You might think that the auto finance industry and the hospitality industry don’t have much in common, but Georgine Muntz, CEO of hospitality operating platform company Visual Matrix, knows otherwise.
Hospitality is “a different place in the same kind of adoption cycle,” she explained, “but getting customers to migrate, getting them to adopt new technology, helping them understand how partnering in the industry can benefit them—all of those things have been really similar.”
After spending 20 years in auto finance technology, Muntz took the helm of Visual Matrix in 2021. Her leadership team’s ability to take the things that worked in transforming auto finance with lenders to hoteliers has been broadly yet strategically applied to Visual Matrix products, which include PMS software and a housekeeping and maintenance app to streamline routine tasks and connect teams.
“Eighty percent has been a repeat for us. And then there's that 20 percent that we're adapting and learning in hospitality that's been different. So that's been fun,” she said. One noticeable difference is the collaboration in the hospitality space. Whereas auto financing was “hyper-competitive” and partnering was “nonexistent,” that’s certainly not the case with hoteliers.
“The collaborative nature of women is part of what led to the success at Georgine's last company, and really, leads into how we partner,” said Chief Development Officer Patty Jefferson, whom Muntz worked with previously and hired for the role at Visual Matrix. In fact, six of the eight members of VM’s executive team are women.
A Familiar Ecosystem
Visual Matrix was started in 2000 from a belief that select-service hotels deserved the same level of functionality and service as a full-service or resort hotel. Many of the challenges a select service or smaller properties face are identical to those faced by larger properties, Muntz explained. “Our company founder had spent many years developing PMS software and believed that this opportunity was large and would greatly benefit hoteliers." Within five years of launch, VM was the number one choice of Best Western franchisees and continued to expand to serve all service levels and other brands and independents.
Muntz describes the PMS system as the “heart” of the operation. “It takes in a lot of data and it delivers out a lot of data. That's exactly what we had in auto finance. I was building a point-of-sale system for lenders; here, it's a point-of-sale system for hoteliers. And what we found is that if we partnered with all those inbound and outbound companies, we could create a lower cost of maintaining the core system and a great benefit for all the customers, because the same problems we have in hotels—like vendors blaming each other, people pointing fingers, problems never getting solved because nobody will take ownership of it—we had those same problems.” When she saw that same ecosystem existed in hospitality, “where we are the core system with lots of ins and outs,” Muntz knew exactly how to position Visual Matrix’s solutions.
The company has continuously evolved, with most of the growth and change being driven directly by hoteliers and hotel team members. Listening to their challenges and needs and building out to meet them allows the company to be the partner they want to be. Muntz shared that the company operates in an agile framework that allows them to improve and update their software every two weeks.
“We host customer input meetings and gather input from the entire user community regularly. Our team is always looking at new technologies and determining how to incorporate new methods or tools. Of course, most recently we have been exploring and adding AI tools to our system to better support users and to enhance the user experience,” she said.
A Partnership Mentality
The company strives to understand how their system impacts users on a day-to-day basis and encourages all team members to spend time in a hotel as part of new employee training. Muntz said one of the first things she did when she took over as CEO was to spend a few days behind the front desk at a hotel. After taking the two-hour online training necessary, she spent a morning checking out and processing front-desk activities and reconciliations, then the afternoon checking guests in and managing inventory. “I even cleaned a room and experienced the housekeeping aspect of the job,” she said. “Unfortunately, I failed the housekeeping inspection, but I learned much.”
What differentiates Visual Matrix’s PMS, Muntz said, is two-fold: the first is the team and how they interact with customers. “We believe our entire existence depends on ensuring our customers can always operate 24/7 and that technology should help—not hinder—their efforts.”
The second differentiator is their culture of partnering. “We don’t believe we are a ‘vendor,’ and we don’t integrate with ‘other vendors’—we choose to partner. We partner with our customers to create product roadmaps and improve support. We partner with other providers to ensure our customers have access to all the tools they need to run their property. This culture of partnership means we don’t point fingers and blame others when a problem arises. Instead, we directly work with our integrated partners to solve customer issues, we set up our support systems to make this possible, and we train our team to treat customers and integrated providers as valuable partners.”
This article was originally published in the September edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.