JAMES LEMON: Good morning. Welcome, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the product keynote this morning. I thought it was pretty phenomenal. But we’re super excited to spend the next 30 minutes with you and really get deep into some of the focus industries we have here at Stripe. And today we’re talking all about hospitality. 

My name is James Lemon. I look after the hospitality, travel, leisure vertical here at Stripe. I’m delighted to be joined by Richard, Tor, and Drew this morning. By way of background, I’ve had about three years here at Stripe. I was reflecting on the panel in my seven years at IHG Hotels & Resorts before this. I spent a bit of time running their innovation hub, sitting on that side of the fence, really thinking about: What are the big SaaS platforms we need to be bringing into the business? And how can they accelerate the innovation we’re having? 

So super excited to go full circle and, three-and-a-half to four years later, be sitting here with those platforms really thinking about how broad and how deep they’re now going in the hospitality space and unlocking problems for their merchants and their end customers. And we'll be exploring a bit about that today as well as diving into what is that balance between the guest experience and technology as we think about how to serve consumers for the next 5–10 years with all the changes we're seeing. So super exciting time, and looking forward to spending a bit of time with each of you. I guess I want to start with some quick intros. It’d be great if you’d just do a quick intro of yourself and your company. 

Maybe give us one interesting fact about the business that people here might not know. And you've all got phenomenal careers. Maybe just tell us a little bit about what sparked your passion for hospitality originally. Tor, we'll start with you. 

TOR OPEDAL: Yeah. Thank you, gents, for inviting us, first of all. And thanks, everybody, for joining us. So I work at Olo. A lot of you have probably not heard about Olo but you used Olo. We sit in between you and many of the large restaurant brands when you place a digital order. So either on your phone or online. 

My journey into Olo? I wish I could sit here and say I planned this out, it’s perfectly measured and timed. But it’s been a weaving career path, starting out in the restaurant operations and then moving over to MasterCard. But then having that blend of restaurant operations and payments put me in a good place at Olo. So yeah, it wasn’t planned out that way; but it ended up being that way, and I’m very happy to be here. 

JAMES LEMON: Nice. Thanks. And Drew? 

DREW PIERCE: Yeah. Hi. I’m Drew Pierce. I’m from Tripleseat Software. Tripleseat Software is similar to Olo: you’ve probably used it and not realized it. We sell to restaurants, unique venues and hotels. And we’re event management software. So if you’re booking an event for whatever, whether it’s a reception, a birthday, a business meeting at a restaurant, generally from the lead form that’s on the website all the way through to booking the menu—the BEO, “banquet event order”—etc., all the way through to paying for that event is our software. 

We’re with quite a few—probably upwards of 18,000—different restaurants. As far as me with hospitality, I’ve been involved with it probably going back to when I was in grad school. I actually was an event bartender at events at a large hotel in Boston. Did that. I got out of it. I enjoyed bartending and that part of it. I was in consumer products for 15–16 years and then came to Tripleseat almost 10 years ago now, and have been there ever since as the chief operating officer.

JAMES LEMON: Awesome. Great to have you here. Richard? 

RICHARD VALTR: Amazing. So hello, everyone. I’m Richard Valtr. I’m the founder of Mews. Mews is a property management system, which is just, I guess, a fancy word for the central nervous system of a hotel’s operation. So we do everything from helping the housekeepers clean rooms on time or, for example, helping guests check in, with taking the reservations and everything like that. And we try and do it in an automated way. 

I guess my journey to Mews was being or growing up in the hotel industry and just hating the software that I would have to work with, especially as a night receptionist, which is the worst job. You’re just sitting there for 12 hours just, basically, clicking reports at 2:00 a.m.—and also letting in the drunk people that want to actually come into their room. And that’s really why I thought 13 years ago, “How hard can it be to actually build a property management system of my own?” Thirteen years later, I’m still doing the same thing. 

But thankfully, we’ve managed to grow to a scale where it’s not just me being frustrated, but it’s now 1,300 of us trying to solve this perennial problem of check-ins. 

