(Photo credit: VinHMS)

CiHMS is a platform that manages all operational needs of a hotel. Any hotels need many different systems to manage their operation, from reservation to property management, from housekeeping to transportation, and to the management of the maintenance of older equipment. What we want to do and what we did with CiHMS is to build a platform that manages all of that operations for our customers. The platform seamlessly connects all departments, make data flow faster, and reduce errors. By doing that, we can reduce the operation costs and increase guests’ experience because now there’s no more something like lost information between departments. We can also increase revenue thanks to our integrations with regional online travel agents (OTA). The system is built on what we call a guest centric way where the guest is the core of everything. It is not just for guests, but also for hotel employees because we believe happy employees will make guests happy.

What make CiHMS different from other available apps like Smile or Opera?

We are confident that, compared to local products, we bring a lot more for our customers. However when compared with world-class products, we are a new player. We can't compare on number of features but we don’t just build a management product as I say, we want to build an open platform that grows with the ever changing needs of the market. The kind of openness will allow the system to integrate with new technologies and services even if we don't know what it is today. In a word, we want to future-proof their operations. I give you an example: about a month ago, Google opened up what they call a Google Hotels, allowing hotels to post on its website. We are the first company in Vietnam that integrates with Google Hotels, only about three weeks after they launched. The idea of an open platform is that when we build our platform, even we don’t know what Google Hotels is before, we follow an open standard so that when it happens we can do integration very easily.

CiHMS has been deployed at all Vinpearl hotels. Do you have any plans to sell the platform to other businesses?

Definitely! We already have a few local customers and many large hotels have expressed their interest. But we are not liberal to say yes because when we work with our customers, we have to ask for their permission to use their names. Vinpearl is the case where we have the permission to use their name. Many hotels don’t feel comfortable to give us their names. We’re working on that and will share when we have the permission. So stay tuned!

VinHMS CEO Nguyen Van Hoang who was the first solutions architect of Amazon Web Services Vietnam is responsible for helping Vietnamese organizations of all shapes and sizes understand and design advanced cloud computing solutions.  Before moving back to Vietnam, Mr. Hoang was co-founder and CTO of Sysnify, a Houston-based startup that built Online Circular platform for 95 stores of United Supermarkets in Texas.

How do you make your product more popular and user friendly?

We understand that technology only is not enough and training is needed. We make sure that all tourism workers of our customers are trained. We do training and also do fresh training every few months for them. Down the road, we’ve partnered with Vin University and schools of hospitality to train their students using new technologies and we accept students for internship at our company. We’ll also build a player test environment not just for Vinpearl, but also for Vinuni so that the school can use that virtual hotel to train the students. Later this year we’ll also provide free online tutorials, videos, and training so that even if you are not part of Vinuni, you can go to our website to learn all the skills from our video tutorials. 

Thank you for taking the time with us! That was Nguyen Van Hoang, CEO of VinHMS.