By HTN Staff - 12.23.2019
Over the last few years, Grupo Piñero, a Spanish tourism group with 27 hotel properties in Spain and the Caribbean, has boosted digitization and data governance, investing in innovations such as digital assistants, for example, to improve customer service.
“Technology has revolutionized this industry by transforming the way of doing things and achieving experiences customization. As technology evolves and we are able to listen what our customers ask us, the more we can offer unique experiences,” says Grupo Piñero Chief Information Officer Mateo Ramón.
Grupo Piñero, which reported income of $982 million last year, with Bahia Principe Hotels & Resorts along with the company’s residential and golf offerings accounting for 70% of the family-owned business, seeks to continue to drive innovation and ultimately enhance the experience for its customers. Toward that end, the company this week announced that it has adopted several IBM public cloud and hybrid cloud solutions to accelerate the development of new customer-facing digital applications and modernize existing applications.
Given an influx of tourism concentrated at different times of the year, Grupo Piñero found that it needs to be able to efficiently manage seasonality to drive business profitability and high-quality traveler experiences. To meet these fluctuations in demand and continuously deliver a high quality of service, the company is using IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI solutions to create a more flexible IT infrastructure.
With this investment, the company aims to transform its IT infrastructure into a hybrid environment, spanning on-premises environments and IBM public cloud to get extra IT capacity during peak seasons and to create new cloud-native applications that use IBM Watson services and allow them to improve customer experience.
For instance, by using IBM Watson artificial intelligence and business analytics solutions on the IBM public cloud, Grupo Piñero will work with client data to better understand traveler behavior and offer guests a best-in-class service by creating new applications.
Grupo Piñero is also adopting the IBM Cloud Pak for Applications running on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, so it can build these new cloud-native applications once and run them anywhere – on-premises, private and public clouds from different vendors, according to their business needs.
Grupo Piñero, IBM and Logicalis, an IBM Business Partner, are developing a new application that will help the company better predict hotel occupancy and meet the demands of its digital savvy clients. The application will use IBM Watson and weather data from The Weather Company, an IBM Business, to predict peaks in room occupancy. In a first pilot application, Grupo Piñero will also use IBM Watson Open Scale technology to correct biases in the data and provide explanatory information about its conclusions.