JAMES LEMON: Perfect. Awesome. I think across the world of hotels, events, restaurants, we’ve just got a phenomenal wealth of experience here. So great to have you here. I think we’ll hear a lot in these couple of days about all the reasons why platforms should think about payments and finance. But I wanted to make sure we spend a bit of time really thinking about the end consumers. 

So maybe each of you could just share, in your space—thinking about diners, event managers, event attendees, hotel guests—what are the big trends you’re seeing on the actual consumer side that you know your customers are having to think about? Drew, maybe I’ll start with you. 

DREW PIERCE: Yeah. I think as far as in the world of events, it’s convenience for our customer—our customer’s customer, which is the end consumer. 

So obviously, the ease of use of filling out that lead on the web. It literally, with our software, can come in because the event managers at the restaurants can actually get those through their phone. Also while on their computer. And the fact that they can do everything. Even the consumer can do that all via their phone—changes to a menu all the way to paying for it. So that convenience has really started to develop, really, over the last seven or eight years. 

The company has been around for 13 to 14 years. Initially, it was a slow roll because it was literally pen and paper. You would fax information back and forth, or you would call them up and do that. So I think it’s the convenience and ease of use, which is extremely important.

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. And Richard, how about when you think about hotel guests? What are you seeing over the last couple years? 

RICHARD VALTR: I think it’s the same. And I think, actually, convenience is a big, big thing. I think for us we think about it as: How can we facilitate trust in the fastest possible way? 

So how can you go from being, essentially, somebody who’s arriving, to a hotel to receiving a welcome? I think we want to go past the idea of checking in, where you’re handing over a credit card, handing over a passport. How can that process essentially just be a handshake? And I think that great technology, like Stripe, allows us to think about: How can we actually unlock some of those moments and then make sure that we scale those moments while that person is actually at the hotel? 

So make every single hotel, say, more of a kind of Uberized experience, where you’re not thinking about point of sale and where you have to go to actually make a payment, but really, being able to make that decision about your own experience every single time you just pass through any single facility. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. 

RICHARD VALTR: And I think that that really would lead to the growth of the guest experience. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. Cool. And Tor, how about diners and restaurant-goers? What are they excited about? 

TOR OPEDAL: Oh, a similar thing, too. It’s for us, as a service provider to our customers, which are the brands, and then for them to give the consumers a great checkout experience. Payments with some of the legacy processors is what we see. We had our customers, the brands, come to us and say, “This payments thing is broken” in so many ways.

But just from a consumer experience, going from having to do 8–9 clicks to check out, to 2 clicks; having a repeat customer come back and have that be a seamless experience, and not come across as someone that brand has never seen before—“Hey, I’ve transacted here 10 times. I come across as a brand-new customer each time. What’s going on?” That makes it hard to come back over and over again when you have those barriers. So it’s really making a familiar checkout experience that is convenient, easy, and trusted, and that’s repeatable. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah, lovely. In the game of delivering experiences, it definitely feels like the fewer clicks, as you say, the less friction, then the more you have a chance to really focus on the hospitality piece. Actually, what is it about the food, the event, the stay that I fell in love with? No one is excited about filling in forms. No one is excited about time taken on payments. I think, Rich, you made a great point around trust, which is that it’s really about then loyalty and delight and how you might think about bringing people back the next time, which is huge. 

RICHARD VALTR: Yeah. I think that it’s really about the change in mindset, even for platforms like us. I think back in the ‘90s and the 2000s, all of these platforms were built around inventory management basically, and thinking about the services and the goods that you were actually doing rather than the experience. And the experience is always built around the actual guest. So actually being able to tokenize the guest and being able to recognize that guest really, really quickly, is the thing that’s the unlock for the experience. 

All of us are in hospitality, and we just care about providing a great experience and making it as convenient as possible for the hotel, the restaurant, or the event manager to make sure that they can actually facilitate the greatest experience. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. Nice. And I think a lot of these experiences are also happening slightly further up-funnel, aren’t they? You’re kind of planning your meal, maybe picking your menu, or certainly customizing your hotel stay. So then you’re in the world of personalization and choices you might make digitally before the event starts. 

