Shreya Shimpi
STAAH, the New Zealand-based leading hospitality solutions provider that has transformed the business processes of its partner hotels in India and across the world with its stack of hospi-tech solutions successfully concluded yet another edition of ‘The Big Connect’ conference on September 12th, 2024 at the Sahara Star Hotel in Mumbai. STAAH partnered with hotel booking platform, Booking.com and WebBeds – the global marketplace for travel trade, to organise the mega hospi-tech networking conference that saw the attendance of over 400 industry experts and innovators converge at Mumbai’s Sahara Star hotel.
The event featured insightful sessions on how technology can be leveraged in different ways to empower owners of hotels to optimize their operations and distribution channels while enhancing guest experiences. Hoteliers were educated on the latest tools and strategies to enhance their online bookings and revenue. The attendees also had the opportunity to share and exchange new ideas and discuss emerging trends and technologies while fostering new connections.
“We are delighted to have brought ‘The Big Connect’ to Mumbai and are thankful to our partners for making this event a huge success! This event saw representatives from the hospitality sector gather under one roof and, in intellectually stimulating exchanges, find new ways to drive the growth of the sector forward with the adoption of new hospi-tech technologies and platforms. Look forward to taking ‘The Big Connect’ to more cities,” said Shoaib Ali, National Sales Head – India, STAAH.
Edwin Saldanha, Marketing Director, STAAH spoke to BOTT in an exclusive chat. Sharing his views about the event he said, “This event is a huge networking event for our hoteliers, existing customers as well as our prospective customers. We are also educating them on what is happening in the distribution technology world since it’s ever-evolving. One of the key things that we do is that we are the enablers to our properties to get direct bookings as well as getting bookings to the online channels. We want to make sure we keep them up to date on what’s happening in the technology world which was the aim behind having this event. During Covid, we did a lot of webinars but nowadays, people are not keen on attending them. Hence, we wanted to have a physical event which has been in planning for months and we are having an exceptional turnout.
Partnership with Booking.com
Booking.com is one of our premium partners. The reason that they are our partners is that the integration we have is tight. The hoteliers benefit from them so they have a seamless booking and avoid these double bookings and other issues. We are an enabler and we drive bookings directly so the process is smooth. They get more bookings without any problems.
India’s position in the global business
A quarter of our business is here in India. In which part of the world do you see 300-500 hotels being built every year? Very few countries in the world can do that. So, it’s huge for us. We are working with nearly two hundred group hotels as well. As soon as they grow their properties, we also grow our business. We ensure that the integration is tight and the support is well maintained.
Strategies to create awareness in the India market
We are penetrating the India market through various online and offline channels. We do our SEO and marketing. We use the Social media. We are powerful on LinkedIn. Amongst our competitors, we feature at the top in terms of engagement. We add a lot of content for our audience. We have e-books being launched. Events like these, give the sales team an opportunity to talk to them. Our team is very passionate and we have worked with people who have been there for a long time”.
“The Big Connect, Mumbai is an opportunity to express our gratitude to our valued customers for their trust in us. When STAAH entered the Indian market, it was a challenge as a New Zealand-based company, but today, we’ve partnered with over 5,000 hotel partners in India, we’ve proven that quality products, persistence, and strong support leads to success in the IT sector. India, with over 100,000 hotels, presents tremendous growth opportunities, as around 50% of these properties are yet to adopt modern technology solutions and we are proud to be recognized by OTAs as a key revenue-generating technology. We are immensely grateful to our customers for their continued support,” said Rajesh Ghanshani, Director – Partnerships, STAAH.
The event concluded with a live comedy session by Atul Khatri followed by a cocktail and dinner at the venue.
