STAYERY mixes short & long-stay experiences with Apaleo

With locations in 6 in some of Germany’s most exciting cities including Berlin, Bremen, Frankfurt or Cologne, STAYERY combines the comfort of an apartment with the service of a hotel. Surfing on new customer segments, the brand cater to the perfect city trip with friends or productive business travel with the perfect mix of design, technology and local community.

As one of the rising stars in German alternative accommodation, STAYERY was looking for property management software which would enable the business to connect proprietary technology built for its specific concept as well as off the shelf solutions.

We had a chat with Laura Neuberger, Head of Marketing, to learn more about how the Apaleo platform enabled the brand to design the perfect technology stack to cater to its needs & challenges. 

Can you introduce STAYERY and the target customers you guys serve?

STAYERY is a serviced apartment brand currently operating in four (at the time of the interview) German cities, expanding to two additional cities in the course of this year. We have six other new openings planned over the coming years. So we're currently vastly expanding across Germany. 

We focus on the millennials and Gen Z and basically want to offer a concept, especially for long-stay customers. That's pretty obvious as well because we're offering apartments so it's very suitable for people who want to stay with us for one month or longer.

Next to the apartments, we're also offering community space to make it easy for them to arrive in the new city, get to know the neighbourhood, get to know the neighbours that live in the building as well, and also interact with our hosts, which are there to facilitate it, but also to be a point of contact for our guests at the properties.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve been able to tackle with Apaleo?

We started using Apaleo because we wanted to have a product that follows a similar vision then we do. It was always clear to us that on the market currently, there are not a lot of tools that cater to our segment, the serviced apartment segment or the long-stay segment. A lot of products out there are focused on the hospitality sector in general. 

We decided early on that we wanted to implement our own digital guest check-in, so we programmed our own check-in kiosk as well as an app (digital guest directory) enabling guests to self-serve themselves, something our target customer is very keen on.

Apaleo enabled us to do this because through their open APIs we were able to connect our own software easily. That, in itself, is one of the biggest benefits for us because it allows us to bring in our own ideas and be agile enough to say we want to change certain processes. Apaleo supports us with that.

I would also say that even though we do have some staff members on property, we're definitely a concept that wants to rely on less staff. So for us, it's definitely important to have a tool that is easy to work with for our operational teams. It's also very important for us that we have the opportunity to automate certain processes so we don't have redundant tasks for them. 

And, make the process, not just a good experience for our guests, and the guest-facing side, but also on the staff-facing side so that we are not just a digital company facing for guests, but also promote that internally for our teams.

What back-office processes have you been able to automate within your operations?

As I mentioned earlier, it's very important for us to not just have a digital guest journey, but also, a digital experience for our staff members so that we remain an attractive employer and that it's fun to work with us. To make this possible, it's important to align the customer journey with the experience our staff has, and that means automating even more processes in the back office.

So with our guest experience teams and hosts at the properties, that means things like automating checkout or automating payments, which is not that easy for a long-stay product like ours because we have monthly payments. But there are certain processes that we question and make sure that we find solutions to automate them.

What would be your main advice for hoteliers looking to switch their PMS & technology landscape?

My tip to hoteliers out there would be to keep an open mind and have a mindset that everything is possible. Don't be afraid of innovation, break up old structures, and question processes that maybe have been in place for a really long time.

Also, I would suggest getting more in touch with companies from outside of the hospitality industry to get inspired by how they're doing certain things and get some new ideas to bring more technology into the hospitality industry. 

So my number one: keep an open mind and expand your horizons also across the hospitality industry.

Photo copyright: Steve Herud