DREW PIERCE: That’s true. And then in our world, especially, you go through and you do that. It’s automated as far as planning the meal back and forth. 

But it had always been until recently. One of the things—even a lot of restaurants still do this—is it’s time to put down the deposit or pay. And they said, “Okay. Will you call me with your credit card? I’m going to send you a credit-card authorization form.” And we’re like, “No. How easy—just within our customer portal. Key in your credit card, pay, you’re done.” 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. We’re not done yet because I’ve definitely printed off credit-card authorization forms within the last 12 months. 

[General crosstalk]

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. Realizing my [crosstalk] sending it back. 

DREW PIERCE: We're definitely not done yet, that's for sure. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. 

TOR OPEDAL: Just to follow up on what Richard said, too. I think the key to technology is to have advanced technology but not in the face of the consumer. So you increase the hospitality because of the technology. And that lays underneath the experience, and it’s unobtrusive. I think that’s the art. 

RICHARD VALTR: No, it sounds good. Kind of invisible. I like that.

JAMES LEMON: Right. So then let’s get into the world of your merchants, your customers. I’m going to ask you that tricky question: What’s so special about your individual businesses? 

Why do your customers pick you versus the competition that’s out there? And then in particular, if it's okay, I'm going to dive into payments, specifically. Why have you chosen to embed payments into your platform? And again, how are you pitching that to merchants? Why is that part of the decision to pick you? Richard, maybe you could give us the Mews story there. 

RICHARD VALTR: So the Mews story. So really, the first thing that I was trying to solve in the hotel that I was building was how does every single person who comes in actually feel like they're being hosted. So it's a 60-key hotel. It’s run by my sister. 

I wanted everyone to feel like they were actually staying at a small Airbnb. So the key to that is how do I make sure that every single time they come in they don’t have to hand over all of these documents, but they’re actually just having a great conversation about hospitality and about the experiences that they want to have, the way that they want to actually see the city? And I think that that’s really where we thought first about payments. And this is before Stripe Connect actually existed. 

So we did it on a merchant of record model and all of these different things because we wanted those payments to be tokenized for you to be able to fill in an online check-in the way that you would on a plane or anywhere else. So you throw those conversations, basically, to the online world. And when you’re actually physically with the customer, you have this really, really deep conversation about the experience and not about the admin that goes into that. 

JAMES LEMON: Got it. So almost in the DNA of Mews, there’s “Let’s remove payments from the front desk, and then we can just focus on experience?”

RICHARD VALTR: Yeah. And I feel like the fact that you allowed us to do that in a way that was compliant, in a way that was safe, from all of those different things basically allows us also to build the great technology that powers the experience, the growth of the hotel, the growth of the actual hospitality, the way that we can interface with other systems and have that handover moment—because it really is a kind of orchestration of all of those next steps that you have in hospitality. So you’re really just managing those different things. 

And if you can do that, basically, with a powerful platform that also unifies some of these other experiences, I think that that’s really, really key. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah, super interesting. And Tor, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about how Olo stands out from the crowd. 

TOR OPEDAL: Yeah. So the headline for us as to why merchants pick us is we cheated on the product-market fit because we have a very good relationship with our customers. So via our product advisory council, they came to us and said, “This payment thing is broken. We have too many rejected transactions. Auth rates are horrible.”

We have franchisees coming screaming to us because we told them to go into online ordering, but now we see all these chargebacks. And that costs a lot. They don’t even know why they get charged back. It’s a nuisance. Then the checkout experience is horrible, like I mentioned earlier. Eight, nine clicks, and what are we really doing here? So they came to us, and we set out to build a purpose-built payments platform for the restaurant industry. So we became very verticalized in the way we’re thinking. 

And by being so verticalized, we have driven very high authorization rates because we have trained models around it. And we also have enhanced data on our merchants, but also on the customers. So for “card not present right now,” we’re sitting at auth rates of 97%. We have chargeback rates at two basis points. Nobody can touch those numbers from other players. Then we have automated reconciliation that fits each order. 

