Meantime Case Studies

Bespoke web-based software saves tour operator 'an army of call centre staff'

A simple web-based management system which lets holiday home owners manage every aspect of their overseas property online has helped a family-run company to grow from a single hotel to one of south-west Turkey’s leading tourism service providers and property developers. And, according to the company’s IT business manager, the system has saved the company “a UK call centre and an army of extra staff.”

Nicholas Homes Group, based in Mugla, Turkey, devised the website, which clients know as the Nicholas Owners Club, to allow its property owners to take care of every aspect of their overseas property over the internet. Everything from arranging airport transfers or grocery deliveries, right through to renting to holidaymakers can be done at the click of a mouse. And as well as acting as a unique selling point for prospective owners, the property management system has been helping the company to grow from one small hotel, to four hotels and over 900 apartments and villas.

Yet despite this amazing expansion, Nicholas Group remains a small, family run company headed by brothers Nurettin and Keramettin Yilmaz and employing just 30 permanent members of staff.

“Without the software that we commissioned, which we call Bing (the Business Information Nicholas Group), we’d need a call centre in the UK and an army of people to carry out the number of functions it does,” says Janet Schofield, IT business manager for the Nicholas Group.

“As it is, we have just four UK staff and have managed to create a valuable sales tool that enables owners to manage every aspect of their property from anywhere in the world. It’s eliminated a huge amount of overheads in terms of premises, administration staff and marketing.”

The Yilmaz brothers first started building and selling properties in the early 1990s, primarily to private owners in the UK but increasingly to clients in France, Russia and within Turkey. But as the empire grew, so did the overheads, so Nicholas Group turned to bespoke software specialists Meantime IT to create a property management system that would enable the company to continue to grow without crippling costs. The result was the Bing system, a database-driven application which manages every aspect of the property, from the initial sale to how often the maids change the sheets.

“We needed a custom property management system to keep records of everything – from when we first started the design of the property, all the way through the building process to the sale,” says Janet. “We then developed the Nicholas Owners’ Club, and on the same system the owners can take care of absolutely every aspect of using their holiday home – whether they want to arrange airport transfers for themselves, or change the frequency of the pool cleaning, or rent it out to holidaymakers. It’s all interactive and it’s all online.”

The benefits of the Bing system are threefold, with owners, holidaymakers and the Nicholas Group all reaping time and cost savings.

For the owners, the Nicholas Group Owners Club comes into effect before their property is even built. As soon as the building work starts, owners are given their own unique log-in to the system where they can keep track of development via the photographs which are loaded onto the site. And when the building work is complete, owners can then choose how much or how little management they require, as Janet explains.

“For the owners, the Nicholas Group Owners Club gives them complete peace of mind in knowing that they can still take full control of their property management even if they only visit it once a year,” she says. “From wherever they are in the world, they can arrange for their property to be cleaned, order groceries to be delivered on their arrival, arrange airport transfers or ask us to do an inventory if they are renting their property to a holidaymaker – the beauty is they are completely in control.”
The same level of detail is afforded to holidaymakers. Property owners can use the same system to make their property available to let, which will then automatically appear on the Nicholas Group’s holiday websites, ngi-holidays.co.uk and ngi-travel.com. Holidaymakers searching for their ideal holiday use the same system to check availability, book their holiday and arrange any extras such as transfers, groceries, and even high-chairs and cots. The system then automatically adds cleaning and inventory to the list of requirements.

Yet despite this attention to detail, the system means that the Nicholas Group staff manages each service with minimum input. “All our management and maintenance contracts are managed through Bing and the system auto-generates tasks,” explains Janet. “Likewise, if a person books an airport transfer, clean and grocery pack nine months in advance, those bookings will sit on the system until they are ready to become active. Our transport manager and housekeeping department then use that information and the automatically generated tasks to manage their workloads and arrange staff schedules, owner accounts will be automatically charged for the services they’ve booked and their account statements can be viewed via the Nicholas Owners Club website - it’s all inter-linked. It’s not only completely eliminated the need for human intervention, it’s also reduced the element of human error.

Because of the way the system has been designed, Nicholas Group has been able to give it to tour operators within Turkey to allow them to book holidays directly into the Bing System.

“Meantime provided us with an unbranded version of our rental booking administration system that we can give it to tour operators,” says Janet. “They can then use it to log into our systems and book holidays directly for their customers. This has really increased sales for our rentals market, especially within Turkey. And because we have different language versions of our websites, we can now sell it into other countries – we’re currently selling really well in France and Russia, and those markets are really growing for us.”

The sophistication of the Bing system gives Nicholas Homes a clear advantage over competitors. “We are not aware of any other property developers that have an owner’s website or anything similar,” says Janet. “It’s a great USP for us, and prospective buyers are always very impressed by it. If you own a property in Turkey and live in the UK you can’t be on hand to deal with every little thing. Our system gives owners the confidence to know that they can still be in control of their property, wherever they are.”
Nicholas Homes Group has grown rapidly from its humble beginnings, and Janet credits Bing with sustaining that growth. “We simply wouldn’t be where we are now without it,” she says. “Take the holiday bookings, for example. It would take hours for each booking. Last year, we had 1500 owner bookings, each booking one or more services for any point over the next 12 months. If it wasn’t automated, we’d need a massive call centre and an army of people to handle the volume of calls and arrangements. Then on top of that we’d need a huge marketing budget just to get the calls coming in. We’ve moved away from that and focused everything purely on the website, where everything can be done in minutes.

“I can quite honestly say that without the Bing system we just couldn’t run our business.”