HA Hoteles: Building the smart hotel around smarter operations

When Alex Flores joined HA Hoteles in 2019, the business looked very different. He started in a weekend customer service role, bringing previous experience from Expedia and an understanding of the hospitality industry. At that time, HA Hoteles was primarily focused on tourist apartments, with just a small team managing reservations.

Seven years later, HA Hoteles has expanded into five hotels and more than 50 tourist apartments, approximately 400 rooms in total, across Madrid, Soria, Granada, and Málaga. And, as Operations Manager now, Alex helps connect the needs of reception, administration, accounting, marketing, and leadership.

The ambition is to keep growing. “We try to expand as much as we can,” Alex says. “We don’t rule out any possibility.”

For ​​HA Hoteles, a smart hotel isn’t about replacing hospitality with technology, it’s about using technology to remove repetitive work so employees can spend more time actually looking after guests.

“We want to automate a lot of processes,” Alex explains. “We want to make everything very intuitive for the guest and have staff at the hotel who can focus more on the guest experience rather than repetitive tasks.”

That philosophy is particularly important given that HA Hoteles operates with lean teams. In some properties, just one person is responsible for reception during the day, balancing guest communication with housekeeping coordination, arrivals, payments, and everything else happening throughout the hotel.

Reception is typically staffed from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m., with telephone support available overnight. That makes a smooth arrival process especially important.

The goal is to create a guest journey in which online registration, communication, payments, and ultimately room access can happen as seamlessly as possible, while freeing employees to step in where a human touch adds the most value.

As HA Hoteles grew, its existing technology setup began struggling to support that vision.

The individual systems worked for their original purposes, but the problems appeared as HA Hoteles tried to connect more tools and automate more processes.

Simple but repetitive activities — sending emails, reminding guests to complete registration, sharing arrival information, or providing access codes — might take only a few minutes individually. Across hundreds of rooms and multiple properties, those minutes quickly add up.

“It’s a very repetitive task that doesn’t change,” Alex says. “When you’re doing it over and over, it takes time.”

Adding functionality meant adding more systems. One solution handled the PMS and channel management, another guest messaging, another check-in, and so on.

“We used to joke in the office that we had a Frankenstein for our operations,” Alex says. “One part was one thing, another part was something else. The whole process was fragmented.”

So began the search for a more connected foundation.

The team came across Cloudbeds and the fit quickly became apparent.

“We wanted everything to be more centralized and to stop having a thousand separate services,” he says. “We needed one for messages, one for check-in, one for something else.”

Many of the tools HA Hoteles already used could integrate with Cloudbeds, and in many other cases, separate software could be replaced with native Cloudbeds functionality.

Initially, moving to a more comprehensive platform appeared more expensive when comparing the PMS costs in isolation. But that wasn’t the full picture.

Once HA Hoteles accounted for the additional systems surrounding its previous setup, the economics changed.

“If you add everything else we were paying for, obviously the price was higher before,” Alex explains.

He estimates that consolidating services is currently saving HA Hoteles approximately €200 per property, per month. The bigger benefit, however, is creating a technology ecosystem capable of supporting the company’s long-term operating model.

HA Hoteles now uses Cloudbeds as the foundation for much of its daily operation, including its PMS, Cloudbeds Payments, guest communication, online pre-check-in, and integrations with other technology providers.

The team is also testing the automatic delivery of smart-lock access codes and exploring additional integrations that could make the guest journey even more connected and personalized.

“Basically, we try to connect everything we can,” Alex says. “Everything we have, we want to connect.”

The impact of automation is already beginning to show.

At HA Hoteles’ larger Madrid property, Retiro Suites, which has 36 rooms, the receptionist previously spent much of the morning contacting arriving guests.

Some hadn’t completed their registration. Others needed arrival information or follow-up. Because reception closes at 6 p.m., the team needed to make sure everything was organized before guests arrived later in the day. According to Alex, the receptionist could spend from 9 a.m. until around noon working through guest messages.

Automating parts of that communication has already reduced the workload. “I’d say we’re saving the reception team at least two hours,” Alex says.

What looks like a tiny manual task — finding a reservation, copying a message, personalizing it, and sending it — becomes a substantial operational burden when repeated dozens of times.

Giving those hours back to the team means they can be used somewhere more valuable. “If I can save them part of that work, even better,” Alex says. “It frees up their time and they can focus on things that are a little more personalized.”

Some of the most valuable improvements weren’t even among the original reasons HA Hoteles selected Cloudbeds.

Alex initially expected employees to spend most of their time working from the calendar, much as they had with their previous system.

Instead, the team discovered how much of the daily operation could be handled from a centralized dashboard.

“From contacting the guest to sending an email and handling payments, everything is in one place,” Alex says. “That’s helped us enormously.”

For employees balancing multiple responsibilities at once, reducing the need to move between screens and systems has made daily work considerably simpler.

It also made the transition easier than Alex expected. Having worked with the previous system for years, employees were accustomed to its workflows, and Alex initially worried that introducing a platform with significantly more functionality might overwhelm the team. Instead, the average employee became comfortable with the new system in around two weeks.

“It surprised me how smooth everything was,” Alex says. “I thought I’d find someone who struggled with it or couldn’t adapt, but that hasn’t been the case at all.”

Cloudbeds University also helped Alex train employees around their shifts, providing videos and visual resources they could use independently.

HA Hoteles is still relatively early in its Cloudbeds journey. The team is still fine-tuning automated messaging and smart-lock workflows, it’s considering how kiosks could allow guests who haven’t completed registration before arrival to check themselves in at the property, and it’s exploring CRM capabilities and potential integrations with its in-room television system.

The latter could eventually allow a guest to enter their room, turn on the television, and see a personalized welcome message.

The company is also exploring Cloudbeds’ extensive reporting capabilities. HA Hoteles’ CEO is particularly interested in occupancy, ADR, revenue, booking sources, and channel performance, while accounting teams need different information around invoicing and room revenue.

As Operations Manager, Alex sits between these teams and helps provide the information they need. Having data available within the same ecosystem creates opportunities to make that process more efficient too, including subscribing stakeholders to recurring reports.

For Alex, that’s the exciting part. HA Hoteles hasn’t simply implemented another PMS, it has created a foundation it can continue building upon as the company grows and its idea of the smart hotel evolves.

“Right now, it feels like there’s a whole world to discover,” he says. “There are so many things needed that we’re only now starting to explore.”

For a hospitality group built around making technology invisible to the guest, and freeing people to provide the hospitality technology can’t, the possibilities are only beginning to open up.