The Berlin-based company ehotel® has managed to write a true success story, driven by the clear goal of facilitating business travelers’ search for finding suitable hotel rooms. This mission has not changed in the 22 years since the company was founded. ehotel® is consistently focusing on fair, transparent and data-driven approaches to save customers time and money. As a data-driven, customer-centric business, ehotel® is fully aware of the needs and everyday requirements of companies and business travelers. The evaluation of data and the ability to make decisions based on comprehensive analyses help customers to optimize their internal processes. The added value of this offering is reflected in the overwhelmingly positive customer feedback on ehotel® as well as in numerous awards from renowned German magazines based on independent customer surveys.
However, the dedicated team at ehotel® is not resting on achieved standards or successes. The company is constantly taking on new challenges in order to continuously pioneer new industry standards with its innovations and state-of-the-art technologies. The open-minded company culture of ehotel® is an important prerequisite for being able to drive progress. “Our customers can rely on us to not only provide “best-buy” offers but also modern solutions for every stage of the process, from sourcing to booking, to billing,” explains Fritz Zerweck, CEO of ehotel®. “We can only guarantee this if we keep up with the times, and have solutions ready now to problems that companies are only just becoming aware of.” To achieve this, ehotel® not only keeps an eye on its own market but also thinks and acts cross-sectionally in order to move forward with its visions. In this way, the hotel booking portal succeeds in shaping the future of companies with continuously evolving versatile services and cutting-edge technologies. The goal now is to perfect the digital cycle of business travel processes for customers and to promote important topics such as sustainability.
Unique Meta Search Technology
At the center of the ehotel® offering is its unique meta-search technology, which enables specific searching in line with all company guidelines for best available hotel rooms, displaying only valid and available offers from all available hotel room contingents of all providers worldwide. In this way, ehotel® can ensure that business travelers only receive valid offers during the pandemic. At the same time, travel managers can use ehotel® Analytics to reliably locate their company’s business travelers and fulfill their duty of care–even in crisis areas.
In addition, ehotel® Analytics produces structured statistics and provides all the details required for high-quality data management in order to analyze a company’s entire travel volume and to identify potential savings. To ensure additional clarity, the ehotel® Analytics dashboard comes with 19 different reports–by country, city, hotel, cost center, order numbers, contract rates or payment method–already integrated to round off the evaluations and analyses, providing a comprehensive overview.
With the sourcing tool ehotel® Rate Manager, contract rates can be checked for availability, correctness, and completeness across all GDS- or non-GDS channels, automatically excluding unwanted contract rates. Systematic audits and effective control of the travel volume enable data-based purchasing and increase cost savings.
Top-tier Customer Experience
The various features in the ehotel® portfolio, which cover the business aspects of sourcing, payment and billing, constitute essential tools for buyers, accountants and travel agents. All tools function independently, but of course also in conjunction with the other solutions offered by the hotel booking platform, to carry out individual or group bookings, plan meetings, events and conferences, coordinate participant management, create and evaluate booking statistics, and organize cost assumptions and tax refunds.
With ehotel® central billing, customers can automate their booking and payment processes with full cost control, and thus reduce the individual effort from payment to evaluation to a minimum. Another key advantage is the ability to introduce uniform processes through the globally applicable billing system, which can be configured according to customer requirements. Incidentally, SAP Concur customers are now also able to benefit from the many ehotel® advantages, as the American software company has been offering the range of solutions by the hotel booking platform in its app center of since 2021.
Sailing through Crisis
Due to the pandemic, the business travel industry is facing a comprehensive overhaul. But thanks to its principle of constant evolution and its versatile offering, ehotel® is prepared to help shape the realignment of the market with new ideas and technologies, and to anticipate future trends. In the last two years and throughout the COVID-19 crisis, the Berlin-based company has proven to be a reliable constant for its customers.
Team of Dedicated Professionals
In order to continue to guarantee a top-tier all-round service for customers, it is above all important that the employees at ehotel® remain motivated and work together as a team. “We have an unconditional open-door policy,” says Fritz Zerweck, “which is better than the fashionable expression ‘flat hierarchy’ because, at the end of the day, we in top management bear the responsibility for remaining financially viable.”
However, the open doors encourage direct and regular exchange. In addition, everyone at ehotel® meets at eye level to develop and fine-tune ideas. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ at ehotel®. “We give every idea a chance, because if you don’t have the courage to follow unknown paths, you cannot expect to remain innovative,” emphasizes Fritz Zerweck.
Future Sustainability and Proliferations
Over the next five years, ehotel® will continue to address the needs of its customers that have been exacerbated by the pandemic: Safety and sustainability are the key factors that ehotel® already takes into account in its tools and filter functions. When searching for a hotel room, customers can see directly whether, for instance, a hotel provides charging stations for electric cars. The search results can also be filtered for sustainability certificates that prove the commitment of the respective hotel. And more relevant functions are already in the pipeline.
As a company, ehotel® itself is on the way to becoming carbon neutral. Sustainability management includes both big and small changes; thus, waste reduction and energy savings are part of everyday office life, and small changes such as green public transport passes and glass-bottled beverages at work have already proven successful. “Everyone at ehotel® is aware of how important sustainability is” reports Fritz Zerweck, “which means that our holistic approach is supported by everyone.” After all, the future of the planet is at stake, so naturally, ehotel® is setting its own bar very high–not only when it comes to innovations, but also with regard to sustainability.
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