Tassos Kotzanastassis is the founder and managing director of the 8G Group, a private equity real estate group,and a founding partner at Petra Hospitality Management, a hotel management company based in Istanbul and focusing on Turkey, East Mediterranean, and wider Central Asia. With the group actively focused on property technology, Hospitality Investor caught up with Kotzanastassis to find out more.
Hospitality Investor: Tell us about the use of drones in the real estate industry.
Tassos Kotzanastassis: Drones are already used extensively in the property industry. They are used, for example, in aerial photograph, particularly when showcasing expansive areas such as resorts. In surveying, drones equipped with mapping software and LiDAR technology are invaluable during the planning and design stages of a project. Drones help us access areas which are difficult or hazardous for humans, such as rooftops. In addition, when equipped with non-visible light sensors (such as thermal cameras), they can help us detect heat losses, water leaks, structural issues or even security threats, such as intruders. These advantages become all the more important when it comes to large-scale properties such as hotels and resorts.
Hospitality Investor: You are using cutting-edge software to process corporate and legal documents. Tell us more.
Tassos Kotzanastassis: Regrettably, the property industry is very much of a laggard when it comes to digitisation. Paper documents are still an issue, and this applies to the hospitality industry as well. We identified the problem several years ago and partnered with a company called Leverton AI (eventually acquired by MRI and now called MRI Contract Intelligence). Its AI-based, deep learning algorithms work at scale, automatically extracting relevant information out of masses of documents and delivering easy access to structured data.
So, for example, in hospitality, one could feed the system with thousands of paper customer satisfaction surveys and extract all relevant information in a structured way. Another application, in residential for example, is to read masses of repetitive documents in PDF form, such as leases, and extract the relevant information much more efficiently. By the way, one of the use cases was non-performing loans, a sector very much in the forefront following the European banking crisis about ten years ago. Our group was heavily involved in the sector and it was a classic case of mountains of paper containing unstructured data in need of digitisation.
Hospitality Investor: What technology are you deploying at Petra Hospitality Management?
Tassos Kotzanastassis: With around 1,500 keys under management, we are proud to be a key partner of Marriott, Hilton, and Radisson in Turkey. Working with major brands allows us to leverage on their technology but we believe that creating our supplementary tech stack is fundamental for operational efficiency and guest satisfaction. One example is HotelIQ which uses predictive analytics, forecasting and revenue management. Improving the top-line is of course crucial to profitability and investor returns.
Hospitality Investor: What tech innovations do you see on the horizon?
Tassos Kotzanastassis: Many of the large chains such as Marriott, are using robots for room delivery and customer service, and larger hotels are using automatic cleaning devices. I think we’ll see more use of robots and drones for cleaning, not least, because staffing is one of the biggest challenges in the industry. Humans will still make the beds, clean the mirrors, and so on, but partnering with robots will speed up tasks. You could also have little drones to hover in each room and do quality inspections.
Hospitality Investor: And distribution?
Tassos Kotzanastassis: Generative AI is already making a big impact on how we as consumers search for hotels and plan travel, so as hoteliers we are very interested in plugging into these applications to make sure that our hotels are coming out at the very top of these searches.
Hospitality Investor: How is the future looking for Petra?
Tassos Kotzanastassis: We see tremendous opportunity in Turkey, Central Asia and very interestingly, East Africa. We add value in three ways: the first and most obvious is operations: professional management, and a centralised team looking after revenue, IT, HR, F&B and so on, particularly for relatively smaller properties which cannot justify a full-time C-suite. The second way is branding which delivers superior occupancies and ADR. Brand penetration is still low in Europe and the RevPAR uplift considerable. And the third way is to extract value out of the property itself, so maybe there is underutilised conference space to convert, expand the physical space and so on