ibis Edinburgh Centre Royal Mile (part of Accor) is a modern hotel at the heart of Edinburgh, making it the perfect base for exploring the city’s attractions. Combining comfort and friendly service, it’s popular among leisure and business travelers.
Even though the hotel has only recently started using Oaky, General Manager Dean Penrose rated the onboarding experience 10 out of 10. We spoke with Dean to learn what stood out during onboarding, why they decided to implement Oaky, and how their experience has been so far.
Challenges: Lack of an established process to inform guests about available offers and missed revenue
Before Oaky, the hotel faced several operational challenges:
This not only meant missed revenue opportunities but also limited the hotel’s ability to enhance guest satisfaction.
As Dean explains it:
"We only have a limited time to communicate what’s available at the hotel. Now with Oaky, we can share offers before guests arrive, making the process smoother and giving guests ample time to plan their stay.
Guided, supported, and empowered: The hotel’s experience with the Oaky onboarding
To address the mentioned challenges and establish an automated, reliable upselling process, Dean and his team turned to Oaky. Right from the start, Dean appreciated the guidance and responsiveness shown by the Oaky team. This helped them adopt the software smoothly and efficiently.
The Oaky team is excellent. Any questions we have are answered promptly, and they help us ensure everything integrates smoothly with our PMS. They even guided us on what works best based on comparable hotels, which made it easier to tailor our offers.
Dean Penrose
General Manager
Dean highlights several aspects that made the onboarding experience stand out:
Clear guidance from the start – the Oaky team provided step-by-step instructions, clearly outlining the capabilities of the product.
Prompt and thorough support – emails and calls were answered quickly, with solutions provided in real time.
Encouragement to be inventive – despite being a select-service hotel, Dean highlights that now their team feels empowered to explore creative upselling strategies beyond standard offerings.
Practical examples and best practices – the Oaky team shared comparable hotel case studies, helping Dean’s team understand which offers would resonate more with their guests.
Seamless 2-way Oaky x Opera Cloud integration – every setup was tested to ensure automatic syncing between the two systems, reducing manual work and making the upselling process with Oaky intuitive and hassle-free from day one.
Fast go-live process – from the signature to launching their first offers, the hotel was live in just a few weeks.
Dean summarizes:
The support we received wasn’t just about solving problems. It was about helping us proactively set up offers in a way that would actually convert. That’s what made the onboarding experience so valuable.
Dean Penrose
General Manager
Final thoughts: Early successes and favorite features
Though Dean and his team have just started exploring Oaky’s full potential, several features have already won their hearts:
The ability to target different guest segments and rates: This helps better tailor offers to arriving guests and generate more conversions.
Flexibility to activate offers on specific days or special events.
Seamless integration with Opera Cloud, minimizing manual work.
As he notes, the first wins have already been evident. For example, they see more signups for their loyalty program via Oaky, and breakfast sales have also picked up significantly. On top of that, the front desk team benefits from smoother operations, as they receive guest requests in advance and don’t have to present offers at check-in in a rushed and hectic way.
Dean concludes:
"Having a tool like Oaky is essential to help guests make use of services that are already there, while generating extra revenue for the hotel. But while creating more revenue, it’s also important not to create more work for the team. And this is where Oaky helps. We’re excited to explore all.
