Customer story
How Flemings Hotels grew half-year group revenue 70%
A second-generation family group of nine city hotels, with RFPs at the back of the queue going out three or four days late. With hivr.ai: same team, same headcount, 70% more group revenue.
Maggie Schubert
Head of Global Meeting & Group Sales
About
Flemings Hotels is a second-generation German family group running nine city hotels across Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Wuppertal.
Segment
Regional group, boutique family-owned
Region live
Germany and Austria
Portfolio
Nine city hotels
Systems
Opera Cloud
Deployment
hivr.ai implemented end-to-end
The challenge
RFPs going out four days late
RFPs came in by email across several properties. Each one had to be read, checked against rooms and function space, priced, built into a proposal and sent, then chased. The team was good and the relationships were strong. The problem was capacity: the ones at the back of the queue went out three or four days after they arrived, and offers expired before the planner came back.
The solution
The building automated, judgement kept
The agents took the reading, the extraction, the availability check, the pricing and the build. Approval rules kept a person on anything needing judgement. The proposal that reaches the planner is branded, priced properly and reviewed. What changed is that it arrives in minutes instead of days, and the sales manager who used to spend the morning building it spends it with the client.
The results
Not another AI pilot. Business value, delivered.
+70%
HALF-YEAR GROUP REVENUE
From $456K to $777K
2×
LEAD-TO-SALE CONVERSION
From 9.2% to 18.8%
100%
ENQUIRY RESPONSE RATE
Response timeouts eliminated
“With hivr.ai we eliminated response timeouts entirely, and our conversion rates climbed at the same time. It's a real game-changer for our convention sales.”
Maggie Schubert
Head of Global Meeting & Group Sales, Flemings Hotels
Demand outgrew capacity to answer it
Flemings is exactly the kind of small hotel chain where group and meetings business matters, the sales team is small, and everyone knows the regular corporate accounts by name. That is also where a manual process does the most damage.
They were not replacing a system. They were replacing the inbox, the availability screen and a proposal built by hand. Nobody chose that process, it just grew. The cost showed up in one number the team could see and could not fix: timeouts. In group sales a timeout is not a delay, it is business you lost that never shows up anywhere as lost.
The worry was character, not efficiency
The obvious risk in automating proposals is that they stop sounding like the hotel, that a corporate client who has booked the same Frankfurt event for six years gets something generic and spots it immediately.
The answer was to be precise about which part of the work was being automated. Pricing rules, brand templates and approval thresholds are configuration, so the proposal still carries the property's branding and a person still signs off anything above threshold. Flemings sells on relationships, and the automation was scoped to protect exactly that.
Live in steps. In the order that paid back fastest.
- 1
Capture & classify
- 2
Qualify & score
- 3
Price & propose
- 4
Approve
Nine hotels. One small team.
70% more group revenue.
Book a demo and see what hivr.ai can do for your meetings and groups business.