Success story: SLEEP'N Atocha

This is how SLEEP'N Atocha welcomes you to its website, a different and creative accommodation, just like the way its director Gorka Rosell works. We talked to him about the hotel sector, sustainability and how GuestPro technology has been chosen to manage his accommodation.

The first thing we asked him is what is the key to his success. The answer is clear to him: people. For Gorka Rosell, the human team makes the difference in a business as tough as his. For example, the whole team has a variable salary, monthly schedules, 10% of the staff are people with different abilities, every day they do a briefing where they read all the comments posted by customers on different platforms. And all this helps to create what he calls the "SLEEP'N spirit".

And what is this SLEEP'N spirit?

According to its director: a perfect location, a clean and well-maintained product, that the guest feels like he is the first one to enter that room, an open-hearted treatment, looking him in the eye and asking him what can we do for you?

In this sense, he comments that the pandemic has left lessons that until then were not so much taken into account. For Rosell, the importance of the client is above all else, making them happy is fundamental for the good functioning of his accommodation, talking to them, solving any problems they may have had during their stay, making the ordinary (sleeping and having breakfast) something extraordinary and thanking them for having chosen SLEEP'N Atocha among the wide range of options available in Madrid.

The result of this effort is the 3rd place of SLEEP'N Atochain TripAdvisor, an achievement that in a place as complicated as Madrid has a lot of merit. According to its director, this is due precisely to this concern for its guests together with the care for the community and respect for the history of the accommodation. The team's happiness at moving from 4th to 3rd place, Gorka tells us, was celebrated with great joy: "all the staff enjoy news like this, the employee is evaluated by the client, so they are very proud of this type of recognition".

A benchmark in sustainability

Another highlight of SLEEP'N Atocha 's philosophy is the excellence with which they apply sustainability in their accommodation, especially considering that it is located in an old building. According to Rosell there are 3 ways of "attacking sustainability":

• Doing nothing.
• Greenwashing or putting sustainability in marketing and making a big deal out of every action that is taken in this respect.
• Doing it for real. Work on it from management, from the core of the accommodation. If management does not truly believe in sustainability, it will be very difficult to implement it efficiently. According to Gorka Rosell, there are economic decisions and it takes investment and time to see the return, so it is essential that the final manager of the business is involved and believes in it.

At SLEEP'N Atocha they were sustainable even before they knew it, for example, in the choice of materials that always ended up being sustainable. They also collaborate with NGOs, are committed to proximity shopping, plant trees and are the first carbon neutral accommodation. Sustainability has become the backbone of the accommodation and although he says that at the beginning it is difficult to lead from this sustainability, later it comes out by itself: "if there is a sustainable alternative, it is the one we choose".

This sustainability is certified by certifications such as Bcorp (currently SLEEP'N Atocha is the 2nd in the world in terms of score), 5 stars Ecostars, Travelife Gold since 2017, Biosphere, Great place to Work, Choos my company, The Code. And several awards such as the most innovative accommodation in 2020, 2nd position in the WeImpactIndex® Spain 2023 ranking, Excellence Award 2023 for the most sustainable Accommodation and the only carbon neutral in Spain.

Finding the right technology is not always easy

Another fundamental axis for the hotel business is the technology it uses for its daily management. At SLEEP'N Atocha they have gone through 4 PMS over the last three years, which has been a learning experience for the management. Rosell believes that technology companies often do not know the hotelier's experience, what he is looking for in this tool is that "it gives me what I need, that it listens to me and that it does not cost me more for the collar than the dog".

And after trying 3 different platforms, GuestPro arrived. A hotelier friend recommended our all-in-one PMS and after talking to Xavier Pallicer, our CEO and founder, he saw that he had what he needed for SLEEP'N, "what is important for an accommodation like ours, I had it with GuestPro that could cover 4 tools in one without losing quality and lowering costs and, in addition, with the peace of mind of having an api connection with third parties".

The philosophy of Gorka Rosell and SLEEP'N Atocha seemed to connect immediately with GuestPro's way of working. "It's a PMS that gives you the feeling of a quarry, they listen to you, unlike many technological companies that don't". A professional like him has many ideas to contribute and GuestPro has created a bidirectional relationship in which hoteliers and technology maintain an open dialogue through which they collaborate and contribute to each other.

Other PMSs they worked with charged, for example, for each integration: "at the beginning it seems that the tool supports everything, but then it doesn't give you what you need and you have to pay for everything". According to Rosell, in the end it cost more than it gave you and gave you the feeling that you needed a lot of tools. "It's better to carry a light backpack that gives us what we need, as is now the case with GuestPro," he says.

He values our PMS as an all-in-one solution that doesn't fail and is very competitively priced. It was easily integrated into the day-to-day work of the staff at his accommodation as it is easy to use and very intuitive.

Thanks to this relationship that has been established between hotelier and technology, SLEEP'N Atocha continues to demand some improvements to make daily management even easier or to continue with the improvements of the web application for clients on which they are already working. Due to his experience and his vision of the business, Gorka Rosell claims that in general we should listen to them and use their "grey matter", "there is no better laboratory for a technology company like GuestPro than listening to its client".

The ultimate goal of all this collaboration between accommodation and technology should be that the accommodation staff, including the manager, can focus on what really matters: the guest. Having an online check-in that improves their experience, a PMS, an RMS, a CRM... In short, a good management system that allows the receptionist to be a good host and have the time to offer a more personalised contact with the guest. "Make them feel listened to, loved, special".