LOCATION

Lindley, Huddersfield

BUSINESS TYPE

Luxury Hotel & Events venue with Restaurants and Leisure Facilities

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

• Start-up wanting to manage different aspects of the business in one place

CORE BENEFITS

• More streamlined operations
• Easy to add new functionality as the business grows and evolves

Manor House Lindley Open their Doors with Alacer

Manor House Lindley is a restored Georgian Manor House that first opened its doors under the ownership of Sara Presley in April 2018. Offering first-class facilities for leisure, business and celebrations, and furnished to an impeccably high standard, the site comprises a boutique restaurant for fine dining, a beautiful Clock Tower with roof terrace for afternoon tea or evening drinks, a Coach House for glamorous private events and a Studio for fitness classes. And with 11 individually designed guest rooms, Manor House offers a unique space to relax in luxurious surroundings located in the heart of Lindley, North of England.

One System for Everything

As well as restoring and preparing the venue for its grand opening, Sara was seeking a suitable software package that would allow her to offer a superior and truly seamless service to her clients. She met the Alacer team at the Hotelympia show in March 2017, was impressed with what the software had to offer. The order was placed in the November to ensure that the system was installed well in time for the Spring official opening date.

Too Good To Be True?

Mark Ayre, General Manager, is no stranger to the hospitality sector, and over the years has used many of industry's software solutions. Having previously been frustrated with separate systems that did not talk to one another and troublesome interfaces that kept dropping, he was sceptical that he would really get everything for the business in one system, but he was pleased to be proven wrong! Mark initially spent time with the Alacer team getting to know the system and in his own words "I was very impressed with what I saw."

Saves Time and Reduces Costs

Reflecting on his experience of using other software packages, Mark commented "Most of them do the same thing and manage a particular area of the business to a greater or lesser extent, but with Alacer, it's all about how everything ties together. From front of house guest services, rates and channel management, hotel bar and restaurants, weddings and events management to online bookings and gift vouchers; without a fully integrated platform like Alacer, things would take longer, and we'd be more prone to making mistakes which could negatively impact the company's reputation and profitability."

With Alacer we can manage the entire business and because it is so feature-rich we have the confidence that we can easily add modules as our business grows and evolves.

A Feature-Rich Solution

Manor House Lindley is fast approaching its one-year anniversary, and excitedly looking towards the year ahead. In the last twelve months they've seen a steady increase in repeat customers, the weddings and events side of the business is becoming more popular and in December they began offering Gift Vouchers via their website, which has quickly turned into healthy revenue stream. Manor House also have The Studio fitness centre and they’re at the point where need to consider a more efficient way to schedule and book classes; they’ve seen Alacer's leisure booking engine, another feature that is fully integrated into the core system and will be looking to implement that in the near future too.

Favourite Features

"While it is difficult to quantify the exact savings delivered by the system, there is no doubt in my mind that the software has helped this business tremendously over the last 12 months. The powerful reporting gives us an overview of the entire business, or we can drilldown into specific areas. Having the stock system linked to EPOS has saved us at least £300-400 per month by not having to do manual stocktaking and we've not had to employ a dedicated finance person yet either as the billings are very easy to run and we feed the data into Sage, so we're covered on the accounting side too! Furthermore, it will be an asset moving forward as it has all the features any multi-faceted hospitality business could ever ask for.

Confidence in Alacer

When Mark was asked if he would recommend Alacer, he did not hesitate to say "Yes". He was entirely positive when sharing his personal experience of the implementation and training process too. "The training was very comprehensive; our team were shown how to use the software as it related to their specific role. We have an excellent staff retention rate, but know that as we expand, any new recruits would very quickly get used to it. In addition, we know that any time we might have a problem the experienced helpdesk team, which operates 7am-11pm, seven days per week, are only a phone call away!"

We have everything we need in one place, no need for us to learn and manage multiple systems or deal with interfaces dropping

www.manorhouselindley.co.uk