Meliá Hotels delivers memorable, personalized experiences with Oracle OPERA Cloud

Meliá Hotels International is the leading hotel group in Spain and one of the largest in the world, with 10 well-known brands and more than 400 hotels across four continents. Founded in 1956, the company has grown around its corporate slogan “Leisure at heart, business in mind,” focusing on exceptional hospitality while fostering innovation and success across its enterprise.

The steady increase in travel since the COVID-19 pandemic aligned with the company’s ambition of becoming the preferred leisure brand for guests. With so many other hotel options available, the company needed to ensure a seamless, personalized experience for guests that would exceed their expectations and boost loyalty and retention.

However, the current technology environment was hindering progress. The company had isolated property management systems (PMS) configured in different ways across its many hotels, making it difficult to compare data among properties and standardize processes across the enterprise. The biggest concern was that these time-consuming, repetitive activities were taking attention away from servicing guests.

Meliá knew that a change was needed to consolidate business systems, streamline operations, and improve real-time data access to provide memorable, personalized experiences for guests.

Meliá recognized the power of a cloud native platform and, after researching the available options in the market, selected Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud Property Management (PMS) for its ability to serve as a centralized platform across all the company’s properties.

The system uses Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP), which seamlessly connects complementary applications. Meliá saw an immense amount of value in the integration because it would incorporate all the company’s vital IT systems onto one platform to streamline operations and enable a better guest experience.

Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud would also be critical in gaining a holistic view of business performance, with a single view of real-time operational data. In turn, being able to analyze this data would help Meliá give guests a frictionless experience across all its properties.

With Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud serving as the nerve center of Meliá’s hotel management, the company consolidated its network of isolated property management systems across the enterprise onto a single, centralized platform. Thanks to OHIP, Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud PMS integrated with various complementary systems to streamline operations and provide a holistic view of the business.

With the PMS connected to the rest of Meliá’s systems, the company gained better access to data to enhance personalization. The information gathered from various touchpoints such as previous stays, guest preferences, and loyalty programs helped Meliá create individual customer profiles. With real-time analysis, insights, and reporting, the company made it possible to cater experiences for each guest. The connectivity also enhanced the company’s loyalty program, so guests can join at any location and accumulate points for use at all other properties around the world.

The integration of OHIP also gave Meliá consistent functionality across its global property locations, helping the company automate day-to-day processes. Tasks that used to be complex, labor-intensive, and time-consuming are now performed by the PMS in seconds. For example, the manual correction of invoices was eliminated, and now employees simply press a button, get all the original billing info from the PMS to make edits, and the old invoice is cancelled while the new one is created.

By simplifying operations, Meliá improved teamwork among employees, optimized staff time, and most importantly, freed those employees from repetitive tasks to spend more time focusing on guests. The efficiency and cost savings gained by implementing Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud were beneficial for the business, but elevating the experience for guests was the true key to success.

Meliá also used Oracle to digitize and simplify services to further enhance the guest experience. By upgrading capabilities in the company’s Meliá mobile app, guests gained more control over their stays than ever before. Guests can use digital keys for room access, contact services like housekeeping or room service, and make future reservations or check out from their mobile devices, creating a frictionless experience that caters to the needs of each customer.

At the end of the day, Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud provided Meliá Hotels International with efficiency, security, automation, integrations and data availability, and the ability to innovate so guests can have a great hotel experience.