Estrel Berlin - Germany's largest hotel becomes part of the #protelfamily

People are waiting longer than ever to get married. The same is true of companies: 25 years after they were founded, Germany’s largest hotel and its leading hotel-management platform have finally struck a partnership, as protel brings its industry-leading protel.I/O Hospitality Platform to the Estrel Berlin.

More Than a Hotel…But Always a Hotel at Heart

After welcoming its first guests in 1994, the Estrel Berlin set about establishing itself as Europe’s largest and most capable multipurpose facility. This being Germany, the first major enhancement to the hotel’s grounds was a beer garden, opened in 1996. The following year saw the opening of the 800-seat Estrel Festival Center.

Work immediately began on the adjoining Estrel Congress Center, which opened in 1999. At 269,000 square feet, the Congress Center is among the largest in Europe, and its integration with the rest of the Estrel complex has made it a sought-after venue for everything from international trade exhibitions to prize fights.

As the Estrel Berlin grew, it never forgot its roots as a responsive, affordable, family-owned luxury hotel. A year after the Estrel Congress Center opened, founder Ekkehard Streletzki was named Hotelier of the Year by the Allgemeine Hotel- und Gastronomie-Zeitung, the first in a series of plaudits that in 2000 saw Streletzki awarded Germany’s Order of Merit for his contributions to business, tourism, and philanthropy.

Bright Futures Built on Illustrious Pasts

Berlin has long been a popular tourist destination, and in the last decade has become a vital hub for conferences and conventions. That popularity has placed significant pressure on the city’s convention spaces, which recently led Estrel Berlin to undertake a massive new building project.

The Estrel has a new hotel tower on the horizon, which will add another 814 rooms and suites, spanning 46 floors. The new residential areas will allow the Estrel Berlin to reconfigure some of its existing space, resulting in new opportunities for its residential and convention operations.

With new opportunities come new challenges, and the Estrel Berlin’s history proves that it is afraid of neither. Still, managing an operation of such scale and complexity proved taxing for Estrel’s various software platforms. Fortunately, a company based just 250 miles away had already risen to the challenge.

protel hotelsoftware was founded in 1994, the same year that the Estrel Berlin opened for business. Its reputation for providing innovative, scalable management solutions tailored exclusively to the hospitality industry has put protel’s property-management software at the heart of more than 14,000 hotels in more than 90 countries.

Like Estrel Berlin, protel continued to build success upon success, and in 2017, just as Estrel was planning the construction phase of its new tower, protel announced its own game-changer: the protel.I/O Hospitality Platform.

After 25 Years, a Perfect Marriage

protel.I/O acts as a hub through which any hotel’s various information platforms can communicate with each other. For smaller hotels, that means more detailed price modeling, smarter offerings of amenities, and more accurate forecasting. For a facility of Estrel Berlin’s scale, it means all of that and more. Estrel’s management can now draw on integrated data streams representing the entirety of Estrel’s operations as never before, allowing it to offer individual guests and groups of all sizes opportunities never before possible.

An enterprise as ambitious and forward-thinking as Estrel Berlin needed an integrated, future-proof information infrastructure from a rock-solid partner. A software company as innovative and proven as protel needed a partner just as devoted to exploring the future of hospitality. Each just found its perfect match.

ITB Berlin is about to begin! Look for people being dressed in black wearing red shoes. Then follow them to hall 8.1, booth 103 ;) We hope to see you there!