We do automatic chargeback contestation. They don’t even need to do anything. And by the way, we have a 30% win rate on those. So as you start to see that, it all kind of trickles down to—it’s not about cost anymore; it’s about the value Olo brings. And then, Richard, to your point, too, the tokenization. Being able to have the consumers being tracked for data enhancements, both for card-not-present and now for card-present transactions. 

You put all that together. We’re now working with the restaurant brands, not as a service provider for them. There’s a little bit of a different dynamic there. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. I imagine that increases the stickiness of what you do hugely, just outsourcing all of those complex payment tasks to you and your platform. 

TOR OPEDAL: Yeah. 

JAMES LEMON: That’s super-interesting. And Drew, how about Tripleseat? 

DREW PIERCE: Yeah, obviously—well, I’ll start off: We were probably the first in event management software that was out there, and arguably we’re probably the best. 

We’re run by hospitality people—four hospitality people, as far as that goes. Ninety-eight percent of our employees were either event managers, waiters, worked at hotels, etc. So they know. They can walk the walk, talk the talk. So that’s always there. But the point of the company is to enable the event managers and the restaurants to free up time so that they can sell more—so grow revenues at the restaurant, especially in the private dining area. That’s probably one of their most profitable areas. 

As far as the payments go, it’s been a slow roll. We first started with Stripe 14 years ago. 

JAMES LEMON: Wow. 

DREW PIERCE: As far as that goes, it’s gone a bit slow. From there, it’s grown dramatically since then. We do have other partners just because, as you can imagine, for us, we’re not their first processor. Their brick-and-mortar is their first. So if they have others, we do offer it. Stripe happens to be our largest one out there and probably one of our best partners. So that’s getting it into the end zone. 

We get it to the red zone, and then the payments. As I talked about earlier, the convenience for the customer and so forth, in order, for them—they get their money quicker. They know it’s easier. They don’t have to worry about their credit card auth forms going back and forth, etc. And I will say good thing we’re not competitors because we have a 98, 99% auth. 

JAMES LEMON: All right, gents. Let’s calm it down. This is pretty geeky. 

TOR OPEDAL: Let’s calibrate next year, and we’ll see where we’re at. 

DREW PIERCE: Yeah, all right. That’s all right.

RICHARD VALTR: Actually, the last I checked, we were quite close to 100%. 

[General laughter]

JAMES LEMON: The authorization rate wrestling starts at five o’clock. 

[General laughter]

JAMES LEMON: No. Really, it kind of sounds like—I guess when I joined Stripe three-and-a-half years ago, I was like, “Yeah, payments is a nice addition to the central function.” But actually, it really feels like it’s core to what you’re building. It’s a core part of the tech stack and something they almost have to take to get the full benefits of your platform. But like you say, they’re outsourcing a ton of complexity. And then Drew, you’re mentioning it's a great driver of growth for them, as well. So suddenly thinking about payments, they're driving more revenues for the bottom line. 

DREW PIERCE: Yeah. It’s convenience, like we said. Because, if you think about it, if you’re at an event and you’re sitting there, whether it’s a business meeting and they come up, you don’t want to pull out your card. You just say, “Use the card on file.” And there, you’re done. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. Perfect. I wanted to talk a little bit about—I suppose some people are calling it kind of ancillary. Some people are talking about capturing more of the trip spend. But there’s definitely a theme in the industry at the moment of, look, you mostly think about hotels, events, dining. But actually, is there an opportunity for you to help your merchants sell more of the trip effectively? Again, whether that be, maybe one day, flights and transfers, insurance and tours and activities and all that kind of stuff. 

But would love to get a sense of whether you’re thinking about that, whether you’re hearing from your merchants, and what might be coming next. Richard, I guess I’ll turn it to you. 

