How This Product Manager Turned a Simple Currency Change into a Game-Changing Opportunity

Oh, OK, I thought this was the one which I just described, but uh,

Uh, OK. Uh. OK. Yeah, for this particular case, uh, OK, so yeah, I do have another case of, uh, uh, we work with another customer like, uh, on an RFP face, uh, where the customer wanted to sell, uh, at a hotel multi-currency, so typically

yep. So, so typically think of a hotel in Mexico, where most of the businesses from the US and they have, uh, uh, this, they want to sell in US dollar, but they also have a significant business from Europe, so they want to sell in euros as well. So typically, the current way they operate is they defend prices in USD and they kind of use uh currency conversion, so they kind of, uh, Convert the currency on the go to different currencies, so the different prices in the system in USD, and when I shop from Europe, they kind of convert this USD to euro and display it. And if I shop from Brazil, they kind of convert to Brazil, and if I shop from Mexico, they kind of convert it to USD to Mexico. Now the problem with this is the hotels could be losing. The hotels are losing revenue. Uh, owing to this market, especially with volatile currencies, uh, like Brazil, uh, Turkish currency, they're kind of losing money, uh, owing to these conversions. Now, in order to address this, uh, what we had the requirement, the kind of came up with the requirement to say, uh, that they wanted to sell a different product, I mean different currencies, uh. This is the, this was the initial case. Now we kind of took the requirement and then we kind of realized, OK, uh, so in order to achieve this, you want to first identify the number of currencies that you want to sell because you can't defend all 170 currencies at your total. It's not feasible. And you want to see like 80/20 rule where you get 80% of your businesses from 2020% kind of currency, so we kind of identified that particular list of currencies and uh kind of enhanced, but halfway through it we kind of realized that, OK, you have non-room products as well, so meaning like you have a jet ski or uh you have a boat ride, uh. Or, uh, a dinner package kind of thing that you sell at hotel, right? So typically because you are in Mexico, you sell in pesos, uh, because you're at the hotel and you actually partner with external vendors as well. Now we kind of saw this opportunity at that particular phase that, uh, OK, doing this not just for sleeping room, kind of, uh, kind of will help with non-room products as well. So where like you can actually book a sleeping room in USD and then add. A non-room in peso. So, uh, this kind of, uh, the initial requirement in the scope was only to address the sleeping room dimension, but whereas we kind of have to, we kind of realize that, OK, this can actually make a big difference when you actually cross sell with non-room products in different currencies. But then we had to make some, some changes up there because the reservation today, the object takes only one currency. You can't have two currencies. So either you book in euro or you book in USD. So it's still one currency. You're booking an entire reservation, but now we'll have to make some tweak on the system to be able to support multiple currencies within the same reservation. So we have to support USD and we had to support peso within the same reservation and show a split up and then ensure that the credit card payments and all of that. So we kind of did a tweak up there, but then it kind of went well, uh, with the, with the customer. Uh, this kind of solution kind of went super well with the customer and they kind of like the idea and yeah, now we're almost at the advanced stage of signing up the contract with them.

No, not yet,

Yeah, it's, it's in the development phase right now, but the design is complete. So my role, uh, my role, uh, would end with the design and, uh, the initial, uh, initial, uh, kind of familiarization of the requirements with the customer and, uh, getting it to the design and passing it on to the R&B. The actual deployment, yes, it's still yet to happen for this. So you, you'll not see it, uh, this capability at this hotels as on date now, no.

Yeah, I mean, like, uh, uh, we were working on this non-room products, uh, as part of a different requirements actually, uh, within the same product, but we're enhancing our product for non-room. We never thought about this multi-currency dimension in case of non-room products, so we were, we were enhancing the. So today if you'll try and book a hotel anywhere, uh, you don't have these capabilities. Uh, I'm talking about the big chain hotels. So when you actually book a big chain hotels, you don't have this capability of booking non-room. So that's a product that we are developing, uh, to be able to book these non-rooms, small chain hotels, yes, you do have the capability where you can, you can still book packages which are like configured within as one rate. So, but you can't say I will book this like just like the airlines when you book flight, you don't actually have to pick a seat, but you can come back later and pick a seat, right? That kind of capability, you don't have it on hotels today, so you, you'll have to book everything when you actually book. You can't say I'll book now and I'll come back later, add this can kind of come back later. That's not available. So we are kind of building that, uh, and that development is complete and, uh, almost rollout is ready. Uh, of being able to add more like the airline seat or baggage kind of thing into the hotels, uh, add, add this non-room or merchandise products into the hotel, uh, booking kind of thing. But then this is completely, uh, multi-currency. When the hotels actually asked about supporting multi-currency for sleeping room, we saw that as a, a new product feature that we could do when you can support multi-currency, and that kind of make more business sense because in the operational ways you. You could sell different currencies. Especially in resort destinations like uh Mexico or Maldives or something like that, yeah. But how much?

Uh, for this one, no. Uh, for this specific one, no, not at all. Uh, it was like, uh, pretty smooth, and everybody liked the idea and everybody jumped on this idea for this specific case. No, I didn't, I didn't have any.