How to choose the most valuable tech partner program

Choosing your ideal partner can be a complex process, but what if you're a hotel management consultant looking for the ideal tech partner to work with? Our guide will help you find the most valuable partner program for your business.

If you’re a hotel management consultant, you’re overseeing a huge knowledge base of vital information and advice for your hotel clients. Staying on top of the latest developments is a full-time job, but essential if you want to remain relevant and competitive.

With teams shrinking post-Covid, hotels may well turn to technology to introduce automation and efficiency into their business operations, so the effective consultant will have knowledge of PMS, booking engines, budgeting & forecasting systems, asset management, sales & marketing products amongst others, as well as how to conduct strategic reviews of operations, undertake an audit of the property’s tech stack and have an understanding of how different solutions can support the hotel business. It’s a lot to stay on top of.

Fortunately, choosing the right tech partner to work with can make it easier to stay up to date on current technologies and new ways of working.

In any good relationship, your partner has your back. Fornova’s ethos is to empower partners, helping them reach their full potential with the ability to offer the best value and integration for their clients. We know that when looking for a business partner, people want a profitable relationship, and our focus is always on the value we can bring - and the value partners can bring us.

A good tech-based partnership is likely to be a long-term relationship, so it can’t be entered into lightly. If you choose the right one, your partner can drive your success and, through the benefits they bring, help you to distinguish yourself from the competition - generating sales.

Whatever you’re looking for, here are our top tips for choosing the right partners program.

It makes sense for your business

Most successful companies identify a niche and become specialists in their field. That’s why hotels themselves aren’t developing tech, because they’re in the business of providing an excellent guest experience. Likewise, hotel management consultants need to find products and partners that are a good fit with their existing service and expertise. You’ve proven your capabilities to your clients and you need to know that any tech you recommend will meet their high expectations. If your suite of tech solutions interfaces, even better.

You share the same aims - success for hotels

The best tech solutions enhance business operations for the hotel, with the aim of improving the guest experience and promoting success and profitability for the property. That means increased efficiency that supports faster, more accurate working. For hotels, the tools they adopt represent their business processes so they’re looking for best-in-class solutions, and they won’t want to be changing them any time soon. As an advisor to hoteliers, you need a trusted tech partner who shares the goal of helping hotels succeed and has the hospitality industry experience to be in it for the long haul, adapting to a rapid pace of change.

You improve each other’s efficiency

A good tech partner can help the consultant work more efficiently, freeing up time spent on tech support and training to focus on supporting clients - or finding new ones. The consultant can balance the relationship by helping to identify issues or challenges that clients want help with, showing the tech partner what they can build into future iterations of their solution to make it even more effective.

You help each other to level up

For hotels, investing in tech is an asset-based decision, so they’ll be looking for solutions and tech innovators with the ability to meet their own ambitions for their business. Smart hoteliers will be looking not at what their tech partners can offer in the short-term but where they can take them longer-term. As a consultant to the industry, your ideal partner is one who has the capacity and the drive to help you and your clients level up your businesses, and you’ll want to build a relationship based on trust and with shared levels of commitment where you will want them to evolve and succeed as much as they want you to thrive.

Full engagement and mutual support

For tech to deliver the best ROI, it needs to be used extensively by the business. That means ongoing training and support of the end-users. Customer satisfaction will depend on their continuing service and the tech company’s ability to respond to bugs and issues. That means the after-sales relationship is vital. Look for a partner that will remain fully engaged even after their product is in place, and which will offer sales and technical support to you throughout.

Sharing leads and transparency on opportunities

Good partnerships exist where support is offered equally from all sides. In your relationship with your tech partner this means that each party can rely on the other to highlight upcoming opportunities and flag up potential business leads so that everyone wins. Look for a partner that is as invested in your success as they are in their own and reflects the way you conduct your own business.

Building a support framework between partners and clients

Your ideal tech partner will not just be focused on your business success but also on your hotel clients and their challenges. Taking revenue management tech as an example, your partner will want to provide a solution that enhances your reputation and offers the best features and cleanest data to your customers. Your partner will continue to test satisfaction with you and your clients to check that the product functionality and the added value it brings financially is meeting their expectations.

One example of successful partnership working is highlighted by Hoteliers.co.il which recently adopted Fornova’s Business Intelligence solution FornovaCI.

Eran Peretz CEO and Founder at Hoteliers Hospitality Technology Solutions said, “We are excited to work with Fornova and are looking forward to uncovering new opportunities in the future by using their market-leading data solutions. We have found their Customer Success Team to be motivated for our success and of the hotels we support, and they work closely with us to ensure we are using the solution to achieve the best results.”

Hotel-related tech is an increasingly crowded field so as a hotel management consultant or outsourced revenue manager you want to identify solutions with a proven track record. Customers of Fornova’s Business Intelligence system often highlight how it brings them increased efficiency, greater insights, improved data, good integration with their existing systems and enhanced functionality.

We believe that by working together through our partnership program we can create additional benefits for our mutual customers while increasing your offering and ultimate value for the hotel industry. Read more about the benefits of our Partners Program.

Throughout history, whenever people want to achieve great things they forge strong partnerships. Collaborative working helps everyone accomplish more, faster, together, than they could hope to gain working alone. Trusted partnership working for a stronger hospitality sector helps everyone succeed in increasingly difficult times.

Learn more about how Fornova’s Partner Program can boost your hotel consultancy business.