Ayres Hotel Profile
For more than 100 years, the Ayres family has been a legendary and well-respected name in Southern California. Multiple generations have been land, residential and commercial property developers, opening the first of its hotels, Cardiff Country Side Inn, in Cardiff-by-the Sea, during 1984. Today, Ayres Hotels owns and operates 24 hotels throughout Southern California.
Jacob Tindall, vice-president of revenue and marketing for Ayres Hotels, has been with the company since 2002, advancing through various positions to his current role.
Don Ayres serves on Ayres Hotels’ executive committee as Principal of the committee. His hotel career began in 1986 and for 15 years, he has participated in the growth and success of Ayres Hotels by developing and managing multiple development projects.
Ayres Property Management Challenges
An Ayres Hotel internal company committee, led by Jacob Tindall, Ayres Hotels’ tech advisor, evaluated the state of their operations across their 16 properties at the time. The company was using five different hotel property management systems (PMS) and a primary initiative was to integrate its various systems to improve efficiencies around reporting, accounting and property management with a view to consolidate and standardize on technology.
The systems being used cost upwards of $50,000 each plus additional annual support fees totaling $80,000 per year. Not only were these systems costly, but there was no way to electronically consolidate accounting data centrally from these systems. Hotel staff had to submit accounting records to the central office daily.
The data was sent manually, entered and processed for billing purposes every day; a time-consuming process that was susceptible to errors and could take up to 4 hours per day.
Business continuity, consistent process and standardization were a challenge with the disparate technologies being used. Whenever hotel staff transferred from one hotel to another, they had to learn an entirely different PMS or re-familiarize themselves with the PMS in use at that location.
How and why InnQuest hit the mark
During the evaluation process, an industry colleague recommended InnQuest’s roomMaster Hotel PMS.
According to Mr. Tindall, Ayres Hotels management was impressed that roomMaster was designed by hospitality professionals for hospitality professionals. This established a trusting relationship immediately because InnQuest implicitly understood the challenges of operating a chain of hotels and the importance of an integrated PMS.
Following demonstrations of roomMaster and competitive systems, Ayres Hotel decided to partner with InnQuest to convert all 16 of its hotels to roomMaster.
InnQuest made the transition easy
“The bottom-line benefits were quickly apparent. Switching to the roomMaster PMS in year 2 saved us more than $80,000 in annual support costs compared to our old systems.”
Jacob Tindall, VP of revenue and marketing, Ayres Hotels
Once the decision was made, a significant benefit of the migration to roomMaster was the installation and training process. An InnQuest technician completed the first installation within just one week, training Mr. Tindall during the process.
“The InnQuest’s technician guided me and the hotel staff during the first installation and I was able to install roomMaster at the remaining 15 hotels and train our team members. Sixteen weeks later, all our hotels were operating and benefiting from the software,” said Tindall.
To address the inefficiencies of Ayres Hotels’ accounting process with the old PMS systems, Ayres deployed the Corporate Reporting Module business intelligence software application (iQ-CRM) at the corporate office.
This provided them with a centralized data warehouse that automatically combined the financial, forecasting and statistical data from each property enabling them to save time, reduce costs and make more informed business decisions using accurate, timely data. Tindall added he and Ayres Hotels management were equally impressed with InnQuest’s service and support.
Amazing support when needed
“We experience few if any problems with roomMaster because it works so well. Our hotel and corporate office staff are fully trained, so they can resolve most issues. If a problem does occur that we cannot address, the InnQuest Support personnel are always responsive and ready to help.”
Don Ayres III, Principal, Ayres Hotels
Value and results!
Today, each of Ayres Hotels’ 24 hotels relies on roomMaster to maintain highly efficient operations and, more importantly, provide each guest with a personal level of service for which Ayres Hotels is known throughout the industry.
Each property’s roomMaster system is connected with the corporate office and having iQ-CRM saves additional time and money as well as eliminating the errors that were frequently experienced using the antiquated manual accounting system.
Ayres Hotels has also added InnQuest’s iQ-POS, a point-of-sale software used in the gift shops at 7 properties. As with roomMaster, it allows gift shop personnel to focus on selecting new products with greater guest appeal and control inventory more efficiently. iQ-POS is also digitally integrated with the corporate office’s accounting system.
Voice of the customer
“We exclusively use roomMaster and the other InnQuest hospitality management solutions. InnQuest is always improving its solutions and introducing new tools to help us maintain our premier position in a very competitive hospitality market.”
Don Ayres III, Principal, Ayres Hotels
About InnQuest
InnQuest Software was founded in 1994 with a belief that guests deserve an excellent hospitality experience and hoteliers deserve a management system that would allow them to maximize the guest experience and property operations.
InnQuest and its many hotel management products, including roomMaster, have evolved with guests’ expectations and the available technologies to serve them better. Today, InnQuest provides first-class hospitality technology to more than 5,500 properties in 100 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
