Standard Operating Procedures

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES

First-class standard operating procedures is the secret sauce to creating a first-class hotel operation.

Financial Reporting

Key Hotels - Finance

Financial Reporting

We offer powerful financial budgeting, planning and forecasting tools for our properties.   Based on the USALI Chart of Accounts, our cloud based financial reporting systems are built for real-time monitoring and transparent management reporting.     


Key Features

Real-time financial profit & loss statements with comparables to budget, actuals, last year, and forecast

Flexible USALI based chart of accounts, the hotel industry standard for financial reporting

Wide range of PMS and accounting software interfaces for ease of installation

Rolling forecast functionality to keep figures up to date.

Calculate “What-If” scenarios based on renovations, closures, etc.

Salaries & wages cost analysis for better staff planning

Cloud based reporting for added transparency and ease of access

Key performance indicator customization


Content Management

Content Management

Key Advantages

  • Improved Web-Direct Bookings
  • Question-Query Visibility
  • 120+ Online Directories & Maps
  • Turnkey Media Distribution
  • Professionally Staged Photo and Video Shoots

Consumer behavior is evolving.  

Keyword searches is quickly becoming a strategy of old.  Our guests are now searching for our hotels via question queries instead.  Key works to ensure our hotels are highly visible to question queries on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices, as well as on Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri platforms. 

We offer consistent, accurate, and thoroughly completed question-centric content, resulting in optimum marketplace exposure, benefiting hotels with improved direct booking performance.


Content Management

Hey Siri. What’s the best boutique hotel in Curacao?

We synchronize the hotel’s content including URL, name, phone, address, policies, and promotional messaging with 120+ online directories, social media, maps, & search engine back links.   Hotels benefit with elevated search engine optimization and expanded distribution of promotional content, rocketing web-direct bookings.

Key Hotels and Resorts Content Management
Key Hotels and Resorts Content Management

Content Distribution

78% of people find photos to be the most important factor in making their hotel choice, exceeding the importance to online reviews (67%).

HRS Study 2019

Key partners with industry leading photographers and videographers, expert in staging highly effective photo and video shoots, highlighting the property’s unique selling points.  Then, we utilize powerful digital media tools to distribute turnkey the hotel’s signature photos and media content to thousands of online travel partners, OTAs, business partners, travel agents, and tour operators – ensuring optimum booking conversions.

Key Hotels and Resorts Media Management
Key Hotels and Resorts Media Management

Content Synchronization

We synchronize the hotel’s content including URL, Name, Phone, address, policies, and promotional messaging with 120+ online directories, social media, maps, & search engine back links.   Hotels benefit with elevated search engine optimization and expanded distribution of promotional content, rocketing web-direct bookings.

Guest Loyalty Program

Key Resorts Rewards – Guest Loyalty Program

  KEY RESORTS REWARDS offers cash back rewards for bookings on the hotel’s website, driving website direct bookings and conversion.  Our guest loyalty program is designed to offer guests cash back options resulting in best rate offerings when searching on meta-search and search engine booking sites and increased website direct bookings.

Key Resorts Rewards Guest Loyalty Program
Key Resorts Rewards Guest Loyalty Program

Branding & Positioning

Branding & Positioning

Key Advantages

  • Research-Backed Positioning
  • Consistent Brand Standards
  • Brand Book Design
  • Consistent Brand Communication
  • Digital & Print Collateral

Our Branding Team executes extensive marketing research in launching a new hotel’s positioning, offering and exhaustive and comprehensive picture of the desired sales mix, product mix, target markets, and key attracters in positioning and branding a hotel.  As a result, Key skillfully distinguishes each of our hotels and resorts with its own unique identity, perfectly positioned towards desired target markets for optimized performance in the marketplace. 

Cohesive communications, guidelines, fonts, collateral, and strategies are the pillars for building a cohesive and consistent brand.    Key ensures its hotel brands are consistently represented both digitally and with print through fact sheets, guest service directories, in-room dining menus, brochures, and in-room collateral.  

Food & Beverage

FOOD & BEVERAGE

Masters of the Culinary Arts

We construct creative Food & Beverage concepts, and offer a hands-on cost control approach to generate highly profitable food and beverage operations.

