3 Reasons Why Hinfo is a Subscription-Based Model

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5min read

Since launching Hinfo back in 2017, some properties have questioned why our service is sold on a subscription-based model.

We understand this is an entirely different way of thinking how you are paying for your hotel compendiums, but we strongly believe in the benefits of this for your property management, mainly for being a digital solution.

As you will quickly realize, our motivation from the beginning was always to be a subscription-based model, to help keep costs down for you, including over the long term.

Dramatically Lower Upfront Investment

All successful businesses rely on a positive cash flow.

Acquiring a new asset or service for any business is more manageable in smaller payments, than one large lump sum, especially if the latter is multiple thousands of dollars.

Our Hinfo service is available with either annual or monthly payment terms. Every property pays no more than one year in advance at a time.

Either of these add up to significantly less than any other digital solution and is cheaper for most property sizes up-front compared to paper-based hotel compendiums.

Here is how our service breaks down, compared to other guest compendiums, for multiple property sizes.

Number of Rooms	Hinfo	Paper Compendiums	TV Compendiums	Hotel Tablets
20 Rooms	$348 paid annually ($29 per month). OR $37 paid monthly.	$600	$7,000	$10,000
50 Rooms	$492 paid annually ($41 per month). OR $49 paid monthly.	$1,500	$17,500	$25,000
100 Rooms	$732 paid annually ($61 per month). OR $69 paid monthly.	$3,000	$35,000	$50,000

All pricing shown in the table above is in Australian Dollars as of July 2022, excludes GST and has no translations included.

Printed compendiums above are calculated at AU$30 each (including all labour) and only available as an upfront cost.

TV Compendium adapters are calculated based on the cheapest adapter required for one TV in each guest room at AU$350 each.

Hotel Tablets are calculated based on AU$500 per tablet and charging dock in each guest room and does not include any software subscription fees (where relevant). In many cases, this is also only available as a major up-front investment with on-going software charges.

Below is the time frame it would take to break even compared to our service, for both monthly and annual memberships.

Number of Rooms

Paper Compendiums

TV Compendiums

Hotel Tablets

20 Rooms

Annually: 1.72 years

Monthly: 1.35 years

Annually: 20.12 years

Monthly: 15.77 years

Annually: 28.74 years

Monthly: 22.52 years

50 Rooms

Annually: 3.05 years

Monthly: 2.55 years

Annually: 35.57 years

Monthly: 29.76 years

Annually: 50.81 years

Monthly: 42.52 years

100 Rooms

Annually: 4.10 years

Monthly: 3.62 years

Annually: 47.81 years

Monthly: 42.27 years

Annually: 68.31 years

Monthly: 60.39 years

Based on the calculations above, if you are a 20-room property that revamps your paper-based compendiums every 1.5 years, you would be no worse off financially compared to joining our service. Our Hinfo service, however, comes with all of these benefits.

Another comparison is that providing a hotel tablet in one guest room, costs more than our Hinfo service does when paid annually, for many small to medium sized properties.

If your property wanted their own mobile app and website solution, with the same feature set as our Hinfo service, it would require a six-figure upfront investment. The on-going maintenance cost for this would also be multiple times more than joining our Hinfo service annually.

In summary, small properties very likely cannot afford an alternative digital guidebook to ours and large properties will benefit from major cost savings.

On-going Support and Maintenance

Any piece of software or online service is like a car. They are initially in perfect condition, but a lack of on-going maintenance will lead to significant costly issues to fix.

All major online services receive continuous updates, even if it is for simple little fixes. Here's a list of popular iPhone apps and how many updates they received in the last several months.

App	Number of iPhone App Updates	Duration for All Updates
Instagram	25	4 Months
Reddit	25	4 Months
Facebook	25	5 Months
YouTube	25	5 Months
Uber	25	5 Months
Twitter	25	5 Months
TikTok	25	6 Months
Spotify	25	6 Months
The New York Times	25	8 Months
Services Victoria App	25	10 Months
Zoom	25	12 Months
The Weather Channel	25	12+ Months

All figures provided above are as of late October 2021.

This shows that all popular apps are regularly updated, at least weekly on average.

Even if each technical update took only 2 hours of development effort each, for 52 updates per year at an average hourly rate of AU$38.00 per hour, this adds up to AU$3952 per year at a minimum. Compared to our AU$708 max per year (if 100+ rooms) when paid annually, our service offers infinitely more value for money.

But why are these updates important?

Software that receives continuous updates are far more like meet the following criteria:

Work reliably with all operating systems (including iOS for iPhone and iPadOS for iPad, along with Android),
Increased security and less vulnerable to attacks,
Works with the latest devices and operating systems as they launch to the public by leading manufacturers, including Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei etc. and
Work on all device types and screen sizes reliably.

Any software service that has an up-front cost, has little to no incentive, to update their software, since there is no on-going financial incentive to do so.

Future-Proof Service with Continual Development

For every software as a service (SaaS) business, if they were to include every feature possible and not have a single technical or security issue, the software would never reach public available.

This applies for Hinfo, online accounting software, social media networks etc.

Our Hinfo Guest Digital Compendium has a roadmap for how we plan to continuously improve our service, with almost every feature on the roadmap being considered bonus over the current feature set.

We are open to supporting new operating systems and devices that have a decent acquisition in the consumer market. For example, iPhone, iPad and Android make up around 95% of all smartphones worldwide, so it's not viable to support the other 5%, which is where our Hinfo.com website comes in to fill in the gaps.

The future is unpredictable!

The current trends in the tech space, suggest that foldable smartphones and tablets, along with smart watches and smart glasses will become a bigger part of the consumer market device in the years to come.

If you bought a digital hotel compendium solution outright today, your property will not be ready for the future, when guests staying at your property are using these new categories of portable devices.

This point alone is worth repeating!

Smartphones and tablets may not remain the only primary consumer devices several years from now, that your guests are using today. Investing your time and money into a service that will adapt to new technology trends, is a safer choice.

Moreover, the fact our solution is fully contactless makes our service compared to all other alternatives, priceless.

To conclude, our service is the most cost-effective solution on the market and provides the best value for money to properties of all types and sizes.

To get started with our cost-effective Hinfo Guest Digital Compendium, please send us an enquiry via the form below.