Interview with Mateo Ramón, CIO of Grupo Piñero

Grupo Piñero revolutionizes hotel management with AI: demand prediction accuracy and operational efficiency

At Fitur, we had the opportunity to speak with Mateo Ramón, CIO of Grupo Piñero, a Spanish tourism group specializing in the sun and beach segment. They are present in Spain, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Jamaica, the United States, and Argentina. The group has three business units: living resorts, travels, and services.

Mateo Ramón is the CIO (Chief Information Officer) of Grupo Piñero, a company he joined in 1991 as a systems manager and is now a member of the executive committee. He has extensive experience in information technology, having previously worked for companies such as Philips Informatics and Communications, and for the last 20 years, his professional career has been linked to the tourism sector. He is also a member of the executive committee of Turistec, where he currently serves as Vice President of Innovation. In 2019, he received the CIO of the Year Award from IDC Consulting in the category “Digital Platform Project for the Launch of New Digital Services Aligned with the Business.”

The interview, conducted in a context of recovery and constant challenges for the tourism industry, allowed us to delve into the current and future trends shaping the hospitality and hotel management landscape.

Xavier López, CEO of EISI SOFT, and Mateo Ramón, CIO of Grupo Piñero

What challenges have marked 2023 for Grupo Piñero?

Regarding technology, the combination of moving from on-frame to cloud, which we started almost at the end of the pandemic, allows us to be more agile in adopting new technologies and tackling projects more quickly, as it saves us many provisioning steps and more.

Another topic we are very proud of in the data office is that data culture is already being consumed by the organization. Calculating the data is costly, but getting people to actually use it is even more so.

Additionally, I would put special emphasis on optimizing the back office. For years, we dedicated ourselves to front-office efficiency, the customer-facing part, but we always left the back office for future years, and we had to accelerate it post-pandemic, which we have now consolidated.

Last year, your colleague Antonio Muñoz presented the impact data of the project. To update the information, what impacts are you experiencing from digitalizing the entire back office? And especially, what role does it now play within the organization?

It was an area where change management was complicated because they were used to working with transmitters, papers, where all orders were verbal. Suddenly, the number one priority, which was the walkie, becomes the mobile or the tablet, where they manage that information.

From the moment it goes from a phone conversation to a pending ticket that needs to be resolved or a repetitive task that needs to be done, some KPIs or counters need to be noted, which go to the hotel's governance boards, the management method changes and becomes more efficient. Our collaborators feel more satisfied with the work they are doing, which impacts the customer's experience.

Additionally, we have been able to bring the KPIs we use to measure the service we provide to clients to the directors' mobiles, integrating this data completely.

Let's talk about trends. I always reference you regarding strategy, taking risks, and applying cutting-edge technology, but the most important thing is applying it with common sense. We enter the famous debate on how to land Artificial Intelligence, which is a current technology with great use and social impact, but many organizations still don't know how to implement it. What practical application of Artificial Intelligence are you carrying out in your organization?

In company committees, they are still discussing how Artificial Intelligence will be applied, but the reality is that people are using it every day, moving faster than us. In 2023, we started to consider how we could apply it. It's not about doing large AI projects; a small triage piece that distributes incoming emails or messages from private networks already adds efficiency to management and is a small AI element. We analyzed which processes we could use AI to optimize, what our framework would be, where we would develop these solutions, and finally, we decided to go for AI cases on operational data, which are more real and verifiable. With this, we launched a 90-day demand forecast that calculates occupancy or sales for the next 90 days based on historical data and offers.

It was challenging to implement because AI also involves change management in personnel. Now they are using it firsthand. We have stopped using manual Excel, and we now calculate sales for the next 90 days. For 2024, we aim to calculate real costs using AI to generate future income statements.

Regarding generative AI, we have projects for inter-channel communication so that an AI initially responds to emails, social media messages, chats, and then our agents handle the rest, be it residential, golf, hotels, tour operations, etc., creating that inter-channel layer managed with a knowledge database governed by AI.

The third point is applying it to work positions, where it is estimated that we can reduce the workload by 40% using AI. Additionally, having assisted collaboration by copilot will be a great revolution, although it will require a lot of information for users to make it truly productive. In the end, we cannot oppose something that is coming; we must govern it as soon as possible.

What challenges do you foresee for 2024-2025, and what challenges do you set for the organization?

Regarding challenges, we remain committed to automating and optimizing back-office processes that take up a lot of time for our collaborators in companies, affecting the service quality we provide to customers. Additionally, we aim to optimize all sales channels through AI and continue to promote governance through data. Every time we generate real information about what is happening, even with AI, we want to analyze what is happening to the customer in real-time through phone calls to reception or through a chat they are writing. We can increase the service quality we provide to customers, not just data for governance but also data to offer the best service.