Paris, France, March 9, 2022 / TRAVELINDEX / Antoine Buhl, CTO of D-Edge Hospitality Solutions, unveils the roadmap priorities for 2022 and announces massive investment in R&D to help hotels of all sizes grow their business and think bigger. 2021 was rich in innovation: we helped hoteliers capture demand and position themselves in the world of e-commerce with MediaGenius, the first multi-digital management platform to centralise, simplify, organise and optimise the management of their digital marketing campaigns and with Fusion, the first website offering a fully integrated and seamless booking process. We added the offline string to our bow with our Central Reservation Office (CRO), allowing hotels to efficiently manage booking requests coming by email, phone, etc, increasing the conversion rate from offline demand. And we started to deliver our Guest Centric vision with the integration of our Central Data Management (CDM) and Central Reservation System (CRS): work that we will continue in 2022.
2022 is already underway
And the momentum will increase further in 2022. We will double again our level of investment in our R&D: in 2021 we hired 80 new product experts & engineers, and we plan to welcome 90 more in 2022 to surpass the threshold of 300 developers working to change hoteliers’ lives in the R&D department.
Why? Because the hotel business transformation is accelerating: staff shortage pushes for more product simplification and a quick learning curve, digitalisation of the economy urges for more personalisation and differentiation, and globalisation leads to more hotel consolidation and rationalisation needs.
It is consequently a natural progression for us to build our Roadmap around 4 core priorities:
1 – To significantly improve UX for better user adoption and greater operational efficiency
2 – To enable you to navigate the ocean of data, through a “Guest Centric” approach
3 – To develop the depth of our functionalities to serve more specific needs such as those of hotel chains
4 – To pursue our unique strategy of developing direct connectivity with the hospitality ecosystem, to provide hoteliers 5 – the freedom to pick the PMS, Distributors, RMS, etc. that suit them best.
Hotel distribution is a complex process. D-EDGE’s solutions are built to make operations as easy and fast as possible. Our Central Reservation System (CRS) – including our Channel Manager to name just one – is already recognised as one of the most user-friendly on the market.
We’ve put a lot of effort into functional alignment to further integrate our solutions into a single, seamless platform. But technical integration is just the first step towards an even more hotelier-friendly platform.
“Our products must be easier and easier to use. We want new users to be able to learn very quickly how to master the D-EDGE Solutions with no heavy training. We want the new features to be self-explanatory. We think that in the context of staff shortage and with a need for flexibility, it is crucial for hoteliers to be able to onboard new users very quickly.”, said Antoine Buhl, CTO of D-EDGE during the internal presentation of our 2022 roadmap.
We have therefore considerably strengthened our UX team: a recognised expert in the world of Product Design and User Experience (UX) has joined us and will be supported by a large, dedicated team of UX specialists. To deliver this vision, we put the user at the center of our product design process. We work closely with many of our hotel clients to define how we could make their lives easier and be more efficient in their day-to-day work.
In the short term, we will be working on the ergonomics of our Central Inventory, the platform for managing your distribution, and in particular, the planning.
And we are not stopping at our users’ experience: we also work on the guest experience, and especially the booking process.
