Blog

September note from the CEO

Written by Krasimir Trapchev | Sep 26, 2024 1:32:01 PM

With time, I’ve come to appreciate the month of September. It carries the vividness of summer, the maturity of autumn, and somehow prepares us for new beginnings. In that spirit, I’ve started sharing a regular update — a simple way to reflect on what’s been happening at Clock during the month.

These notes won’t be formal, just my thoughts on our progress, what’s new, and what’s coming next. My goal is to make this a monthly practice.

Business as usual

Our development team has been hard at work, releasing over 35 new features and improvements. Here are just a few highlights:

  • Sales and Events Extensions: We are continuing to add new useful features, like the improved Charge packages that help you handle the package handling, ToDo action plans that will help you set and track all usual tasks related to the successful organisation of an event and the Event breadcrumbs which will simply improve your experience allowing you to pick up where you left.
  • Service Group Merchandising: That’s one of my favourite new features, although you may even find it invisible on the first glimpse. It helps promote additional services without overwhelming guests.
  • Smart Reconciliation Reports: Simplifies payment reconciliation and provides better control over transactions to hoteliers using our In-platform Payment solution.

Some impressive achievements

Looking at some performance statistics, which I do from time to time, I’ve seen that our long-time partners from The Yellow in Italy have surpassed 35% of all their bookings coming directly through Clock's booking engine.

This is a fantastic achievement, and we congratulate them for successfully driving more direct bookings — showcasing how our booking engine can really make a difference.

Things to improve

With the latest MICE update, we’ve once again seen the importance of handling transitions well. Quite some users have migrated to the new version of our Sales and Events functionality, and our developers have optimised the menus for the use of the new version.

That turned into a real problem and frustration for others, who have not migrated yet-teaching us a lesson that there is more to plan in handling such changes.

We don’t know quite yet what exactly we should be changing in our procedures in future, but we apologise for the inconvenience and are thinking on how to improve the process of rolling out the new features and updates.

Team developments

September brought some great additions to our team. I’m really pleased to welcome three new team members to our marketing department.

First, Nina Soldo, our new Director of Brand Development, has joined us and has already started making an impact. Her energy is contagious, and she brings a fresh perspective that we’re all excited about.

We’ve also welcomed Stefanie Thiele, who has been a long-time customer and now joins us as Product Marketing Manager. Her deep understanding of our product and customer needs makes her a perfect fit to help us communicate our solutions more effectively.

Lastly, a special congratulations to our marketing coordinator, Nas Chonkov, who welcomed Katerina — a new baby girl into his family. We’re all so happy for him, and I’m sure Katerina will bring a lot of joy to their home.

Looking ahead

There’s a lot to look forward to in the coming months, including the upcoming release of our hybrid attribute-based selling (HABS) feature, which will help hoteliers generate more revenue from their rooms without needing to restructure their properties.

As our focus on hotels with event functions remains strong, we’re preparing some exciting new features in this department. We’re working on integrating email capabilities into our event management system, bringing transactional and conversational aspects closer together.

And there’s more to come as we move toward a digital-first alternative to traditional event handling. We have a vision of the ultimate Sales and Event solution we want to build, and we’ve recently published an article outlining its complete concept.  

It’s been a pleasure writing this first letter, and I’m excited to share more updates with you in October. There’s plenty to be excited about, and I look forward to what’s next.

Warm regards,

Krasimir

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