30%
Month-on-month growth in transactions from Nov 2022 to Jun 2023
36%
Profitability due to increased sales from owned platform (hotel website)
20%
Reduction in steps taken in the payout process
22%
Manpower needed for reconciliation
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Sahid Hotels & Resorts is a pioneer in Indonesian hospitality, starting with its first hotel property, ‘Sahid Jaya Solo’.
Since its beginning in 1965, it continues to expand its legacy with 26 exquisite properties across 21 cities in Indonesia. Sahid now stands as a leader in international hospitality management in Indonesia, with an unwavering commitment to superior service and unparalleled guest experiences.
Challenges
Low booking rates due to a lack of online payment capabilities
Previously, Sahid Hotels & Resorts did not have digital payment capabilities on its website. For any bookings made through the hotel website, guests will only make payment upon arrival at the hotel. This was inconvenient for guests, and resulted in low direct booking rates on their website.
Alternative solutions needed to counter high fees charged by online travel agents (OTAs)
The high fees incurred for bookings obtained through online travel agents (OTAs) have a negative impact on Sahid Hotels & Resorts.
Therefore, the hotel chain’s management needed to boost the number of bookings coming from its own website. The website runs on the booking engine Alaric, which charges much lower fees compared to OTAs.
Commission payouts to the booking engine took up too much time and resources
To pay Alaric’s commission fees, Sahid Hotels & Resorts’ team had to go through a painful process:
- Obtaining and processing the invoices sent by Alaric
- Re-calculating the commission fees according to the total transactions based on Sahid Hotels & Resorts’ records
- Manually performing bank transfers every month to Alaric’s bank account
Solutions
Diverse payment channels for direct bookings on Sahid Hotels & Resorts’ website
To solve the problem of high cancellation rates, the company needed to implement convenient and cost-effective ways for guests to make payments online.
Partnering with Xendit, Sahid Hotels & Resorts now offers a wide range of digital payment options that make it easy for guests to pay with their preferred payment methods. These payment methods include:
- Virtual accounts
- E-wallets
- QR payments
- Credit and debit cards
With these easy payment options, Sahid Hotels & Resorts can easily charge guests for their bookings, which in turn lowers cancellation rates.
Quick and easy integrations with Sahid Hotels & Resorts’ existing booking engine–Alaric
With ready-made integrations between Alaric and Xendit, Sahid Hotels & Resorts could implement the payment methods and go live within days. This meant that the hotel chain could reap the benefits of providing digital payments almost immediately.
Automated payment routing
Using Xendit’s Platform Payments solution, Sahid Hotels & Resorts is able to make various finance processes a breeze:
- Accepting payments and reconciling transactions across all 26 properties
Xendit’s Platform Payments solution allows Sahid Hotels & Resorts’ central finance team to treat each property as a separate sub-account, giving limited access to each sub-account and accepting payments on its behalf.
This structure allows Sahid Hotels & Resorts’ central finance team to oversee and manage transactions of all properties in real time on a single dashboard, instead of having to look at each property one by one. - Payment of commission fees to the booking engine
Xendit’s Platform Payments solution eliminates all manual steps–processing invoices, calculating fees, and performing manual transfers. All commission fee payments are now completely automated from start to finish.
Results
30% increase in month-on-month transactions
Due to the range of digital payment options offered, there has been a significant increase in bookings coming through Sahid Hotels & Resorts’ website during the period of November 2022 to June 2023.
A more cost-efficient solution compared to bookings through OTA
The costs associated with guest bookings through its own website are much lower compared to the take rates incurred when obtaining bookings through OTAs. Furthermore, Sahid Hotels & Resorts is able to benefit from this online system without having to dedicate specific staff members to work on it.
Increased efficiency for the finance team
Sahid Hotels & Resorts’ finance team can now work much more efficiently and save time:
- Reconciliation: The reconciliation process is much easier now, as the team no longer needs perform cross-checking of data for the 26 properties. Now, everything is clearly recorded on Xendit’s dashboard–all in one place.
- Payouts: Payouts of commission fees are completely automated now–the 3 painful manual steps they had to go through have been eliminated.
- Reporting: The team no longer has to separate the transactions for each of the 26 properties and prepare the reports for each of them. All reports are now fully automated.
Before Xendit | After Xendit | |
Accepting payments | Guests were only able to make payments upon arrival at the hotel | Wide range of digital payments that allowed the hotel chain to collect payments online, upon booking |
Reconciliation | Required a lot of time and effort as the finance team had to perform a lot of cross-checking of data | All data clearly recorded on Xendit’s dashboard, making reconciliation a breeze |
Payouts | 3 steps involving:
| Fully automated |
Reporting | Manually prepare separate report for each of the 26 properties | Each property’s report automatically available on Xendit dashboard |
Not only that, with the wide variety of digital payment options provided by Xendit, we’ve we’ve managed to boost the number of bookings obtained directly through our website.
