Aditya Sanghi, Co-Founder and CEO, Hotelogix

Interview with Aditya Sanghi, Co-Founder and CEO, Hotelogix

Aditya Sanghi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Hotelogix, a brand offering a globally renowned, disruptive cloud-based property management system.

Aditya is a business leader with a distinct vision and impeccable track record of executing path-breaking strategies and leading technology-driven transformations over the years.

As someone who always believed that impact at scale can only be made by delivering products of high quality and relevance to the industry, Aditya embarked on the journey to solve challenges faced by the global hospitality industry with Hotelogix.

With customer-centricity at the core, Aditya believes that Hotelogix can help hotels realize the best potential of their business and deliver memorable experience to all guests.

To address these aspects, he joined hands with Prabhash Bhatnagar (Founder and Chief Product Officer, Hotelogix) to establish the Hotelogix brand in 2008.

Prior to embarking on his entrepreneurial journey with Hotelogix, Aditya Sanghi spearheaded product initiatives at Informatica and ABO Software in various leadership
roles.

He has been instrumental in building global product positioning, and executing highly successful business strategies.

Aditya is an industry stalwart and thought leader who is now not only leading Hotelogix to greater heights, but is also a keen contributor and member of organizations such as SaaSBoomi, iSpirt, Round Table India, TIE and NASSCOM.

Aditya is a regular at global industry events/conferences and tradeshows in the travel and hospitality segment like WTM London, ITB Berlin, HITEC etc. This enables him to network with other industry thought leaders and experts.

Aditya is known to be a resilient entrepreneur with an optimistic outlook on life. Having completed his post-graduation in International business from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Aditya has successfully optimized and leveraged his expertise across various leadership and entrepreneurial roles over the last few years.

Besides his academic achievements Aditya also attributes his professional success to the world of sports.

Having been a sports person during his college life and having played competitive table tennis at the state level, Aditya truly believes that the best lessons of his entrepreneurial journey came from his experiences on the field of sports.

Aditya believes that the time spent with loved ones and developing hobbies play an important role is grooming and nurturing leadership skills.

When away from work Aditya enjoys playing sports, spending time with family and listening to good music.

In an exclusive interview with Aditya Sanghi, Co-Founder and CEO, Hotelogix explains How he start his entrepreneurial journey..

Please tell us a little about your entrepreneurial journey.

Aditya Sanghi: My quest to become an entrepreneur by creating a world-class product started when I joined my brother’s company, now called Edisphere.

My stint there prompted me to make a product/brand out of India that can solve problems on a global scale.

My attempt at it got a boost and solid backing when I met Prabhash Bhatnagar, the Founder, and Hotelogix came into existence in 2008.

In a way, my passion for putting India SaaS on a global map also influenced my decision to embark on my entrepreneurial journey with Hotelogix.

Kindly brief us about Hotelogix, its specialization, and the services that it offers

Aditya Sanghi: Hotelogix PMS is a top-of-the-line international solution helping the users overcome the limitations posed by conventional on-premise tech solutions.

The brand offers integration with all leading third-party software and deployment without any delays. The solution takes care of the end-to-end booking system starting from displaying accurate inventory information, to collection of deposits against reservations, generating and emailing custom quotations as per customer requirements, capturing valuable data to be used in CX analysis and enhancement. 

Hotelogix is recognized as a leader by Gartner in its hotel management front-runners index. According to Capterra, the brand has the third-highest user base in the world. 

Hotelogix has a workforce of more than 200 people located across the world. Hotelogix clientele includes some of the leading names in the global hospitality sector such as Wandertrails, Leisure Hotels, La Fontaine, Landmark Hotels and Resorts, Hotel Imperial, and many other boutique hotels to large hotel chains with over 10,000 rooms inventory. 

Hotelogix’s mission is to deliver a seamless experience to its hospitality customers by the deployment of cloud technology that delivers consistent and uncompromised application performance globally!

What service(s) or product(s) does Hotelogix offer?

Aditya Sanghi: At Hotelogix, our motto is to help hotels of all sizes and categories to fill in more rooms, sell at the best rate, and serve guests better.

And there is only one way to ensure this – by offering them top-notch cloud-based solutions. Our product portfolio for independent and hotel groups includes Hotel Property Management Systems, Mobile Hotel PMS Apps, Channel Managers, Revenue Management Solutions, and many more.

