October the 15th, 2021 - The Croatian startup RoomOrders, often referred to as the ''Croatian Glovo'' has experienced success and is now expanding to Spain and Turkish resorts.

As Bernard Ivezic/Novac/Jutarnji list writes, it isn't only the state and the tourism sector that have benefited from this year's remarkably (and surprisingly) good tourist season.

The Croatian startup RoomOrders won two major jobs in record time by introducing its platform for ordering food and other services via mobile phone, after testing the system this summer in the tourism sector here in Croatia.

Eugene Brcic Jones, the co-founder and CEO of RoomOrders, says they have worked mostly abroad in previous years. However, due to the record-breaking recovery of tourism in Croatia, they focused on the local market this year, and thankfully it well and truly paid off.

''Based on our experience in Croatia, we're introducing our system in a large resort in Bodrum, Turkey, which has seventeen restaurants, including a water park, apartments, and a marina, we're also doing the same in Kempinsky's resort in Marbella, Spain,'' explained Brcic Jones.

He added that after last year, which the global coronavirus pandemic turned into the worst imaginable for the tourism sector so far, they found a way to turn the model used by Bolt, Glovo and Uber into a tool for increasing the profitability of the tourism industry and importing offers in various destinations. They introduced billing within the application (app) itself, meaning that they added a fintech component to it.

''We're aware that there are mobile apps that allow the ordering of food and services, but only to your home or other (residential) addresses. RoomOrders is, I believe, the first in the world to introduce ordering via QR code to hotels and now we've expanded it so that guests throughout the entire hospitality ecosystem can order what they want,'' said Brcic Jones.

This includes resorts, hotels, restaurants, cafes and other catering and hospitality facilities.

The Croatian startup RoomOrders started up six years ago as an app for ordering food from your hotel room, but not only from the hotel's own restaurant(s) but also from restaurants in the local area. Most hotel kitchens don't work non-stop, and delivery, unless otherwise agreed with them, isn't typically allowed.

Soon after getting their feet off the ground, the Croatian startup RoomOrders got its first user - the Hilton Hotel in Boston. This was followed by the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, and then the list included numerous hotels from Fiji, through to Sydney, Singapore, Dubai, Athens, London, Warsaw, Barcelona and more, as well as large hotels across America. Today, they have contracts with 300 hotels and catering/hospitality establishments on all continents except South America. Payment is made through the hotel, meaning that guests can order food only from the establishments with whom the hotel has a contract. The hotel and RoomOrders thus receive a fee, and the guest pays for the service when going to the reception.

Brcic Jones says the coronavirus pandemic hit them like the rest of the tourism industry, and they projected revenue of one million euros this year, but they will have to wait for that to materialise, especially given the fact that tourism on a global scale has not recovered nearly as fast as it has here in Croatia.

''More than 50 percent of our hotels still aren't working at all or are far below their usual capacity, so they're not using RoomOrders,'' said Brcic Jones.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Croatian startup RoomOrders focused on tourist players across the Republic of Croatia and globally on various resorts. The director of RoomOrders says they recently introduced a mobile ordering service from any location in a hotel or resort.

''According to the initial results from the Sheraton hotel in Dubrovnik, which offered this service for ordering from swimming pools and beaches in August, the results are fantastic,'' said Brcic Jones. In addition to all of that, RoomOrders has expanded into digital menus, making sure to keep up with an increasingly digital world.

''Several countries, including Croatia, have introduced measures during the coronavirus pandemic that require hard menus to be removed from the table and sanitised each time. Or to simply replace them with digital menus,'' said Brcic Jones, adding that the interest in digital menus is strong and that he believes that it will remain as such even after the crisis, maybe even officially.

He stated that they're currently in a pilot project with Zagrebacka pivovara (Zagreb Brewery), and they are jointly introducing digital menus across 4,000 stores in Croatia.

''You can already see them in Bonita on Cvjetni trg (Flower square) in Zagreb and in the Swanky bar in Ilica, and all you need to do is scan the QR code with the sticker on the table. All this is part of building a digital hospitality ecosystem based on QR ordering and mobile payment, which already exists in China, where payments are made via WeChat, an app which is similar to WhatsApp, so you don't need to carry a wallet at all,'' concluded Brcic Jones.

For more, make sure to check out Made in Croatia.

December 10, 2020 - Giving opportunities to develop an entrepreneurial mindset to Croatia's younger generation is one of the key battles in trying to move this country forward. A great initiative from RoomOrders, a global start-up with Croatian origins, to do just that for 33 youngsters from Kvarner. 

