Profitroom People | Product Team - Meet Profitroom’s Chief Product Officer

After our annual company get-together, where the management team shared a new exciting company vision with us (and an occasional drink or two), we thought this would be the best time to introduce you to some of the key talents behind our solutions.

Our Chief Product Officer, Waldemar Antonowicz, is kicking off this new ‘Meet the talents behind our solutions’ blog series, with a Q&A taking us through product development throughout the years and how Profitroom’s product vision evolved.

Let’s start this off with an easy one: what Profitroom solutions is your team responsible for?

Our team is working on several core solutions which jointly make up for our 360° reservation platform, the Profitroom Suite. Our system is built on a guest-centric foundation, meaning that guest experience and retention are at its core.

The flagship solution across all the markets we operate in is our Booking Engine 360. In addition to that, we offer hoteliers a strong Marketing Automation tool and a Channel Manager. Hoteliers also benefit from our highly converting hotel websites as they are seamlessly integrated with our booking platform. This ultimate power combo is delivering unrivaled direct booking results because both the Booking Engine and Website product teams are working closely together and developing it to its maximum potential in-house. Additionally, we help hoteliers boost their brand online with Digital Marketing Services in various service levels for the best possible brand exposure.

What is truly unique about our team is that we have more than 50 in-house developers working on these solutions. We now cover over 40 markets across the globe and bring together best practices to make our solutions exceptional and cutting-edge.

How long have you worked at Profitroom and what excites you most about leading the product team?

I had the pleasure of seeing Profitroom grow and outperform its own goals continuously since the very beginning of the company’s founding - more than 14 years now.

The feeling that our highly experienced teams can jointly make a real difference for hoteliers and their guests worldwide is what excites me the most. Product development has always been about listening to the customers, empathising with the users, and, of course, proper data analysis. 

However, there are so many things that you still can get wrong the first time. After over a decade in this position, you realise that there is not one single recipe for success. Our dedicated teams work really hard, in a never-ending cycle of designing, developing and user testing, experiencing new outcomes every time. It’s hard to be bored working in our product team, believe me 😉

What was the most memorable experience and the key moment for shaping the product vision moving forward?

During one very fierce discussion about the product vision, our marketing department shared the results of a massive guest research campaign we had collaborated on with our hotel partners. Reading through the results together for the first time, truly blew our minds! 

The guests responded much more positively than we ever bargained for and the responses about their expectations were absolutely aligned with our vision. This reassured us that all our efforts paid off, that we were going in the right direction and it was definitely a key moment affirming our joint success.

So what is Profitroom’s current product vision?

Profitroom has always been all about hoteliers' top performance and boosting hotel's profits. We have always been very focused on usability, cutting-edge design, and guest experience. However, we also felt like there is so much more to achieve in these fields.

This is why we decided to strengthen our efforts into bringing much more value to our clients by satisfying their guests. We see ourselves as a B2B2C platform that will now focus even more on the guest experience. We strongly believe that this approach will be the most successful for our hotel partners as our main goal is to help them achieve and even over-perform their results. 

This is why Profitroom’s vision is to accelerate profitability for outstanding hotels and resorts by increasing direct revenues with the industry-leading direct booking technology. Our seamless 360-degree reservation platform is going to offer an even more complete set of eCommerce tools that will support the entire guest’s journey. We are building an ultimate user experience that not only converts the best but also supports the ultimate booking personalization and advanced stay customisation. Moreover thanks to the completeness of our solution we are also boosting the guest retention rates with proper use of the guest database combined with effective and easy to-use marketing automation and online marketing capabilities. 

Our love for delivering a great user experience is also reflected in our back-office for the hotel’s staff. It’s very powerful yet simple enough to be easily manageable. Moreover, Profitroom offers a dedicated Customer Success team that everyday supports our customers into bringing the most out of the direct booking channel.  

And why will hoteliers and their guests love this new vision?

Booking direct is especially valuable for leisure travelers, who seek a holistic stay experience. We now have over a decade of experience in observing and analysing their booking behaviour and expectations. And that’s precisely why we are experts in helping hoteliers focus on offering unique, unforgettable experiences to their guests and achieving the highest direct share possible, while continuously boosting direct booking conversion. We enable guests worldwide to easily book a personalised, memorable stay with the possibility to enjoy a unique experience from pre- to post-stay.

Our holistic platform is smart enough to outperform, yet very simple to manage. It is a complete set of solutions but can be adjusted to hoteliers' needs by API connectivity around its core. Our solutions perfectly fit into the hotelier’s digital marketing strategy, while our strong network of partners and marketing agencies will further elevate their online marketing activities across all markets.

For both our hotel partners and their guests this guest-centric approach truly offers direct booking benefits and reflects the hotelier’s efforts to satisfy their guests across all touchpoints. Together with the Customer Success and Onboarding teams we work hand-in-hand with our hotel partners to ensure they are utilising all of our Profitroom solutions to their full potential.

If you would need to describe the product development over the last years with the title of a movie, what would it be and why?

I really believe that in order for us to successfully develop our solutions, we need to have a very close relationship with our hotel partners. In that regard, I can say that we were struggling with the very same challenges and always shared the same fears and joys as our network of hoteliers did.

Having said that, one movie title alone certainly is not enough to describe the development of our solutions throughout the last years, and also the growth we experienced so far as a team.

Some of the more challenging times could be compared to scenes from Armageddon and on some days I felt like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception. We would also have enough interesting material to provide for a whole Mission Impossible movie series, always with the mission ‘develop, test, repeat’ in changing settings.

Overall the movie plot from Jumanji - The next level would describe our dynamics quite nicely: the core team remained the same, but the game has changed and we constantly adapt to new challenges. In the end, our joint power is unlimited, we strive in a challenging environment and are always ready to put in some hard work to reach the next level.

And today, I feel that A star is born may be a good example, as I do believe that all of us can be even stronger together with a very clear and joint vision for the future, as we share it at Profitroom.

Thank you for sharing some insights about the multifaceted work your team is responsible for, Waldek.

We hope that you, our dear readers, enjoyed this interview as much as we did. Stay tuned for the upcoming interviews with some of the core talents behind the Profitroom solutions!