“After seeing how stressful it was to call hotels to get rooms for our crews, I thought there had to be a better way to do this.”
As our crews travel around the country responding to emergencies like the recent winter storms, the last thing they should be worrying about is where they will be spending the night. It’s so important that our crews have a place to rest and recharge after a long day of taxing work, especially when they have to do it all again the next day.
To help make sure our crews always have a place to stay, a lodging group was formed to handle hotel reservations. As part of this group of volunteer corporate employees, Luis Aguilar Jr., CPSM, Manager of Procurement, would research different hotels in a target area and call around to find a hotel that would fit the company’s needs, which included enough rooms for the crews and parking lot space for our trucks.
This process used to take hours.
Luis knew there had to be a better, easier way to book hotels, so he started researching systems that could automate the process. That’s when he found Hotel Engine.
With Hotel Engine, the volunteer lodging group can now research the different hotel options in an area and reserve rooms for large parties from one platform. They can easily see which hotels have enough rooms, which ones have sufficient parking, and even which ones offer free breakfast. And just as important, General Forepersons no longer have to put down their company credit cards to reserve rooms and chase down invoices to complete expense reports. Now, all of the stays are billed to the company directly, and anyone who has access to the Hotel Engine account can grab the invoice they need.
Thanks to Luis’ initiative and commitment to one of Lewis’ values, improvement-mindedness, booking hotels for crews during storm or other out-of-town work is a faster and much less stressful process for everyone involved.
“Everything goes back to trying to support the General Foremen and crews to make sure that they’re not worried about where they’re going to be staying,” Luis says.
To learn more about how we do leadership differently here at Lewis, visit https://hubs.ly/Q02gY4dm0.
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Manager, Project Management Operations at The Expo Group
2moHotel Engine has the best folks on the Groups Teams!!!! They truly make miracles happen!!!