Líbere Hospitality is part of Spain’s disruptive All Iron Group and operates a mix of serviced apartments, aparthotels and hostels across the Iberian peninsula. Their parent, All Iron Group, is a tech forward company comprising a venture capital arm alongside an innovative real estate business and this has afforded them a unique approach to the sector.

We’ve seen some massive efficiency savings from using Pace, now FLYR for Hospitality – we have not even needed to hire dedicated revenue managers as a result. That’s not normal!

They recently raised capital for a new phase of hospitality growth focused on Madrid, Barcelona and other cities in Southern Spain. The plan is to have 735 apartments by 2024 and they will be building plots and using existing buildings with the objective of turning them into urban aparthotels, corporate or student residences, hostels or hotels.

Libere currently operate four properties, with five more due to open over the summer and they will finish the year with a total of 15 properties open for business. Their aparthotels have taken a new approach to understanding space, with no restrictions or limits. That also means flexible stays and guests having total control of their experience from their smartphone.

We spoke with CEO Mikel Rodriguez Uranga about how they are leveraging their in-house technology experience and know how to help manage revenue.

Old school frustrations

“In 2019 we made the switch to the Mews PMS. One of the main reasons was that their open platform allowed us to integrate with all the software we had developed internally and it also opened us up to other integrations like revenue managers.

Nobody in our company had worked in hospitality before we opened our hospitality operations a few years ago. Nonetheless, we all had strong backgrounds in technology, data and business and so we were always rigorous at doing our research and analysis on what software to add to our tech stack.

We studied three or four RMS providers. In short, we ruled everyone out as their pricing algorithms were all focused on CompSets…except Pace (FLYR for Hospitality). We want to partner with vendors that are disrupters and, when it comes to revenue, focusing on demand is all important and they are the only one that is doing that. Ultimately, the core data philosophy was the main reason for choosing Pace (FLYR for Hospitality)..

But there were other important factors. We have many different people in various departments looking at revenue so ease-of-use was a factor. We don’t have GMs at our properties as everything is centralised so we have people in operations, marketing and sales all using the platform and it’s very intuitive. I personally like the dashboard view as its so visual. You can see all the data you need right there in a glance.

Pace (FLYR for Hospitality) also has the ability to handle a complex inventory mix like we have with aparthotels, serviced apartments, hostels and hotels. And the group forecasting functionality was massive for us.”

Instant results

As for revenue performance – this summer is forecast to look as good as the summer of 2019. We feel very comfortable with the decision engine’s pricing recommendations. Automated pricing works really well both several months out and with a super short booking window like now.

There’s also been some massive efficiency savings – we have not even needed to hire dedicated revenue managers as a result. That’s not normal! So it’s really helped our labour cost structure, which has been particularly important in the last year!”