I have my eye on a few start-ups in Croatia which I think have potential to go all the way. It was really cool to hang out with the shoe geniuses from MIRET recently, for example, shose revolutionary eco-sneakers are made from 97% natural materials, as well as being very stylish and comfortable. Learn more in With 20 BILLION New Shoes a Year, Meet MIRET's 97% Natural Eco Sneakers Collection

One other great start-up is RoomOrders, the 'Uber' of hotel room ordering. I first came across them 18 months ago and featured the new business in Meet Croatian Startup RoomOrders, the 'Uber' of Hotel Room Dining.

A very simple and effective concept which is now being used in hotels from Australia to the United States to Montenegro. But there is also another aspect to the RoomOrders team which I really like - pushing it forward and helping to develop the skillsets on the next generation. Below a press release which I received today which explains its latest initiative - a really great opportunity for 33 interns, surely a record in Croatia for a company of this size. We will be taking an interest in this project and interviewing some of the participants in the coming weeks. 

DELAWARE, United States _ It’s not every day that a company welcomes over 30 interns - especially not in Croatia.

But hospitality start-up RoomOrders has just done that, opening its doors to over 33 ambitious students from Rijeka University, who want to experience the inner workings of a global organisation this semester.

“It is unconventional and perhaps audacious,” said CEO Eugene B. Jones about the decision to accept so many interns, particularly since RoomOrders only has a handful of developers and other staff in its office in Zagreb, and that, well, that the world is in the middle of a crippling pandemic.

“RoomOrders does not want to be an ordinary company and this move reflects our different way of doing things too,” said Jones.

“Boldness is not a natural reflex for most people, particularly young people starting their professional careers. We hope our confident attitude and readiness to take on risks will rub off on them as well.”

RoomOrders is a mobile ordering platform that allows guests contactless self-service of food and beverages in hotels, restaurants, bars, and cafes - whether they are in lobbies, poolside deckchairs or rooftops. They just scan or tap a QR code with their smart phones.

The company is a global leader in its niche and is used in leading chains like Hilton, Marriott and Accor, from as far as Brisbane to Boston and Belgrade to Barcelona.

RoomOrders was doing really well before COVID-19 hit the industry, suspending business in hotels and laying off thousands of workers. It forced the company to adapt and invent new revenue streams.

“Business is always tough but nowadays it is even more fluid and requires quicker decisions to be made. New technologies are unrelenting, so you need to be informed and ready to change direction fast. You can be wrong, but you can’t be scared. You have to move, experiment, adapt, find solutions, learn and re-learn … “

The Kvarner region is a great location for us as there are lots of hotels, restaurants, bars and cafes for the interns to get a real coal-face experience of working in the hospitality sector. There is no perfect time to start, so one of the first things is to get used to the volatility of free markets.”

Davorin Balasz, a deputy researcher at the University of Rijeka, identified RoomOrders as a promising partner during summer and initiated cooperation.

“We struck a good instant contact. RoomOrders is an ideal fit for students to get their feet wet and develop practical, Western type-work ethics,” he said.

The students will be divided into three rotating streams during the semester: 1. Marketing and design; 2. PR, digital communications and social media; and 3. Sales.

“It’s a very hands-on experience,” said Mr Balasz. “The students will be writing strategies and plans then implementing and managing them with real clients and customers. They will be given responsibility to design and create collateral for campaigns, including video commercials and press releases. They will also generate leads and try to convert them into sales.”

“We are a business and we need to make money to survive,” said Mr Jones. “This is an important lesson that will be conveyed from the start in an internship.

“We want these kids to understand they have an extremely unique opportunity now. Never has there been a chance to climb the corporate ladder so fast, to become rich and successful at a very young age. The gap between senior staff and junior staff has been bridged by technology. Modern companies need senior people with experience to work together with young people who understand modern customer behaviour, particularly toward digital technology.”

Jones said that RoomOrders hopes to keep at least three interns on full-time after the program ends next semester.

Despite the coronavirus, RoomOrders continues to sign new hotels and resorts. It recently signed Swiss chain Hapimag AG, which operates more than 50 holiday properties all over Europe and the US. RoomOrders is currently being used in almost 100 hospitality venues around the world, on every continent except for South America.

You can learn more about RoomOrders on the official website. 

For more on the creativity coming out of Croatia, check out the TCN Made in Croatia section. 

May 26, 2019 - A Croatian app is sitting quietly on the desks of some of the world’s most prolific investment offices, but unlike the pile of would-be unicorns, this start-up for luxury hotels is not gathering dust. Meet RoomOrders.

Leading hotel IT industry influencers The Tech Move reported today “Poor ROI & low demand has seen hotels discontinue their room service offerings, but at last week's #IHTF we met a Croatian start-up, RoomOrders, Inc, that claims it is ready to “Uberise” #hotel room service.”

