Navis may have been founded in 1987, but you could say that the boot-strapped technology company, which focuses on serving independent resort hotels, has sped up its metabolism lately.
The Bend, Oregon,-based company specializes in helping independent hotels, especially resort brands like Hershey, Greenbrier, Pinehurst, and Destination Hotels, convert more of the demand they’re already generating.
Over the past six years, Navis has increased its headcount three-and-a-half times, to 300 employees. This spring it entered Mexico, its first foreign market.
It is staking its claim to what it calls “rev tech”, or technology that helps hotels derive more revenue from their multiple channels by bringing together the key revenue systems for reservations, sales, and marketing under one data warehouse.
In its words, it breaks down department and data silos, produces business intelligence from that data, and making the insights available and actionable at all levels, down to the point of sale.
It claims that its typical client sees a gain of $4,000 more revenue per room, per year, by using its full system. It also says it retains 97% of its clients, via its month-to-month contracts.
One Navis specialty is combining data from call centers with data from online traffic. For instance, it helps in managing leads from people who call the property and for whatever reason don’t book.
Its marketing automation system (using email and more) pursues those leads. If a traveler calls, say, a Hershey resort, but doesn’t book, then within a day or two, a message could be emailed out automatically.
New platform
Navis says it has an open API structure, which lets hotels be selective about which of its sales and marketing technologies they want. Hotels can choose to use its data in other vendors’ tools as well.
To stay flexible, the company is investing in a new open-source tech stack, written in Clojure, that will be highly scalable.
