As competition in the tech-based hospitality space increases, Treebo Hotels has filed four patents in India and US to seek IP protection for its proprietary Quality Management System, called ‘Prowl’. The methods and systems used in Prowl, which the company has filed the patents for, allow Treebo to measure, monitor, and control quality across its vast and distributed network of almost 400 franchisee hotels, across more than 70 cities.
The four patents filed by Treebo pertain to collection of quality inputs from multiple channels, method of conducting quality audits, use of IoT technology in controlling quality, and design of a quality assurance setup based on machine learning.
“Quality of stay at hotels has always been somewhat intangible, something that is not tightly defined, let alone measured. All quality metrics have traditionally been post-facto, outcome metrics like CSAT and NPS, which are not very actionable. With Prowl, for the first time ever, we have made quality granular, measurable, and actionable. We break down a guest’s experience at a hotel into thousands of touch-points. Everything - including cooling level of the air-conditioner, seepage on the walls, water pressure in the faucet, etc. - that impacts the guest’s experience is a touch-point. Then with our unique algorithms we convert these touch-points into data-points for analysis and control, thereby effectively ‘quantifying quality’,” said Kadam Jeet Jain, co-founder, Treebo Hotels.
While this technology is not directly running the day-to-day operations of its hotels, Treebo claims that it is at the heart of Treebo’s ability to deliver a superior experience to its customers.
At the front end, Prowl comes in the form of a mobile app, which is based on these techniques, and is used by Treebo’s quality managers on the ground, as well as, by its crowdsourced community of mystery auditors, which it calls ‘Friends of Treebo’.
Prowl allows gathering accurate feedback on the property, taking quick action to fix issues, generating relevant metrics and reports, and automatic and preemptive blocking of inventory in case high-severity issues persist in a particular room.
Apart from Prowl, Treebo also recently announced a technology called InstaConnect, which allows guests staying at Treebo to connect to the Internet without the hassles of getting the password. Earlier, it had launched a tablet based property management system called Bumblebee.