CEBU-BASED startup HiveRooms said its digital platform for client bookings, room inventory management and price setting would boost the competitiveness of hotels and resorts.

Herbert Y. Dionzon, chief executive officer and founder of HiveRooms, told BusinessWorld via video call their app cuts the waiting time for bookings compared with some sponsored pages on social media, which have longer response times than the ideal five seconds.

“I created HiveRooms based on my experience with technology, especially hospitality,” said Mr. Dionzon, who used to work as a global distribution manager at Dubai-based Emaar Hospitality Group, where he handled 30 hotels in the Middle East.

He said hotels use a bot to respond to customer inquiries immediately, but the person who is looking for answers would appear two hours to a day late.

“If there’s a guest who is already on his way to the resort, and we are not able to respond immediately to the inquiry, we might lose the booking or client,” Mr. Dionzon said.

HiveRooms partners with leisure property groups to use their “all-in-one platform” that includes a property management system and channel manager.

Its property management system allows partner-clients to access the room inventory and pricing from their smartphones without calling the front office. Hotel owners can also use the app for information on their own properties.

Meanwhile, the channel manager serves as the central platform that connects hoteliers to online travel partners such as Booking.com, Expedia and Agoda.

“With the platform, they just have to log in using their account and then they can see the occupancy of their property, same as if there were inquiries,” Mr. Dionzon said.

HiveRooms has more than 40 hotels, resorts and vacation houses and about 900 rooms, mostly concentrated in Cebu. Other properties are on Bantayan Island, Mactan Island, Negros Island and Pangasinan.

The platform, which works as a commission-based instead of a subscription-based app, has had 3,000 booking transactions to date.

“We provide the platform and then we do the research and development for our partners,” Mr. Dionzon said.

He cited the case of a property in downtown Cebu that was facing occupancy challenges.

After three months of using the app, its occupancy rate jumped to as much as 70% from as low as 20%, Mr. Dionzon said.

But some hoteliers are still hesitant to digitalize, thinking that it would lead to layoffs, he said. But HiveRooms is just a tool to automate tasks and make it easier to run the business, he pointed out.

He added that manual booking tasks make it harder for staff to serve guests and make them feel welcome. — Aubrey Rose A. Inosante

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