Company

hotelkit – let’s have a look back on 2021!

Hard to believe, isn't it? 2021 is drawing to a close. If 2021 has taught us anything, it might be to expect the unexpected. Still, for many, there was no lack of déjà vu. More than once, we felt thrown back to 2020 and not in a nostalgic way. Fortunately, as it does, the wheel of time keeps on turning, and we get to reflect on many wonderful experiences and events. We want to invite you along for the ride one last time this year. Let’s take a look at 2021, hotelkit style!

Restructuring and Growth — hotelkit in Transition

You’ve heard it before: cool, calm, collected. That’s how you get ahead. In 2020, we were all forced to grind to a sudden halt for a while. And perhaps to take a deep breath. At hotelkit, we used this time to adapt our internal structure to the size of the company, which had grown considerably since its foundation. Spring 2021 arrived and with it, a transition into this new structure. By implementing the Holacracy model, we consciously decided on a company structure with flat hierarchies. Team Leads are now entrusted with organizational and strategic issues in the departments and ensure that we all keep on working on our common goal. And this team grows and grows. In 2021 we had the privilege to welcome many new faces at our locations in Salzburg, Vienna and Dresden. A whole 50 new hotelkids means the family has doubled in 2021! And that’s a good thing. Our main focus, as always, lies on the happiness of our customers. By expanding our resources, we can support operations, especially in difficult times, and continue to develop our product.

Our goal in product development is to always listen to the needs of our customers and to perfect features that make their everyday work easier. To keep our finger on the pulse of the times, we need a swarm of clever and creative minds. That’s why we’ve doubled our Development Team in 2021. Our Product & Tutorial Team, in turn, has nearly tripled in size this past year and now produces tutorial videos in eight languages. hotelkit goes international? You bet! Our team is made up of no fewer than 17 nationalities. Servus! Dobar dan! Buongiorno! Bonjour! Hotelkit now speaks a total of 22 languages. We are no longer babies, but forever young at heart: the average age in the company is 30.24 years. We can’t complain about a lack of young talent. Speaking of babies. Overall the club of our junior-talents counts 31 members. In 2021, we got to welcome two tiny hotelkids to this world. They keep their moms and dads on their toes and have a way of interpreting the company motto — “get sh*t done” — in a very literal sense.

We do get sh*t done

As you can see, our company has taken a significant step forward in development in 2021. There was always plenty to do. Phone lines ran hot, busy fingers typed away, answering customer inquiries. And to make sure that communication is also running smoothly within the team we’re using our own platform for internal collaboration. We wrote 6,188 handovers and created 9,268 tasks this year alone. Not a dull moment at this company! The same applies to our social media channels: We kept our community up to date with 516 posts. Anyone who follows us online knows that our team is always on the move. Quite literally. Anyone who wants to can get their squats, push-ups and planks in once a week by participating in an online workout with Maikai Gym. That’s just what the doctor ordered, especially when working from home. And it has paid off on many occasions. We ran 355 kilometers at this year’s Wings for Life World Run and even reeled in two podium finishes at the Salzburg Firmentriathlon 2021.

We are stronger together, and we can prove it. Our annual team event on the Postalm in August saw us competing in the Highland Games. Aye! And we did alright, to say the least! In disciplines such as barrel rolling, caber tossing and tug-o-war, everyone showed stamina and fighting spirit. But the hotelkit supreme discipline is, without a doubt, table tennis. In 2021, we spent 63 hours dueling on the small table. The high ambitions of some team members and the fact that our best players made it to the company championships this fall have made a serious upgrade of our training materials necessary. In addition to the legendary miniature table, our Salzburg office now also has a full-size table tennis table.

But don’t be fooled, our most spectacular successes were not limited to fun and sports. At the Hotel Tech Awards earlier this year, hotelkit struck again and won four of the coveted awards, clearing the categories Best Housekeeping Software, Best Preventative Maintenance Software, Best Employee Engagement Software and Best Staff Collaboration Software. How do they do it, you might wonder. Well, folks, the secret is love, grit, and a ton of coffee. Werner Kaffee supplied us with 98 kg of coffee beans in 2021. We’ll just let that number speak for itself.