Apart from our solutions, we also have strategic integrations with a wide range of third-party solutions to allow hotels to pick and choose offerings that suit their requirements.

The crux here is that we aim to help hotels drive their growth by leveraging the power of the cloud with significant time and cost savings.

What is unique about Hotelogix?

Aditya Sanghi: Aditya Sanghi: We are the pioneers of cloud solutions for the hospitality industry. When we rolled out our Hotel PMS and other solutions in 2008, the cloud was yet to emerge as a big thing in India.

It was a bit ahead of time for the hospitality markets globally. Hence, selling our products in developed markets where you have early adopters, like North America and Europe, was the starting point.

Here are our few noteworthy USPs –

• We have a very mature product born on the cloud that has evolved over a decade to become agile, robust, scalable, and secure.
• We now have a full-stack solution encompassing a hotel operation’s significant aspects.
• We have played a critical role in bringing the best practices of the SaaS world to the global hospitality industry.
• We have a deep focus on the mid-sized hotel segment. Hence, our solutions and the entire team, including sales, support is aligned with what is suitable for users in this segment.

Another of our critical USPs worth talking about is – we offer the industry’s first multi-property solution on cloud.

It empowers hotel groups with centralised control over operations, multi-property reports, and easy access to centralised guest history, among many other business benefits.

To be noted here – very recently, we have successfully implemented our multi-property solution for over 50k+ rooms under a single deployment.

Not only this, but we have also trained more than 5000+ users for this deployment entirely online. This is a one-of-a-kind achievement in the world of hospitality technology.

Today, it gives us immense pleasure to say that we have earned the trust of 5000+ hotels in 100+ countries.

What made you choose this type of business?

Aditya Sanghi: The primary driving force was to offer hotels something powerful to leverage the growing online travel while operating more efficiently and profitably.

And then, there was this urge to do something niche that would help us make a mark for our brand. I am confident that the products and applications in this segment will be highly verticalised as IT adoption in hospitality will grow quickly in the time to come.

What was your mission at the outset?

Aditya Sanghi: My mission at the outset was to create a well-defined roadmap for the industry and other players, primarily startups in different SaaS verticals.

How many employees are in your organisation?

Aditya Sanghi: We are a growing organisation with a highly passionate workforce. With our strong position in the market and the industry, we have been able to attract great talents for our leadership roles.

We also have a strong culture of mentoring and working with interns. We currently have 200+ employees and are in the process of hiring across departments.

We are always looking for people who have the fire to learn and grow in a fast-paced yet mature organisation like ours.

What are your company’s goals?

Aditya Sanghi:  Our goal is to drive the momentum of this whole shift of hotels towards the cloud and provide them with the right solution to recover from the Covid-induced losses.

In the next few years, we aim to become the most preferred and leading technology partner for hotels in the markets we operate in, including South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, LATAM, Europe, and North America.

What have been some of your failures, and what have you learned from them?

Aditya Sanghi: In the early stage, we failed to hire the right and capable talent pool for middle management. It has taught us this – the sooner you get good leaders in middle management to own processes, the faster the company will grow.

I have also learned that the founder’s passion can take the company only so far, but rapid scaling up needs a strong team delegation.

Key things to consider before starting a startup?

Aditya Sanghi: First and foremost, you need to understand the problems you are solving. Then, it would help if you could find out if the problem you are trying to address has a substantial market size and are the customers ready to pay. These are a few essential aspects that need the utmost attention before establishing a startup.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made?

Aditya Sanghi:  Firstly, it took us a long time to understand how to judiciously plan spending when you are bootstrapped and how to go about after raising investors’ money.

One needs to be extremely careful while spending investor funds because it can shorten the timeline to success via exponential growth rather than organic and linear growth.

Secondly, early on, we tried to scale up in a market before establishing the product-market fit. Once this is done, it assists you with continuous growth without getting stuck with operational issues.

Your success tips for young and aspiring entrepreneurs. 

Aditya Sanghi: To start with, you should firmly believe in the problem you are attempting to solve. Get ready to analyze situations without emotion, especially when dealing with business decisions.

Stay focused on the ground reality and never be surrounded by yes mates. Make sure that you have a positive attitude towards change.

Most importantly, you must enjoy the journey at every stage as much as you look forward to celebrating success.

Read more interviews of Indian entrepreneurs & startups at SugerMint. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn