Leif Jägerbrand’s story of founding and building Atomize.
“Being a newcomer to the hospitality industry whose mind was open to exploring new solutions to old problems turned out to be my advantage when founding Atomize and making it today’s top-rated revenue management system”, says Leif.
From adtech to hospitality
Before starting Atomize, Leif founded and ran an adtech company which never lost a single optimization benchmark and was ranked no. 1 in the world in their field. After selling this company, Leif learned that hoteliers manually set room rates and was totally shocked. Coming from an industry where everything was 100% automated, he could barely believe it.
Founder and Chairman of the Board, Atomize
After confirming this through a market study, I decided to change that by creating a hotel revenue management system worthy of the 21st century.
Given the track record of Leifs’ previous company in adtech and the similarity between optimizing display ads and hotel room rates, Leif was confident about starting Atomize from the outset.
To sum it up, I’m a tech guy by trade and an entrepreneur at heart whose greatest joy is solving complex business problems with technology, Leif explains.
Shifting from manual to automated hotel revenue management
If you ask me, there are two reasons why humans shouldn’t price hotels manually. First, the problem’s scale makes it impossible. Even small hotels with few room types and variables (e.g. breakfast or cancellation) will find it impossible to regularly take time out of their busy schedule to update their rates and do it well. Secondly, the problem is highly complex. Changing the rate for a single room type can impact rates for all other room types on the same day and the following days. Instead of trying (and failing) to understand these intricate connections, revenue managers should leave pricing to an automated AI system and focus on strategic hotel revenue management, not on shuffling numbers in Excel.
Proof of concept: Atomize grows rapidly
Our commitment to making our clients’ lives easier helped us quickly gain traction, first in Sweden, then abroad. While some legacy PMS providers have proven to be true growth stoppers due to unavailable or outrageously expensive API technology, partnering with the likes of Clock Software PMS, the top-ranked PMS on HotelTechReport, helped us increase our reach and build a reputation, both among hoteliers and in the hotel tech world. Today more and more hotels are looking for an automated revenue management system like Atomize, which helps them save time and increase their RevPAR through improved pricing strategies.
Moving ahead at full steam
Looking at how things are going, I’m confident we’ll achieve our goal of making Atomize the world’s leading automated revenue management software. Soon we’ll release our new, fully developed automated RMS solution and we’re already working on our real-time optimization engine. It will lead the way to real-time channel price optimization, segmentation price optimization, and so much more. Even further down the road, we’d be excited to open true, individual real-time pricing on leading OTAs. These dynamic rates and commissions would end the direct booking war and be a huge step forward for both hotels and OTAs in providing a better customer experience. And if you think about it, that’s what hospitality is all about, isn’t it? For the full interview with Atomize founder Leif Jägerbrand, visit HotelTechReport.
