Nordic Choice Hotels

Nordic Choice is one of the largest hotel chains in Scandinavia, counting more than 170 hotels in 6 countries. The brand Nordic Choice includes several standalone hotels as well as five sub-chains of hotels with different levels of price and service. From budget hotels, to resorts with spas, to design hotels and more, the company manages very diverse operations in the hospitality sector. The chain is currently upgrading their IT architecture in order to be able to offer even better service to their customers. We spoke to Jonas Carlsson, director of IT of Nordic Choice, who told us about his problems with the previous system, his experience with LS Retail and expectations for the future.

Previous challenges…

The system that was previously in place at Nordic Choice hotels had a number of limitations which hampered the company’s ability to offer the standard of customer service they aimed for. Some of the problems they faced were:

• Lack of support for promotions and offers, so that they were hard to manage;
• Difficult and imprecise management of general ledger. For example, it was hard to calculate liqueur tax across the chain;
• Time-consuming setups: each hotel had to be set up singularly, a hard feat considering the scope of the operations;
• Lack of standardization between hotels: the same item might be assigned a different code between hotels, making it impossible for the company to achieve effective reporting and data analysis.

…and current solutions

Most of these problems now belong to the past. The company, with the help of local LS Retail partner Cenium AS, implemented LS Central for hotels, an efficient and tailored software solution which they are currently using in almost all of the 170 hotels of the chain. LS Central for hotels is also deployed in all the new hotels that Nordic Choice opens. LS Central for hotels brought various benefits to the company:

• The software setup time per hotel has decreased considerably, going from 2 days to just a few minutes;
• All hotels share the same template, making implementation easy and fast;
• Promotions and offers can be easily managed, improving the overall customer service and increasing loyalty;
• The chain has achieved greater efficiency by standardizing items between hotels. This translates into more accurate statistics and faster and more effective management;
• The new data director works much better. Now items, prices, staffing on more than 2000 POS can be easily managed from the central office, ensuring the company that they have total control over their whole operation from headquarters;
• Although they all use the same system, the sub-chains utilize different interfaces, tailored on the needs of their specific customers.

Looking towards the future

Nordic Choice is committed to offer an outstanding experience to guest, and therefore strives to respond swiftly and precisely to its customers’ needs and demands. In this spirit, Nordic Choice challenges LS Retail to make their product even more extensive, so that they can provide an even superior level of service. Nordic Choice’s demands to LS Retail revolve around:

• Sustainability tools, so that the company can use the software solution to manage their sustainability program, “we care”;
• A software solution to offer self-service check in, an option that many guests appreciate and request;
• Further tools focused on increasing guest experience, from order to payment.

At LS Retail we believe that no product is so good that it cannot be improved, and we are always happy to take on new challenges. We thank Nordic Choice for the insights into their business’s necessities, and we will put them high on our list when deciding new directions for our product development.