Castilla Termal

We use Proposales for all our hotels and it’s really helping us to lower the workload where we have high volumes of RFP’s coming in.

_{Lucia Pumares
Sales Director}

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Recently we interviewed Lucia Pumares, Sales Director of Castilla Termal, and Silvia García Sánchez, Commercial Assistant, who have been our clients for a year and a half and a precious source of improvements for Proposales.

We asked them questions to discover more about their workflow and how they are using Proposales in their day-to-day work, the results they are generating, and future applications.

Can you give us some context about your group?

Castilla Termal is a group of five hotels, including the new Castilla Termal Brihuega, a very ambitious project. In total, we have 3 four-star hotels and 2 five-star hotels (thanks to a new addition).

It is a unique offering where we combine historic buildings, but above all we give great importance to sustainability by working with local suppliers and local employees to revitalize our rural and lesser-known environment.

We use Proposales for all our hotels and it’s really helping us to lower the workload where we have high volumes of RFP’s coming in.

How do you use Proposales?

It is mandatory to use the Proposales tool in all of our hotels, for individual booking requests, groups, meetings, events and even F&B requests. We create established templates, as complete as possible to save time, which is one of the main reasons why we decided to use the tool. Creating a proposal is very simple and agile.

We are not yet using it for weddings but it will be the application we will give it in the future. The reason is that our target audience for weddings is practically local, except perhaps in Valbuena, and it generates a bit of uncertainty and doubts about whether they will like this very dynamic format. For us, it is clear that it works perfectly, so the next step is to try it in this regard.

What are the main challenges you face in the company?

The main reason why we decided to start using Proposales was time management because our process was very tedious. For each request, we did something ad-hoc and even though we had established templates, it was quite a manual job. The main challenge we had was to optimize the time of the teams by manually modifying the template, and even though we had some guidelines and protocols, there could always be some lack of knowledge in certain situations or the way we expressed ourselves may not have been what the company wanted. So the goal was to improve the quality of our offers and the day-to-day operational tasks of our team, remove manual work so they could focus on the most important part: customer service and personalization. And also the most attractive way to show the hotel to the customer because the company image is something very important to us, and Proposales helps us a lot to make an impact with the possibility of even showing videos.

In summary, our team was completely overwhelmed handling requests, we were losing focus on the personal and networking part with the customer in-person, and investing too much time in administrative and operational tasks. We saw that we needed to make life easier for our team so they could focus on creating great experiences.

Why Proposales?

We felt super supported and safe throughout the process, from the first contact, through the collaboration agreement, training, and follow-up.

Our company is a small company and resources are limited, and we have to make well-considered decisions on where we invest both our time and our economic resources. Proposales let us do a trial period and we were convinced that it was the perfect tool for us. Then we did several training sessions with the whole team to answer questions and concerns and to get the most out of the tool.

Regarding your results, how are you measuring them?

Regarding results, we have shortened the response time, which was one of our major goals, and which we want to continue improving, as well as optimizing time management. We have also improved conversion, but since we are in a post-pandemic situation and customer behavior is changing a lot, we have to wait to make comparisons.

In our Castilla Termal back office, we record requests and whether they convert or not. We do it in an Excel and have associated pivot tables from where we extract very valuable information, for example, how many requests we have had from an agency, so that when renewing an agreement, we can now measure requests and conversion in Proposales, where their clients come from, how much they have converted, and so on.

If you could make a wish list of elements to ask for from Proposales, what would they be?

Regarding what we talked about in the previous question, if we could have a download button for statistical data within the Insights of Proposales, it would be ideal.

We would also like to include an event summary table at the top of the proposal, we now write this in text, but a table overview would be great to have.

Another point was the multiple sending that would also streamline internal processes, and we are pleased that this functionality is now up and running!

For internal communication, sometimes it would be great to be able to communicate within the platform to share information to other teams about event operations. Currently, we are forwarding the summary pdf generated on the platform to our colleagues, but it would be ideal to automate it.

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