Meet Paul Menanteau, former hotelier and CEO of GetWelcom.

“This is how GetWelcom was born”

For a few months now we have been conducting interviews with personalities from the hotel sector. Today it is the turn of Paul Menanteau, our CEO, to take part in the interview game: “Hotels, a profession, a meeting”.

Hello Paul, could you introduce yourself and quickly tell us about your background?

My name is Paul, I am 27 years old and I am the CEO of GetWelcom.

I come from a general management background. I took advantage of this 5-year training to focus on the hotel sector.

During my gap year, I worked for 6 months in Bangkok in an Accor group hotel, a Mercure and Ibis combination. I assisted the director general of the establishment. It was an operational experience, I was in the field in contact with the various department heads.

After these 6 months, I went back to France. I stayed at Accor, but this time at the headquarters level, where I participated in the marketing and operation of a pop-up hotel called Flying Nest. It was a hotel concept that was made with containers, designed by the French designer Ora-Ïto. Our objective was to locate this hotel at the heart of events such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, LLe Mans Classic, Les Rencontres d'Arles or even in ski resorts.

Following this experience, I completed my last year of study with a specialization in entrepreneurship.

I then worked for the Barrière Group in Deauville where I assisted the Operations Director of the Le Royal hotel on all the financial and management control aspects.

Finally I returned to Accor and joined the hotel le Molitor in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, I was in charge of the customer experience part. My missions were mainly to monitor the quality in the various departments, to set up operational projects and to maintain customer relationships.

These experiences, in all different establishments, allowed me to become familiar with the hotel market and to discover what the expectations and needs of customers but also hotels could be.

How did the idea for GetWelcom come about?

In my various experiences, both as a hotelier and as a hotel customer:

On the one hand, I noticed that there were internal communication problems when there were incoming customer requests.

On the other hand, as a hotel guest, we are too often misinformed about the benefits and services available in an establishment, we sometimes discover them too late.

Hadrien, for his part, had an experience within the group. Pierre and Vacances, he was working on an internal application to help Center Parcs customers prepare and make the most of their stays.

This is how the idea of GetWelcom was born: to offer a solution that is simple to implement, which adapts to the needs of each establishment, to simplify the lives of hoteliers and those of their customers.

What can you assess this first year and what are the projects for 2023?

To give a bit of context: we tested a beta version on 3 hotels starting in November 2021 and we used user feedback to modify our solution before launching the first marketing phase in March 2022. We are constantly drawing on feedback from our customers to provide new functionalities and improve the solution.

The balance sheet is positive, the commercial objectives for this first year have been exceeded.

From a team point of view, we started the project with 3 people and now we are a team of 7 people.

For 2023, the objectives are numerous:

We want to equip more than 250 hotels thanks in particular to a new version of the solution that offers more functionalities and strategic partnerships with other players.

We also need to expand the team, whether at the technical, marketing and commercial levels. We are working on this to be operational fairly quickly at the beginning of the year. In summary, the project for 2023 is to accelerate.

Based on the experience you have accumulated in the sector, what are the challenges of a startup in the hotel sector?

Today, there are several challenges in the hotel sector.

It's a hyper-competitive market. So you have to really succeed in finding your place. Define your value proposition, the advantages you can highlight and once you have them, know who to contact because there are a lot of different types of establishments.

These establishments do not have the same needs and this is where it is really important to define your target well. What are the functionalities and specificities of your offer that fit this target audience.

In addition, today hoteliers are in high demand. They are called and contacted all the time. You must therefore find the possibility and the right way to present your proposal and the reason for your approach.

There is also a whole section relating to OTA. There are quite a few debates on this subject, I will not go into more detail, but it is really something that comes up a lot, especially on the taking of commissions. Today you have to know how to position yourself in relation to this.

Finally, in my opinion, a challenge that is very important for a startup entering this market is the concept agility and reactivity. We have really listened to the requests of our partners to improve the solution. If we are where we are today, with a solution like this, it is mainly thanks to the feedback from our customers and the end users of the solution. You have to know how to listen.

What is the vision you have for GetWelcom in the long term?

With GetWelcom, we want to enable hosts from all over the world to welcome their customers in the best conditions and to help these customers prepare and make the most of their stay.

So now a quick bonus question, if you had to pick the best and most difficult moment of the past year, what would they be?

Moving into our new premises was a great moment. Before that we were in an incubator with shared offices that were perfect for getting started. When we arrived here, it gave another dimension to the project. Now we are taking advantage of our closed offices in Paris and we are even lucky to have a small garden!

That moment in September was great, it's really a good memory.

As far as the bad memory is concerned, which represents a period of time, it is the beginning of March.

When we started at the beginning, the hotel market had not picked up at all, everything was at a standstill. I remember that I was going around Paris hotels with my backpack and I was going to meet the hotels, with the mask, and I was talking to masked people. We were really in a special atmosphere. I tried to get feedback, to talk about the solution, but the hoteliers I met weren't up to it at all. The only desire they had was to fill their establishment, which was completely normal. It was a complicated period because hoteliers had other problems in mind and the climate of the pandemic did not help matters.

Over time things worked out. In the end, this experience was necessary to confront the reality of the moment and allowed us to be even closer to our first partners.

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