By Jonah Nwokpoku

Marek Zmyslowsky is the founder and CEO of HotelOga, a mobile application designed to help hotels in Africa get and maximise their online presence. Zmyslowsky is not new to Africa hospitality industry.

Marek Zmyslowsky

Before HotelOga, he co-founded and managed one of Africa’s largest online hotels booking company, Jovago.com, now Jumia Travel. In this interview with Vanguard, Zmyslowsky explains that HotelOga was built with a deep understanding of the African hospitality market and that the solution will redefine hotel management while addressing critical challenges of competition and technology within the sector. Exceprts.

How it works

Today, there are hundreds of online travel agents, OTAs in Nigeria. Hotels are connected to these OTAs but always having problems managing each booking from different websites. The HotelOga solution makes it possible for hotels to connect to these OTAs and over one million travel agents and handles them all for hotels that have signed up to the HotelOga app. The app gathers all bookings, emails, customer information and payments in one place. HotelOga also manages all commissions with all foreign agents with just one invoice in a local currency. Furthermore, HotelOga provides a simple hotel management system, a system that works even if a hotel is not connected to the internet and at no extra cost to the hotels. HotelOga also builds free websites for hotels and installs the HotelOga solution and trains the hotel’s staff on how to use it.

“As a hotel, you normally will have to go to five different companies. One company will give you bookings like OTAs, another company provides software to manage OTAs, another company builds your website, and another company promotes you all over the world. What we have done is take all those services and package them into one company called HotelOga,” said Zmyslowsky.

Building technology with local contents

According to him, the solution was inspired by the realisation that most technologies available for hotels in Africa were built by companies that lacked the requisite knowledge of the market.

“I noticed that available technology products in Africa are never built by companies which understood Africa. Our other understanding is that a typical hotel manager in Nigeria does not have the understanding of these technologies. Our hypothesis is that when you manage a hotel in Africa or in Nigeria, your priority will be to grow sales and then may be to optimise operations and increase your customer service. Depending on where the market is, the priorities can change. So I realised that many of the software companies available in the market for hospitality companies, always come to them and say they want to help them manage their hotels better. This may be in the form of allowing them to optimise operations, save time, hire less people, etc. But you as a hotel manager may say, my staff is cheap, I can hire more, just get me more bookings, and that immediately shows you they have different priorities,” he said.

Free technology for hotels

In Nigeria today, to deploy efficient technology in a hotel, there are limited options available. As a hotel manager who want to have a technology in your hotel, you are either going to buy a very expensive software that will cost you millions of naira. This will require you acquiring a local server to make it work perfectly well even if you are in the middle of a desert. But if you do not have the cash flow, you may have to use web based solutions which are free and cheap. The only challenge is, you always have to be online. And in a country like Nigeria with epileptic power supply, this will hardly be the case because there are constant power cuts and the data network will not actually be working. Besides these options, there is nothing in between. That third option, in between, is what HotelOga proposes.

“We at HotelOga want to give technology to hotels for free. This is because we do not want to spend so much time explaining why this technology is great for you and that it makes sense for you to pay a flat fee for it every month. We believe that technology right now is eating the world, it is all over the place and it is cheap to build. So why would we charge money for it.

“What we do is that we go to hotel managers and we say to them, this technology will start getting more and more bookings; will you use it for free? The answer is usually yes. So at HotelOga, the only thing that differentiates us from what we have in the market is that whatever we give you, it is for free. It is our investment in your hotel. And we will make money only if you are making more money from online bookings, from growing sales. We are like diet consultants, we give you our advice for free but you will only pay if your body starts getting in a better shape. So, we tie our payment to your results,” explained Zmyslowsky.