RICHARD VALTR: Yeah. We have a kind of mental model around what hotels are, and it’s slightly different to the way that hotels see themselves. And it’s just because of the fact that we think of hotels as, essentially, purveyors of 24-hour experiences. And how they see themselves, the main thing is the eight hours that somebody spends in a room. So eight or nine hours while they’re getting ready. But that’s only a part of that experience. 

Maybe if you’re a one-star hotel, you only really care about—so if you’re a kind of roadside motel, you really just care about that nine-hour experience. But if you’re a five-star hotel, you actually care more about the 16, 17, 18 hours, basically, of that experience. And if you have a concierge function, that kind of rounds it up to the 24 hours while that person is actually not on the premises. And I just feel that technology should lead every single hotel to be able to handle those 24 hours. 

But the way that we then think about ancillary spend, it’s just all a part of that kind of experience management. And that’s the business that we feel that we are and our hotels are in. So, when we think about growth, it’s about allowing you to capture more of that share of wallet, basically, of your customer, and to capture more of that mind shift of the next spend that I should make, or the next recommendation. And if you can really, really learn more about the customer—so, for example, using great tools like Radar to really understand where is this customer, for example, coming from. 

How can I, for example, use the BIN number to think about the type of card that they’re using? Can I extrapolate credit information, basically, about that customer? Can that mean that the moment that they check in, I can actually personalize their offering to the thing that they’re going to be actually experiencing next and to the type of spend that I should give my staff as a goal? 

So, instead of their goal being to check in that customer, their goal is now: Can I actually maximize the revenue from this customer, and the experience, and the enjoyment, which is the nice thing about hospitality? So if I can make more money, basically drive better experiences with this customer over that 24-hour period of time, over 72 hours, or, if I’m a brand, over 365 days, I think that’s really where we think that the future actually comes for this industry. 

And that’s why we get really, really excited about the ancillary part of that equation. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah, perfect. And then, Tor, how are you thinking about maybe ancillaries and new revenue streams for your customers? 

TOR OPEDAL: No, I think—we created what we call “borderless,” which is a consumer-science output in the payments credentials, the necessary information in order to transact. But there, there’s also—again, on opt-in, you can put preferences in. 

So, for instance, I can identify as a vegan who does not like onions, and Zinfandel is my favorite wine. Based on that, now for the restaurants that use this on Olo’s platform, I come in the first time—I’ve never been there before—I get greeted and say, “Hey, Tor. How are you today?” Sit down. “Would you like a glass of Zinfandel?” as you sit down. You say, “How would they know that?” Well, that’s the underlying technology. It’s not obtrusive, but I had already told them that. I then get presented with a menu. Let’s say it’s digital. 

I’m never going to eat steak, so steak is never—it’s not going to be on that menu. I’m a vegan with no onions. It’s going to present to me options based on who I am as a person and what my preferences are. And that’s going to, obviously, increase the stickiness for us, too, because now technology is driving a better consumer experience for the brands across the platform. And I think, additionally, what we can also do is, again, be reactive to our brands. Should a restaurant brand want to do subscriptions for something, we have to have the technology enabled to accommodate that. 

And there could be things coming up that we don’t even know about today, but just being at the forefront, talking to our customers and then, obviously, having a partner ecosystem to where we can effectuate those things. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah, fascinating. Brilliant. Drew? 

DREW PIERCE: Yeah. For us, like I was saying earlier, it’s all about how we can help the restaurants, event spaces, etc., to grow their revenue. A couple of things that we’ve introduced over the last few years is we have a product called TripleseatDirect, where it enables the restaurants—maybe not on their busy days—for a customer to go in. 

And they’ll have a menu out there. And they say, “Right. I’m going to book a birthday party,” and here’s the menu. Boom. Boom. They don’t have to talk to anybody. All they have to do? Go in. Click, click, click. This is what they want. They put in their credit card. They pay, whether it’s 50% of the deposit, the rest later or the whole thing, and they’re done. Now the people at the restaurant, all they do is get the info. They know the date. It works with a calendar, obviously, to make sure you’re not double-booking or anything. But that’s an area. So they’re, hopefully, selling events during times that are slow for them. 