Key Hotels and Resorts Culinary Testimonial
Key Hotels and Resorts Culinary -Testimonial
Key Hotels and Resorts Culinary - The Food Network
Key Hotels and Resorts Culinary – The Food Network

Director of Food & Beverage- Executive Chef Diego Amat

Executive Chef Diego Amat
Executive Chef Diego Amat

Master Executive Chef Diego Amat has a distinguished culinary career spanning nearly thirty years.  He most recently served as the Executive Chef of the Zagat top-rated Mercat a La Planxa Restaurant located at the landmark Marriott Autograph Hotel Chicago, considered the “best in all of Chicago,” and was recently featured on the Food Network’s Bite Club Chicago. Chef Diego began his career at Barcelona’s prestigious Hoffman School and stayed on following graduation as an Assistant Professor.  After leaving the University, he began his works with Barcelona’s most revered Michelin-starred restaurants like Gaig and Jean-Lun Figueres.   Later, Chef Diego opened Barcelona’s first gastrobar, La Estrella de Plata, awarded amongst “the best tapas bars,” and at the forefront of a new wave of innovative tapa barsLater, Chef Diego served as the Corporate Executive Chef of world-class restaurants in Lyon, France and South Beach, Miami before making his mark in Chicago, and Suriname.


Food & Beverage Profit Centers

We offer creative recipes and concepts curated by Executive Chef Diego Amat coupled with cost control platforms for all food & beverage hotel outlets.

  • Breakfast Buffets
  • Casual Pool Side
  • Fine Dining
  • Banquet
  • In-Room Dining
  • Chef’s Tables

Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance

Offering a first-class hotel operation to one guest is easy. Doing so for each guest every time is what separates the great properties.

Key Hotels and Resorts offers a thorough and periodic quality assurance audit review of the hotel’s operation, maintenance, finances, human resources, bookkeeping, and food & beverage. Each Fundamental to ensuring the highest levels of quality. Each review is complemented with an improvement planner, allowing for the continuous improvement of the hotel.

Engineering

Engineering

Key Hotels & Resorts oversees the Engineering Departments of its properties and works to protect the value of the property’s assets, equipment and facilities. Ultimately, our engineering team is responsible for the comfort, protection and safety of our guests.  Energy and water conservation plans are enacted with quarterly projects resulting in better sustainability measures and efficient operations. Detailed Preventative Maintenance Programs administered quarterly with a team of Care Specialists are assigned to ensure the guest rooms are in top-quality condition at all times.   Daily inspections and quality assurance programs add redundancy and quality control checks. 

Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS)

We offer comprehensive CMMS tools feature preventative maintenance, work order software, maintenance scheduling, and inventory management. Our CMMS toolset is key to increasing guest satisfaction, energy conservation and environmental sustainability.

Reputation Management

Reputation Management

Optimizing Operation Performance

Key Advantages

  • Total Online VoC Insight
  • Benchmarking Performance
  • In-House Reviews

  • Professional Review Responses
  • Dashboard Scorecard
  • Improved Guest Loyalty

Recent Path to Purchase analytics show 85% of hotel guests will start their purchasing decision by seeking out negative online reviews of hotels. 

Key empowers its hotels with an innovative online review platform tool designed to centralize all online reviews to one dashboard.  We collect reviews from the hotel’s own post-departure surveys, Trip Advisor, Google, Expedia, Booking, Zoover, Tui, and many others to one dashboard.  From here, hotels will benefit from real time reporting and benchmarking of their true Voice of the Customer Performance matrices, allowing for departmental operational reformations.

Post-departure surveys, custom-created by Key, are sent to guests allowing hotels to capture and address service recovery concerns prior to online publishing, minimizing negative reviews.  Key offers professional, timely and SEO-centric responses to the hotel’s online reviews.

Key Hotels and Resorts - Reputation Management
Partnership with TrustYou

Sales Force Management

Sales Force Management

Key Advantages

  • Professional Sales Representation
  • Promotional Activities
  • In-Person Sales Activities

  • Expansive Travel Account Database
  • International Tradeshow Representation

Research tells us that prospects need eight to ten touches to even to begin to think about making a buy.  With offices in Holland and USA, Key offers international sales representation for its properties, growing and strengthening its account base feeding bookings to our properties.  Key will utilize a combination of touch points to build relations, communicate property updates and offer promotions including office visits, entertainment calls, newsletters, site visits, sports outings, road shows, webinars, networking events, and holiday events.


