Les Hôtels JARO is the largest hotel group in Quebec City. The chain offers three- and four-star accommodations across 7 different establishments, with a total of 1215 rooms. Its facilities include tropical gardens, indoor pools, catering, restaurants, bars, night life, and health and fitness centres.
The success of the chain can be attributed to the hard work of the Robitaille family. Today, it is still a family business, with the third generation contributing to its legacy. Annie Robitaille, Marlene Robitaille, and Nancy Robitaille are the owners of the properties.
The Challenge
As the chain has been in operation for over 40 years, they have seen travel change in so many ways. One of those ways is the importance of online travel agencies, driving the need for all hotels to have an online presence.
However, they knew that JARO hotels needed to automate the management of reservations from OTAs for this strategy to scale.
“We wanted to sell our rooms on the OTAs, but with the quantity of reservations that come from OTAs, we would not be able to follow up with guests and manually input reservations into our PMS. This would cause errors in our availability.”
The Solution
They quickly realised that a channel management solution was necessary to keep up with the demand for online reservations across all properties.
“With a multi-property PMS and 7 hotels, it would be impossible if reservations were not automatically reserved in our PMS. We needed to find a bridge that would help us, a 2-way connection with Maestro’s PMS.”
They heard about SiteMinder’s solutions from a marketing firm called HD Marketing. Specifically, they were interested in the channel manager feature, because of its 2-way integration with Maestro.
“We settled on SiteMinder because of its affordable cost, its compatibility with Maestro, and because we did not have to be locked into a long-term contract.”
SiteMinder’s channel manager was then implemented into all 7 JARO hotel properties.
“On the SiteMinder side, the implementation was pretty quick considering we had 7 hotels. It went very smoothly and was pretty easy. It met our expectations.”
Greater productivity with less effort
The Results
With SiteMinder, JARO hotels is able to accept reservations from OTAs without any manual intervention.
“We would not be on the OTAs if our reservations were not automatically managed by SiteMinder through Maestro’s interface. It increases our productivity because without it, we would need to have more staff at the Central Reservations Office (CRO). We definitely save man hours by not having to manually input each reservation.”
The Robitaille family is happy with the service they receive from SiteMinder.
“Everyone at SiteMinder is knowledgeable and their level of service exceeded expectations .Every request is answered quickly and professionally. We were always welcome when we had so many questions. The team was a great help every step of the way.”