What’s new in Oaky? [Q1 2024]

Our team started the new year with a burst of fresh ideas and renewed energy, all aimed at improving the Oaky product and refining your customer experience.

From useful updates to your guest landing pages and inventory management to no less important behind-the-scenes developments, explore the latest Oaky releases of Q1 2024.

Feature: Minimise guest request rejections with Inventory 1.0

Introducing Inventory 1.0, a newly released feature designed to benefit both you and your guests. Now, you have the power to precisely manage your inventory for services, ensuring you offer only what's available.

Previously limited to parking deals, Inventory 1.0 now extends to all deals. It allows you to set specific quantities for each add-on or service you upsell and prevent unavailable deals from being presented to guests. This shapes a smoother experience for them. With only available deals shown, you can minimise request rejections, ultimately elevating the guest experience.

Feature: Improve personalisation and guest engagement by including additional reservation details on the guest landing page

With OTA bookings surpassing direct bookings (only 38% of guests booked directly in 2023), Oaky is on a mission to maximise the engagement of OTA guests with your upselling deals and offerings.

Recognising that Oaky's pre-arrival emails serve as your brand's first touchpoint for most OTA guests, we've introduced an enhancement to guest landing pages. Now, you have the option to incorporate the following additional transactional details at the top of your landing pages so your guests can feel confident that offerings on the page are tailored specifically to them:

• Reservation number

• Check-in date

• Check-out date

This feature will certainly add more credibility to your emails and ensure enhanced personalisation. The outcome? Improved upselling performance, with guests feeling more compelled to explore their bespoke deal selection.

Feature: Opt out guests from Oaky communications in bulk [Available only in the Chain Dashboard]

In our tech-driven world, it’s no wonder that you might be using multiple solutions for guest communication, especially if your hotel is part of a bigger chain.

Do you have guests who unsubscribed from receiving communications from your hotel on other platforms, such as your CRM or any other guest communication system?

To help you align your communication strategy across the board, we’ve rolled out a feature that allows you to bulk-add lists of opted-out contacts. With this option, you can make sure that your unsubscribed guests won’t receive Oaky’s pre-arrival emails.

Feature: Copy the Guest Link directly from the Oaky dashboard

You asked, we’ve implemented!

Meet our new feature, which enables you to effortlessly retrieve the unique link to your guest’s personalised Oaky landing page and share it via alternative channels when needed. This ensures that your guests have access to their customised deal selection, regardless of any technical issues they may encounter with OTA messages.

If certain OTAs prevent links in guest emails, you can still help guests upgrade their experience by sharing the link through alternative methods like personal emails or Whatsapp messages.

On top of that, this feature lets you preview the deals your guests will see.

Integration: Unlock the power of automated and scalable upselling with the two-way Oaky and the Shiji Enterprise Platform integration

Are you using the Shiji Enterprise Platform as your PMS? Then this update is exactly for you.

We’ve successfully rolled out our robust 2-way integration for all the hotels using Shiji. With this powerful integration, you can:

• Increase ancillary revenue through personalised upselling

• Elevate the guest experience with tailored deal and service recommendations

• Reduce manual work and save time thanks to a swift sync between Oaky and Shiji

• Enable upselling across the entire guest journey — from pre-arrival to check-in and in-stay

• Implement your upsell strategy across all your properties in just a few clicks with Oaky’s multi-property capabilities tailored specifically to large hotel chains.

Developments behind the scenes

1. Empowering insights: Oaky’s data warehouse is underway

Data undoubtedly reigns supreme when it comes to enhancing your business operations. Recognising this, we are building a robust data warehouse that will serve as a treasure trove of insights to empower you in various aspects of your business. From enhancing upselling operations and understanding guest behaviour to benchmarking your performance against similar properties, our data warehouse will be your go-to resource for driving informed decisions. Stay tuned, as this project is expected to unfold over the course of several months.

2. Enhancements to the reservation import flows

To improve the speed of the Oaky software and ensure system stability, our team worked on fine-tuning the volume of incoming data from our integration partners to the Oaky system. By optimising our import processes with improved rules and a refined setup, our reservation import flows are now more balanced and equipped to handle the continuous influx of data, ensuring seamless operations 24/7.

Coming soon: Oaky and Mews two-way integration revamp

With the ever-evolving hospitality tech industry, we’re further enhancing and keeping up with the newest industry standards by refining our robust integration with Mews.

Here are the benefits you will be able to enjoy:

• Enhanced speed and usability of the integration, enabling Oaky to retrieve reservation information and other details from Mews on the fly.
• More control over your room types and availability by leveraging the on-demand room upgrade feature. It will allow you to approve upgrades manually once the availability reaches the predetermined threshold.
• A live reservation flow between the two systems now gives you the ability to capitalise on last-minute reservations, unlocking even more sales avenues for time-sensitive deals such as last-minute room upgrades, early check-in and late check-out deals. Our customers using Front Desk Upsell automation will find this enhancement particularly beneficial.
• The ability to apply dynamic pricing directly from Mews to your room upgrades and late check-out/early check-in deals. This feature will let you maximise your revenue potential by capitalising on peak booking periods, demand fluctuation, and room availability.

Final thoughts