Innovations in the Hospitality industry

How has the hospitality industry involved in the last few years? In what way has digital innovation improved the customer experience while redefining the nature of competitive advantage? And does any of this change the way we work and live? If so, how? I talk about this, and more, with Javier Cedillo Espin, who’s gained much experience working with hospitality world leader Accor and operating an Airbnb-like platform hospitality startup, onefinestay, before launching his own venture-capital fund and working on the business of “co-living”.

Javier has been through three different chapters throughout his career.

Innovation involves going from a functional culture to an experience one

In the first chapter, he helped and established company, namely Accor, evolved from functional excellence to excelling at building experiences. He defines himself as becoming an experienced engineer. This requires understanding of emotional benefits as opposed to simply understanding how to optimize a given process.

Innovation in the hospitality industry means evolving to a platform business model

In the second chapter of his career, he became CEO of Airbnb like platform business startup called onefinestay. The issues here involve building excellent experiences without being able to work upon an existing infrastructure but rather building an ecosystem of partners that deliver the same level of excellence and experience while at the same time leveraging digital technologies such as Digital keys to make everybody’s life easier in the hospitality business whether it’s operators or customers.

And… innovation is renovation!

In the third chapter of his career, Javier has founded Key Partners Ventures. He is backing startups that are enabling digital transformation in the hospitality sector. One start up is improving the in-room experience in the hospitality business, as an example. Javier is also questioning our residential choices and seeing how to leverage Europe’s formidable historical residential assets and propel them in the 21^st century. What if you could live in a 16^th century castle while working in a 21^st century corporation at the cutting edge of technology?

It’s all here!