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How Best Western Gyldenløve Hotell turned check-in into a ten-second experience with Protel Cloud
Small and medium enterprises
How Best Western Gyldenløve Hotell turned check-in into a ten-second experience with Protel Cloud
At a glance
- Prepayments from Booking.com, Expedia and other channels now land inside the reservation, so a payment that once took two minutes of manual look-ups takes two clicks to check-in.
- Invoices, welcome letters and folios are sent straight from the system by email, cutting out necessary printing, scanning and paper handed over the desk at checkout.
- Integrated Planet payments and card-on-file authorisation have all but removed human error, and the chargebacks, which came with keying card details by hand.
The challenge
Best Western Gyldenløve Hotell is a 63-room, family-run hotel in Kongsberg, an hour outside Oslo. Started by Ole Eirik Sel Tveito’s grandfather and now run by his father alongside him, the hotel employs around 26 people and serves a guest base drawn largely from Kongsberg Technology Park — home to some of the world’s biggest oil, energy and defence companies.
That guest profile sets a high bar. “We want to have great technology within our hotel in order for our guests to feel welcome and feel at home, because they’re used to this, they work with technology every day,” says Tveito. It also sets a high bar for security: with senior people from the technology park staying regularly, the hotel has invested heavily in a secure network to protect them.
But the day-to-day mechanics of the front desk were working against that ambition. Prepaid reservations arriving through Expedia and Booking.com had to be chased down by hand – log into the channel, find the reservation, log into another site, key in the card details, submit, print, then push the transaction through the PMS.
“A prepayment reservation took a couple of minutes to do,” says Tveito — and every manual card entry carried risk. “When you enter credit card details manually, it’s easy to get a number wrong or to accidently charge too much, or too little, and you get these chargebacks from the credit card company, which costs us money.”
Invoicing was just as laborious. Sending an invoice by email meant printing it, scanning it back in and attaching it — time that came straight out of the hours the team wanted to spend with guests.
The solution
After reviewing multiple PMS vendors over several years, the hotel chose Protel Cloud with integrated payments from Planet — becoming the first Best Western property in Scandinavia to run the modern platform.
Payments were the decisive change. Prepaid bookings now arrive in Protel Cloud clearly flagged, with the virtual card attached to the reservation. “The credit card is in the reservation. You press two buttons and you’re there,” says Tveito. The only manual step left is confirming the amount is correct.
Around the payment flow, the everyday routines the front desk relies on — check-in, card authorisation, prepayment handling, invoicing — are all simpler. Invoices and welcome letters go out directly from the system by email, and guests no longer leave the desk holding a printed folio. Protel Cloud also connects to the hotel’s wider stack, including its restaurant and point-of-sale system, key card encoding, e-invoicing and accounting.
Being cloud-based changed how the hotel is managed, too. “I’m able to log on from anywhere in the world, not being forced to stay here in Kongsberg at all times,” says Tveito. “Flexibility is key.”
The result
The clearest measure is at the desk. Check-in that would take five minutes at a traditional hotel now takes ten seconds. At peak summer occupancy, when almost every booking arrives prepaid through an online travel agent, the arithmetic compounds. “During one shift you have, let’s say, 30 check-ins, and that would take you two minutes per check-in. That’s an hour to only do prepayments. So you save a lot of time.”
Payment accuracy has followed. “There is almost no errors at all now,” says Tveito. With the card on file and the payment triggered from the reservation, mis-keyed amounts and the resulting chargebacks have gone. Training is faster as well — “it’s so much easier to show them what to do, and easier for them to handle. You don’t have to be worried about mistakes here and there. So that’s peace of mind.”
Handing responsibility for hosting the PMS to Planet has added further peace of mind. For a hotel that takes network security seriously on behalf of its corporate guests, having the property management system managed by Planet is, as Tveito puts it, “one less thing to worry about.”
Crucially, the time saved is being reinvested where the hotel wants it. “One of our top values is that the guest comes first at all times,” says Tveito. “A lot of that comes down to having the time to actually speak to them, get to know them, and make sure that they feel welcome. This time that we save on manual operations is invested directly into the guests”. Tveito notes that it shows in the reviews.
There is an environmental dividend, too. Emailing invoices instead of printing them is “efficient for both the guests, us, and the environment.”
“I would tell other hotels that there are real benefits in moving PMS and payments to Planet — especially the payments, the prepayments, the handling of guests, how easy it is to send out welcome letters and invoices. And, of course, the stability. We haven’t had stability issues with Protel Cloud. That’s been very, very good.” Ole Eirik Sel Tveito, Hotel Manager, Best Western Gyldenløve Hotell
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