Account Management

With our extensive twenty-year history in the international travel market, Key has acquired and developed thousands of key travel accounts and partnerships for all of our hotels and resorts, allowing for uniquely expansive distribution of the hotels content, rates, and availability, and giving our hotels and resorts a definitive competitive advantage in the market place. 

Key Hotels and Resorts Key Accounts
Key Hotels and Resorts Key Accounts

Tradeshows

Attending Tradeshows and Travel Fairs is an essential component for maximizing a property’s exposure to B2B and B2C partnerships.  Key navigates through the numerous tradeshows and fairs and selects those with highest return for investment.   Such valued tradeshows for include Vakantiebeurs Utrecht, ITB Berlin, BLTM Barcelona, WTM London, IMEX Frankfurt, 50+ Beurs Utrecht, and CCRA Colombia.

Key Hotels and Resorts Tradeshows
Key Hotels and Resorts Tradeshows
Key Hotels and Resorts Tradeshows
Key Hotels and Resorts Tradeshows

Promotional Activities

Promotional activities are important in gaining travel account market share from our competitors.  Travel agent store window ads placed in thousands of stores, city light posters in targeted feeder market train stations, online digital brochure promotions and newsletter inserts are examples of promotional tools Key deploys to our closely held accounts in promoting our hotels.

Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing

Reduce OTA Commissions | Steer More Business to the Hotel’s Website

KEY ADVANTAGES

  • Digital Display Ads
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Digital Retargeting
  • Meta-Search Marketing
  • Social Media Targeting
  • Search Engine Marketing

Our geo-targeted Digital Marketing Campaigns are crafted specifically for each of our hotels. By focusing on the consumer’s complete beginning-to-end Path to Purchase, we stand out from the industry’s typical reliance on shallow advertising activities.


Search Engine Marketing

Key Hotels and Resorts Search Engine Marketing

GOOGLE HOTEL ADS

Key’s Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tools allow our hotels’ rates and inventory to be synced directly from their Property Management Systems to Google Hotel Ads, Bing and other search engines, displaying availability in real time on search pages and Google Maps for travelers that are ready to book.  Our experts at Key strategically manages our properties’ SEM campaigns.


META-SEARCH MARKETING

Key’s Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tools allow our hotels’ rates and inventory to be synced directly from their Property Management Systems to Google Hotel Ads, Bing and other search engines, displaying availability in real time on search pages and Google Maps for travelers that are ready to book.  Our experts at Key strategically manages our properties’ SEM campaigns.


Display Marketing & Retargeting

Our Digital Marketing Department offers revolutionary technologies to reach geo-targeted guests, optimizing our hotels’ web-direct bookings and reducing OTA commission expenses while improving brand awareness.  Through digital prospecting, social media marketing and retargeting efforts, Key places its hotels in front of targeted consumers who are in the market for their respected destinations.  Then, once ready to commit, Key connects the consumer to the hotel’s website for booking and retargeting should the consumer leave the hotel’s website.


Social Media Marketing

Our Digital Marketing Department offers the latest technologies to reach target consumers on social media platforms, optimizing our hotels’ web-direct bookings and reducing OTA commission expenses while improving brand awareness.  Through social media prospecting and retargeting efforts, we place our hotels in front of targeted consumers who are in the market for the respected destinations.  Then, once ready to commit, Key connects the consumer to the hotel’s website for booking and retargeting should the consumer leave the hotel’s website.

Key Hotels and Resorts Social Media Marketing Ads
Key Hotels and Resorts Social Media Marketing Ads

First-Class Website

Hotel Website Design

Designed for Optimum Direct Web Booking Conversion

  • Beautifully Designed Content
  • Upsell & Room Hold Functionality
  • Search Engine Optimized 
  • Online Reviews Summary
  • Booking Engine
  • OTA Rate Comparison Tool
  • Key Resort Rewards, Loyalty Program
  • Predictive Personalization Tools
  • Multiple Languages
  • Mobile and Tablet Responsive

Optimizing Direct Bookings is at the Heart of a Hotel’s Strategy

We construct beautifully designed search-engine-optimized websites for our hotels and resorts, each highly detailed with content-rich photography, strategic key words and question queries, ease-of-use navigation, booking engines and translations in multiple languages.   Then, utilizing the latest technologies and algorithms, we deploy a set of tools to personalize each guest’s visit to the website with language specific promotions, price comparison tools, retargeting ads, USP displays, and price matching.  

