Last November ICNEA started its annual meetings with its clients, the first one being in Barcelona, along with this year’s invited partners Booking.com, Roomonitor and Abal Consulting. The aim, as every year, is to review all steps taken in the last 12 months, discuss where we are and explain where we are going at a company level. During the 4 daily programmed sessions we then left space to our partners to present their product and services before beginning an open debate over any question, doubt or suggestion.
Each year ICNEA organizes a set of encounters spread in different Spanish cities to allow clients to meet us in person, listen to our CEO Xavier Marin expose steps taken so far, where we are and where we are going, discuss any topic that arises and meet our partners who develop new services we then end up offering.
This year we had the pleasure to host Roomonitor which explained how his sound, electric and door closure systems work along with the auxiliary services they provide. It was quite interesting to know how technology can help agencies avoid the risk of being fined or even lose their license due to noise complaints from the neighborhood, clients leaving A/C running although out of the property thus helping contain costs or enhance security without compromising comfort.
Abal consulting was next to show in practice how general management of vacation rental agencies still have lots of space for improvement. The biggest advantage of our specific field is that we have an actor who is far ahead of us and can therefore be used as benchmark as its product is very much alike: hotels. Beginning from a more detailed and segmented revenue management to more up to date marketing strategies with the objective to transmit experience and emotion rather than an appealing but cold product.
The encounter finally ended with the activity we most like to concede time to: an open debate among everyone regarding any development we could realize to make our product more useful and effective and their feasibility, general questions and doubts and curiosities regarding channel manager functionality.
Thanks to a such successful 2016/2017 Icnea increased clients so much that we decided to add one more encounter compared to last year. Now that we have many clients in southern spain we selected Malaga to get closer to them and meet them in person!