Barclays Hobart - Colin Chung

"The primary motivation is that payments are made direct to us and are pre-paid. There is also a lot less work for us, the administration time is greatly reduced and we also now have a merchant facility."

The 1970s apartments that Colin and Leonie Chung bought a few years ago have lost everything that was wrong about the look of the 1970s in their remarkable transformation to sleek, contemporary accommodation.

With the fantastic city and river views that West Hobart is so good at delivering, Barclays Hobart offers luxury four-star accommodation to Hobart’s corporate travel market.

‘We made the move from a traditional B&B to corporate accommodation.

We’re at the high end of the corporate market and so we’ve refurbished the property in line with that—leather lounges, high quality fittings, wireless broadband and so on.

‘We have two self-contained luxury apartments as well as a penthouse, and we also live on-site.’

Given the modern, urban edge that Barclay’s offers, it’s unsurprising that Colin and Leonie have chosen to engage with their customers online.

‘We were attracted to making the change to online through our personal contact with the Visitor Centre.

‘We were using a manual system at the time and we went with Tas e-Connect initially to minimise the risk of double bookings, which are greatly reduced now through using Front Desk.’

The advantages for the Chung’s business extend beyond administrative efficiency.

‘The primary motivation is that payments are made direct to us and are pre-paid. There is also a lot less work for us, the administration time is greatly reduced and we also now have a merchant facility.

‘Security was an initial question but we were assured that it was fine and our clients are very comfortable with it.

‘It also brings us enormous exposure to agents and travel sites without having to seek out those distributors personally.’

Integrating a completely new system held one or two challenges.

‘In the set up of the system we did initially struggle with some aspects—such as blocking out seasons—and there were some issues with generating invoices.

‘But we had direct support and the Helpline was just fantastic—9 ½ out of 10. The only reason that’s not 10/10 is that the Help Desk is based in Perth and so there’s sometimes a slight delay in making contact because of the time difference.

‘There are a lot of additional functions with the system that we haven’t taken up—you can do a lot more with it than we do. I stuck to the basics as an inventory management system but there is enormous scope to do more. You can create newsletters and e-mail outs and there are research and data functions—lots of things.’

The move to online business has brought clear benefits to Colin and Leonie’s business.

‘The major observable benefit is the increase in bookings.

‘We’re meeting a demand that exists in the marketplace for online bookings. Our bookings are now 60/40 online/direct bookings.

‘In terms of marketing and promotion, we expose the book now facility on the website but it’s not currently in our brochures.

‘There is also a greatly increased efficiency in terms of how we use our time, our inventory management and it just simplifies all the processes of operating the business.

‘It makes it a lot easier for us to provide service to our clients.’