Jacana Amazon Wellness Resort – Suriname

La Cabana Beach Resort – Aruba

Rate-Matching

We stand by our Best Rate Guarantee promise by offering automated rate-matching technologies for our hotel’s website direct bookings.

Our automated rate matching platform contributes to our Best Rate Guarantee promise, contributing to optimum direct booking conversion. With hundreds of booking channels offering the hotel’s inventory, ensuring the hotel’s website’s offering of the best pricing is an ongoing challenge. It is inevitable, as hotels expand distribution, to encounter rate disparity. Key solves this ongoing issue with website direct rate matching. If another travel site decides to undercut the hotel, our platform will rate match in real time, allowing the hotel to capture the booking while our Team resolves the disparity.


Online Reviews Summary

Unique to Key, we offer our guests the full picture online review summary directly on the hotel’s website contributing to confidence in booking and website direct booking conversion. From our hotels’ website. guests can review a selection of positive and constructive reviews from a number of review sites including TripAdvisor, Google, Booking, Expedia, Tui, Facebook, and many others.


Search Engine Optimized

BUILT FOR CONVERSION  Our marketing department works on the back-end to ensure the website is highly visible on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  These efforts serve to ensure we optimize direct booking conversions from our website, reducing OTA commission fees.  Then, Key elevates users’ experience by applying smart machine learning behavioral applications, resulting in a more personalized website user experience and greater booking conversion.


Best-in Class Booking Engine

Our industry-leading booking engine turns lookers into bookers, ensuring optimal direct booking potential. Our booking engine delivers a highly intuitive and easy to use navigation functional across all devices. Tools are in place to capture guests with targeted merchandising enhancements, promotional offerings and retargeting activities.

Strategic Revenue Management

Strategic Revenue Management

  • Powerful Revenue Systems
  • Business Planning and Budgeting
  • Revenue Reporting & Forecasting

  • Market Demand Analytics
  • Historical Performance Analytics
  • High/Low Demand Date Management

Move from traditional rate-setting analytics and evolve into strategic multi-market Revenue Maximization. 

Key stands apart in the revenue management discipline with a winning formula for advancing RevPAR Index performance for independent and boutique hotels by combining strategic business planning and ultra-modern revenue management systems with a professional team of revenue specialists proficient with analytical revenue maximization.

Revenue Management Automation System

Connect to our powerful revenue management systems utilizing advanced algorithms to automatically optimize room rates by room type on a 365-day revolving calendar multiple times per day.  Our ultra-modern revenue systems analyze historical trends, demand coefficients, and competitive rate shops, and airlift demand to destinations.  Our team reviews these automated rate recommendations and matches them against high demand/low demand calendar dates amongst other considerations impacting optimum performance.

Revenue Strategy Team

Complementing our revenue systems, our Senior Executives offer the “big picture” strategic revenue vision and budgeting, setting the optimal business mix framework from various market segments in the marketplace.  We evaluate market condition contributions from various segments including BAR, OTA, Consortia, Wholesale, Discount, Package, Corporate, Leisure, Government, Group, Government, and Permanent, and determine the appropriate Sales Mix.  Further segmentation can be defined based on geographic, demographics and consumer behavior with targeted pricing strategies applied.  Further strategic initiatives are uncovered in market related demand drivers.  Supplementing these initiatives, we offer travel partner umbrella agreements, displacement analysis, and length of stay and booking window strategies. 

