Andrea Chaves

The goal of the Hotel Systems Transformation program was to replace an outdated Property Management and Call Center system with two newly designed, fully integrated cloud-based systems for a Fortune 500 Hospitality company in the US.

The program required custom development from two key vendors as well as custom and standard integrations with dozens of systems. As a program manager, Andrea oversaw all design, development, scheduling, integration, and testing for both vendor-delivered and in-house systems. This meant orchestrating schedules and dependencies across five separate projects, ensuring that stakeholders were actively participating, coordinating activities with the change management team for communication across the enterprise, managing the program's budget, and communicating status to the Executive team.

The implementation of this program would impact thousands of users and customers and was critical for the company's roadmap.

A charter airline had been operating off of spreadsheets and mostly manual processes. They had begun automating the system as a Phase 1 POC, but were having issues with their existing PM. Andrea was brought in to take over the project and lead it through the next and final phase: full automation of the inventory, scheduling, administration and call center system as well as an online customer booking system.

Andrea worked closely with an offshore development team, a development lead, a business analyst, and business stakeholders to gather functional and technical requirements and ensure scope was fully defined and ready for full-scale deployment.

Development of the system was followed by testing and two deployments: the first one for the administrative engine which included inventory, scheduling, reporting, and call center booking, and the second one for the customer booking engine. Both deployments were successfully delivered on time, and Andrea was able to complete the project under budget thanks to savings in QA due to a scheduling optimization strategy.

A large hotel and casino company in Las Vegas was in need of a redesign of the online booking portal and revenue management system. The project had started and was not going well, so Andrea was asked to step in to turn it around.

As an agile project manager, Andrea was not only able to significantly improve the relationship between the company and the software vendor, but was also able to help speed up the product development cycle and suggest improvements for code management and branching standards to reduce regression issues that had been encountered.

As part of this project, Andrea worked closely with Marketing and Revenue Management stakeholders to help identify requirements for the booking engine pages (search, calendars, offers, checkout) as well as revenue management (minimum length of stays, dynamic rates, etc.).

After releasing key UI and marketing features, the marketing team was able to significantly improved conversion rates, and as a result, booking engine revenues increased significantly.