After listing the solution’s features, they asked, “With Hilton & others coming on board, could this be an in-room dining disruptor?” 

Indeed, RoomOrders has soft-launched in leading branded hotels like Hilton and Sheraton on three continents so far, but is so fresh on the market that its three months free period has yet to expire and thus has no income to report – apart from its pilot case Hilton Boston, US, where in-room dining order value shot up by over 30%.

“We’ve been trying to keep a lid on it, but news recently leaked and now we should introduce RoomOrders.com and explain what it’s all about,” said global head of marketing Eugene Brcic Jones, hinting that the company was expecting to announce some titillating news regarding funding in coming weeks. 

Brcic Jones claimed the response at their first trade fair was “overwhelming.”

“It opened talks with partners for integration into hotel management systems as well as with venture capitalists, particularly from Asia,” he said.

OK, so what’s it all about then?

RoomOrders is basically an e-menu. A cloud solution for hotels which enables guests to order in-room dining from an illustrated digital menu, right off their own smart phones. All guests have to do, is scan a QR code with their phone camera and order much like they would any other popular food delivery service.

“The idea was to be an Uber - a solution tailored to the modern digital native, to the average person who cannot live without their smart phone and expects any kind of business they have with others to gel seamlessly with their current lifestyle and habits,” said Viktor Matic, owner of software company Ingemark and co-founder of RoomOrders.

The beautiful thing about start-ups is that they are unpredictable. They don’t just emerge from flashy corporate buildings or state-of-the-art warehouses in bustling developed cities, the innovation could emerge from a garage or a teenager’s bedroom in the slums of a third-world town. Usually all that is needed is an internet connection and computer device.

A tourist haven, with over 1000 islands in the pristine Adriatic, Croatia is a fitting place of origin for a hotel app. Although registered in Delaware, US, up to 30 developers in Croatia’s capital Zagreb had a hand in creating RoomOrders, churning through almost two years and two million dollars to get it to market. As well as in-room dining, the app has marketing features (user-generated content, like social media location and post sharing) and feedback analytics to help hotel quality assurance and continued improvement.

“We decided to take a chance on it because it was too hard to say no,” said Sheraton Zagreb General Manager Mario Susak. “There is no capital outlay and there is no disruption to our existing operations, so it makes sense to move to a solution which will phase out fixed telephones and improve guest experience. The risks were zero, potential high.”

Hilton Boston General Manager Ed Mroz said that RoomOrders helps solve the dilemma of outsourcing room orders or keeping it in-house as studies showed most trends of eliminating room service were a deal breaker for the vast majority of luxury hotel guests. “It’s no secret that it’s hard to maintain profitability of room service, RoomOrders offers several clear value-adds and improves bottom line for us.”

RoomOrders streamlines current processes in ordering food and beverages to hotel rooms. As it communicates directly to the hotel kitchen or restaurant digitally in any chosen language, it eliminates miscommunication with a concierge or receptionist, who may also not be familiar with the offering to cross or up-sell.

Seems easy, so why didn’t anybody else think of it?

“It’s not so simple to make a simple solution,” said architect of RoomOrders and co-founder Harris Dizdarevic. “In fact, the more simple and intuitional the solution, the more technically demanding the task to create it.” Dizdarevic explained that his team noticed that hotels were neglecting one of the most popular associations with hotels, alongside accommodation, and tended to be hotel-centric.

“They’re looking at internal problems that need to be resolved to make a guest’s stay more pleasant through the prism of the hotel,” said Harris. “We did the opposite,” he added. “We looked at the behaviour of guests and adapted our software to harmonise the relationship between the needs of a guest and the needs of the hotel.”

In-room dining hasn’t changed since it was introduced more than 50 years ago Brcic Jones said. He thinks the niche segment of the hotel industry, which brings in billions of dollars through some 190,000 branded hotels worldwide, is ripe for disruption.

“Guests don’t want to be trapped by hotels, or pledge loyalty or download apps,” he maintained. “They don’t want their world to stop at the doorstep of a hotel. They want an extension of their world inside the hotel, to continue doing everything through their own personal devices as they would out on the street, anywhere in the world. Seamlessly”

If early traction is anything to go by, RoomOrders appears to have done it.

The platform trialled in Hilton Boston six months ago and is now launching in Hilton Belgrade and Hilton’s flagship Asia-Pacific hotel, Hilton Sydney, at the end of the month. The hotels will add to Hilton Zagreb and Sheraton Zagreb as well as five local branded hotels in Dubrovnik.