Key Hotels and Resorts Strategic Revenue Management
Key Hotels and Resorts Strategic Revenue Management
Key Hotels and Resorts Strategic Revenue Management
Key Hotels and Resorts Strategic Revenue Management

International Distribution

International Distribution

Expand International Distribution | Beat the Competition

  • GDS Channel Connectivity
  • Global Meta-Search Connectivity
  • German Market Connectivity
  • Dutch Market Connectivity
  • Americas Market Connectivity
  • UK Market Connectivity
  • Asian Market Connectivity
  • Russian Market Connectivity

Our hotels gain an important competitive advantage through our proprietary network of travel partner account channels, distributing the hotel’s inventory to untapped international markets, consortia, travel agents, and tour operators.  Then, we consolidate the hotel’s bookings from the hotel’s website, OTAs, bed-banks, tour operators, travel agents, meta-search engines, global distribution systems (GDS), consortia partners, corporate travel sites, group meetings & events, and search engine sites into an easy to manage platform, plugged into the hotel’s property management system.

Global Distribution Systems (GDS) Channel Connectivity

Travel Agents book hotels on one of four global distribution systems.  We connect our hotels seamlessly to all four GDS and portals.  In doing so, we ensure the hotel’s rates and availability, content, and photos are kept up to date, ensuring optimum booking potential. Quarterly audits take place to further safeguard the hotel’s performance on GDS channels.

Key Hotels and Resorts GDS Connectivity
Key Hotels and Resorts GDS Connectivity

Meta-Search Marketing

Sixty-percent of hotel and resort decision making begins at the meta-search stage.  We are one of the few marketing companies tactfully connecting our hotels and resorts’ rates, content and inventory to the top eleven of the major meta-search partners including Google, Trip Advisor, Kayak, Trivago, Wego, SkyScanner, RoomKey, HotelsCombines and more.  Our hotels benefit with increased direct booking performance, up sell revenue generation, and improved brand loyalty.

Meta search marketing

German Travel Market

The German Travel Market continues to be the worldwide leader for international travel. 50M people from this travel segment take long-haul trips annually, with an average length of stay of ten days.  With an estimated 10,000 travel agencies all over Germany, over fifty percent of all bookings are made other than through online booking.  Key Hotels has strong ties with German tour operators including Tui DE, DER, FTI, Alltours, travel agencies, and German-centric OTA sites allowing for distribution from this key European feeder market.Dutch Travel Market

Dutch Travel Market

We connect our hotels to the Dutch market through Dutch-sourced tour operators including Tui NL, Corendon, KLM, travel agents, OTA sites and consortia partners.   We have a very special relationship with our partners capturing the leisure travel market.  80% of Dutch Travel is leisure, consisting of 14M trips annually.   Length of stay for holiday trips skew heavier between November and April.  Summer holiday bookings peak in the 1st quarter of the year.  40% of bookings in 2020 are made online, a growing trend from 20% in 2013. iDEAL is the preferred online payment method in this feeder market. 

Dutch travel market

UK Travel Market

21M travelers will be seeking long haul travel options from this feeder market.  Travel from this lucrative market peaks in summer with over 40% of all travel coming between May and August.  For leisure travel, 50% are seeking beach holiday destinations, 10% seeking City Break, an 15% seeking personal tours.  Family holidays are a firm favorite in this sector.  We connect UK sourced leisure and consortia accounts directly into our hotel’s property management systems for direct bookings. 

Asia Travel Market

Roughly 25% of total worldwide tourism is sourced from the Asian Travel Market, the fastest growing global travel segment. City breaks remain by far the most popular form of outbound travel. While this market continues to rely heavily on the internet for information and bookings, nearly 50% of travelers book their travel via travel agencies.  We offer multi-language communications on booking sites, Asian-centric OTA and tour operator connectivity.   

North America Travel Market

Hotel bookings made on own via online channels and a growing reliance on review sites characterize this travel market.  Trip Advisor commands the attention of this market segment of meta-search options. Nonetheless, 30% of this segment will use a travel agent.   We connect our hotels to leisure tour operators and bed banks from this feeder market, allowing for expansive distribution.

Centralized Reservations

Centralized Reservations

Less Work | More Bookings

  • 400+ Channel Connectivity
  • Centralized Inventory & Rate Control from PMS
  • GDS Connectivity

  • OTA Connectivity
  • Consortia Connectivity
  • Bed Bank Connectivity

Our industry leading Centralized Reservation System, recipient of the “Best of Industry Award” in 2018 by IAC, has been developed to optimize direct booking conversions from over 400 international travel sites and business to business connections from around the world. 

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