Diallo Powell is Founder & CEO at Curant, a mobile platform that enhances service, payment and promotions across multiple sectors, including hospitality. Curant’s mobile-first Property Experience (PX) product offers its property management partners a white-label mobile solution to drive revenue, automate service, amplify marketing and gain new data insights. The company’s enterprise SaaS product uses location-based technologies to engage individuals at every touchpoint in their property journey from pre-arrival through post-departure. 

Tell us a bit about Curant and the benefits your mobile solution delivers. How are your platform capabilities helping hotels improve the guest experience?

The Curant platform, like hospitality in general, is about providing timely and personalized service. The platform allows our partners to optimize service while maximizing opportunities to drive revenue and engage customers, from the pre-arrival experience through post-stay. We think of the mobile phone as a remote control for experiences within a physical space. There are so many scenarios where this delivers value to the guest and our partners.

How about lowering hotel costs and improving operational efficiency? Are hotels able to quantify the benefits of a mobile service platform in terms of financial outcomes?

There are clear efficiencies that come with automating service. Our software-based solution integrates directly with our partners’ existing workflow and various point solutions. This approach has made for quick implementation with minimal training that has clear benefits for guests and staff. One statistic stands out that illustrates our platform’s success: an 80% reuse rate by unique users, which speaks to a very positive experience. We also realized that with each order, as a user grows to trust the system, ticket sizes tend to grow. These are both very encouraging signs of driving incremental revenue while improving operational efficiency.

We recently published an article  about Thompson Zihuatanejo’s deployment of Curant. How did that client relationship come about and is that a typical engagement?

The Thompson Zihuatanejo relationship came out of the property’s desire to deliver an experience based on its brand promise tied to a certain hipness and youthfulness. We focused on engaging their clientele where they are—literally on their phones—and figuratively—meeting new expectations in an on-demand world. We understand that physical experience is not enough anymore to drive brand loyalty. Merging physical and digital interaction is critical in the longevity of customer relationship management and is the core mindset of Curant. It makes for an easy partnership within hospitality.

What are the biggest obstacles and challenges hotel operators face when it comes to adopting mobile applications and tools?

There are a lot of different perspectives on the role of technology in advancing hospitality and where the line is drawn between modern and traditional approaches. I think every brand, operator and owner needs to make that decision for themselves. Our job is to make a solution flexible enough to adapt to different environments and approaches that delivers value. Our goal is to never cram technology down anyone’s throat, but to truly understand the business and how we can offer something that makes the lives and experiences of guests, management and staff better.

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Hotel Technology News is the hospitality industry’s premier source of information and insights related to technology innovation at the world’s leading hotels and resorts. Our reporting, research and opinion pieces reveal how forward-thinking hoteliers are upgrading their technology capabilities to improve operational performance and the quality of the guest experience, as well as to reduce waste and improve environmental sustainability, and how top solution providers are advancing the frontier on next-generation hospitality technologies.