebastian Leitner. Sebastian is our vice president of partnerships here at Cloudbeds and also the host of our very own and very popular podcast called The Turndown. Take it away, Sebastian. Hi, everyone. I'm Sebastian. You've already seen how Cloudbits helps you predict demand, capture bookings, deliver standout guest experience and run rock solid financial operations. But here's the truth. The hospitality market is highly competitive. Your success is defined by your ability to stand out. And to do that, you need the best possible solution for your business needs. That's why we're so excited to launch the CloudAds Preferred Partner Program, a major step forward in how we recognize and empower the relationships that make your business stronger. Over the past two years, our partner ecosystem has more than doubled in size. We now have over 400 partners. All partners in our marketplace provide quality connections that are fully certified and meet the highest standards in terms of connectivity, onboarding and support. If they don't, they wouldn't be in our marketplace. That's how we ensure you always have flexibility, customization and choice you need to run your business your way. The Preferred Partner Program brings clarity and focus to that ecosystem, spotlighting a curated set of solutions with proven adoption, reliability and measurable business impact. Here's what that means to you. When you see the Preferred Partner badge in the Clubhouse marketplace, you know it's a solution that has been vetted, certified and trusted by fellow hoteliers. From revenue management to guest engagement to distribution, you'll find top tier integrations that extend your competitive edge. For our partners, this program means more visibility and deeper collaboration. So together, we can innovate faster and deliver more value to you, the hoteliers. This program is about celebrating excellence and driving even greater value for our customers, our partners and the entire Club Biz community. I invite you to explore the preferred partners in the marketplace and discover the exceptional solutions they offer. Thank you to all of our partners for being in our marketplace. Talking about partners, we joined forces with them to bring you a few great sessions. Let me highlight those. Revenue reimagined, the future of pricing and profitability. This session brings together the architects of today's leading revenue management systems to explore how technology is fundamentally rewriting the rules of hotel profitability. With Google, we're diving into how Adjantic AI is powering travel search. If you're wondering how future guests can use AI to find you, tune in. And don't forget to check out all of our sponsor booths, these live workshops immediately following the keynote. Now back over to Adam to close us out. Well, folks, we did it. Thanks for joining us at Passport. A huge shout out to all of our sponsors who helped make Passport possible. Don't forget to tune in to the live workshops right after this. Now to our customers watching around the world, you inspire everything that we build. And to our team, what we accomplished this last year was extraordinary. And to our partners, you extend what's possible for our mutual customers every day. Now when intelligent forecasting meets marketing, meets guest experience, and operations all work as one integrated ecosystem, the noise fades. The signals emerge and your path becomes clear. The question isn't whether intelligent hospitality is possible. The question is, what will you do with CloudVets when nothing stands in your way? Let's experience that future together today. Thanks. I'm VP of marketing Nancy Huang, and I'm here to announce the first ever Cloudbeds collection, a global celebration of the hoteliers pushing our industry forward. From large chains to boutique resorts to innovative hostels to concept hotels, we will be honoring dozens of the most unique properties as part of this special collection. Our awards will recognize innovation, service, and the ambitious ideas defining the future of hospitality. We've already received more than 600 nominations of amazing Cloudbeds properties around the world. We've narrowed this list down to our top finalists, and now we're asking all of you to decide who will be awarded hotel of the year. The winner, along with the entire set of Cloudbeds Collection hotels, will be announced early next year. Go to this link on the screen to vote for the property that inspires you most. We can't wait to see who you all vote for.