No sooner had he graduated from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona with a degree in computer science than José María Ramón Cardona (Ibiza, 1977) had a clear professional goal: to build websites. “Whatever the sector,” he recalls. Since he returned to his native Ibiza after his studies, his main clients ended up being hotels. His mother gave him the room where she used to sew so that, with a computer, he could start his business. Ibiza’s version of Apple’s garage.
Back then, he would have never even remotely dreamed that this venture would grow as it did. That it would not only design sites, but also offer digital solutions to improve the management and profitability of accommodations. Nor that it would become a company that two decades later would be expanding internationally or that it would be highlighted as one of the 50 technology companies with the greatest projection in Spain according to the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Programme ranking.
“It was a very tiny thing at the beginning, I never thought it would take this scale”, tells La Voz de Ibiza in this interview the CEO of Neobookings, the company that has turned 21 years old.
-How did you see the need for hotels to improve their IT services?
-I started making hotel pages because it was the strongest industry in Ibiza. Then the hotels themselves told me that they needed constant updates to the site because bookings were dropping or dates were changing. “I spend a lot of time doing calculations on the bookings,” they would tell me. That’s when I saw the need for an online system to make those calculations.
-How did this initiative gain momentum?
-The word was spreading. I didn’t move at a commercial level, it was all word of mouth. For some years now, partly thanks to the hoteliers themselves who have told me “this is missing”, “that is missing”, we have been improving things. Over time this required hiring more people. I added two people who worked with me as partners. Today the company employs about 50 people, and we have a national presence, two years ago we opened offices in Mexico and, last year, in Colombia. At no time did I think we would leave Ibiza.
Listening, the key
During the talk with La Voz de Ibiza, Ramón Cardona repeats one word several times: “listen”. In his opinion, it has been one of the keys that have positioned Neobookings as a market leader.
-What have they done right?
-I think in the end it’s listening to customers and looking at the competition. We realized that the product was very complete. What we see is that in the technological hotel industry everyone is all about numbers, quick sale, hire a tool and that’s it. We like to give a familiar treatment (something more and more complicated with this growth, since we manage more than 800 hotels).
-Is there a lack of humanity in the hotel industry?
-It is an industry with more and more international companies in which only numbers matter. We want those who stay with us to feel our support and listening, we try to transmit our passion to them.
-And how is this transmitted?
– For example, many systems today are designed for a single function, and what goes beyond that cannot be done. We try to do a lot of what they ask us to do, to listen and offer something in line with what customers require. Along these lines, technology companies are often seen as gray or standardized. We like to transmit joy.
“We’ve started selling ourselves too late.”
It was a long way from that one-man enterprise to this company with fifty workers. A period in which, gradually, Ramón Cardona has understood the importance of teamwork.
“I have also had people who have helped me along the way. I didn’t see myself setting up offices outside Ibiza, but a worker who is now a partner told me “I’ll do it”. When this becomes a big thing, you realize that you need a team. Because it’s not just about having your product, you have to have sales people, do a lot of marketing, people in financial management, go to a lot of events. You need a lot of people who believe in the idea.
-What is the main mistake you have made during this time?
-We started selling professionally very late, only about two years ago. Even so, we have a very small sales team, especially when compared to the sales teams of other companies, which are much larger. And we have to grow, because no matter how much product you have, if you don’t go out and sell, people don’t know about it.
Pandemic and artificial intelligence
-What lessons have you learned from the pandemic?
-We started to give a lot of importance to data. Before, as things were working well, and this is something you see a lot in Ibiza, where businesses work almost without doing much, we were comfortable. When things started to get complicated, we had to be aware and anticipate cancellations, which were falling every day and we had no way of quantifying them in real time. That made us focus a lot on the importance of data. There is an emotional part in our decisions, but we must contrast them with data and projections, with scorecards. This has been a paradigm shift.
-What role does artificial intelligence play in your industry today?
-We give it a lot of importance. It’s not just ChatGPT, what people know most, but all the rule automation that you can do. In our case, predictions and development. Today we work a lot on predictions, on what can happen during the season. Of course, these predictions can be dismantled when something happens, but they are very necessary.
From Ibiza to the world
Ramón Cardona believes, based on his experience, that “the hotel industry in Ibiza and the Balearic Islands in general is one of the most advanced we have seen in the sector”.
“We are advanced. You go outside and they move differently. The one here is very strong.”
-What does that look like?
-At the level of hotel performance, occupancy, how rooms are distributed at the sales level, the marketing that is done. Many places in other latitudes are not very efficient in the use of resources. In addition, for example, the percentages of direct sales of hotels in Ibiza can be from 15 to 35% and in LATAM they are at 3%.
-Does it need to be valued more?
-I think we Ibizans have a complex: it seems that what is done here is not so good, we feel small. We see ourselves as “a little island”, it seems that what comes from outside is always the best. But here we have many skills, there are powerful entrepreneurs and a knowledge that is not in other places.
-What are the company’s projections?
-At the moment we are striving to become more established in Mexico and Colombia. Each country has its idiosyncrasies and way of working and doing things, and seeing technology. It costs a lot. Here we are already known, we have done many events. But there it has nothing to do with Spain. It’s starting from zero.
