HIMMAPANA VILLAS

Himmapana Villas eliminates overbookings and grows direct bookings with Cloudbeds

Stories

"I have not worked with a company that has such good customer service as Cloudbeds has. It's miles ahead."

- Thomas K. Petersen, Managing Partner at Himmapana Villas

Key Insights

Grows direct bookings with Cloudbeds booking engine and payment processing

Cloud-based access allows for remote operations

Easy onboarding with knowledgeable customer support

Learn more about Himmapana Villas: himmapanavillas.com

Discover how Cloudbeds Hospitality Platform can boost your business

Located in the Kamala Beach area on the island of Phuket, Thailand are four dreamy luxury resorts that make up the Himmapana brand. In the five years since Thomas K. Petersen, Managing Partner at Himmapana, moved from Denmark to Phuket to help build the Himmapana brand, he and his business partners went from managing three villas to building their own resorts. Today, Himmapana consists of 41 high-end villas complete with private luxury pools, massage services, private chef bookings, transportation services, and much more.

Thomas’s business is unique in that they build, sell, and manage their own villas, providing a full-circle development and management service. “We build our own villas, we sell our own villas…we do everything,” he explains, emphasizing that this approach is key to their success as it allows them to control every aspect of the business.

He also stressed the critical role of customer service in their business model. “We always make sure everybody’s happy, and if people are not happy, then we make sure they’re happy again,” he said. This approach has resulted in a high rate of returning customers and a strong reputation for their brand.

Because the Himmapana Villas are booked all the time, year-round, Thomas needed reliable hospitality management software, especially a channel manager that could take bookings 24/7 without any downtime, lag, or overbooking issues. That brought him to choose the Cloudbeds platform as a technology partner four years ago. Since then, Himmapana has experienced exponential growth.

The Challenge

An unreliable channel manager was causing overbookings

Before switching to Cloudbeds four years ago, Thomas and his business partners used another system to manage their room inventory on OTAs. Unfortunately, that channel manager did not have a good API connection and that caused occasional overbookings.

Thomas and his team prioritize flexibility and customer satisfaction above all else, and he knew they needed a reliable, accessible and comprehensive property management solution to effectively manage their bookings, guest experience, and growth.

The Solution

A reliable channel manager and easy onboarding

After seeing Cloudbeds as the number one search result for hotel management software on Google and an impactful conversation with a local, beloved Cloudbeds Market Manager, Thomas and team made the switch.

From the beginning, Thomas had an easy experience with Cloudbeds onboarding, sharing that he “had constant dialogue with some of the people from Cloudbeds and they were very, very helpful.” Since he’s added more resorts to Cloudbeds, he’s taken on completing the onboarding process himself because it’s so intuitive.

Also, overbookings have become a thing of the past with Cloudbeds. As Thomas puts it,

The reason why we’re using Cloudbeds is because the most important thing for a channel manager is that it always works. We talk to our competitors and we know our competitors use a lot of other channel managers and they get overbookings.

The Results

Goodbye overbookings, hello more direct bookings

In addition to eliminating overbookings, Thomas and team have seen massive growth in the volume of direct bookings over the past year. He attributes the increase to Himmapana’s strong presence on social media channels, like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, in conjunction with Cloudbeds’ booking engine and payment processing set up on their website, which allows them to take bookings 24/7. Thomas shares,

Instead of customers seeing us on social media and going on an OTA, they will now go directly to our website because they can see they can pay by credit card. So our volume of direct bookings has had a crazy growth the last year.

It’s also the simple functionalities that help streamline Himmpana Villas’ day-to-day operations that have kept Thomas a happy Cloudbeds customer over the last four years. Himmapanas impressively manages at least 2,000 bookings annually and many guests have special requests. He says, “It’s a simple thing, but if we didn’t have the calendar function, if we didn’t have the notes we could put in Cloudbeds, if we didn’t have monitoring of what they’re paying and so on, it would be very difficult to manage.”

Another win? Thomas and team can use Cloudbeds’ cloud-based platform remotely when they move around the property or even when traveling. “It’s very, very, very convenient that you can do it remotely because everybody here is not really sitting down that often,” relates Thomas.

Finally, Thomas praised Cloudbeds customer support for their timely and knowledgeable help, “I have not worked with a company that has such good customer service as Cloudbeds has. It’s miles ahead.”