Na'im moved from restaurants into property management and hit scaling problems that led him to co-develop Zvoob, a property management software. He explains how a PMS is the brains of your operation while channel managers are the arms connecting to booking sites.
Naim, welcome. How are we doing? And could you just tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?
Yeah. So my name is Naeem. I got into hospitality at a relatively young age, starting off primarily in restaurants as a waiter, and later on in my summer holidays working in hotels. And while at university, I started getting into property. And then the two of them sort of mixed together and I ended up in service apartments. So my initial encounter was when Airbnb was still a relatively hadn't quite qualified as much as it has now. I started off in Cambridge managing service department and setting up a company, managing them for others. And from there I went into rent to rent SA before I even knew what rent rent meant or what service apartments were as a term. All I knew about was Airbnb and then something called booking.com that was meant to fill the gap when things went quiet in August. So that grew quite a bit. And then I started facing issues of systematization as the business was growing. So we went within six months when I started working on a top release, about 50 units, and we started having some expansion issues. So I decided to slow things down and then took about a year or so to change staff and get things going properly. And when I looked at expanding again, we were facing issues with finding a good PMS or channel manager software. Basically, at first I struggled to understand what the difference was between the two and why you needed to have two separate systems. So that's how Zvoob was born, basically. So about two years ago now, I started working with our current team on developing the software, and that's our latest project.
In simple terms then, and you just quickly touched upon it there. What, what is pms? What is property management software? What is channel manager in the most simplistic ways that you could describe it to everybody that's tuning in?
Sure. The way I put it is that the property management system is the brains and the channel managers with arms. So you've got sort of everything sitting in the pms, coordinating stuff, and then you've got the channel manager that's linking you up with the different websites, grabbing the booking, sending other sites and so on. So they're meant to help simplify the running of your business, help with your marketing, advertising, reaching more guests across multiple sites and automating the collection of those bookings and processing to some degree.
So in your opinion, why is it so important to have a PMS for your business, whether it is service accommodation or hospitality?
So I guess in service accommodation, it's slightly more complex than running something like a hotel in certain aspects. Now, if you've got food and beverage in the hotel, of course that adds complexity, if you've got swimming pool and saunas and spas and all of that. But just in terms of if you're doing self catering rooms only in a guest house, say, or if you're doing service apartments. The issue with service apartments is that you've got multiple units in different locations. And once you start looking at the operational aspect of managing those and ensuring that the quality is maintained and that all the stakeholders are kept informed, such as your cleaners, know where to go, at what point, that you can be sure that the clean has been done, that you can remotely monitor the qualities of those cleans without having a head housekeeper who's going double checking on everything to make sure you've got the supplies in place, you've got your linens there, your access arrangements are in place. So as you start adding more and more units, those things add in complexity and it sort of doesn't scale linearly, you know, you just end up in a mess. So I do know of people who've got, you know, up to 15, 20 units who don't use any software. They run on spreadsheets and Google calendars and just think OTAs between themselves. But it takes up a lot of time and there's a lot of potential for error. So it's okay as long as the business owner is doing it. But if you're thinking of starting to outsource things, if you want to have a VA who's going to answer some emails and they need to know what's going on, you really can't rely just on spreadsheets and iclouding.
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