The Bohemia Suites & Spa Gran Canaria is beloved by its guests, significantly outperforming other luxury hotels in Europe based on online guest satisfaction ratings. To learn how they have achieved these results, we spoke with Papis Diouf, the property’s Food and Beverage Manager, who was responsible for implementing operating processes and technology that allows their teams to deliver the service that is earning their category-leading reviews. This case study covers the story of how they did this.
Papis Diouf: the maestro behind the F&B operations
Papis Diouf is the Food and Beverage manager at Bohemia Suites & Spa Gran Canaria and seems to have been born with the hospitality gene. Sitting down with him, you’re instantly impressed by his warmth and energy. It’s something that comes naturally to him. “I grew up speaking French, and then my dad taught me Spanish,” he told me. “I learned German and English as I was traveling the world. A love of travel led to an interest in studying hospitality as a profession, and he ended up studying at the university in Las Palmas, Spain.
It was during his university studies that Papis’ career in Food and Beverage began. “I started working as a waiter. One thing led to another, and now I am managing our entire food and beverage operations! What I found working in the hospitality business is that Food and Beverage is one of the most important departments in a hotel,” Papis reflected. “For us, it’s 40% of our revenue.”
About the Bohemia Suites & Spa Gran Canaria
The Bohemia Suites is a TripAdvisor Travelers Choice award winner, and that’s just the beginning of its accolades In an analysis of reviews across more than 100 review sites using Shiji ReviewPro’s Global Review IndexTM (GRI) data, we found the property strongly outperformed its peers.
Their GRI of 93.8% exceeded the 89.3% for other five-star hotels in Europe in 2023. Clearly, the team is doing something right, and we wanted to know what that was.
“We just like performance,” Papis said with a big smile. “We always want to do more and more and more.”
One of the interesting ways this passion for excellence manifests is how much the Bohemia Suites team spends on market research to ensure they have the most fresh, innovative offerings and ways of working at their property. When I spoke with Papis, he had just returned from a research trip to the U.S. that started in Miami and ended in San Francisco, learning from the best hospitality businesses in America.
The guest experience Bohemian Suites aims to provide is like staying at a friend’s place, Papis told me. “We are always trying to give our best and do our best and make our guests feel like they’re at home. It’s classy hospitality, but not formal or stiff.“
“When people go on holiday, they want to relax,” Papis continued. “We don’t want them to be in an environment they feel stressed in, so everything from the clothes our staff wears to the way we provide service is designed to create a thoughtful, casual environment. Our guests enjoy that our team acts like they are enjoying the environment with them – because they are.”
One way this manifests is how the team communicates with their guests, which is digital-first. “We’re talking with them on Facebook,” Papis said. “Guests ask us questions on Instagram, and we get right back to them there. It’s very different from a traditional luxury hotel.”
Challenged by legacy technology
Even though they were used to operating in a mobile-first, always-on digital environment on social media, Papis and his team were encountering significant challenges with the legacy food and beverage management technology they had inherited.
“We were working with a prominent legacy vendor and found significant challenges with integrating our operations management into the system – and managing our revenue overall,” he recalled.
Papis had a background in technology and was able to find workarounds to keep the operation going, it wasn’t efficient and ended up being a significant drag on his time. One of the big challenges he faced was how the whole system was based on a software installation on their computer system instead of the cloud.
It was time to make a change. Rather than continuing to get by with subpar technology, Papis and his teams needed modern systems that would allow them to seamlessly provide the hospitality they had become known for.
They knew new opportunities would emerge and they wanted to be prepared. “We saw artificial intelligence was coming in to play an increasingly large role in hospitality and we wanted to be able to participate in that,” Papis said.
Evaluating technologies
The Bohemia Suites & Spa team developed the habit of attending the Spanish tradeshow FITUR every year to learn what was new, what was good, and what might be a good fit for their business. In 2019, Papis attended with their hotel manager and marketing manager to see what technology providers were offering.
In speaking with Shiji Group, they found their team was the most helpful. “Compared to the others, we found Shiji’s explanation of what they were building, how they built it, and how we could benefit from it clear and compelling,“ Papis told me.
One of the most compelling elements of what they learned was how Shiji’s POS, Infrasys, would adapt to their workflows instead of the other way around – which is all too common in hospitality technology.
Convinced that they were the right partner for their hotel, they decided to move forward.
Designing an experience from their ideal state
Because Infrasys offered the ability to adapt its technology to any workflow, Papis took advantage of starting with a blank slate and drafting his ideal workflow and reporting systems.
“I told their team I wanted it to be like this and that, and if I ordered in the restaurant, the chef would get it in this sort of way.”
Pulling from his experience operating at a high level at the property and his own market research of high-performing hospitality businesses, he developed a workflow that would delight staff and guests alike.
This is where the partnership with Shiji Group shined. Their support of Papis and his team through the entire process came up again and again in our conversation. “It’s not just enough to have the right technology,“ Papis told me. “You need the right people who can configure and help you use that technology as well. We found that in Shiji Group.“
What they built
With the new system in place, Papis noticed team members immediately being impressed by the implementation.
“We have a lot of young people working on our teams and they had never used true mobile technology as part of their work – but wanted to have it.“
Now, they can use their mobile devices to send orders directly from the table into the kitchen, which makes the whole process easier and more efficient for everyone involved.
The impact of modern operating technology
Before the new technology, everything was much slower. “We get 200 guests each morning for breakfast, and our teams were running around writing down orders on paper, then they had to take them to the kitchen. This whole process typically took at least five minutes per order.”
Today, everything is much faster. The time to process each order has dropped from 5 minutes per order to just 30 seconds.
Even better, the order goes directly to the kitchen. “Often, we can bring out the eggs nearly as quickly as we can bring them coffee,“ Papis said.
Guests are loving the result. Reading through the reviews guest after guest says how efficient and fast the process is. Fast for staff, fast for guest. Everyone is winning.
Benefits of digitizing F&B operations
Beyond the clear efficiency gains, moving to a modern cloud-based digital operation provides useful intelligence in many ways, including a few unexpected ones.
Papis shared an example of this where a guest called him and thought they got food poisoning from the dish at the restaurant. “But I was able to pull up what they ordered and saw that 100 other people also ordered it and didn’t get sick,“ Papis said. “Being able to troubleshoot things like this is really important for us.”
Papis is also able to look at sales reports and finds it helpful in many ways for producing new menus.
“When we do menu engineering, Infrasys helps me quickly identify things that don’t cost much, but guests are happy to pay a premium for. Those sorts of items that have healthy profits for us and make our guests happy are what we want to be focusing on.”
It’s also proved very helpful for making changes. “We are always looking to see where we might change some of our dishes that may not be working in that season,” Papis said. “It helps us stay fresh and relevant and engaging with our guests.”
More money. More profits. More time.
“Everything moves so quickly that you need to be using the right technology to help you be more efficient and provide the best luxury hospitality”, he told us. When asked if at the end of the day, Infrasys has made them more money, Papis’ response was instant. “Of course. Without a doubt.”
“We not only make more money, but we make more profit. On top of all of that we’re saving time. And time is money.”
A model in modern F&B operations
Every hospitality professional can learn from Papis and the team at Bohemia Suites & Spa Gran Canaria about what it takes to succeed in hospitality today. By constantly looking for inspiration and working with a technology partner that could help them implement a modern, operationally efficient workflow, they have delighted their staff and guests alike.
And they’re making a lot of money now doing it – the holy grail for any hospitality business.