It’s one of the areas. The other thing, sort of going to something you had mentioned: It’s tickets. A lot of restaurants will have ticketed events, whether it’s a wine tasting or a beer tasting, or etc. And we now offer the ability for our customers to sell tickets to events. Again, it helps them to do it. Ease of use, but it’s also used in payments, at the end of the day. So more and more is flowing through the payments. We all make money, as far as that goes. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting that culturally you’re all really obsessing with, actually, just how do we make our customers more money. And then the core of that already feels like payments data equals customer data. So being able to play that strength of the Stripe networks plus your own networks back to them, I think you can offer a lot of knowledge. I wanted to get into the world of emerging technologies and AI. So I know people go to some conferences, and people can be a little bit general around AI use cases. You’d never find that at Sessions. So I’d love you all to be really deliberate. What’s one practical use case of AI you’re seeing in hospitality right now that’s really impressing you and people should learn from? I guess, Drew, maybe we’ll start with you. 

DREW PIERCE: Yeah. I'm not going to tie it into payments because I think, obviously, the experts have enough of that, whether it’s fraud, etc., that they’re using it. From the standpoint of our company, where we’ve really been successful with AI, obviously being with hospitality, people want to have a personal experience. But what we did is we implemented an AI bot into our customer support team. We were very hesitant at first because restaurant people want to be supported the way they support their customers, and it’s been very successful. 

We first started out within our chat and used that. We did that about 18 months ago. We’re up to almost 50% deflection on tickets. And we just recently, basically about 2–3 months ago, launched it for our after hours and weekend. And this is actual emails coming from our software. And it started out at about 15, 16%. We hit 22%. This past week, we were about 27, 28% deflection. 

So it’s been very successful for us as far as that goal. And our CSAT scores have not gone down, which is extremely important being in hospitality. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. Something we touched on at the keynotes yesterday. This rate of AI adoption is incredible, isn't it? 

DREW PIERCE: Yeah. 

JAMES LEMON: So it’s great that… Again, hospitality maybe gets kind of poorly labeled with being a little slower to adopt, but it sounds like they’re jumping on it. Tor, how about yourself? What do you see? 

TOR OPEDAL: Yeah, I can mention, also, nonpayments AI technology. But we have implemented with P.F. Chang’s what we call OrderReady AI.

So you make an online order. And when you go to pick that up, if you go on your own ideas, you’re either going to come up 20 minutes early because they’re slammed and your food is not ready, or last time it took 20 minutes, so now you think it’s going to take 20 minutes again. You come up, and your food is cold. 

So we have inserted an AI module as you order to look at your overall order flow and operations of the restaurant at that moment, taking into account all the orders that go in, and then have a predictive model to say when you should come and pick up your order, which is better for them because they’re going to provide a better customer experience. And it’s going to be better for you, too, because you feel, “Wow. This was seamless. This was awesome, and I want to come back and do this again.” 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. Brilliant. That’s great. And Richard, obviously you had your big conference unfold last week, and I know there are some cool AI announcements. Do you want to share a bit about what Mews are doing? 

RICHARD VALTR: Yeah. I feel that there’s so much, whether it’s revenue management, whether it’s—case deflection is a big thing for hotels—and thinking about: How can we make the receptionist, essentially, or, for example, the reservations agent also just an AI bot, to a certain extent? But the one that I get really, really excited about is what we’ve done as, essentially, profile summaries. 

So hotels usually have a lot of information about guests in what are known as folios, basically, and all of these different things that they will have that attract against this room or that room or that kind of experience. What we did was we centralized the profiles. So in our system, we’re the only property management system in hospitality that works from a centralized customer profile. 

And that essentially then just means that if you’ve been to the hotel before or if you’ve actually existed within the chain, we now get to summarize that information and actually show it to the receptionist or the host as just a summary. Essentially, what we’re trying to do there is: What’s the next best action? So what should you be greeting that host with? What types of services should you be actually offering? 

