Laris Hotels unlocks legacy data with Power Automate

Laris Hotels Group manages a wide variety of facilities, including 20 premium hotels, hostels, and aparthotels—a hybrid of a traditional hotel room and a rental apartment. Laris employs more than 300 employees who support sales and operational services. 

The company uses a dedicated property management system (PMS) to manage bookings. The system tracks bookings made directly with each hotel and is also integrated with various reservation channels that Laris customers use, such as Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb. One limitation of the system for Laris is that the system doesn't provide aggregated information across hotels. This made it difficult to analyze booking trends over time.

To provide Laris with the custom reporting they needed, employees would have to manually download Excel spreadsheets for each hotel and aggregate the data from other hotels for analysis. The process took hours to complete, and reporting was not available on a daily basis as management needed. “There are other PMS products that can aggregate data, but they are not able to customize the data like we needed,” says Chris Barker, International Sales Director at Laris Hotels. For Laris, this includes a breakout of commissions and taxes, which the company uses to better understand revenue—a task that also had to be done manually. 

To help improve the process, Laris worked with Atteli, a Microsoft Partner that had successfully implemented the company’s Dynamics 365 Sales system. Atteli recommended Power Platform as the fastest, most cost-efficient solution. “With Power Platform, we were able to build a solution for Laris Hotels at just 20% of the cost of traditional code—and three to four times faster,” says Jacek Szafader, CEO and Founder at Atteli. Additionally, RPA in Power Automate served as an ideal workaround for moving data from the legacy system, which did offer an API at the time. 

It took just one developer two weeks to complete a production-ready solution. A desktop RPA flow pulls data from the company’s PMS software each day and moves it into SharePoint. Data on SharePoint is then displayed in Power BI, providing an easily digestible overview of hotel performance with options to create customized reports. These reports are directly accessible on Microsoft Teams for designated recipients. The automation ensures that the reports are automatically distributed to the interested parties. The low-code solution also makes it easier to keep up with ongoing maintenance—a critical component as the PMS interface is often changing.

Faster, more effective analysis of booking data

The new system provides Laris with a more effective analysis of booking data, including options to more easily customize the data. Data filtering is one powerful example. “With Power BI, we were able to quickly and easily break out commission costs and taxes so we get a clearer view of our net revenue position,” says Barker. The team is also able to enter budgeting data into the system and match it with the latest booking data to check if they’re hitting their latest financial targets. 

Another key benefit is that with daily updates to data through the automated system—versus the weekly updates from the previous manual process—the company is now able to more effectively adjust pricing based on fluctuating demand. This, in turn, has improved business. As Barker notes, “Our Power Platform system provides us with greater availability of booking data, with average hotel occupancy increasing by approximately 15% as a result.” 

Along with benefiting its own operations, Laris plans to leverage the system to support the company’s latest initiative—Hotel Sales Link—which provides servicing for hotels outside the Laris network. “Many hotels, especially independent hotels, lack effective revenue reporting. Our Power Platform system will help provide that on a real-time basis for both Laris and the other hotels we support,” says Barker. With RPA in Power Automate, the system will also be ready to draw data from a wide variety of PMS systems, both old and new. 

At the same time, Laris is also working with Atteli to explore other ways of leveraging their reporting solution. “Power Automate RPA provided a fast, effective way to address a critical legacy data challenge for Laris. We see how the solution could be easily adapted to address similar challenges with other legacy data across the company,” says Jacek Szafader, CEO and Founder at Atteli. 

Szafader also sees opportunities to expand the system with other products like Microsoft Fabric for even deeper and even richer reporting. “With Fabric, we’ll be able to combine more data from other systems such as their accounting system and CRM systems.” For example, Laris currently uses Dynamics 365 CRM to manage group reservations. Using Fabric, this data could be combined with individual reservations to provide a broader view of overall booking trends. With a foundation built on Power Platform, another new wave of innovative reporting solutions may be just around the corner for Laris. 

Find out more about Laris Hotels Group on LinkedIn and Facebook.