"Created in late 2010, dayuse.com is the innovative world leader in online reservation for the emerging ""day use"" hotel room segment in a typical ""Blue Ocean"" strategy. It provides an answer to this key question ""Why should I book a hotel room for a full overnight price when I only need it for a few hours?""
DAYUSE has the ambition to leverage on its leading commercial position in the ""day use"" segment to shake completely the Hospitality Industry by imposing gradually and globally a new scalable industry standard based on an hourly service/rate, 24 hours a day, similarly to industries like car renting.
To consumers (guests) this brings a new range of offers (business travelers, commuters, tourists...) combined with a fairer value to the use of assets thanks to the hourly pricing. To hotels it brings greater efficiency by generating incremental revenues from existing assets and facilities.
Concretely, the company targets to provide to hotels a DAYUSE Proprietary Management System (PMS) called DMS delivered through SaaS with a ground-breaking pricing ""per transaction"" mode.
The PMS market is estimated at $1.5 billion in 2016 and expected to grow to $2.0 billion in 2024. DAYUSE targets its gradual smooth adoption, first as a complementary tool to existing PMS and finally as a full substitute.
DAYUSE will then extend its reach to the whole Hospitality Industry while integrating other distributors. The company wants to be the European game changer in an industry where North American players prevail.
With this project DAYUSE has engaged in preparing and fine-tuning the IT tools for the industrialization (“DAYUSE Global Connect”) while running pilots in different countries (Europe, US, Asia) with different hotel types (Independent, Chains) to be prepared for the challenges of the Go-to-Market execution in Phase 3.
The Phase 2 project is structured in 4 steps over 24 months:
- step 1: Develop the Extranet (WP2)
- step 2: Develop the DMS (WP3)
- step 3: Test and improve the solution with pilot hotels (WP4)
- step 4: Prepare the Go-to-market strategy (WP5)
Conclusion of the action
During the first half, the project progressed well on track, during the second half however it was strongly impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. It has affected every sector across the globe, and the hotel industry which we operate in is among the hardest hit. This major and unexpected change to our ecosystem created both opportunities and challenges at the same time for our project. Opportunities - faced with historically low occupancy rates due to the absence of tourism, hotels are looking for new models to make up for lost revenues and they now clearly see the opportunity of both the commercial and the technical innovations offered by DAYUSE. Challenges - faced with short term financial difficulties hotels and deploying drastic cost reduction plans, this is undeniably a very unfavorable timing to commercialise a new piece of software.
The Go-to-Market strategy and corresponding project plan were therefore adapted to the context and Phase 3 postponed as a result. It was decided that rather than offering a full range paying solution to our partner hotels, it would be more efficient to offer a free solution with a smaller functional scope for now, focus on creating value by bringing dayuse business and develop our brand an notoriety, and at a later stage when the hotel industry conditions have improved deliver additional functionalities and switch to a full range paying solution.
As of today 70% of our hotel partners have adopted our Day Management System, and we are receiving a large number of inbound requests from independent hotels as well as hotel chains. Although the functional scope of the product was reduced and the commercial phase had to be postponed, we consider this Phase 2 as a success and we will be ready to deploy Phase 3 when time comes."
