By Alex Gaggioli
We Made It
We did it. We made it to the new year. We’ve endured a lot – as a community, as individual businesses, and as people. While we don’t expect the world to go back to normal at the stroke of midnight on December 31st, we think 2021 looks promising.
It has become a tradition for us to recap our year, and 2020 has certainly been one for the books. As you may know, our company motto is More Reservations. Happier Guests. Everything we do centers around doing the right thing for our customers and employees. Recap the year with us.
Exciting Updates From Our News Desk
Cloudbeds graciously received several awards this year. Recognitions local, national, and international are due in part to the team’s endless effort to create a best-in-class platform for hoteliers and property owners.
Completed a $82M Series-C in March 2020
Viking Global Investors with participation from PeakSpan Capital, Recruit Co. Ltd., Counterpart Ventures, and Cultivation Capital led our all latest fundraising round. The funding is being used to create new products aimed at growing revenue and deepening hoteliers’ connections with guests, enhanced automation, and expanding our API.
Phocuswright Innovation People’s Choice Winner 2020
CEO and Co-Founder, Adam Harris’s presentation at Phocuswright Conference Online 2020 won the people’s choice award. Watch it here.
Deloitte Ranks Cloudbeds on the Technology Fast 500 2020 North America
Cloudbeds landed on Deloitte’s ranking again this year with a 539% 3-year growth rate landing us in the 222nd spot.
Red Herring Ranks Cloudbeds on the Top 100 2020 North America
The Red Herring Top 100 ranks the most exciting startups from Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
HotelTechReport’s 10 Best Places to Work
HotelTechReport named Cloudbeds as one of the best places to work for the third year in a row.
The Best Tech Companies For Remote Jobs In 2020 According To Glassdoor
Forbes shared a list of best tech companies for remote jobs, where Cloudbeds ranked number two.
Offering a Helping Hand
COVID-19 sent the world into a tailspin. The hospitality and travel industry was and continues to be one of the most impacted industries. In March, Cloudbeds launched a three-pronged COVID-19 response effort to help our industry.
Hospitality Helps:
As the pandemic first hit, Cloudbeds spotted an opportunity to serve lodging providers while doing good; they spearheaded #hospitalityhelps, a non-profit initiative connecting lodging providers to the essential workers and high-risk cohorts that have been displaced. Within days the initiative was launched and a coalition of industry partners formed.
CloudTalks – Local Virtual Events:
We created a community of hosts and hoteliers to share best practices and what they’ve learned during these uncertain times. Our regional market managers have led round table discussions with industry leaders and share market insights.
We’ve talked with people from the United Kingdom, to Australia, to Canada, to Europe. You can see the recordings on our YouTube channel here.
Free Account Optimization and Customer Care Calls
Earlier this year, we started offering complimentary one-on-one calls between our customer coaches and our properties to optimize their Cloudbeds setup. The goal was and still is to help property owners, managers, and employees maximize their experience and earning potential.
Powerful Additions to our Product Suite
Our product and engineering team has been hard at work creating new features and optimizing the Cloudbeds platform. They have shipped hundreds of updates in 2020, but we want to feature a few that made a big difference to our customers.
Officially Official
Cloudbeds’ channel manager is world-class. We’re proud to be an official partner of Airbnb, Agoda, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor. As official partners to some of the largest companies in travel and technology, product owners and managers can rest easy knowing that their technology is verified and trusted.
Our Booking Engine Gets a Face Lift
In February, we updated our booking engine to give it a modern look and feel. Our direct booking engine allows properties to take reservations directly from their website, which saves them a lot of money on commissions. We added a gallery design that shows travelers multiple photos of the room they are about to book. We also added a color picker, making it easier to make our booking engine match each property’s unique brand. You can read about all of the enhancements we made here.
And a Whole Lot More
- Guest merging
- Multi-currency
- Group allotments
- Newly designed knowledge base
- Report guest misconduct to Booking.com
- New integrations
- Reservation locks
- Group management enhancements
- Custom group email templates
We document all of our product updates publicly on our website here.
Our Team Continues to Grow
Despite the pandemic, we’re proud to have maintained our workforce. We added 145 people from around the world since January 1, 2020. Fun fact: more than 88,000 people applied for a job at Cloudbeds this year. We doubled the size of our onboarding team (we showcased our strategic changes to our customer success department in November) and made several strategic hires to catapult us into the future. We’re humbled that so many people want to join the Cloudbeds team.
To support our current team, we set up a wellness-focused Slack channel called “Cloudwell.” Since April, our team has hosted more than 150 activities to boost team morale across all of our timezones. Activities are led by internal volunteers and include a broad range of topics – from language learning (French, German, Russian, Portuguese & Italian) to workout classes to parenting support groups and beyond.
We also launched a diversity & inclusion committee focused on making Cloudbeds a great place to work for everyone. The committee is tackling diversity & inclusion training in our onboarding process, hiring training, and manager training. In 2021, we hope to launch more diversity and inclusion training and celebrations in local markets, as well as globally across our organization.
Educational Content Designed to Elevate
This year, our team focused on creating content related specifically to the ongoing pandemic. When the future became uncertain, we talked to experts in various fields to try to bring value to properties around the world.
Standard Operating Procedures: Housekeeping + Free Templates
Housekeeping and general cleaning procedures became more important than ever this year. Our team created a comprehensive guide to housekeeping procedures with editable templates to help keep properties as safe as possible.
A New Reality: The Contactless Guest Experience
As guests return to properties, the experience is going to be much different. Many guests will prefer a completely contactless experience.
Cloudbeds’ Global Sentiment Surveys
Our team conducted two sentiment surveys – one in May 2020 and one in July 2020 – to get a better understanding of how our customers were feeling. More than 2,500 properties from 100+ countries responded and shared valuable insight.
How Hoteliers Can Use Operational Pauses to Reshape Their Business
Almost all properties experienced some sort of operation pause in 2020. We created a guide to share a few key practices to focus on while we wait for the world to return to normal.
Looking Back. Moving Foward.
To finish out the year, we had down-to-earth conversations with our customers about their 2020 experience. Unprecedented circumstances forced us all to evaluate how we do business. From rural Maine to downtown Sydney – our customers have some pretty incredible stories. We invite you to listen to them here.
Cheers to 2021!