More than a dozen individual hotels are expected to sign up by the end of June with a breakthrough on the cards with two US Real Estate Investment Trusts controlling well over 100 popular luxury hotel brands soon after. Success in Australia with a leading international chain is expected to lead to rapid expansion across Asia Pacific, according to assurances made to RoomOrders, said Matic.

Learn more about RoomOrders from the official website.

Looking for the latest in Croatian innovation? Check out the dedicated TCN Made in Croatia section.

As Lucija Spiljak/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 21st of May, 2019, the Zagreb software company Ingemark and the RoomOrders startup, launched by Croats despite having been registered in America, created the first application (app) for ordering food from hotels to hotel rooms and started to conquer the many challenges of the huge global market. They began with the development of this application at the end of 2017, and back then, as a pilot project, they first tested it out at the Hilton Hotel in Boston.

According to them, they will launch RoomOrders at the Hilton Sydney hotel, and then in Belgrade's Hilton in Serbia by the end of the month. The application's software, in which 2 million euro has so far been invested was started by the Zagreb-based company Ingemark, which has been in existence since as far back as 1990, and as of 2006, it has specialised in software development by order.

Funds for the application's development have also been withdrawn from EU funds. In the list of references are big clients such as Agrokor, Adris, HT... One of the most significant cooperations was, as they say, one in the Middle East where clients developed a platform that distributed multimedia content, and soon their latest project, ZorroTines, a regional music platform, will see the light of day right here on the Croatian market. Right now, it seems that this Zagreb company's RoomOrders app is going to go very far indeed.

As Eugene Brčić Jones, the marketing and sales manager at RoomOrders revealed, last week at the International Hotel Technology Forum in Zagreb, the company negotiated with numerous hotel industry leaders about integrating their products.

"We've intrigued the leading world chains and deepened the existing relationships, about which we're certain will bring us to the position of ''disrupter'' of the in-room dining segment within the hotel industry," Brčić Jones said, adding that he believes that in several years, it will be present in a number of world hotels which boast 4 and 5 stars.

"With the help of the RoomOrders application, guests in hotels can order food to their rooms in a few clicks and not in the ''old fashioned'' way. In addition to it having a faster mode, hotels can embark on this project without any large investments," explained Ingemark's director Jurica Mikulić, adding that the application has managed to receive some excellent initial customer reviews and financial results for the hotel. Hilton in Boston has increased its average order value by as much as thirty percent.

''We offer a simple solution that not only increases revenue, but promotes hotels through user-generated content and facilitates analytics. The greatest benefit is that this solution can be implemented without disturbances to the processes involved, and it provides almost instantaneous results,'' Brčić Jones added.

The author of the application, Haris Dizdarević, explained that the creation of RoomOrders was triggered by the current rather obsolete ways of ordering and the obvious need for faster selection and the changing of the menu that guests want in the room.

"We realised we should digitise the offer and thus expand it. The simple idea has become a complex but a successful project," said Dizdarević, explaining that the positive signal was the fact that hotel guests continue to use the application after the first time of using it, and for several days in a row. Although they acknowledge that the Croatian market is not really a priority, they're still negotiating with several Croatian hotels in Dubrovnik and with Maistra, Blue Lagoon (Plava Laguna) and Liburna, and that soon, the application will be launched in Sheraton, part of the huge global Marriott hotel chain.

Otherwise, RoomOrders was introduced DoubleTree by Hilton in Zagreb a few months ago, but then it was a modified version of the app.

"With the new application or system, the guest can, as soon as he is given the room after booking, in advance, even when travelling, immediately choose a range of dishes and orders so that it's ready and waiting in the room upon their arrival. The guest doesn't need to order it from the hotel room, they can do it in advance and choose from a simple and flexible application where all the photos, descriptions and the prices of the food and drinks in the hotel's offer are,'' they explain from hotel Sheraton where this new type of offer and service will be on offer by the end of May, which will, as they say, bring about improvements.

"The application also enables sharing of guest experience on the platform, real-time appraisal of food and services so that the hotel can almost react at the same time to all guests' comments and adapt to the current wishes and preferences of the guest," they added from Sheraton.

"We're sure that at some point there will be some competitors in this segment on the market, but we believe that we're strong and already ahead of them all. We're focusing on the development of this product which we want to make perfect. Along with marketing, the analytic component is the most important, to be more concrete, the analysis of the reactions, comments and the number of orders, so, the entire internal process. We hope to conclude this year with good results and continue to expand successfully,'' Brčić Jones concluded.

Make sure to follow our dedicated business and Made in Croatia pages for much more.

Click here for the original article by Lucija Spiljak for Poslovni Dnevnik