Satisfied Customers and strong Partners

Bringing teams closer together, networking and facilitating their everyday work is our goal. We are pleased to say that 548 new customers decided to tackle the challenges of everyday work with our three platforms hotelkit, medikit and teamkit in 2021. We now help 2,000 organizations manage their daily work routines quickly and efficiently. This was no easy task for our Customer Success team, which held 1,100 training sessions in 2021 to ensure that all our new users were able to exploit the full potential of our platform.

It is not only in the hotel industry that our digital solution for better collaboration is becoming increasingly popular. Communication and knowledge documentation are also key challenges in the healthcare sector, which is why we developed our sister product medikit in 2014 based on hotelkit. While the popularity of that software has already increased significantly in recent years, our growth of over 70 percent in 2021 proves one thing above all: digital communication is now indispensable in the healthcare industry as well. The 20 different fields our 350 customers come from, prove that medikit with its practical tools answers the needs of health care companies of all shapes and sizes. Happy medikit users range from dental practices and pharmacies to veterinary clinics, large care home and spa and healing facilities.

We are excited about the many new customers, but above all it is the support and good cooperation with strong partners from the industry that truly pleases us. This year, for example, we forged cooperations with Fairjobhotels, Martin Becker GmbH and InnConcepts. Together, we pursue the goal of making everyday work in the hotel industry more appealing and sustainable.

Useful Interfaces, Features and many new Tutorials

Just like our company, our software never stands still. Our product developers are constantly working on adding new applications. The needs of our customers are always the compass for our actions. Equipped with numerous new features, hotelkit is ever ready to continue making everyday work easier for current and future customers in 2022. Our housekeeping tool in particular has been spruced up with important additional functions: Housekeeping pre-planning, statistics for cleaning, inspection and tasks, individual cleaning intervals, housekeeping in multiple shifts, the Green Option and much more.

Our developers were not the only busy bees in our office in 2021. In order to easily present the new and existing features to all users, our tutorial team has created 107 new tutorial videos. You can find it in the hotelkit Help section in the bar on the top right. Our platform is just as international as our team, with currently 30 available system languages.

There is also good news for all who are tired of constantly having to multitask and switch between various systems. 16 new interfaces ensure that information from other software products can be retrieved smoothly in hotelkit. Our 2021 integrations newcomers include additional guest communication tools such as Stay-App, Review Pro, and Quicktext, as well as new PMS such as Mews and Protel, and Xingular‘s Green Button. Our platform now boasts a total of 61 interfaces, 38 of which are already available, with 23 being in the development stage. Our customers appreciate being able to view information from multiple systems centrally on one platform: in 2021, the interfaces were activated 1000 times.

Get sh*t done — the Consensus in the hotelkit Community

The usage behavior of our customers demonstrates one thing very clearily: getting sh*t done is not just our company motto, but also the guiding principle of the many businesses that work successfully with hotelkit. We saw an increase in all areas of usage in 2021. We are proud of this positive development and of all our users. This year alone, a staggering 2,388,601 tasks were completed — a 39 percent increase compared to the year before. In 2021, all users combined checked off 31,121,761 checklist items. Communication is key — as evidenced by the 6 million comments, news items and handovers posted last year. The Handbook is ever popular for documenting knowledge, be it new operating instructions, legal requirements or hygiene standards. A total of 154,544 knowledge articles were created — a 45 percent increase compared to 2020. The hotelkit Repairs tool is simply top-notch for the rapid communication of any defects in operations — 806,676 repairs were handled quickly and easily via the tool in 2021. Thanks to efficient communication and cooperation, our customers had more time for their guests. Ultimately, this is also evidenced by the 371,963 guest requests that were fulfilled. And our hotel teams rarely stayed in the same spot: they completed 128,325 walkthroughs. When it comes to housekeeping processes, hotelkit provides even more essential tools to facilitate their daily work. 2,505,727 times the status of a room was set to cleaned and inspected via the Housekeeping Tool. All we can say is: Keep up the great work!

Not enough exciting News for you?

No? Then let us direct you to our 2021 hotelkit blog, where you find many exciting contributions to current topics and personalities of the industry. Enjoy the read!

It's Michael's passion to write, he wants to become a writer.

About the author

Michael Santner

Narratives about impoverished poets during his studies encouraged him to follow his passion in a secure jobIn hotelkits marketing he takes care of packing the numerous ideas of his colleagues into exciting stories. 

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