The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have the time to fall

Great stories are the ones that start with a purpose and allow us to be resilient in the face of circumstances, here’s Beonprice’s why.

By Emilio Galán, CTO & Co-Founder Beonprice

Artículo escrito originalmente en español. Puedes leerlo aquí.

As a good aviation fan, I would like to start by recalling how the Wright brothers, creators of the first powered flight, demonstrated in 1903 that an initiative with hardly any budget, but with great passion and determination, could change the course of world transport history, in a race against large corporations with unlimited resources trying to achieve the same goal.

The difference that allowed these entrepreneurs to succeed was that they were driven by their purpose to change the course of the world, as Simon Sinek explains in his book Start with why. I certainly agree that the great stories of the world are those that start from a great purpose.

Therefore, while my partner Rubén reviewed in a previous article the history and main milestones of Beonprice, today I want to focus on why we created Beonprice. From my point of view, it is the basis of everything we have done so far, and the engine that drives us to continue enjoying what we believe in.

WHY

Like the Wright brothers, Beonprice was created as a result of the passion and daring of two entrepreneurs who, in one of the worst moments of the economic and social crisis, dreamed of doing things differently. The world in which we lived had collapsed and we felt the need to do our bit to get out of that situation. However, just like the pioneers of aviation, Beonprice was not born with unlimited resources at our disposal, but we started from Salamanca, dreaming that soon our impact would be global.

The world in which we lived had collapsed and we felt the need to do our bit to get out of that situation.

This conviction remains fully valid to this day. The entire Beonprice team is aware that we don’t do technology for the sake of creating a business, but because of our ambition to change the status-quo, create real value and positively impact society. Only by taking the reins, challenging ourselves in this way every day and giving 200% of ourselves are we achieving this purpose.

HOW

But changing the existing order is not an easy task. I believe it can only be achieved through a noble and inspiring path. Our path at Beonprice is and will be to empower companies by helping them to make better decisions based on data, through technological innovation and accompanied by the service of the best professionals.

Making decisions without the support of data becomes a mere exercise of intuition whose outcome, although it may sometimes end well, generally leads to terrible results. Bearing this in mind, our first step at Beonprice was to ensure that we had the necessary data, creating a Big Data platform that allows us to extract, store and process a large amount of information. Today we can say that we have one of the richest databases in the sector in which we work.

However, disruption is not only about having the data, but also about extracting the value they hide. In this sense, technological innovation has always been and will always be a great ally. Advances in the field of cloud computing mean that techniques such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have been around for years, can now be applied on a massive scale, expanding their potential to discover the true value of data.

At Beonprice we have always been clear that we did not want to be a Market Intelligence tool that simply showed data, but we wanted to extract value from it in the form of predictions and recommendations for users, as well as being accompanied by the service of the best team of professionals. The Beonprice family is made up of 65 members with first class qualifications at the service of our clients and with values that are completely aligned with our purpose.

Beonprice family is made up of 65 members with first class qualifications at the service of our clients and with values that are completely aligned with our purpose.

WHAT

Quoting a giant like Google that summarises its mission in a phrase as inspiring as bringing order to the Internet, at Beonprice we feel inspired by concentrating our mission in the phrase we want to put a price on the Internet. For us, this statement combines our purpose with the fact that we bring value to our customers in an area as important to them as making the best business decisions, bridging the gap between demand and supply.

However, the Internet is very broad, so when we asked ourselves where we could start, we knew we had to start in a sector where we could really make an impact. We were not afraid that it would be an unknown sector for us, as we were aware of our strengths in the technological field and that we could complete them with the support of experts in the sector. We finally decided to go into the hotel sector thanks to the experience of a family member and after seeing that it played a key role in the GDP of many countries. Now that we have been in business for 8 years, we love this sector and confirm that we have made the right decision.

The hotel industry has coined the concept of Revenue Management together with the airlines to refer to the optimisation of room sales revenue. This has been a red carpet for us to make our mark, which is none other than democratising best practices, leading and transforming the Revenue Management strategies of hotels through data, technology and people. And we are extremely proud to have pioneered the creation of the HQI™, the first index that quantifies guest expectations when making a reservation, as a key tool for calculating the Fair Pricing that has such an influence on customer loyalty.

Our purpose is what has allowed us to stay the course, despite having gone through difficult times like this pandemic with the utmost commitment to help the hotel sector that has suffered so much with this crisis, looking forward to all that is to come as we continue to enjoy travelling the road.

I feel like when Orville, one of the Wright brothers, was asked how they had achieved the first flight with hardly any support and he summed it up in this sentence: the airplane stays up because it doesn’t have the time to fall.