And the more information that we can actually centralize to make sure that that person who’s actually speaking to the guest makes that next-best recommendation based on what their past spending is like, what they’ve actually told you about themselves or what they’ve told Booking.com that has, basically, flowed through to the system, or what we can glean from things like, for example, their BIN numbers and things like that. That’s, I think, what really, really excites me about where we can go to be able to have better conversations with the guests. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. Brilliant. No, it feels, definitely, a common theme of really starting with customer support, customer operations. And I guess if you can insert some seamless payments into there, as well, it becomes another value add. I think some of the stuff we’re hearing upstairs with the keynote is really, actually, it’d be really interesting to see if AI introduces new booking channels now. Are people going to start booking through their AI chatbots? And how do you make that payment automated and invisible? So definitely, definitely more to come. Conscious of the time. We’re going to finish up with a quick rapid fire, if that’s okay. So I’ll ask a quick question, and you guys give quick answers. 

Let’s start with a simple one. Pet hates in hospitality? So Tor, I’ll start with you. What’s your hospitality pet hate? 

TOR OPEDAL: I’m sorry? 

JAMES LEMON: What’s your hospitality pet hate? 

TOR OPEDAL: Technology becoming obtrusive. 

JAMES LEMON: Okay. Drew? 

DREW PIERCE: Having a reservation and then showing up and having to wait more than 10 minutes to be seated at your table. 

JAMES LEMON: Richard? 

RICHARD VALTR: The fact that I’ve been to the hotel 20 times and you still don’t know who I am and still haven’t recognized me and still don’t actually know that I am a loyal customer. That’s unbelievable. 

JAMES LEMON: I built the system you’re using. 

RICHARD VALTR: Yeah. 

JAMES LEMON: All right.

RICHARD VALTR: It never happens with me. 

JAMES LEMON: It’s pretty early in Sessions, but so far from what you’ve seen, what’s the innovation you’ve heard about at Sessions you think will have the most value for the industry? Drew, I’ll go with you. 

DREW PIERCE: I heard just this morning something that I’m interested in. It’s the new product that’s coming out to help with chargebacks.

JAMES LEMON: Mm-hmm.

[Crosstalk] 

DREW PIERCE: So we have those every once in a while. And I think that if that can get automated to help not only us but our customers in order to eliminate or minimize those, that would be terrific. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah, definitely. That tension between rising chargebacks in the industry and how Stripe is obsessing with bringing the rates down. They have fingers crossed. There’s a big opportunity there. Richard, how about yourself? 

RICHARD VALTR: I think the same. I think a lot of the fraud tools, the ways that we can actually work with them, the fact that, for example, Radar is becoming interoperable with other providers and things like that—I think that that’s a huge unlock because, again, hospitality is one of the most targeted by cyber criminals. And so from that perspective, any help that we can get from Stripe is just very welcome. 

JAMES LEMON: Yeah. It’s a complicated payments landscape, isn’t it? The more you can be interoperable, I think, and play nicely with others, the better. How about yourself, Tor? 

TOR OPEDAL: For us, the innovation would be the Stripe partnership with FreedomPay. It really activates 3–4x in payments volume opportunity for us because most payments in restaurants are still on card-present. So, with us being able to capture that and now see 100% of the digital payments for the restaurants, that’s the biggest innovation for us. 

JAMES LEMON: Brilliant. No, that sounds great. And if people haven’t checked it out, the expo is full of FreedomPay and other partners. It will definitely help you get going faster.

I think about the Klarna thing we saw upstairs with Link. We’ve barely scratched the surface, but unfortunately, our time here is up. So hopefully you’ve enjoyed a bit of a whistle-stop tour through the world of how hospitality platforms are really managing that tension between guest experience and technology. A huge amount of innovation is coming and just a ton of value, I think, unlocking for the industry. So massive thanks to our guests, Richard, Drew, and Tor. Thanks so much for joining us. 

RICHARD VALTR: Thanks so much. 

DREW PIERCE: Thank you. 

JAMES LEMON: Thank you. Enjoy the rest of Sessions. Thanks, everyone.