CORAL SPRINGS, FL—M&A activity is a hot topic when it comes to the hotel industry; over the past couple of years, major companies have been transformed by consolidation—and the same is true for vacation ownership.
“Certainly, a trend right now in vacation ownership has been consolidation. You have the large players acquiring the smaller players,” said Bryan Ten Broek, VP, business development, Nordis Technologies Inc. “As a result, they’re trying to match up systems and communications with different customer groups in a way that’s cohesive. But that can be challenging.”
Nordis Technologies is a full-service technology platform that engages in customer communications management and payments, and it works with several large vacation ownership companies that have acquired other companies in the past five years, including Diamond Resorts International and Holiday Inn Club Vacations. “Trying to communicate with those different owner bases in a consistent way can certainly be a challenge as you look to onboard those companies, and essentially put new processes in place that are consistent with what their standard operating procedures are,” he explained, noting that tech companies like Nordis can help.
“What we do as a company is produce print and digital communications for our customers,” he said. “From our standpoint, the output is the easy part: printing or emailing communications out to the end user. What makes us unique is that we’ve attacked the process with technology. We look to help our clients automate as much of their communications as possible.” The company does this through Expresso, a cloud-based platform that gives companies control over preparing, modifying and distributing electronic and mailed billing statements, compliance letters, confirmations, newsletters, marketing pieces, etc.
Steve Pflugner, SVP of capital management, Orange Lake Resorts, which has a strategic alliance with IHG for Holiday Inn Club Vacations, said, “Nordis Technologies took our printing and marketing capabilities to a new level. It is more than just a printer, and has become an integral partner in connecting with our customers. Its leadership is uniquely experienced in printing, marketing and technology.”
“As a company like Holiday Inn brings on more business, it’s able to use Expresso to onboard these new resorts or management contracts and efficiently put communication with the owners in place, send billing statements and manage the HOA aspects like meeting notices and budgets. And we’ve recently put into the marketplace an automated voting procedure, so they could run HOA elections using our technology,” said Ten Broek. “All of their owner touchpoints, whether print or email, can reside in our system and they can execute those communications from the desktop. They can build a content library with different logos, addresses, content and copy, assemble those communications and execute that all from their desktop.”
Expresso lets timeshare companies quickly create and modify messaging and communications
This, he noted, is especially important to larger companies that want more autonomy. “These companies want to move really quickly. They don’t want to wait for a vendor to process a proof. What Expresso allows them to do is run the process on their own,” he said. “We’re there to help and we have the ability to do a lot for them, but we find our largest clients like to control that process on their own so if they need to make a change—which could be something as simple as changing a disclosure or logo in a communication—they can do that in a matter of minutes. They log in and update a letter or package, or the content and that goes into production the next day.”
Pflugner agreed with Ten Broek’s assessment. “Their technology is very dynamic and allows our company to change the content and messaging rapidly. We have been very successful in onboarding new customers and portfolios in just days versus weeks,” he said.
According to Ten Broek, simplicity was key when it came to designing this platform. “We try to identify where there are pain points in the process and we try to bring a technology-enabled solution to solve that pain,” he said. “For example, one thing that’s very common across all larger organizations is if they have to engage with their internal IT departments, that creates time and expense. What we’ve tried to do is create solutions the business can use to execute different communications without involving IT. We’ve done that by offering a cloud-based application that can be accessed through any web browser of any connected device. We call ourselves data agnostic. We can ingest virtually any type of data file and convert that into whatever we need to execute the communication campaign. When you’re talking with the business about putting an agreement together and you explain our solution does not require internal IT resources, it gets their attention.”
Ten Broek noted that ExpressoVote, which allows vacation ownership and property management companies to manage the annual election process for homeowner associations, has been popular lately. “Running an election for a 100-unit condominium is not that difficult. With timeshare, you multiply everything by 50 or more. A typical timeshare condo may have 75 owners because they sell every-other-year usage, so the numbers get big. That’s where automation comes in,” he said.
What will be a major focus for Nordis Technologies going forward? “Within vacation ownership, the industry is starting to again focus on sales and marketing, particularly selling to first-time buyers,” said Ten Broek. “For years timeshare was rolling, and there was a lot of expense in the sales and marketing side of the business, but they were growing and adding owners. When the Great Recession hit, financing dried up and so developers slowed down sales and focused more on selling more timeshare to their existing owners—which is a much different sales and marketing process from when you’re out prospecting for new customers. That’s starting to shift back to where large developers are shifting at least some focus on selling to first-time buyers.”
And the demographic of that buyer has changed. “It’s skewing younger. The next generation is entering that period of their life where they’re looking at vacation ownership as a potential solution for their vacation needs,” said Ten Broek. “As that next generation comes into peak earning years and wants to own this product, the way you communicate with these customers is much different than how it was with baby boomers or gen Xers.”
Certainly, it was a factor in the development of ExpressoPay, an online payment portal. “Boomers pay by checks but millennials want to pay on their phone, and the generation in between is online. There are different percentages for each in terms of how they want to pay, but vacation ownership companies should have a digital payment strategy,” said Ten Broek. “We’ve had success in bringing that technology to the marketplace in the last few years.” HB
